Oh noes! We're doomed! And it's not because of the 2012 prophecies, but because of the Large Hadron Collider, that giant particle accelerator in Switzerland that fear-mongers are convinced will destroy the earth with black holes -- assuming it ever turns back on and gets up to its peak energies.
The LHC was all set to be fired up and ready to go -- and then an errant bird with a taste for good bread went and dropped a hefty crumb on a sensitive piece of outdoor equipment. The end result? Overheating the accelerator and causing yet another delay for the beleaguered collider. For a big bad, world-destroying machine, the LHC is turning out to be more of a hot-house orchid, brought down by a l'oiseau and une baguette. (The bird is just fine, by the way -- probably just peeved at the waste of good quality bread.)
Notes Popular Science: "With freak accident after freak accident piling up over at CERN, the idea of time traveling particles returning from the future to prevent their own discovery is beginning to seem less and less far fetched." Or, as New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye summed up that particular theory: "A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the
hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the
collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would
ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make
one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."
Don't you love the sly innuendo of "otherwise distinguished physicists?" Let us heed our ornithological omen, people. Maybe Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya -- the harbingers of this particular fringe-y theory -- are onto something: a vast conspiracy on the part of Nature to keep lowly mortals from discovering her innermost secrets. Nature doesn't really abhor a vacuum, but apparently it abhors the Higgs.
Admit it: the conspiracy theory is way more interesting that the far more mundane (and likely) explanation: that with such a large, expensive and complicated machine, there are bound to be vulnerabilities and technical difficulties before everything gets up and running smoothly.
There's nothing quite like taking science to the people in the form of their local pub, particularly if it's part of the ongoing Quantum to Cosmos Festival, hosted by the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada. Last night I joined physicists Lee Smolin (a founding member of Perimeter, Jazz Whisperer, and author of The Trouble of Physics, among other books) and Cliff Burgess (McMaster University and All-Around Mensch) to chat with our fellow imbibers about the Large Hadron Collider, the Standard Model of particle physics, what one might do with an old, outdated accelerator, and after the alcohol took effect, we even delved a bit into quantum gravity (Lee's bailiwick). Good times!
The festivities were hosted by ringmaster Wilson da Silva, Awesome Dude -- also editor ofCosmos magazine. Those Aussies know how to bring science where it counts. There are photographs of the event, oh yes, and there was supposed to be a podcast suitable for downloading, but apparently we didn't speak loudly enough and there were "technical issues" as a result. No matter. A good time was had by all, especially the panelists.
The evening's title was "The Biggest Gamble in Physics?" because Wilson believes in bringing the controversy right out of the gate. The Large Hadron Collider is a huge machine, very powerful, very expensive -- is it worth the price tag for whatever we're likely to discover (if anything)? Cliff quickly established himself as the optimist among us, convinced we will not only find the Higgs boson when the LHC (finally) turns on, but a few other exciting things too. He's expecting surprises, and looking forward to them.
I conceded that it might be difficult for the average Person on the Street to justify spending that kind of money on a big machine to explore the Big Bang when people are losing their jobs and homes in droves (especially in the US), but pointed out that there are economic benefits as well: the LHC generates jobs and spinoff technologies, many of which we can't even envision yet. And Lee brought some much-needed perspective by quoting Eric Weinstein: "For the cost of bailing out one bank, we put a man on the moon." (And that's not counting all the hefty bonuses announced this past week.)
We also commiserated about the difficulty in summing up the Standard Model of particle physics for a general audience. Wilson claims he once tried to write a short sidebar summary for a Cosmos feature, "and 748 words later, I was finally finished." I marvel he could do so in under 1000 words. I like to use the analogy of a big noisy family of particles, akin to the loud Greek relatives in the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding: there are all kinds of cousins, second cousins, aunts and uncles, half of whom are named Nick, and even the occasional crazy grandparent making a rare appearance. It's tough to keep them all straight. So with the Standard Model. Lee says his goal is to reduce the model down to something more manageable, along the lines of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It would be easier to just have a Papa Bear, Mama Bear and Baby Bear.
