Life as a Physicist

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.

I’m here at CERN and everyone has been talking about the funding mess over in the UK. I was forwarded this BBC article. Reading, besides shaking my head at the mess, I was very impressed at the level of reporting. I don’t think any of the major newspapers or news programs in the USA do nearly as good a job. For example:

When news of likely cuts to certain programmes was announced earlier this year, the STFC process was branded as short-sighted and unsustainable by some.

This is because there is a perception that high-profile projects have been saved, while lower profile areas of basic research, which feed into and support these very same applied programmes, have been axed.

Ok. Ignore the spelling (not that I would be one to complain!). Very clear description of what the main point of friction is. In other places they assume the reader knows a bit about the science being discussed - which results in an article that is fairly high level rather than getting bogged down in defining every word that is used.

If you want to know more, here is another article. By a science reporter with my same last name, no less!

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.

I was trying to ignore the TV show Big Bang Theory. Mainly because it seemed like a bunch of stereotypes, and perhaps ones I don’t think are right. However, after reading this column by Ouellette in Symmetry magazine, I discover that an old friend of mine, David Saltzberg, is doing the shows science consulting.

People’s opinions of the show weren’t very positive the first time I mentioned it on my blog. Have they changed? I’ll post back when I’ve gotten around to watching it. From Ouellette’s column, it sounds like one has to watch more than just the first one or two episodes (i.e. while I might object to the science stereotypes, women might have complained about the female stereo types and that has been better developed over time).

Persis Drell (SLAC director), along with Steven Chu (LBNL director), and Thom Mason (Oak Ridge Director) had a chance to visit the house speaker the other week.

We explicitly told the Speaker that we three Directors of major research institutions were not asking for anything for our individual laboratories. Our message was that a broad national commitment to scientific research and innovation was necessary—and that this would certainly create an environment in which we, and our partners in the academic community, could compete and thrive.

Exactly. I couldn’t agree more.

I personally doubt there is much more than can be done for this year’s budget mess (but I’m in favor of trying!!), but perhaps we can convince congress to be ready for the ‘09 budget - which probably won’t be settled until well after the election.

As I write this the exchange rate is about $1.54 US to one euro. This will probably come out the middle of next week - no telling what it will be then.

When I moved over here on July 1 the dollar was $1.35 US (see Yahoo! Finance).

Even though France is helping out by paying me a per-diem over here, it is paid in constant dollars. Darn.

Our graduate students and post-docs over here are in the same boat. They are also paid in constant dollars. It is worse for them, of course, as they are paid less than I am and so have less of a cushion to fall back on (I don’t even want to talk about what has happened to my savings account during the stay over here!).

Indeed, we just had to raise the student’s battle pay in order to account for the exchange rate difference. Where does this money come from? Our grant, of course. To supplement the grant so that it can accommodate these increases we are asking for extra cash, of course, but everyone doing physics over in Europe is in the same boat and there just isn’t much extra money in the various funding agencies coffers after the last budget battle.

I don’t see the dollar coming down soon. I keep hoping it will plateau. This latest turn-around is, I think, only temporary. But it is definitely cutting into our ability to send people over to Europe, and we do science with people - less people, less science. It started with a small fraction of bad loans, which is slowly claiming more and more people - and now spreading out from the housing sector to the financial sector and… to the science sector. If there is such a sector!

BTW - when the insurance adjuster dropped by we talked a bit about the financial crisis in the US. He said it was a scandal: “Why haven’t you guys caught the people responsible?”

LHC has shown up on some blogs in the tech-sector recently. Gizmodo has some fantastic pictures of the ATLAS detector under construction.

Scoble also got a tour of the LHC, led around by Frank Taylor, a prof from MIT I know. Scoble has a huge readership in the world of tech-blogging (one of the “a-list” bloggers).

I like these efforts - inviting non-particle physicists into our field and everything we do takes continuous work. After all, most people don’t live this science day and day out - and when we suddenly show up with a new W mass measurement… well, hard to expect people to get excited out-of-the-box. The only way it works is continuous communication - and these sorts of things are just the ticket.

So, McCain is going to be the republican candidate. Now that that looks official it is time to pester him with lots of science questions. You are reporter? Ask him where a science advisor will sit in his administration? How about basic research funding? Support the increase in NSF/OOS funding that others have been talking about? How about climate change? Not a reported? Contact his campaign and ask him and his staffers!

At the very least, make it part of the conversation. I realize the economy and the war are items 1 and 2 with the public right now - but science is too important to the future of our country to be ignored!

[P.S. (can you do a PS on a blog posting!?) - Please note that I'm not talking specifically about particle physics here - I am talking about all of science with a preference for basic (or pure) research.]

I’d urge you to do the same thing with the Democrats, but there is some real sorting-out work that has to be done there - they need to concentrate on that. I guess they both need super delegates at this point - no way this won’t leave a bad taste in people’s mouths one way or the other.

Well, it looks like What’s New is having only a short furlough. In the comments of my post, however, David Pace wondered what would happen if we had a community What’s New. David wrote a what’s new, which is really good — click through to read it. David — how long did it take you to write that?

But that would be a great idea. One could create a blog which had a series of writers - all looking for what’s new style goings on. Each post would be one. Then a senior editor (a.k.a. Bob Park) could sift through this raw material and pick out the themes and send a mass mailing which would have a much larger audience.

Of course, we don’t need to do that now, since Bob’s back!!

BTW - David is a graduate student. I’m quite happy to see he spends a little of his time being aware of how science and politics interact in the USA. The more we have doing that, the better. Of course, you can go to far (as in… not get your Ph.D. because you get distracted!).

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?