See CERN History December 1, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in CERN, Fermilab, physics life.9 comments
This is a quick note to draw your attention to a small retrospective program that CERN has put together – “From the Proton Synchroton to the Large Hadron Collider – 50 Years of Nobel Memories in High-Energy Physics” – yeah, yeah, it is like a Microsoft product name, but check out the list of speakers – 13 of them are Nobel prize winners. And these are all “memory” talks – so they should be quite entertaining. The event will be video-broadcast over the internet – a link should appear in that agenda page where you can watch. The time is European central – which is 9 hours ahead of Pacific time in the USA.
The context for this event is the turn-on of the LHC, of course. The accelerator recently took the title of “most powerful accelerator in the world” away from Fermilab – and is on its way to a turn-on and real data. Ironically, I was on shift at Fermilab a few hours before this event happened – my plan was to call up the ATLAS control room if it did happen and congratulate them… but I was asleep by the time it actually happened.
I’m at CERN now – and the atmosphere is electric. This review talk is a perfect stepping stone for the future.
George & Remi November 11, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in Marseille, physics life.add a comment
I’ve been pretty bad at posting this – I keep meaning to, but I keep not having time! But I have to send congratulations out to George and Remi for getting their Ph.D.’s:
They entered graduate school on the same day and the only reason they didn’t graduate on the same day was no one wanted to schedule a defense in the morning. I’ve had the pleasure of working with both of them and they are both excellent (sorry, they already have jobs – if you are around CERN they should be there pretty regularly). They graduated just before I left Marseille earlier this year, in September.
Congratulations to both! And best of luck – and enjoy the LHC startup! 
Dark Matter Discovered – Loosing Control Of Your Data October 26, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in GLAST, physics, physics life, science.2 comments
Ok, so it is a sensationalist title. But it was triggered by archive submission with the following title: Possible Evidence For Dark Matter Annihilation In The Inner Milky Way From The Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope. Wow! That is quite a title!
First, a bit of background on this paper. This is authored by two theorists who analyzed publically released FermiLAT/GLAST data. Fermi is a NASA funded project and one of its stipulations is that all data it collects must be made publically available 6 months after it has been collected. The authors of the paper downloaded the data, used a simple background model, added in their dark matter theory, and did a fit. And pow:
The red points are the data from Fermi, the dash-dot line and the dotted line are backgrounds (galactic diffuse, and a single TeV source), and the dashed line is their model. Nice fit, eh? Yep – looking at this my first reaction is “Wow – is this right? This is big – how did Fermi miss this?” and then I run across the hall to find someone that actually knows this data well.
It turns out the basic problem with this analysis is that not all sources of background are included. This is the galactic center, and, as one would imagine, there are lots of sources there. Not just one TeV source modeled above. My impression from hallway conversations is that when you take into account all of these sources there is much less (if any) room left for the dark matter model. I don’t think that Fermi has published a paper on this yet, but I suspect they will try a some point soon.
Ok, so all’s well. Fermi will publish the paper and everyone will know the right way to do this non-trivial analysis. Except that things got away from them. Nature news has picked it up and wrote a short update. This is pretty widely read. Now Fermi has a PR problem on its hands – people are running around talking about their data and they’ve not really had a voice yet (the science coordinator for Fermi was interviewed for this bit, but her comments were relegated to the end of the post). Fermi is a big collaboration (yes, not the size of the LHC), even if their paper is close to publication it would probably be at least a month or more before the collaboration could agree on a response. So what to do?
There are a lot of issues surrounding making data public. To first order, it is the tax payers that are paying for these experiments, so the data should be public. On the other hand, you can already see that besides the work and infrastructure of making the data public (which costs real $$ – especially for a big experiment like Fermi or one of the LHC experiments), you have to respond to other folks that analyze your data – basically pointing out their mistakes and trying to help them along, even when they might be in competition with some of your internal analyses. In NASA’s case all the data has to be made public – it is written into every grant submission and NASA even provides money for it. This is not currently the case for particle physics. In many of these advanced experiments the data is quite complex – and someone that can’t depend on the large infrastructure of the experiment to help interpret it is bound to have some difficulties.
One only wishes that the authors had gotten in contact with some Fermi folks before submitting their note to the archive…
Units, Units, Units October 23, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in physics, physics life.4 comments
Undergraduates know that Physics Professors get all wound up about units. We can’t help ourselves.
