Thanks to Harvey Newman, a brief update on how the repairs are going.  This is all good news – it means they have a way of detecting this sort of problem before it becomes catastrophic,  and implementation of better means of mitigation is also proceeding well.  Even the ping pong ball test, where they send a ping pong ball around the beam to test for obstructions which may occur when the magnets are warmed, has been effectively utilized.  I see this all as very encouraging.

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Via symmetry breaking, here’s a neat video of artist Josef Krisofoletti painting a stylized image of ATLAS on the side of the Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC:

But no art (nor science) comes to the public without some misunderstanding:

“As with the creation of the real ATLAS detector, Kristofoletti faced a few setbacks along the way. Approached by a policeman who thought he was covering the wall with graffitti, he explained what he was doing and that the painting was of one of the particle detectors at CERN. The policeman had heard of CERN and the LHC, and let the painting continue, but not without a quick discussion of much-publicized doomsday scenarios.”

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Darn it, Peter got to it first, but I too would like to call your attention to the interesting essay that Dennis Overbye wrote in The New York Times this week.  (I have to post more rapidly.)  It reflects upon President Obama’s call to “restore science to its rightful place,” and the interplay between science and democracy.  There is a shout-out to the LHC in there, as he remarks that people from a great variety of backgrounds have happily worked together (or at least happily enough) on these projects.

I agree with Overbye’s arguments, but the essay, which asserts that democracy is one of the values of science, got me thinking about what other values that science gives us.  I think that one of the most important values for me is one that Overbye touches on a little: the value of listening to what nature is telling us.  In science, that means listening to the data that our experiments provide. 

There are many ways to be creative in science — in my particular science, we create new acceleration technologies, devise new ways to detect particles, and find clever ways to analyze our data so that we can measure particle properties with the smallest possible uncertainty.  We have a healthy appreciation, and admiration, for ideas that we haven’t seen before that turn out to have a big payoff.  Practitioners of theoretical physics can build very creative theories that explain current measurements and make predictions for future results.  But there is one thing that we are never creative about, and that’s what the actual answers are.  Those we can only find by doing the experiments — we can’t make it up, we can’t guess, we can’t rely on the opinions of others, we can’t be superstitious.  All of the creativity we have must bump up against the realities that nature presents us with, and if our hypotheses disagree with the data we record, we must discard them.  It is a little humbling, in a way.

But on the other hand, it is also empowering.  So many answers may be out there, if we only open our eyes and look!  This is obviously true of something like particle physics, but I think it applies to a broader range of human problems.  What kind of programs are effective in reducing societal ills?  What economic policies might improve the lives of the largest number of people?  You can try them out and see what works, or analyze the results of previous attempts to implement them, and see if those worked.  We can do better than just following a philosophical ideal or notion — we can test our creativity against the real world.  Obviously these sorts of “experiments” have all sorts of complications that physics experiments don’t.  But we can still collect data and learn something from nature.  Perhaps that is one of the rightful places of science that Obama has in mind?

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The two chambers of the American Congress, the House and the Senate, are working their way through separate stimulus bills that total $819 Billion in each case. But the devil is in the details and if you look for funds to stimulate science, which would make a lot of sense in these days, because of the obvious link between science education, research and development on one side and the economy on the other side, the two bills are quite different. Effectively each package vows to support three science oriented funding agencies, the DOE Office of Science, NSF and NIST. Here I will only comment on the DOE and NSF proposals, because these are the agencies that predominantly support high energy and nuclear science.

In the house version, which passed yesterday amidst a very partisan vote, the DOE Office of Science can expect a $1.9 Billion increase, and NSF will receive a $3 Billion increase compared to last year’s continuing resolution. Now that budget was already considerably below the projected science funding agreed upon in the America Competes Act in 2007. So it might make more sense to compare the numbers to the projections of the America Competes Act. In this case the increase for the DOE would be around $700 Million and the increase for NSF $1.7 Billion, still sizable numbers that pass as real stimulus.