That complexity, of course, is why it proved so difficult to dispel the myth that the LHC will create a big black hole that will destroy the world. No major media outlet could resist the temptation to play the Doomsday card, although the Daily Show gets kudos for ridiculing the mastermind behind the hysteria. I argued that, as annoying as the media coverage became, the LHC was the third biggest news story of 2008. The LHC has fantastic name recognition, even if it's as a Doomsday Machine.
Afterwards, we repaired to Perimeter's famed Black Hole Bistro -- it seemed fitting, if the LHC is going to make a black hole to destroy the world -- where we hobnobbed with fellow panelists, and I got to hover shyly near author Neal Stephenson (Anathem, The Baroque Cycle, and my favorite, Snow Crash) as he chatted with MIT's Neil Gershenfeld and others. Even I have my Fangrrl moments. All in all, it was an amazing festival experience, and I'm sorry I could only take in such a small part of it.
I definitely will be among the physics fans glued to the TV set this Thursday evening for the series premiere of Flash Forward,
based on the sci-fi novel of the same name by Robert J. Sawyer. Heck,
the novel kicks off the action at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, despite
the fact that it hadn't been built yet when Sawyer wrote the book in
1997. But Sawyer, an uber-science fan, read about plans for the
project, and it just so happened that the concept of achieving
unprecedented energies fit very neatly into a science fiction plot he
was sketching out at the time. The result was an action-packed story
that prominently featured physicists on the ALICE experiment.
Particle physics has come a long way since 1997, but the LHC is
unlikely to trigger a global event in which billions of people black
out for exactly 2 minutes and 17 seconds, and catch a glimpse of their
lives six months into the future. Judging by the series trailer, a lot
can happen in six months. That's one of the departures from the
original book, according to Sawyer, who told io9 recently
that the producers opted not to have the glimpse be 20 years into the
future, because then they would face the daunting task of trying to
imagine and then create that future on a Hollywood set. And who has the
budget for that these days?
Symmetry Breaking is currently featuring a terrific interview with Sawyer about the series, his book, and his love of science. The blog is also running a series of posts on the science of Flash Forward,
including the reactions of physicists who have volunteered to watch the
pilot. I predict a bit of nit-picking, since even Sawyer admits the
producers departed significantly from his book (which took some
liberties of its own). But Sawyer did serve as a technical consultant
on the series, and was chuffed to discover that several cast members
had read the book to prepare for their roles, including star Joseph
Fiennes (pictured above with Sawyer).
Flash Forward isn't Sawyer's only novel to feature physics and physicists. He's also featured the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (Hominids) and the search for dark matter (Starplex),
and hints in the Symmetry Breaking interview that his next book may
well feature the Canadian Light Source, a national synchrotron research
facility. He doesn't think that gives much away, since "a synchrotron
is a Swiss army knife of science."
If this keeps up, network television will be dominated by physicists in the coming years. Certainly Flash Forward has the advance buzz to make it a potential candidate to displace The Big Bang Theory as the hippest physics show on TV. Can a physics-based crime drama be far behind?
Via Tom at Swans on Tea comes an amusing riff on the age-old problem of socks disappearing from the dryer. This happens to all of us at some time or another; I personally have three orphaned socks sitting in my drawer, in vain hope that one day their missing partners will magically reappear from whatever extra dimension they're currently visiting. (Clearly the portal to said extra dimension is inside our dryer.) But apparently it has more to do with the fact that socks are fermions rather than bosons, and thus subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. Per Tom:
Put two socks comprising a pair into the wash and occasionally only
one will be there at the end of the cycle. Why? Two socks can clearly
exist in a system, thus there must be at least two sock states. Let’s
assume two, making them sock spin one-half states, and call these “sock
up” and “sock down”...
The socks are in the dryer system and one of them is sock-up with
the other being sock-down, in perfect accordance with the Pauli
exclusion principle. However, occasionally there will be an interaction
with the dryer (I call this the argyle sock-flip interaction, which
should be mediated by the Lint boson) which is very strong; the socks
cannot remain confined to the dryer, and one sock is expelled by the
degenerate Fermi sock pressure.
