Quantum Diaries

Last night I was catching up on some of my favorite TV shows via the web and I came across this ‘Bones’ episode called ‘The Science in the Physicist’ which caught my eye. It aired two weeks ago so it’s quite recent, and based on the title this was supposed to be fun. And, oh yeah, it was !!

The dead woman had worked in an elusive secretive high level physics lab on the discovery of the God particle, i.e. the Higgs, using the Large Hadron Collider. Hmm. In addition she was the editor of one of the major journal publications in science. The lab was headed by a blind, good-looking dude working on super-conductivity, and the other main characters worked on garnering energy from earth quakes and cutting edge radioactive dating techniques. So this apparently was your run-of-the-mill typical physics lab. Hmm. All the people were young and extremely good looking and swapped sexual favors at leisure. Exactly how I would describe the LHC or Brookhaven ;-). The whole thing wouldn’t probably be worth mentioning if it weren’t for the extremely inventive ways how physicists kill each other. So she was working on destroying the earth via black hole generation, but that didn’t kill her. What did was that she refused to speed up the publication of an article in her journal. So the young and ambitious scientist decided to kill her by implanting highly radio-active material in her office chair. Hmm. That got things started, she developed a tumor at the right place in her body, but she didn’t die fast enough, and the publication date of the competition was looming. So he decided to kill her by ramming a pen in her throat (not very inventive), but in order to dispose of her body he freeze-dried her in liquid nitrogen and then blew her to bits and pieces by exposing the body in a high pressure vibration chamber (very inventive). The several thousand pieces of her body could then be neatly recycled in two standard garbage bags and only her engagement ring, made out of a piece of a meteorite that her physicist fiancee had discovered, gave away her identity. Hmm.

Oh my, that was quite a whirlwind tour through science, from the heavy metal geek students to the conspiracy loving black hole fanatic over LHC, Higgs, superconductivity, seismic oscillations, vibrations and radioactive dating. And all that in 60 minutes. Was it entertaining ? You bet ya ! But it also left that old feeling of consternation that for the general public there is actually no difference between a physics laboratory and a UFO convention. All these clichees were rolled up into this common approach of: we don’t understand what you’re doing, it might be cool, but we don’t care, and in the end you’re a bunch of freaks anyway. I always liked ‘Bones’ because it shows the nice dynamic interplay between science and a more hands-on societal approach, which is displayed in the interactions of the two main protagonists, she a scientist, he an FBI agent.  But this time they drove the ‘otherness’ of science to the breaking point and in my view made a little bit too much of a mockery out of serious science. 

I had a similar experience last week, right after the Quark Matter conference in Knoxville. Apparently the local TV station had sent over a camera team to catch the purpose and vibe of the meeting. Here is the clip, decide for yourself.

There is certainly an element of self-deprecating humor in our field. You won’t understand what we do, so we don’t even try and rather make fun of ourselves. On the other hand the reporter didn’t even try, and although ending the piece with a free-form rap from the wait stuff is funny and entertaining, they should have probably tried out our LHC rap instead.

In addition the LHC apparently  also made it into ‘South Park’ this week, when one of the parents stole a piece of the LHC to build a propulsion engine for a school race with toy cars. By accident he discovered a warp drive and was scolded by a bunch of aliens for it. Well, that’s funny, although I haven’t seen it yet.

With all this exposure some good might come out of our pop culture popularity, but we have to be careful and aware. And quite frankly I am not sure whether I should look forward to ‘Angels & Demons’ or not. We’ll see. Until then, nanu nanu.

There is a lot of buzz about the world’s largest ‘atom smasher’, the LHC, and rightfully so. And if you peel away the glamour of the machine itself, there is some of the most exciting science still to discover. We have predictions paving the way to new frontiers, such as the Higgs, supersymmetry, Dark Energy, extra dimensions, and the list goes on and on.

But after some weeks of reading article after article I can’t stop wondering: what ever happened to good old fashioned Quantum Chromo Dynamics ? Have we unraveled the mysteries of asymptotic freedom, of deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration, and I just missed it ? Have we experimentally verified a nobel prize winning theory that still left much to be understood ? Have we indeed cracked the fundamental question of matter formation in the universe ? I would venture to say ‘no’ to most of these questions.

And you might say, wait a minute, doesn’t electro-weak symmetry breaking and the potential discovery of the Higgs solve all our remaining questions about matter and mass. Well, does it ? I am talking about the good old proton or neutron here. The building blocks of nature. How do these hadrons come about, how does hadronization occur, this extreme jump in mass, this unique principle of confinement ? Somehow high energy physics has largely turned away from this fundamental process in QCD. Too complicated, not calculable, not first principle, not fundamental (?) etc. etc. And there are at least some factorizable theories, such as fragmentation, or some neat lattice QCD calculations, to answer most of it. Yup, tell that to your first year graduate student. Well, there once was a quark, very energetic and then suddenly it decided to break up into many hadrons just like that. Pleeease. This is where the phrase ‘…and then a miracle occurred..’ enters into our fundamental understanding of nature.