On the Senate side though, these allocations were seriously curtailed. The Senate proposes an additional $430 Million for the DOE and an additional $1.4 Billion for NSF compared to the continuing resolution. This is in effect an additional $141 Million for NSF compared to the America Competes level, but a de-facto reduction of $752 Million for the DOE compared to the America Competes Act. 

I think in general all my colleagues are very excited about the prospects of a stimulus package for science. But we also view our work in research and education as a central part of getting the economy back on track, and it is worrisome to see that these allocations, which should be at the heart of every stimulus or recovery package, are considered low priority and negotiable. The House numbers were reasonable and based on detailed input by large organizations such as the American Physical Society, the Association of American Universities and the Task Force for the Future of American Innovation. The relative cuts in the Senate bill seem less well motivated and one needs to see whether the House numbers could potentially be restored in conference. The DOE funding is of particular relevance to high energy and nuclear physics. The proposed $430 Million in the Senate bill are largely assigned to infra-structure projects and thus will not lead to additional grant money for research and educational groups or Frontier Research Centers as planned in the House Bill.

The American Physical Society initiated yet another letter writing campaign in order to convince your senators and house representatives that additional funding for science is well targeted and effective in getting the economy going. You can find pre-written letters at:

http://www.congressweb.com/cweb4/index.cfm?orgcode=apspa&hotissue=81

http://www.congressweb.com/cweb4/index.cfm?orgcode=apspa&hotissue=82

Let’s just hope that in all the partisan wrangling about who is serving the people best, one essential piece of actual sensible stimulus does not fall prey to ignorance. Money for science education and research is not ‘pork’, it never has been and it never will be.

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I admit it: I’m still pinching myself on a daily basis when I see “President Obama” in newspapers and on broadcasts.  While many are excited about how he will restore balance to American foreign policy and the gyrating economy, those of us in the science community are still buzzing about Obama proclaiming loudly and clearly, in his inaugural address no less, that he will “restore science to its rightful place.”

Dennis Overbye wrote a lovely piece for yesterday’s Science Times on this, thoughtfully explaning the connection between scientific method and democratic values.  In particular, science is “not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth”.  That is to say, it is an approach towards finding truth which implies a worldview based on values of “honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view.”  Overbye goes on to discuss how this pragmatic activity, this behavior which “evolved because it worked”, is often squelched in authoritarian societies such as China.  There, any contradiction with Marxist dogma (which while anti-religion, does all those things that orthodox religions do), including advocating the Big Bang theory, leads to imprisonment or worse.  But even nominal democracies like ours can stray, as it has in recent years:

But once you can’t talk about one subject, the origin of the universe, for example, sooner or later other subjects are going to be off-limits, like global warming, birth control and abortion, or evolution, the subject of yet another dustup in Texas last week.

What still surprises me, in this optimistic new era, is that science can still remain under attack — but the techniques get more and more insidious.  To my eyes, the doomsday crowd plays a similar role as the same gang of politically-motivated thugs who try and squelch actual science.  But rather than claiming that certain science is immoral (e.g. stem-cell research), they object to it on the grounds that it is somehow dangerous for humanity on scales that we can barely imagine — based on “scientific” arguments which can be proven false.  Seriously, I could accept their concerns, but only if they had a point and they took a consistent scientific approach to the problem, allowing all relevant evidence to bear upon it.

But check out this Onion-worthy headline Fox News ran today (pointed out by fellow blogger Seth): “Scientists Not So Sure ‘Doomsday Machine’ Won’t Destroy World.’” from an article by Paul Wagenseil.  It seems to start out in the right way: here is a scientific paper which says something, and I’m telling you the conclusion.  But he isn’t.