And so forth. That Tom has a way with the physics in-jokes. According to his theory, you can't make two socks occupy the same space (a single foot, for example) and this means they would be fermions, because they adhere to Pauli's exclusion principle. What is that? For those non-physics minded among us, let us consider the atom.
An atomic nucleus is
10,000 times smaller than the region in which electrons orbit around it.
Electrons are restless particles with serious intimacy issues; they need a lot
of personal space. Imagine you are a patron in a local cafe. Each patron can occupy only one seat at a given table, and would
most likely shove off a stranger who tried to sit in his or her lap – although
if that person happened to be an attractive member of the opposite sex, the two
could share a table.
The tables, each with a certain number of seats, represent atomic orbitals, which correspond to specific energy states. Only a
certain number of electrons can occupy a given orbital. For instance, a helium
atom has two electrons, and both can occupy the same orbital (or “table”)
provided they are opposite “genders” (spin up, spin down). In this case, two is
company, and three is definitely a crowd: if a third electron tries to horn in,
it will be bumped up to the next energy level. I
In a normal eatery, patrons would scattered randomly throughout the room at separate tables, but
electrons in the Atomic Cafe are more orderly. As an atom absorbs energy and new electrons are
added, the electrons fill up the “seats” one by one, beginning with the most
desirable “table” -- the ground state -- and working outward. This is the Pauli
exclusion principle: once an electron occupies a seat, it excludes others from
sitting in the same seat. (There is no lap dancing in electron land.) As
electrons fill up the shells, their number determines an atom’s chemical
properties, thereby creating the periodic table of elements.
We look forward eagerly to Tom's full peer-reviewed analysis of this phenomenon on the atomic behavior of socks in the esteemed Journal of Irreproducible Results.
Image: Still from Futurama's "The Route of All Evil." Via The Infosphere.
She's baaack! AlpineKat (a.k.a., Kate MacAlpine), that is, who gave us the Large Hadron Rap last year -- currently viewed by over 5 million people on YouTube, and still counting. This time, she busts a rhyme over the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), a new project of the DOE being bult at Michigan State University in East Lansing. MSU hosted an event this past week to celebrate the future of rare isotope research, and AlpineKat was on hand to debut her new rap in full HD version: three elevated screens 14 feet across, augmented by a cutting-edge sound system.
This is the way physics rap was meant to be experienced, I'm sure, although YouTube is still the best way to reach a massive audience. Here's what MacAlpine had to say last year in Symmetry Magazine:
I think rap is a good way to communicate. Rhyme has always helped embed words in my mind; hopefully science rap can help cement ideas in the minds of students and other interested people. “Nerdcore” has been on the Web for a while, fusing “nerdy” from the cultures of video games and hard science with the “hardcore” of rock and hip-hop.
Check out the cameo appearance of Brad Sherrill, chief scientist of FRIB and a distinguished professor of physics at MSU -- who has a little fun wagging his bushy eyebrows mischievously at the camera.
In the case of FRIB, there's precious little material on the Web that isn't either highly technical, or, well, exceedingly non-specific -- what is it about DOE Web copy that puts a reader to sleep faster than Proust's Remembrances of Things Past? But give them time: FRIB is a brand new facility, after all. AlpineKat's Rare Isotope Rap is a welcome summary of what the project is, how it works, and why we should care about studying rare isotopes.
Rare isotopes are short-lived nuclei not normally found on Earth, and as AlpineKat raps, scientists still don't understand why some isotopes are stable while others decay. Investigating this myster could reveal clues about the life cycles of stars and the birth of the elements -- most of the heavier elements (everything except hydrogen, helium, and a bit of lithium and other light atoms) are the result of supernova explosions). Some of these rare isotopes could also lead to better diagnosis and treatment of human diseases, so it's not just all about esoteric, space-age science.