But in reading a nytimes article this morning I couldn’t help myself:
In addition, Mr. Holder said, the authorities have seized more than $32 million in American currency, 2,700 pounds of methamphetamine, 4,400 pounds of cocaine, 16,000 pounds of marijuana and 29 pounds of heroin. More arrests are expected.
Well… this is what happens when you wait until the evening to write a blog post you spotted in the morning – they change the article. That 2700 pounds? It was 2700 kilograms (which is significantly more). In short – they had mixed kilograms and pounds. I was going to get on my high horse and… well, seems someone at the times is as sensitive about this as us physicists are.
But it also occured to me that the notion of units is rather flexible. For example, when we do particle physics calculations we often set the speed of light to 1. Normally it is 300000000 meters/second (really fast!). Seriously. We just set it to 1. We are so annoyed by having to carry around that number in our calculations that we just up and set it to one. We do that with an other constant as well (called h-bar). Your unit system ends up being very weird when you do that:
Normal Every Day Units Units in h-bar = c = 1 Energy Energy Time 1/Energy Mass Energy Length 1/Energy
I know this seems weird – but you see it all the time. This is just like making the following unit conversion in the list of drugs: instead of telling us the number of pounds or kilograms, tell us how much pot they got in terms of its street value. And to tell the truth, that would have been a very useful number to have in that article.
Heck, in the old days, the unit of measure in the market was the length of the king’s forearm. When the king changed, the whole country would change its unit system…
Un physics professors getting wound up with units is ironic – we don’t really use them that heavily when we get to more advanced calculations. On the other hand, we can only drop them because we have already learned how to use them. At least, that is what we tell ourselves and everyone else! 
Congratulations to Sasha Rozanov! September 8, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in Marseille, physics life.add a comment
Each ear the French Science agency – CNRS – awards silver and gold medal’s to its researchers. Sasha got the silver one this year. This is a big deal – people were coming from all over France (and from CERN) to take part in the party and short symposia held in his honor. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. If you know him, definitely send him congrats!
BTW, that is a picture of Sasha killing his cell phone during the ceremony. I’ve got more dignified pictures in the usual spot.
Chat on the Airplane July 18, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in physics life, travel.5 comments
I guy I work with (and know fairly well) recently dictated a column to the NYTimes Frequent Flyer Column:
I ALWAYS laugh when people say they don’t want to talk to their seatmates. I’m a friendly guy and, on occasion, I wouldn’t mind having a chat with a fellow passenger, especially if I’m not that busy with work.
It is so true. My seatmates almost always steer the conversation to another topic as soon as they find out what I do. And, as anyone that knows me knows – I like to talk (well, I write a blog, don’t I?). Part of the problem is that I fly a lot – so I end up seated in the front of the plane, near the other frequent flyers – which means no one wants to talk to anyone else. Head down, buried in a book, magazine, or work. If you start a conversation – well, you are clearly a Sunday Traveler!
That isn’t to say I’ve had some long discussions with folks about what I do on planes. I remember two of them clearly. One was on a flight to Chicago from Seattle and the guy sitting next to me owned and ran some number of tire stores. He was from Eastern Washington. He was very curious about what I did and asked lots of questions. Right before we got off the plane he asked me what had clearly been bugging him for much of the ride: “Why don’t we do faith-based science funding and research?” The other one I remember was a guy that was convinced the LHC could generate electricity and save us from our power problems. We talked about this for a long time – I’m pretty sure I was able to convince him that this wasn’t possible…
Most conversations (even these ones I just mentioned) are actually pretty good – it is often surprising to hear what people think you are doing. The will have read about it in the newspaper and the newspaper reporter will have heard about it from interviews, emails, etc. – so it is very much a bit of a telephone game, each step colored by the recipients own interests and past education and hobbies.
Actually, I think scientists need to talk to people more. After all, we work for the people, all people, the taxpayers. We should do our bit to explain where your money is going and why our work is interesting, important and what it means to you and your future.
Totally true! Thanks to Paul Grannis who posted an internal news item pointing this out.
Pay The Man: ATT 1 Gordon 0 April 8, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in physics life, travel.2 comments
I got lost in Prague. My hotel was very near a central transportation hub with two very large tram stops on opposite sides of a corner. Instead of walking I decided to be clever and hope on a tram to my destination. About 20 minutes later I was totally lost. I got off the tram but I could see no land marks. The obvious thing was to get back on the tram, but what would have been even better would have been to look at a map. Of course, I was far enough out of the central tourist area that there were no maps on the tram stops.
