Scientific Integrity April 22, 2011
Posted by gordonwatts in physics, physics life, politics, press, science.17 comments
… means not telling only half the result
… means not mis-crediting a result
… means an obligation to society to not falsify results
… means not making false claims to gain exposure
… means respecting your fellow scientist and their results
… means not talking about things that aren’t public (or, say, that haven’t undergone an internal review)
… means playing by the rules you agreed to when you enter into a collaboration
It means being a scientist!
Integrity is more important that ever given how much the public eye is focused on us in particle physics.
Update: I should mention that this post was authored with Alison Lister.
Every Move You Make… September 23, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in LHC, press.add a comment
Here is a bit of news that showed up on CNET:
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, the organization that built the LHC, announced Thursday that a transformer that helps cool part of the collider had malfunctioned, forcing operations to be suspended.
Think about that for a minute. CNET – a tech web publication – is following the ups and downs of the LHC. Have we ever had that level of interest in a HEP experiment before!? Not that I’m aware of. I remember the Fermilab start-up and even then no one tracked it like this.
One thing about the article:
No word on why it took CERN so long to let us know about the malfunction, though.
I don’t know for sure, but I can guess: they aren’t used to this level of press interest. So telling the press exactly what is going on with the machine gets done after everything else is taken care of (how to fix, implement the plan, etc.).
I wonder if they will have the latest magnet quench web page? We should write a desktop widget which has LHC status. 
Are We Asking This Question? August 8, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in ATLAS, physics life, press.16 comments
There is a book review in the NYTimes right now by Overbye titled “Inside Story of the Telescope That Nearly Wasn’t Built” – about the Hubble.
The space agency wanted to make sure its long-awaited and astronomically expensive telescope — soon to be launched into orbit above the turbulent fog of the atmosphere — made an appropriately cosmic splash. The advice from those of us in the press peanut gallery was always the same and simple: pictures — cosmic postcards like the live pictures of other planets being transmitted from the Viking and Voyager spacecraft — early and often.
This is PR 101 — everyone, including us scientists, is easily captured by pictures. Especially stunning ones. Sure — they may not be the best way to convey accurate scientific measurements – but they are very easy to relate to. Are we doing the right thing for the start of the LHC? Do we know what pictures – science pictures – we are going to be pushing to the public?
ATLAS has a whole outreach group (as does CMS, I’m sure). We have the ATLAS Book. We have a movie. But what cool picture are we going to give the press when the science starts? Another picture of our detector – like the one attached to this blog posting? Surely we can do better. Our event displays – most are tuned for us to look at as scientists, not for the press or the public. Do we have anything?
Enough of my ideas. What should we have ready when science starts to roll out? At the Tevatron we write these plain-English-summaries. They aren’t totally plain, unfortunately. But perhaps we should get someone from the PR office to work with every analysis that is published to work on something like that?
Other ideas?
Follow up on the CERN Black Hole Flap June 25, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in Pop Culture, press, science.9 comments
I’ve not said much (or here) about the lawsuit that seeks to halt the turn-on of the LHC because it may produce a mini-blackhole or other object that devours our earth and the universe. In response to the press when the original suit was filed, CERN sponsored a safety review, which was recently released.
Ars has a great summary of the report:
The report’s conclusion is that, if the LHC were capable of destroying the earth, nature would have beaten us to the punch.
Read the report. It takes 96 pages to arrive at that pithy sentence. Or read the Ars bit which is a good summary. They end with:
Overall, it’s hard to read this report and not wind up viewing the apocalyptic fears as simply being poorly thought through. It was striking how clearly the worries over the LHC have parallels to the fears over biotechnology, which came up during our recent interview with Carl Zimmer. There too, billions of years of natural experiments and decades’ worth of scientific experiment should be informing our view of safety; for at least some segment of the public, that’s not happening.
Better in Essay Form April 15, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in LHC, press, science.add a comment
There is an essay by Dennis Overbye in the NYTimes today that is a much better discussion of the black hole flap that occurred a week ago, generated by a real article by Dennis. My favorite (laugh) quote:
Besides, the random nature of quantum physics means that there is always a minuscule, but nonzero, chance of anything occurring, including that the new collider could spit out man-eating dragons.
And my favorite serious quote:
“As in all explorations of uncharted domains, there may be a risk,” Dr. Rees wrote, “but there is a hidden cost of saying no.”
Definitely worth a read – much more so that the actual article itself, I think.
Bust Open That Black Hole! April 3, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in physics life, politics, press, science.10 comments
I really didn’t want to say something about this article. Actually, at first I wondered if it was just an excuse to show a truly awesome picture I wasn’t going to write anything. But then it started showing up on tech blogs, it rose to near the top of the New York Time’s most emailed articles. And non-physics friends of mine started asking what I thought about it. And then I saw some of the comments left on the article at the Herald Tribune’s version of the article (read them – it is worth it). I agree with Peter Woit: “it’s unclear why the story deserves any attention” However, I can hold out only so long.
Here is what I think: this article has the legs for reasons similar to why ID and Creationists are able to push the “evolution is only a theory” so effectively.