People keep asking MacAlpine about possible record deals, and she's pretty realistic about those prospects: "I don't think that'll be happening any time soon." And that's just fine by me. The music industry's loss is physics rap's gain. Five million YouTube viewers blows most record sales out of the water.
Good news comes from John at Cosmic Variance regarding the status of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which was sidelined last year shortly after its initial startup. LHC fans will be pleased to hear that the last replacement magnet is being installed, and the machine should be ready to start up again by late summer, achieving actual collisions by late fall -- although he doesn't think there'll be any sign of the Higgs boson before 2012 because it will initially be running at lower energies.
It's good news for LHC fans, that is. Perennial doomsday prophet Walter Wagner is probably freaking out and getting ready to file another lawsuit to stop the LHC from destroying the world. Wagner was actually featured last night in a satirical clip from The Daily Show, with John Oliver reporting as a British devil's advocate for the fearmongers.
Heck, Oliver actually went to CERN, where he interviewed theorist John Ellis, among others. I give Ellis high marks for playing along with the outrageous satire, even challenging Oliver on which of them best understood the basic definition of a Kelvin. (Hint: Ellis wins, hands down.) But the best scene is Oliver's deft juxtaposition of Ellis' estimate of the chances of the LHC destroying the world (zero) with Wagner's (50/50). Oliver's response: "I'm not sure that's how probability works." Personally, I'd have quoted Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." (For a primer on probability, check out Jason Rosenhouse or Ask Dr. Math.)
I don't know what's gotten into CERN lately; they seem intent on over-throwing the pervasive stereotype of scientists as humorless nerds. First they cooperated with director Ron Howard on the filming of Angels and Demons, even inviting the Hollywood contingent to a special premiere at CERN. Now they're willingly playing straight man for The Daily Show. That pretty much makes CERN -- not to mention the LHC -- the hippest science institution in town.
Via Swans on Tea, I found this satirical article in Canada's The Morning News by Toronto-based writer Michael Rottman, offering some helpful survival tips should one accidentally swallow a Higgs boson, with the unfortunate side effect that one's mass begins to increase at an alarming rate. My personal favorite among the 10 tips:
Initiate a quantum fluctuation which resembles the formation of a new universe. The Higgs boson will attempt to create mass in the faux-universe; when it does, phase yourself out of this dimension before the boson gets wise. You may also need to rally intermediate vector bosons to keep the Higgs occupied while you make your escape. It may be encouraging to know that if something goes wrong, you have a viable kidney in each of the 11 dimensions.
Of course, initiating a quantum fluctuation that gives rise to a baby universe -- or at least a fluctuation that causes something resembling said baby universe to pop into existence for a fraction of a second, long enough to fool the Higgs boson -- is easier said than done. Phasing in and out of dimensions is a cakewalk in comparison.
Rottman suggests that neophytes stick with the far less challenging "Freundlich Maneuver": "a firming of the will that respects the Higgs boson while asserting your own dominance. Just because it can create mass doesn’t mean it has to."
A few weeks ago, during Neutrino Week, I mentioned UCLA's David Saltzberg, who is spending his Christmas holiday "on the ice" at the South Pole, as part of a collaboration to build and deploy a neutrino detector dubbed ANITA-II (the ANtarctic Impulsive Transient Array, Take Two). It's designed to
detect high energy neutrinos produced by collisions between cosmic rays
and the photons that comprise the cosmic microwave background radiation
that pervades the entire universe. It's a chilly, thankless task for a scientist. Here's David's actual "bedroom" during the experimental set-up:
Brrr! That makes me cold just looking at it. And here's David and one of his students planting sensors in a borehole in the ice (there should be a sign saying "Caution: Scientists At Work" or something near the solar panel):
Alas, the best-laid plans of scientists sometimes go awry, for reasons beyond their control. There were several frustrating weather delays to the launch. But over the weekend, David emailed with excellent news: "I am (very) happy to report that the ANITA-II payload was launched this morning and made a happy ascent to the top of the stratosphere." (For those who want to follow ANITA-II's progress, you can track its path here.) Bon voyage, ANITA-II!
