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Posts Tagged ‘Jordan Pitcher’

Higgs Seminar Liveblog from TRIUMF

Wednesday, July 4th, 2012

Hi there! This is TRIUMF’s liveblog of CERN’s Higgs seminar, coming to you all the way from Vancouver, Canada, where it is quickly approaching midnight. As someone who is not a scientist, I’ll be offering the layman’s point of view of the seminar. So, to reiterate, it is quite late and I’m not a scientist, meaning I should be making a fool of myself at least once tonight. I apologize in advance for that and for any technical difficulties I am sure to run into tonight. Enjoy. See you at midnight!

1:48 – Okay. It’s over now. Good night. I hope you all enjoyed my illuminating commentary.

1:46 – Rolf just killed it with the most succinct explanation of what was actually happening tonight. I understand the science was necessary, but still.

1:45 – Rolf is getting feedback on the mic! Noooo.

1:44 – “as a layman, I would now say, ‘I think we have it.'” This is why Rolf is the best.

1:44 – ROOOOOOLF.

1:41 – My boss just told me that everyone has been applauding because they’ve announced 5 sigma, which is like a “slam dunk” for confirmation in physics. It’s not perfect yet, but there’s no going back now. Finally, something I understood.

1:40 – “Need more data” is a recurring sentiment in science, I’ve found.

1:38 – No idea what that discovery was.

1:35 – A lot of clapping. Big discovery.

1:30 – 80% of this slide is graph.

1:27- On to the results!

1:24 – Um.

1:17 – “This part is perhaps a little too technical for this presentation” please, continue.

1:13 – The science is impenetrable.

1:06 – These slides have their own, inexplicable color schemes.

1:04 – Seriously, though, not a nice font.

1:02 – Second biggest challenge of 2012: the use of Comic-Sans on these slides.

12:59 – They are working beyond design. Impressive.

12:58 – Pile-up was the biggest challenge for them in 2012. Too much data!

12:56 – ATLAS was conceived 2 decades ago, built 1 decade ago

12:55- This data is really fresh.

12:54 – The events really are beautiful.

12:53 – ATLAS. No snack break.

12:53 – Way to go.

12:52 – 3,300 scientists on CMS.

12:50 – Just heard him say  “New boson” Woo!

12:49 – “In conclusion” graphs pop up all over the screen. Not helping.

12:48 – Rolf just coughed.

12:46 – “Do I have five minutes?”

12:44 – “Jumping to my results. Don’t want to do that” YES YOU DO

12:37 – People clapping. One person whistled.

12:33 – Anytime there is a longish gap in coverage, it means I literally understood nothing, my eyes became unfocused, and I slipped into a waking dream.

12:31 – The 2011 data was reoptimized blindly.

12:30 – Higgs to zz (as if I know what this means)

12:30 – Seriously, graphs.

12:28 –  There is a little bump in the comparison between the 2011 – 2012 data. “This is very significant” dramatic pause. Next slide. What!

12:27 – “It’s quite hard to see if anything is there” yep.

12:26 – Many graphs. Many, many graphs.

12:25 – He’s close to coming to results soon.

12:23 – “Well, these are technical things” (like everything else so far)

12:22 – How wild, though, is not within the scope of this talk.

12:21 – Blind analyses in 2012. Never looked in the band where the signal would be. Keeps people honest. It also gets “wild” when people look in the signal band.

12:20 – He’s talking about the Higgs now!

12:18 – I might be in the minority here, but I prefer the look of Fake Tau over Real Tau. Sorry!

12:16 – I’m looking at my computer like I understand what is happening, but I don’t.

12:13 – “I’m going to run over, Rolf”

12:13 – The CMS detector weighs 14000t. Weighty, indeed.

12:11 – This CMS diagram looks really good.

12:08 – They moved to 8TeV this year.

12:05 – Okay. Here comes the science. Picture looks nice and 50 interactions is impressive…I think.