Instead of quoting the actual paper, an unrefereed (it’s arxiv, natch) preprint by Casadio, Fabi, and Harms (yes, Harms), Wagenseil quotes a blog post merely about the paper on arxivblog.org.  Arxivblog is  anonymously written by a blogger named “KFC” and is unrelated to the actual arXiv.org website.  I personally think KFC is an amusing blogger, as do many others, and seems to know something about physics.  However, the conclusion drawn from the last sentence of the paper: “Whoa, let’s have that again: these mini black holes will be hanging around for seconds, possibly minutes?” has two serious problems.  First, it has no obvious connection to the destructive power of said black holes.  Second, it is completely at odds with the conclusion drawn by the authors of the paper, who most-likely know their assumptions and results far better: “We conclude that, for the RS scenario and black holes described by the metric ([6]), the growth of black holes to catastrophic size does not seem possible” (which is the second-to-last sentence.)

If you’re going to use a paper’s conclusions to support an argument, the scientific method requires you to cite the full conclusion, not just the part that you need.  All of the estimates in the paper, based on quite relaxed assumptions, tend to work against a doomsday scenario, but this doesn’t seem to make it into either the arxivblog post — nor into the article by the putative science journalist who doesn’t bother to read the original paper, or simply call the authors.

Instead, all you get is a punchy headline, which can only add fuel to the fires raging against doing actual scientific research.  We can only hope that in the Obama era, Overbye’s imagined “wild and beautiful” garden of wide-ranging scientific research is properly protected from those fires.

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The Bad Astronomy blog is publicizing a chance to choose what the Hubble Space Telescope looks at.  The basic idea is that there’s going to be an internet vote between six objects that Hubble has never looked at, and Hubble will be pointed at the winner and send out pictures of it by April.  It seems like a fun way to get the public to learn more about, and feel more involved in, the Hubble project.

I’ll let you read more details at one of the links above, but I have another question to consider: can we do something similar with the LHC? That is, could we put up some kind of page where people could vote on what kind of physics we would study over the course of some particular week?  Maybe a choice between searching for Supersymmetry, or a high-mass Higgs boson, or a low-mass Higgs boson?  At first glance, the answer would seem to be “no.”  We obviously have no control over what kind of physics happens when the protons of the LHC collide — we just look at what comes out.  And it seems unlikely that any physicist would volunteer to put their work hours into a particular analysis because of a public vote, and anyway we’ll have people working on all the high-profile analyses and many low-profile ones besides.

But there actually is a sense in which ATLAS or CMS could to something similar.  Remember that our detectors can only record a few hundred events every second, out of the almost forty million times the beams cross during that second.  There are lots of collisions we have to throw out because we can’t store enough data, and it’s the trigger system that decides which few we keep.  In practice, there are a number of different signals that we program the trigger system to be interested in: we take a certain number of random low-energy events to help us calibrate what we see in our other events, and we have separate “trigger paths” for hadronic jets, for muons, for electrons, and so on.  We try to record all the events that might represent interesting new physics, but as the collision rate at the LHC increases, we’ll have to throw away even some of those.  When the committee meets to decide how to balance the different possible triggers, what is at issue is precisely which kinds of events the detector will “point at,” i.e. recognize as important and save.  People with different interests in terms of physics might make different choices about how to achieve that balance, and every study would always love more trigger bandwidth if it were available, and that’s why we have committees to argue about it in the first place.

So why not reserve 5% of the ATLAS or CMS trigger bandwidth for a public vote on what physics to look for, to give a little extra oomph to one study or another?  Actually, I can think of several good and practical reasons why not — but it’s fun to think about!

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Just a quick blog to add a little strangeness to your life, or mine anyway. Back in Boston, where we’re getting yet more snow today – we’re running out of places to put it.   Anyway, 8 inches of snow (or sleet or rain) does not make for a great bike ride home so I slogged to the bus, and on my way, encountered this:

A river of rather dirty smelly water in travelling down the Mass Ave in Arlington, deep enough to leave the street and start invading the sidewalks.   There was talk at the bus stop about manning the lifeboats.  Seems a sewer pipe somewhere uphill broke – the real problem will be cleaning this up before it freezes and turns the main thoroughfare into an ice skating rink!

Not much to do with the LHC or physics in general, but scientists do do ordinary things like take the bus to work too.  They don’t often encounter sludge, however.