All photos: David Saltzberg, UCLA. Used with permission.
Last week, a terrific documentary called The Atom Smashers made its debut on the award-winning PBS series Independent Lens. It chronicles 15 intense months at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator in Illinois, as the aging machine sought to discover the elusive Higgs boson before its nemesis, the next-generation Large Hadron Collider, came online. (The LHC, after much hoopla, officially turned on in September, only to be turned off nine days later later for repairs after a faulty electrical connection resulted in a helium leak.) Check out this preview clip:
It's easy to see why the filmmakers were drawn to the story. There's a terrific narrative: with all eyes turned toward the LHC, can a plucky old workhorse of particle physics -- with a pretty impressive track record to date -- eke out one last major "scoop"? You also have a colorful cast of characters that includes Nobel laureate Leon Lederman (who dubbed the Higgs "the god particle," thereby earning the enmity of his colleagues who loathe the misleading moniker); Ben Kilminster, who fronts his own rock band when he's not analyzing raw data; and John Conway, experimentalist, who blogs over at Cosmic Variance.
Ironically, Conway found himself at the center of a bloggy controversy a little over a year ago, when rumors swirled that the D Zero collaboration (one of two major experiments at the Tevatron) had found a slight "bump" in their statistical data that could be an indicator of the Higgs. Conway wrote about it on Cosmic Variance, as did another physicist/blogger, Tommaso Dorigo.
Conway in particular wanted to convey the excitement of actually doing physics in real time, and both he and Dorigo included appropriate caveats about the "bump" in question, cautioning that such things are actually quite common in particle physics, and usually don't amount to a genuine discovery. Unfortunately, the story ended up getting quite a bit of play in the press -- and those caveats were not, at first, prominently mentioned, giving the misleading impression that a major scoop was imminent. It caused a bit of consternation in the physics community, raising questions about the new role of blogs in the dissemination of new experimental results.
I, for one, can appreciate the difficulty. High energy physicists must analyze millions, if not billions, of "events" picked up by their detectors following collisions; out of every 100,000 of those events, only a few turn out to "statistically significant." The field has become something of a numbers game, with scientists gradually building up evidence block by block until they reach a point where they get enough of a "bump" in the data to distinguish it from all the background noise.
These days, a major discovery -- like the top quark in the late 1990s -- isn't based on a single observation, but on data that slowly accumulates over time. I suspect this slow, ponderous approach would be maddening for someone in today's 24-hour news cycle. Dennis Overbye nicely summed up the difficulty in his July 24, 2007 article for The New York Times:
"The job is further complicated by quantum randomness, the dice-rolling quality of subatomic interactions, which ensures that there will be bumps and fluctuations in the data even in the absence of any unusual physics.... To physicists, the gold standard for discovery is what they call a '5-sigma' bump, where sigma is a measure of bumpiness known as a standard deviation. A bump that high means that odds are less than 1 in 3.5 million that it was produced by chance."
As physicists are all too well aware, however, a 5-sigma bump is extremely rare; more often than not, they're looking at something in the 1-sigma to 3-sigma range, and these usually disappear as more data accumulates. Both Conway and Dorigo said this in their blog posts; that doubt just wasn't adequately conveyed in the press accounts. As Conway later told Physics World, "Any science reporter whose primary source of scientific information is blogs is about as responsible as the student who, writing a paper, draws primarily from Wikipedia." Blogs are not necessarily authoritative sources, particularly in the case of Conway and Dorigo, both of whom clearly state that their blogs are personal in nature.
Hindsight is 20/20; would Conway have written about his all-too-human excitement at this intriguing possibility if he'd known it would be so badly hyped? Probably not. And now other physicists with blogs are likely to be more reluctant to share similar stories about how science is done. That's a crying shame, because almost all scientific progress is first predicated by failure of some sort. Null results play an important role in accumulating knowledge -- something that is not well-appreciated by those outside the community.