And people will argue with me that much more is understood and on good footing, and they are probably right, but a.) we have stopped investing a lot into the experimental verification of the phenomenon of hadronization and b.) as long as constituent quarks, instantons, sphalerons and even more exotic states are allowed as explanations for the most basic process in the evolution in our universe I don’t feel that the book is closed and that we have achieved a really deep understanding.

Admittedly there are QCD physics groups in all the three major experiments at the LHC, but the buzz seems to focus more on exotica and smartly labeled ‘new physics’ rather than on the questions that should interest all of us the most. 

And let’s not forget that there were some recent experimental breakthroughs on QCD physics. Mostly from RHIC, which now has unambiguously proven that a deconfined state of matter exists at a sufficiently high temperature. It behaves weird though, more like a perfect liquid with strongly coupled degrees of freedom, rather than a weakly coupled plasma.  But it is deconfined, so it unravels one of the QCD pillars experimentally. Its preferred re-confinement method seems to be recombination of quarks, though, rather than fragmentation, which is in blatant disagreement with one of the oldest accepted models in elementary particle physics. So maybe the hadronization in medium is different than the hadronization in vacuum ? And if so, which one is relevant for the generation of matter in the evolution of the universe ? Was the universe a vacuum or a deconfined medium at the time of hadronization ?

And in addition there is still very little evidence for the other pillar of QCD, chiral symmetry restoration, which tries to convince us that a massive universe will turn into a state than can be described by a massless symmetry theory (QCD) above a certain temperature. Pretty dramatic, hmmm ? And still not experimentally verified.

So let’s turn part of our attention back to the basics. It’s true that verification of the chiral transition will likely require heavy ions and is thus the strong suit of ALICE, but also the more limited heavy ion programs in CMS and ATLAS as well as the proton-proton programs in all three experiments can make fundamental measurements to the question of generation of QCD mass, not Higgs mass, in nature. And to me that is more interesting than all the exotica that might or might not prove Gene Rodenberry and Isaac Asimov right. Just call me old fashioned.

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.

The 700 Billion Dollar government bailout of struggling financial institutions in the U.S. will likely soon cast its shadow over government funded science projects. Steve mentioned in his blog last week that things are happening already ‘under the radar’ in Washington that might affect us greatly. As a first step the House overwhelmingly voted in favor of a continuing resolution rather than a real budget until March 09, when the new administration will be in place. The continuing resolution for science funding was frozen to the level of the 2008 budget without any provisions to include the supplemental funding that was late in the year appropriated in order to keep large projects such a Fermilab afloat. So it is expected that, by the beginning of 2009, some of the major U.S. National Laboratories will be in dire financial trouble again . The impact on beam times, experiment operation and new projects etc. can not even be estimated yet. 

There is very little chance that the America Competes act, which asked for doubling the NSF and DoE budgets over the next ten years, can be enacted in these times when presidential candidates are already indicating that their most pressing programs, such as health care, might take a backseat to finding 700 Billion Dollars in the budget that is already weakened by extensive war expenditures.

We need to mobilize the community. We need to make sure that Washington understands that a slowing down of scientific enterprises and government funded research and development will directly lead to a slowing down of the economy and in the long run to a halt of scientific ingenuity, which was the driving force behind much of the market boom in the 90’s, and for that matter throughout the past century. This is not the time to save on science. This is the time to make science innovation one of the pillars of the evolving re-structuring of the market economy.

If you want to help and you are a scientist in the U.S., please join a user group and stay in touch with their outreach efforts. There is, for example, the US-LHC users group (https://www.usluo.org) or the users group at RHIC (http://www.rhicuec.org). All major user groups are part of the National User Facility Organization (http://www.nufo.org), an outreach organization which has, in part, been formed to facilitate more communication between users at national science facilities and lawmakers in Washington. You can also volunteer to become part of a NUFO list that organizes meetings between congressional leaders and scientists in your specific congressional district. Just send information to [email protected]. If you are a concerned citizen please make yourself heard by communicating with your local representative in the House and the Senate. 

There might be difficult times ahead for federal funding of basic research. We need to get involved in the process and convince our politicians of something that many major business leaders know for a long time: There is no economic future without scientific innovation.  And this innovation often comes form the most fundamental research projects worldwide. The LHC will be a perfect example.

Ok, we’re down until spring. This is for the standard winter shutdown plus fixing and understanding the helium leak. For somebody who has worked at the AGS and RHIC for the last two decades, this series of events is really no surprise. As was said before, these problems occur during a startup phase and are really not indicative of the quality of the overall project or the probability of success in the future. Next year’s long runs are still something to look forward to. But in the meantime we can shift our attention to other, similarly important, things. And because serious issues such as financial bailouts and presidential campaigns are on everybody’s mind, I thought about a more light-hearted topic for this week, which came to my mind during a gathering of physicists and non-physicists this weekend: Finding the right partner for life….