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It’s one crazy time, post-inauguration.  I mean, Obama was sworn in again.  And the stimulus package is really kicking the science community into high gear.

So expectations will probably be quite high today, when Secretary Chu (no more mere designate, he) speaks to the DOE community today by video.  I will update this later today after watching.

[Update: I couldn't get my RealPlayer settings sorted out until just before the end, so I basically missed it.  BNL will post video soonish, but in the meantime, I found a nice set of notes posted on Cosmic Variance.

Some things jump out: Energy is priority #1. The national labs are crown jewels.  The US needs to replace the great industrial labs that have closed down.  He expects lots of young-to-middle-age scientists to shift their careers toward energy to develop the transformative technologies needed for US energy independence...more later when I see the video.]

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I was there.  My personal politics are hardly a secret for those who are interested, but I am not inclined to say too much here about why I was there or what I think about it.  However, there were things to be celebrated at yesterday’s inauguration that even Rick Warren and Diane Feinstein could agree on, things which have already been said by so many who are more eloquent than I am that I hesitate to say a word.   But I will leave you with the words of another, and my own small addendum:

This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight.

– Senator John McCain, November 4 2008

That special pride belongs to all of us, Senator McCain.

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Barack Obama is sworn in.

Yes, the coverage of the historic day is just as intense here in France.  We watched the big ceremony on TV (you perhaps can see the french subtitles of the swearing-in ceremony on the TV).

Favorite line in inaugural address: “We will restore science to its rightful place…”

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Went hiking up the Jura Mountains the other day with my friend Maarten.  Going to the mountains is the only manner of staying sane in Geneve during the grey grey grey grey grey wintertime.  It’s the Brouillard, and sometimes you don’t see the sun for weeks.  Everyone gets grumpy.  But the cure is is just to go up, as we did:

You can see the soup of clouds behind and below me, underneath which is Geneve and Lac Leman.  We did a little slipping and sliding, but overall had a great time in the sunshine at 1500 meters, when it was dark and dreary at 400 meters.  Just one of the things one does around here when not banging away on the laptop or in a meeting (or both).

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I was very amused to read in the article “20 years of the W and Z bosons” (Physics World, vol 16 no. 1, Jan 2003) that CERN supposedly turned off heating to “make sure that the physicists took a Christmas vacation, and maybe even relaxed.” The motivations of upper management still remain obscure and elite, but heating certainly felt like it had been solidly off that first week I was back on the job. Now that the fingers are functioning again, some physicists have even started to do non-physics things like posting on blogs… but then, the same article mentioned that management “knew that many physicists would gladly freeze to death if they thought they would be able to get time on the computers,” ahem…

On the left: My home-town is by the city of Kuala Lumpur, 3°N 101°E — asian, tropical, and unapologetically unsophisticated in how it is alive. Having a number of loving parents ensures that I am volunteered for vacations.

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During the holidays, many of my colleagues working at CERN and I went home, where we encountered aunts and grandpas, parents and friends, all with the the same questions to be answered: What it is that you do? Is that the black hole thing? OK, right, physics… but what is your actual JOB?

While I was in the US, I went to visit a high school class near Rochester, NY. One of the most important things I thought I could explain to the students there was how researchers at CERN become researchers at CERN. That’s something I didn’t understand at all when I was choosing a career path, and it helps explain a little about what it is that we do everyday.

A disclaimer: People take all kinds of paths to become researchers at CERN, but there is one standard path, and that’s what I’ll describe. There are, of course, many variations on this theme — my own path wasn’t exactly what I’ll describe here. I’ll also talk mostly about the way it works in the US — it is similar in many other countries, but with subtle differences in years, titles, etc.

Here, then, is my guide for families, friends, and particle physics enthusiastics to what it is that many of us do.

