It may be cheating, but sometimes I have to go no further than the US/LHC front page to find something to blog about. This morning, this “headline” from Scientific American blogger John Matson caught my eye:
Reading the entry and the original Princetonian article, it turns out that Princeton undergraduate Xiaohang Quan found a bug in the CMS software for reconstructing the particles that come out of a proton-proton collision inside the detector. (Reconstruction is the process of interpreting the singals from the detector as particles. For example, an electron is identified when a charged track matches up with energy deposited in the electromagnetic calorimeter, a photon is identified when energy is deposited but no track matches, and so on. This picture helps.) My first reaction was that this isn’t news at all: if CMS software is anything like the software on ATLAS, then bugs are found in it all the time!
The software for our experiments is extremely complicated, trying to do myriad things at once, and it has (at a conservative guess) several hundred people working actively on it at the same time. All of them are adding features — for example, new and better ways to look for particles — and changing things around, which introduces a constant stream of incompatibilities and bugs. So we constantly have major glitches; then we (constantly) find them, and (constantly) create more. Very few of us are really “pros”; we’re physicists, not computer programmers, and it shows when you look at our code and how it’s organized.
And many of our collaborators are undergraduates, and they aren’t just working with us in order to “gain experience.” They are, and are expected to be, serious contributors to the overall experiment. They generally don’t take on extremely long-term or full-time projects, but they test equipment, investigate ways to explore new physics, and give talks in meetings. And yes, they introduce bugs in the software, and find them too — just as do graduate students, postdocs, and professors.
In short, Quan’s achievements don’t somehow imply that the rest of CMS was asleep at the wheel — they show that we all work together, and that every collaborator counts.
Come on, Seth, leave the kid alone! He did good work.
Yes, she certainly did. And I’m always happy to see publicity for the work we do — I just think the media coverage of this story reflects some misconceptions about particle physics collaborations, which is what I was trying to address.
Seth, I think you’re right that the actual story here is that this isn’t news. That is: these collaborations often have very talented undergraduates working for them who make solid contributions. The problem is that it was spun as “Look at the undergrad schooling the silly physicists!” rather than “Look what you can do even before you get to grad school!”.
It really boils down to he/she/we and us … recognition is all well and good but when someone takes enormous credit for work that happens on a daily basis around the world… well it’s probably motivated by A) money B) a proud mom. You all deserve credit in the media daily as individuals. The people on the outside deserve some credit daily too.
I have to say… being in the film industry as a programmer and developing software over the past 15 years, I have seen plenty of credit handed out to people that, in my humble opinion, just did what everyone one else was doing. Look at Bill Gates and Steve Jobs for example. From the media, you would think those guys wrote the operating systems on their own.
Mad respect to all.
I thought the John Matson blog explained the situation well:
“John S. Conway, a University of California, Davis, physicist (and Cosmic Variance blogger) who is part of the CMS team, says that finding such glitches is common and not cause for concern. He says Quan found ‘a bug in the software we use to reconstruct events’ that ‘would have been found very quickly by any one of hundreds of other people who are testing our software every day.’”
Was this edited in later? You never know. In any case, it’s common for headlines to be more sensational than the contents that follow.
Bruce: Yes, Matson handled the story ok. I think other media outlets did not handle the story as well or as accurately. On the other hand, I must admit I’m a little peeved by sensational headlines that imply that I and my colleagues are idiots; even if the subsequent story corrects the facts, that first impression remains.