Ah! I have a smart phone. It has a GPS chip. A few minutes later I knew where I was – not that far from where I wanted to be, just on the wrong side of a hill. How awesome is that?
It was pretty awesome until I checked my cell phone bill online. That quick fix required about 0.9 megabytes of data. And cost me close to 20 bucks!! Yikes! Imagine what would have happened if I’d actually left the cell phone going, receiving emails, etc.
I’ve been resisting paying an extra 25 bucks a month for cheap (limited) data access over in Europe. But modern smart phones are just too useful. The question is – will the limited amount of data (20 MB) be enough for one week of travel? Time will tell…
Wu-ki Tung April 2, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in physics life, university.3 comments
Wu-Ki Tung just passed away.
![tungBanner2[1]](http://gordonwatts.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/tungbanner21.jpg "tungBanner2[1]")
Wu-Ki is famous for his work on parton distribution functions (PDFs). I’ve known of him for years – but after retiring from MSU he moved to Seattle to be near his kids. Once here he joined the department of physics as an affiliate. That was when I got to know him personally. He attended many of our joint theory-experiment meetings. He helped me out a bit when I was teaching my graduate particle physics course (he wrote a book related to the topic). He smart and knowledgeable and always helpful. He will be missed.
I stole the picture from his retirement symposium page.
They Really Did Dress Like That March 15, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in physics life.4 comments
My Dad is also an experimental particle physicist. Here is a picture from 1961 – about 5 years before I was born – when he was a graduate student at Yale:
![3353983261_14a9a7904d_d[1]](http://gordonwatts.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/3353983261-14a9a7904d-d1.jpg?w=587&h=484 "3353983261_14a9a7904d_d[1]")
My dad is the guy in the middle. Check out the lack of tie! That is like going to work in a tee shirt these days! And that was a complete experiment – a small scattering chamber (on the left), a pumping station with sample collector (middle, Dad built that), and then the controls on the right. Nice dial.
If you look around the flickr stream that clicking on that picture above sends you to you’ll see several other pictures like that from the time (along with ones of me when I was really young!). The look so NASA, don’t they? The other thing that impresses you (or me) is how small the experiments are. For scale, here is one of my current ones:
![atlas_600[1]](http://gordonwatts.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/atlas-6001.jpg "atlas_600[1]")
Note the tiny little person standing in the middle there. Of course there is no way I could every have built 1/3 of the experiment there!
The Good Olde Days!
Free My Text Books! March 2, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in physics life, university.11 comments
![the_raw_feed_on_kindle-BIG[1]](http://gordonwatts.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/the-raw-feed-on-kindlebig1.jpg "the_raw_feed_on_kindle-BIG[1]")
I love the idea behind the Kindle. I don’t own one and I’m not planning on owning one anytime soon… unless…
As I’ve gotten older my eyes have followed my father’s: fantastic until 40, and then fall off a cliff. It won’t be long till I’m wearing trifocals. But the more rest I give my eyes – or, the more exercise I give them by looking around at objects at different distances – the better they feel. I stare at computers and books all day long. And so I don’t read much in the way of books at night. A few magazines perhaps, but not often enough to warrant the $360 dollar price of the Kindle.
But what I really want are my text books in electronic form. There is nothing like a well written text book to learn from. The web just doesn’t hack it (yet?) in this department. I can find little nuggets of information but there is almost never any context. But if I want to be taken from basic lagrangians, through group theory, to the Higgs mechanism in some detail… well, I a text book is my best source for that.
I’ve got some 80 of them, taking up a significant bit of my shelf space. They almost never leave my office here at work. The furthest they sometimes make it is home and back. And they are much less useful because of that. There is only one reason for this: they are heavy!
Wouldn’t it be great if they were electronic? I’d be happy to pay the same price for them, so long as I could put them on my various computers. I could display them on my big computer screen, and use my Tablet to take notes or create a lecture. Or even better, if they were in some sort of PDF format (or similar) I could write on them on my tablet and leave myself little margin notes! I’d be quite willing to put up with some DRM as long as it didn’t prevent me from reading it on my various computers.
Scanning through Amazon’s library of text books (as you might expect, I can find almost all the textbooks I need there) I’ve yet to see even one that I could get in electronic form – in any electronic form. What a pity!
Eventually this will happen – I just wish it was faster. And when it does I suspect it will be something like the folks older enough to own vinyl or VHS. Everyone will be forced to re-purchase the books in electronic form. Good thing these text books can be put down as tax write-offs!