12:04 – CMS progress on the Higgs search beginning.

12:03 – “For a certain particle. I forgot the name.” Rolf, getting the laughs, as per usual. Awesome speaker.

12:00 – Rolf is talking now. Let’s do this.

 

Written by Jordan Pitcher (Communications Assistant)

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Art and Science: Both or Neither

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

 

I don’t get it. I guess we just have different brains than them.” – two young science students, regarding a piece of art.

It’s a funny feeling, being an individual with a predominantly artistic mind working in a place dominated by science. I’m not saying I don’t have love for the sciences, but if we’re talking in terms of how my thought process lazily unfurls itself when faced with a problem, I’m definitely more of an artist than a scientist. The very fact that I have used the terms “scientist” and “artist” in a way that does nothing but reinforce the eternal dichotomy that exists between the two groups indicates that the problem is so widespread, indeed, that even the person trying to formulate an argument calling for a cessation of the “war” that exists between the two groups cannot avoid thinking of the two as incontrovertibly disparate.

 

A page from Leonardo da Vinci's famous notebooks. He remains one of the finest examples of an individual expanding his mind to take in both science and art.

 

The quote at the top is a real thing I heard. Aside from the disquieting use of “we” and “them,” the most troubling thing about the above assertion is the outright dismissal of the piece of art in question. The finality and hopelessness of the “Different Brain” argument does not seem ridiculous outright because it has been propagated by you (yes, you), me, and everyone else ever in the history of time when we don’t want to take the time to learn something new. Artists and scientists are two particular groups that use the Different Brain argument on one another all too often. In order to see the truly farcical nature that underlies the argument, picture two groups of early humans. One group has fire. The other group does not. One person from the fireless group is tasked with inventing fire for the group. The person in charge of making fire claps his hands; no fire is produced. He gives up, citing that he and his counterpart in the other group must have different brains. His group dies out because of their lack of fire.

I hope you followed the cautionary tale of our dismissive early human closely, for he is the rock I will build this post on. The reason one group died and the other thrived is quite obvious. It is not because they simply lacked fire; it is that they lacked the ability to extend their minds beyond their current knowledge in order to solve a problem. Moreover, they not only lacked the ability, they lacked the drive—a troubling trend that is becoming more pronounced as the misguided “war” between artists and scientists rages on, insofar as an intellectual war can rage.

If you were to ask a scientist what he or she would do when posed with a problem, the answer will invariably be something along the lines of, “I would wrestle it to the ground with my considerable intellect until it yields its secrets.” During my time at TRIUMF, I have noticed a deep, well-deserved pride in every scientist in their ability to solve problems. Therefore, it is truly a sad state of affairs when our scientists look at something that puzzles them and then look away. To me, that’s no scientist. That is someone who has grown too complacent, too comfortable, in the vastness of their knowledge that they begin to shy away from things that challenge them in a way they aren’t used to. What’s more is that no one (artists or scientists) sees this as a defeat. As soon as you’ve said, “Oh well, different brain,” you’ve lost.

Any person familiar with rhetoric will tell you that in order to build a strong argument and persuade people, you have to be honest. Be sneaky and fail to address something potentially damning and your credibility is shot and the argument is void. Since it works so well in politics (snark), I figure I should give is a shot here. The problem of the Different Brain argument does not just lay with the scientists; if I’ve excoriated them, it’s out of fear that soon, a generation of scientists will stop growing and thinking. The artists are guilty of invoking the Different Brain argument as well whenever faced with math, science, or anything, really, that they didn’t want to do. The only difference between the two is that I heard a scientist use the different brain argument in a place of science, in a place where knowledge is the point.

Different Brain is a spurious concept, which is obvious to anyone with more grey matter than pride, but it’s not just wrong because I say it is. It’s wrong because look around you.