If nothing else, Conway and Dorigo helped bring a spotlight onto exactly how major discoveries are made in 21st century particle physics, educating reporters and interested members of the public about the intricacies involved in these analyses. Personally, I have that much more confidence in the scientific enterprise every time I see it engage in this kind of rigorous, self-correcting process. My hope is that others would feel the same. After all, The Atom Smashers proves that high-energy physics can make for a riveting documentary. Think of all the other science stories just waiting to be told.
Photo: An aerial view of the Main Injector Ring (front) and four-mile-long Tevatron at Fermilab. Source: Fermi National Laboratory (public domain).
Welcome to the fourth and final installment of Neutrino Week at Twisted Physics. In prior posts, I explored the first detection of solar neutrinos; the subsequent realization that neutrinos can change their "flavor" and thus have a tiny bit of mass; and a couple of South Pole experiments (AMANDA and IceCube) to further investigate the intriguing properties of this complicated little "ghost particle." But there are also two competing neutrino telescopes under construction that will take the hunt down to the depths of the sea.
It's admittedly an unusual approach to astronomy, which generally involves looking up to scan the heavens for clues to our universe, gleaned from light, radio waves, x-rays, infrared radiation, or gamma rays. But any instrument designed to do so must grapple with how best to filter out all the extraneous "noise" to focus on the most useful data. In recent years, astronomers realized that because the Earth is largely opaque to most of the aforementioned forms of radiation, if you sink neutrino detectors deep under water (or bury it under a lot of Antarctic ice) you'll mostly just see neutrinos -- which are otherwise extremely elusive.
That's where ANTARES comes in, short for Astronomy with a Neutrino Telescope and Abyss environmental RESearch project. (Clearly, they took some liberties with the acronym, in part because it's also the name of a prominent star.) It's comprised of an array of 12 vertical stings of photomultiplier terms serving as its "eyes", anchored to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea just off the coast of Toulon, France.
ANTARES goes about detecting neutrinos in much the same way as AMANDA, looking for telltale flashes of Cherenkov radiation on the rare occasion when a neutrino collides head-on with an atomic nuclei in the salty water. In fact, ANTARES is a companion telescope of sorts to AMANDA's successor, IceCube: the two projects employ similar operating principles, merely point toward opposite hemispheres. ANTARES was completed in May and over the next few years, its scientists hope to produce a detailed map of cosmic sources for neutrinos, as well as helping with the ongoing search for dark matter.
The main rival to ANTARES in the search for neutrinos under the sea is the project known as NESTOR (Neutrino Extended Submarine Telescope with Oceanographic Research), slated for deployment on the sea floor just off Pylos, Greece. Its "eyes" consist of lots of glass balls holding the usual photomultiplier tubes, connected via star-shaped titanium frames that are stacked on top of each other into a tower that will ultimately boast 12 "floors." The various detectors are connected via a deep sea optic fiber to the communications system.
What do astronomers gain from deploying their neutrino telescopes in the ocean? Well, light scatters less in water than it does in ice, so one advantage of
the deep-sea environment is slightly better resolving power. The
downside is that ocean water contains the radioactive isotope potassium-40, giving rise to more sources of background light than ice. Nor is the deep sea environment especially gentle: underwater currents can be quite powerful, and in fact, NESTOR has struggled to deploy its various components in bad weather.
And then there was the surprising discovery by astronomers -- marine biologists have known for centuries -- that the ocean depths are teeming with multiple forms of bioluminescent marine life -- not something easily confused with Cherenkov radiation, but still, it's that much more background light that must be filtered out of the collected data before the weak neutrino signatures can be detected.
ANTARES, at least, incorporates a special camera system to automatically track bioluminescent organisms, and whatever it finds will be shared with the various ocean science institutes participating in the collaboration. This is interdisciplinary cooperation in action -- even if it happened a bit after the fact. Perhaps we'll end up learning as much about deep-sea creatures as we will about the cosmos.
Photo: Artist's conception of the ANTARES array. Source: ANTARES collaboration.
Jennifer Ouellette is the author of "Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics" and "The Physics of the Buffyverse", holds a black belt in jujitsu, and lives in Los Angeles with a tall cosmologist named Sean.
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