If you don’t have time to read the article: Wagner (ex physics researcher, lives in Hawaii) and Sancho (author, researcher on time theory (!?), lives somewhere in Spain) are suing Fermilab, the Department of Energy, and CERN to prevent the LHC from being turned on. Their’s is a doomsday worry: a small black hole or something similar will be created in the center of one of the detectors and will quickly expand to eat up the whole universe. Including us. I actually think that I’ve seen Wagner. One day, when I was a graduate student at Fermilab, I remember seeing a collection of people protesting outside the Batavia gate. I didn’t stop, but some friends did. It was someone from Hawaii who was worried we were going to end the universe. I don’t remember the name, but I suspect it was Wagner.
Now, in the evolution and creationism debate we scientist types call evolution a theory. In science it doesn’t get much more iron clad than that – pretty much the top of the heap. Note that we very carefully do not call it a fact. The reason is that science is always looking to improve the answers. We may have a model that fits all of our observations – but that isn’t to say that we’ve not missed something thus will need to extend the model or theory at a later time to account for new observations. Scientists are very careful about declaring the limits of their knowledge, and are very reluctant to go out on a limb and make a statement for which they do not have supporting evidence. That is part of the reason why we don’t call evolution a fact.
Now, lets go back to the article. There are lots of papers talking about mini-black holes and their possible production at the LHC. So far no one has seen any evidence of a black hole generated at any of the operating accelerators. But can you get any scientist to declare: “Absolutely, under no circumstances, ever will there be a black hold like this produced.”? I doubt it. If you asked a particle physicsts if they were worried about it – I don’t know of any that would be. Most would love to be at CERN, in fact, when the LHC starts up. I’d love to be there, but I may be teaching instead.
There is another aspect in this – risk evaluation. For example, it is much more dangerous to drive in your car than fly in an airplane. That is the raw science (statistics, whatever) of it. Yet we fear flying. When it comes to something like this how do you evaluate the risk? There is no way a non-scientist can do it themselves. The more science literacy there is the better people will understand the language that scientists use, but… And there is no way you would want to limit scientific endeavors and research to the list of topics that the non-scientist can easily understand! Ahhh… outreach!
Obligatory joke: fear not; us particle physicists will be first to pay if we’re wrong. 
But you have to admit — that is one amazing picture of CMS! These large detectors are stunning. I think someone should gather up the copyrights for some of these pictures and make a lulu.com book or something like that.
Particle Physics Is About to be Sexy Again February 11, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in press, science.8 comments
Well, that is what the Economist says in a small science and tech article:
Unfortunately for Dr. Aymar, it is Dr. Heuer who will reap the reward, for after a decade and a half in the wilderness since the United States abandoned its own plans for a giant accelerator, called the superconducting super-collider, the subject of particle physics is just about to get sexy again.
Besides the implied total write-off of the Tevatron (grrr!), cool! Glad to see that the Economist gets it. Earlier on in the article it points out why things are about to get sexy again:
Inside it, he and the thousands of other physicists who work at CERN hope to find the secrets of the universe: dark matter, dark energy, extra dimensions, tiny black holes that evaporate in an eye-blink and the origins of mass itself.
This article was written because Dr. Heuer is about to take over from Dr. Aymar as the head of CERN (a big deal, obviously). And the article was pointing out that Aymar has worked hard to make the LHC come in on time and on budget (well, sort of), but will not be director any longer when the machine turns on and starts producing physics. Bad luck, eh?
More Higgs? February 7, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in physics, press.3 comments
Nick asked a question on one of my posts:
Okay, humor me for a moment while I learn something: is this laughable because it suggests there are many “types” of higgs particles (which I’ve only ever seen reference to in this article) or just because the article suggests that the search is over and then quietly notes that we’re really still in the same place we were before the article was printed?
The latter. There have been discussions of the possibility of many Higgs for years — for longer than I’ve been in particle physics (>20 years – yikes! That is scary!).
How many Higgs particles depends on which world you live in. Lets say you live in the plain old Standard Model, and only the Standard Model. In that case, there is just one, the ONE Higgs. At the moment the Standard Model predicts pretty much every result we can measure. The Higgs particle was added to the original version of the Standard Model in order to get the W and Z boson masses correct — those are things we can measure today (unlike the Higgs, of course, which remains unseen).
Actually, that paragraph contains a lie — the Standard Model can’t explain everything — dark matter and dark energy, for example. There are other reasons why we think the Standard Model isn’t the whole story as well – so we have to fix it. So, on the one hand, we know it isn’t complete, but on the other hand we also know it can predict the results we measure at current experiments to amazing levels of accuracy. So, if we do fix it, we have to be careful of not breaking it in the process.
So we “extend” it. We develop new theories that “contain” the Standard Model. There are lots and lots of these theories. One of the more popular ones is called SUSY. Another is extra-dimensions. And there are more. Some of these models, like SUSY, actually contain 5 Higgs-like particles. The one that CP proposed in the paper referenced by this article also has 5 Higgs. In these extensions, btw, they must still get the W and Z masses correct – as the Standard Model does — and that is what Marcella (I think!) is complaining about: You might find another Higgs like particle, but the one in this model that does the work of the Higgs that gets the masses of the fermions and bosons like the W and Z right is still going to be just as hard to find.
On the other hand, finding a light Higgs as suggested would be a revelation. And grounds for a Nobel prize if the theory was born out. So the article that CP wrote is just fine. I was complaining about the way the press wrote it up.
Or should I remember that all press is good press?