I was standing in the middle of Whistler Village with my fiancé, when we spied a poster for a band called Art vs. Science (you’re doing it wrong, guys!). She immediately said, “Science would win.” No question. No pondering. No soul-searching. Gut reaction, like flinching from a feigned punch. She’s a statistics major and biology minor, so she has a “science” brain and her response didn’t necessarily surprise me. I was a little sad, though, because she wasn’t seeing the world like I was seeing it. We debated the problem for a few minutes until I told her to look around.

The shape of the buildings: Architecture

The pleasant configuration of the shrubbery: Horticulture

The signage on the buildings and lampposts: Design

The food in the bag in my hand: Cooking

The phone in her hand: Technology

I asked her to picture a world where science had “won”. What’s architecture without art? A shape. What’s horticulture without art? A forest. Design? A grid. Cooking? Paste. Technology? Sufficient. It’s a tough world to imagine. Look at the next thing you see and try to separate the science and art of it and imagine what it would look like, whether it would function at all. It’s absolutely dystopian.

It was then that my argument became clear: science and art are inextricable. There can be no dismissing, no deigning, no sighing in the face of it. There can only be and has only ever been unity between the two. The problem is that the two warring sides are too preoccupied with the connotations the words “art” and “science” seem to realize it’s not a question of either/or, but both/neither.

I was worried about whether this war of the different brains would always rage between the two sides, but three things lent me hope and I hope they will lend you hope, too.

1.)  These two quotes from Bertholt Brecht (20th century German playwright and poet, whose work I don’t much care for):

“Art and science work in quite different ways: agreed. But, bad as it may sound, I have to admit that I cannot get along as an artist without the use of one or two sciences. … In my view, the great and complicated things that go on in the world cannot be adequately recognized by people who do not use every possible aid to understanding.”

and

“Art and science coincide insofar as both aim to improve the lives of men and women.”

2.) I was feeling discouraged about my argument for this post and had taken to turning it over in my mind even when I was otherwise occupied, but when I heard Rolf Heuer, the Director-General of CERN, say, only a handful of feet from my face, “Science and Art belong together,” I felt a renewed sense of vigor course through my brain, spurring me on. If one of the foremost scientific experts of our age can see it, I wonder why many of us turn away from it, when it is clearly there.

3.) In case one thinks that I’ve gone too soft on the artists, imagine a world without science. Think of our society as a book of fiction or a painting. Unequivocal works of art. Yet, what holds the book together? How were the pages manufactured? How were the chemical composition of the paints devised? Science.

Keeping these points in mind, I am calling for the abolition of the concepts underpinning the Different Brain argument. The war between art and science is one of mutually assured destruction and will turn us into a lopsided simulacrum of a culture if we are not careful.

–Written by Jordan Pitcher (Communications Assistant)

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Before I began working at TRIUMF, I knew that science communication was a thing; much in the same way that I knew that there was someone, somewhere manufacturing tissue paper. It was just something that was. Reading an article in Scientific American or, to an extent, Wired, I never paused to consider who had written the article and what made an effective piece of science writing. I simply read it and moved on. Now that I have written a few articles that discuss science—nothing too long or in-depth, mind you—I have caught a glimpse of the harrowing plight of the science communicator and it is one fraught with frustration and self-doubt, but it is not without hope.

I, along with the majority of the communications team at TRIUMF, attended a talk at UBC called, “STORYOMICS: Proof that Scientists Evolved from Humans,” presented by scientist and documentary filmmaker, Randy Olson. I won’t go into too much detail about what he talked about because, to me, it was somewhat commonsensical. (Note: This may be because I’m an English major, whose sole purpose is to be painfully familiar with the components of a story.)