Step 1. College, AKA “Undergrad.” This one is pretty well understood. Most physicists working at CERN went through four (or more…) years of college, with a physics degree or some other related science degree. In the four years of classes, students should learn the basic physics and math tools that they’ll need. In addition to taking classes, many people also start to do research with a professor at their university. This professor is someone who does research in addition to teaching. He or she is actively engaged in answering some question that no one has answered before, working in a lab on campus, or working as part of a big collaboration like the ones we have at CERN.

Step 2. Graduate school, AKA “Doctorate” AKA “Ph.D.” After finishing college, most people who want to do research (in any field, not just physics!) apply to graduate school. It’s usually a good idea to go to a different university for graduate school, to experience a new place and meet new people. The first one to two years of grad school in the US feels a lot like undergrad, only more so: classes, projects and papers, exams. Each university has a different set of exams for physics students to pass, before they can focus all their time on research. During the time that students are taking classes, they are also usually teaching classes at the university. They may be supervising labs, grading, or teaching small sections of a bigger lecture class once a week. Physics grad students may also get started doing research right away with a group of people at their university. This means that most science grad students are not paying to go to school like law students or medical students — they are getting their tuition covered, and getting paid, by teaching or by doing research.

After the classes are over, graduate students in physics focus on research. They have one or more advisors, who study a topic that the student also wants to become an expert in. The average physics Ph.D. is about six years, so people may spend 2 years on classes and then four years on research. This is one of the most misunderstood parts of science grad school, I think. After those first few years, grad school is a lot like a regular job. You don’t have any more classes, you do work, you get paid, and your tuition is paid by the research group.

The culmination of a Ph.D. in any area is the thesis. In this document, the student puts together their contribution to their field: their advancement of the knowledge in their research area. They should present a new idea, or answer a question no one has ever answered, or write about a new measurement they’ve done. The thesis is judged by a committee of professors including the student’s advisor, and once it is done, the degree of “Doctorate” is awarded and people joke around with you for a while calling you “Doctor” and asking if there’s a Doctor in the house.

One tip for family and friends of graduate students: The question that no one near the end of the Ph.D. wants to be asked is “When will you be done?” It may seem like polite chit-chat to you, but it may be a wrenching topic for them. There is no set schedule for a Ph.D. to finish. Ph.D.’s are not necessarily awarded in the spring, or in the fall, it doesn’t come everyone after a set number of years like 4, 5, or 6. It’s a decision made by the students and the advisors, when they
all feel like the work they are doing is ready. Asking people when they’ll finish only reminds them that they may not know THEMSELVES when they’ll be finished, and that’s often frustrating.

Step 3. Postdoctoral Research Scientist AKA “Postdoc.” This is the job that I have now. After finishing a Ph.D. in partiçle physics, people who want to continue doing research usually take a job at a university or lab called a “postdoc.” There’s a pretty seamless transition from grad school to being a postdoc, because postdocs also do research — similar to the last 4 or so years fo grad school. In our field, people usually take a job at a different university than the one where they were a Ph.D. student, and they keep the job there for about 4-5 years, with a bit of variation on the term (sometimes 3 years, or as many as 7…). Postdocs are often put in charge of bigger projects, and do more mentoring of grad students. Postdocs also have more choice about which topics to work on.

Step 4. Faculty member or Researcher at a Lab. After being a postdoc, physicists staying in the field apply for research positions at labs, like Brookhaven National Lab where Peter works, or they apply for research or faculty jobs at universities. Both offer opportunities for continuing research, and faculty members teach classes as well. (Sometimes research associates teach, too.) Once you have this position, you still have to deal with getting tenure if you want to stick around. I remember listening to a very interesting NPR interview with a Harvard biology professor whose students couldn’t believe that she still had things to worry about — the job she had as Harvard Professor was her goal, wasn’t it? She explained that she still had a lot to do if she wanted to STAY a Harvard Professor. The whole interview about her career and passion for deadly mushrooms is online.

Hopefully, this will give you some context for the posts here, written by people at the grad student, postdoc, and researcher/faculty levels, and some idea of the paths we’ve taken to get here.