As we all know, it’s hard being a physicist. Let’s not kid ourselves, people often run away at parties when we start talking, they look puzzled, they don’t know how to respond, and quite frankly they don’t really care. That brings up the question: Can the Geek Squad ever score ?

Even if you unlock the mysteries of the creation of the universe, mostly the religious fanatics stay with you in order to prove you wrong, because God made the proton and not Mr. Higgs. So what’s a good physicist in search for a mate to do ? Well, lately I recognize a certain brashness in my younger colleagues by turning a bad thing into a good thing, a new approach which can be described as The Black Hole Come-on Line.

Here is how it works. In the middle of a rather benign conversation about the sub-prime mortgage crisis you start off by saying that you’re working on a project at the biggest atom smasher (or particle creator, although ‘smasher’ is always a winner) in the world (moderate interest ensues),  then you drop the possibility of creating a black hole (eyes widen, but still only slight interest), but then after a well timed pause you mention that it could potentially destroy the earth (unbridled attention and even slight admiration is a given at this point). You need to follow up with the obligatory disclaimer to put the person at ease: well, if we make a black hole that only one of the good kind, too small to break something but big enough for mankind to learn a lot. And there you have them hooked. You go off with them into Black Hole Wonderland, and if you don’t only know ‘Battlestar Galactica’ but also a little ‘Sex and The City’ you might even carry the conversation beyond the courtesy five minute mark.

Well, good luck Young Skywalker and God’s Speed !!

I happened to log in to Yahoo News last night around midnight and, to my surprise, the top story, again, was the LHC. This time due to the late reported transformer failure at CERN. But first the positive: this was the third time this week that we were the lead story on Yahoo. First the actual turn-on, then the hacker attack and now the transformer failure. You could turn that into the negative by saying that when we didn’t destroy the Earth we were at least fodder for the internet because of hacker attacks and equipment failure, but to all those naysayers I say: the word ‘atom smasher’ is by now engrained in everybody’s brain and that is a mighty good thing. First year undergraduate students come up to me after class and tell me that they have heard that I am working on this enormous physics enterprise, the world’s largest accelerator, and that we might unravel some major science mysteries. That is a great start, because we can capture them even further by telling them the details of our exciting field, and because we are professionals who know how to deal with the negative publicity. Equipment failures are common in the startup phase of such highly sophisticated machines and hacker attacks are our speciality. So we will find you, buddy ! And besides, our hack attack paled in terms of news coverage in comparison to the people who got access to Sarah Palin’s e-mail account. 

In a time of wall-to-wall political coverage, a major financical crisis, a war and two political campaigns spending several hundred Million Dollars each to capture your vote, it is reaffirming to see what human beings are are capable of when it comes to creative applications of their strength. So let’s celebrate the purpose and resolve and ingenuity of this project in this time of wastefulness. Yes we can. 

The Big Day is nearing and the reports are piling up. I think it makes sense that many of the blogs as well as ‘news reports’ still link the event to the famous doomsday scenarios, because if not, would anybody listen or read ?
We are too engulfed in sensationalism, and the idea that we could destroy our own planet for the sake of scientific curiosity also carries a certain, very popular, stigma about scientists (just read Angels and Demons from Dan Brown).

Well, we didn’t destroy the earth with RHIC and we’re not going to with the LHC. The problem is that we have learned in the last century that nature can never say ‘never’, and that we will always have to work with probabilities. Now probabilities can be infinitely small, but how can you get that across ? Even my mom would say: ‘So you’re actually telling me it could happen ?’. Well, mom, no.

My friend and theory colleague, Sean Gavin, came in yesterday and said that some of his friends had calculated that it is actually more likely to spontaneously combust rather than being killed by a life-threatening black hole from the LHC. We are from Motown where we know a lot about combustion, so here is a comparison that I like, because, although the idea of spontaneous combustion of humans was prominently featured in the movie ‘Spinal Tap’, you might remember that it really only affects drummers of heavy metal rock bands !! So no ‘sudden bang’ for most of us.

But seriously, it is important to keep modern science in check and have independent groups look at ongoing research. Renowned scientists have done that in the case of RHIC and LHC and have published their results and findings, all of them coming to the same, less sensational, conclusion that there is no threat. It is then rather useless and even reckless, though, to generate fear and panic in people based on a scientific advance that likely will unravel mysteries about the universe that date back all the way to its creation. This is a day for excitement and celebration, because humanity has had the ingenuity and developed the technology to bring us closer to a very fundamental understanding of the universe we live in.

And quite frankly the most engaging and entertaining piece of news I have seen and heard in time for tomorrow’s start-up was the LHC rap on YouTube, which has now been viewed in excess of 1.3 Million Times ! Right on Kate !!