After the talk, a man named Dave Ng joined us for lunch. While we were chattering away, he said something that, initially, seemed like just an insightful observation. However, It has been ricocheting around in the damp recesses of my brain ever since. The observation was this: when news broke about the faster-than-light neutrinos, everyone covered it. Everyone. Of all the people who covered it, what percentage do you think knew—without reciting the Wikipedia entry for it from memory—what a neutrino actually was? Very few, I would bet. Judging from what I had read at the time, it seemed that everyone had reposted chunks of CERN/OPERA’s press release with bits of fluff around it to make it look like an original work. The main thrust of my scattershot thought process, the philosophical question that has me wandering the desert of my psyche looking for an answer is: can you ever effectively report on/write about something that you don’t have a deep knowledge of?

I used to write for a university newspaper and, while I did write about current events and physical fitness (which, if you know me, is not my forte), I gravitated towards the Arts and Life section. I wrote about books, movies, television, and video games.  What do all of these things have in common? I know about them. When I wrote about books, I was in my natural element because I understood the underlying principles that govern narrative and I knew the significance of things that the woefully uninitiated don’t pick up on (I once wrote an entire paper on the use of en and em dashes in a play, so don’t even dispute me on this). The writing was full of verve and wit (if I do say so myself). It had a confident, singular voice behind it. Confidence is the key to communicating anything effectively, but it is rare to find someone who is confident speaking about something they are not knowledgeable of. That’s why we see this paradigm: The head of the communications department at TRIUMF, Tim Meyer, is an excellent science communicator…who has a PhD in physics. Randy Olson is an effective science communicator…who has a PhD in biology. The list goes on: Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, etc. The point is that there is no doubt that scientists can become communicators. Can communicators communicate science, though? That seems to be a point of contention for scientists and communicators alike.

Before we go any further, I should probably establish my credentials: My background in science is less than negligible. I took Physics 11 in high school and Biology 100 in university. One of my (many) problems is that I was born with the curiosity of a scientist but without any of the skills to back it up. My interest in science is what made the opportunity to work at TRIUMF so appealing. It promised the opportunity to write about science, which is something that scared me, still scares me.

I recently wrote about the controversy surrounding the CERN/OPERA faster-than-light neutrino experiment and I was nervous the entire time. The prose was shaky, too reliant on quotes, and meek. It was listless and gray, devoid of all effervescence or joie de vivre. It was a passable science article. I felt how I think many science communicators feel in the beginning: gutted. The lack of “myself” in the article called into question whether I could communicate effectively, or if I had ever done so.

Science communicators are in the enviable and rare position to be attacked from every angle: from scientists for not being thorough enough and from communicators for being boring and ineffective. Both parties are assailing disparate aspects of the work and no one is pleased. If you heard a funeral dirge in the back of your mind while reading this, prepare for the tinkling, inspirational piano number because, in my mind, there is hope. I’ve only been at TRIUMF for three months, but I already feel like I’ve learned a great deal about science communication.

1.)       Always collaborate, when possible, with someone who is deeply familiar with the science you are discussing. I know it’s easier to Google, but this is the Internet. I’m a doctor on the Internet. This way, when you cite your sources, you don’t have to cite Wikipedia, you can cite a professional, which will confer a lot of credence to whatever you wrote.

2.)       Metaphor is your new best friend. You already have a best friend? Too bad. You might not know the dictionary definition of metaphor, but humans have been using it forever (hyperbole) to communicate complex ideas to the many. The more complex the concept, the more important the metaphor becomes.

3.)       Don’t be afraid to imbue the work with a sense of style. This is what I see most often. People think that because something is about science, it needs to be antiseptic. It doesn’t. If you’re a communicator, you have a unique voice, or I hope you have, anyway.

With the modicum of experience that I have in communicating science, I realize I’m no professional—yet—and this is by no means an “answer” to the questions posed earlier. These points are, however, a jumping off point for people who may be thinking about communicating science, but are afraid it has to be the written or verbal equivalent of gruel. They are also for the people who are communicating science but it has become so mechanical for them that they can’t see themselves in their work anymore.