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So things are getting interesting: the House Democrats unveil an $825 billion (billion…) stimulus package, and the Times tells us:

… it would provide $10 billion for science facilities and research…

Ten billion dollars.  I wonder who exactly is going to get a piece of that.

One answer I’ve heard is that the DOE office of science (a major source of particle and nuclear physics funding) will get $5.9B — that’s nearly 50% more than the current funding provided by the FY09 Continuing Resolution (CR).  Now who is going to get a piece of that?  Anyway, it won’t matter until it gets farther along in the process, but wow.

UPDATE: fellow blogger Rene has pointed me to a nice set of links:

• Press summary
  Highlight: “Department of Energy: $1.9 billion for basic research into the physical sciences including high-energy physics, nuclear physics, and fusion energy sciences and improvements to DOE laboratories and scientific facilities. $400 million is for the Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy to support high-risk, high-payoff research into energy sources and energy efficiency.”
• Full bill

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So, I’ve been gone a bit (again), sorry.  I’m not sure you really want to hear about my trials and travails in teaching undergraduates Classical Electromagnetism, although a nice story on my class did appear in the New York Times yesterday  (Prof. Sciolla is a colleague, we were teaching two different sections of the same class, and Ms. Rimer visited hers).  I can discuss this TEAL business in another blog, if there is demand.

Made it back to CERN in October briefly, and now during the MIT break in January.  Pretty quiet over here, but I sense after last fall’s exercises in Cosmic Ray running and “almost Beam” running, people are gung-ho to apply what was learned and sharpen our preparations to improve our “readiness for beams”.  This is a good thing.   Exactly when we may see some more beam?  The $1,000,000 question – but there is a workshop in early February which is expected to produce an updated schedule for 2009.  It would be very good to see beam this year.

In the meantime, there’s the continual plight of  Science Funding in the US – noone is quite sure what will happen, but everyone is quite happy about Obama’s science team – Energy Secretary Steve Chu (a fellow member of Project Steve!), Nobelist and Director of LBL certainly is cogniscent of the issues in HEP, and John Holdren, President’s Science Advisor,  also recognizes the importance basic science can play in everybody’s life (even if they don’t realize it).  Before the legislative branch recessed, there was some indication that funding for science would be bundled into the Economic Bailout legislation, but I haven’t heard any update.  Otherwise it is a continuing resolution, which would be bad – I don’t want to go into what bad means, it’ll depress me.

However, two things I caught recently encourage me – first, a document from the National Academy of Science (executive summary for free) which notes the link between National Security and Technology, and among other things finds

US national security and economic prosperity depend on full global engagement in science, technology, and commerce

although most of the note is about export rules, but it does recommend lifting the rather stringent Visa requirements for foreign scientists coming in to the US.  Having had collaborators who spent 5 hours in Border Control after a trans-atlantic flight, and excellent prospects whom we simply could not hire due to Visa restrictions, I can see where this may have a direct benefit on Science, and the demonstration of the benefit of investment in scientific pursuits on other aspects is certainly something to be applauded.

Second was an guest opinion in the New York Times (you can tell how I get my news when I am at CERN, huh?) from Stanford PhD. biologist, who uses the LHC as an example of Big Science – to (mis)use his metaphor, if you want to reach the fruit at the top, you need to build a big ladder.  He is advocating something a little different, Citizen Science, where ordinary citizens gather eg. ecological data for survey purposes, but even the LHC has its own version – LHC@Home, where you can put spare cycles on your home computer to work for LHC.  I think there are even some variants out there, but you can use google, right?  Anyway, the good omen is that scientists outside the arena of Particle Physics are recognizing the reasons behind why “Big Science” is the way our field works, and even seeing how the developments of our field (large scale computing, synchrotrons were his two examples) are benefiting other scientific disciplines which lead to direct ramifications for the public at large.

All this is fairly heartening from my point of view – evidence that we are moving away from a situation where science pursuits were seen as a luxury,  towards the recognition of the cross feeding between different scientific endevours and the realization of the importance of the role science plays in our societal “pursuit of happiness”.

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