My time at TRIUMF lasts five more months, and the journey will, without a doubt, involve more frustration and failure in the face of this nigh-rhetorical question. Instead of gently weeping into that good night, I will use the words of Charles Kettering, an engineer I just Googled, to give me hope: “99 percent of success is built on failure.”

–Written by Jordan Pitcher (Communications Assistant)

 

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Powerless Haikus

Thursday, April 19th, 2012

Jordan is an English major on a Communications co-op term at TRIUMF. When the power went out at TRIUMF, he was asked to write about what it was like. He decided to write it in haiku. He had never written a haiku before. It showed.

I have never written a haiku before. After the power came on, I Googled haikus and these barely count.  Enjoy.

 

The power is out

There is nothing left to do

Except write haikus

 

Computers shut off

I forgot to save my work

Many strong expletives

 

Eyes raised to the ceiling

A brief respite from the screen

It is sunny out?

 

A brief argument

On the location of Spain

No one can Google

 

Two scientists turn

Engage in deep discussion

Or maybe shallow

 

Silent Meson Hall

Punctuated by a laugh

Cannot find the source

 

The power is back

I am Googling some haikus

Amateurish, I

— Written by Jordan Pitcher (Communications Assistant)

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My Time at AAAS 2012

Thursday, March 8th, 2012

Jordan is an English major on a Communications co-op term at TRIUMF. This is his take on the AAAS conference that took place this February in Vancouver. AAAS is a conference that gathers researchers from around the world from all disciplines to share ideas with each other, the media, and the public.

It is difficult to write about any event, be it a concert or a science convention, without slipping into a pattern that resembles a mad-lib (e.g. “I saw noun and it was adjective!”). In order to avoid that particular pitfall, it’s important to focus on the individual connection one forges with the event, the broader implications of the event, and the emotions evoked by it. AAAS 2012 was, surprisingly, an event suffused with emotion. I say “surprisingly” because “science” is a word that carries with it the connotation of a stodgy atmosphere built upon cold rationalism. Despite this, the atmosphere at AAAS 2012 was built on anything but.

AAAS 2012 began on a typical (see: rainy) Friday morning in Vancouver, but the mood inside the exhibit hall was in stark contrast to the gloom outside. Though it was quite early in the morning and a number of exhibitors were frazzled and silently checking and rechecking their to-do lists, the hall quickly became characterized by laughter and discussion. People dropped by booths asking after old friends they had previously worked with, smiling at the old memories and the assurances that their friends were doing well. People who knew each other only by reputation met on the floor of the exhibit hall and traded stories about their current projects and experiments. People who did not know one another perused booths, asked questions, handed out business cards, and walked away deep in thought. The entire exhibit hall was a microcosmic example of the scientific community as a whole; a community fueled by curiosity, collaboration, camaraderie, and a friendly sense of competition. Though Friday was not open to the public, there were still a number of unique visitors, particularly American Junior Academy of Science (AJAS) members to students who had registered for student scholarships through TRIUMF and the BC Innovation Council (BCIC). These students were given a full conference pass and a one-year membership to AAAS. The AJAS members and student scholarship recipients displayed a sense of curiosity and mental alacrity befitting the next generation of scientists as they interacted with one another and the ideas presented at numerous booths.

The free public event, Family Science Days, opened on Saturday and it made the excited atmosphere of Friday seem funereal. The enthusiastic chatter of the children who attended Family Science Days with their parents in tow created the feeling only generated by like-minded individuals, radically diverse in ages and backgrounds, interacting with one another without any sense of pretension or disingenuousness. It was an interesting example of how science has the power to unify people. This is fitting, since the theme of the conference was  “Flattening the World: Building a Global Knowledge Society.” To me, the theme of the conference was fully realized when I looked around and saw the old educating the young and the young inspiring the old with a vigor for attempting to understand the unknown and a heavy reliance on the words “why” and “how.” I’m sure this brought a smile to every scientist’s face, knowing that the inquisitiveness that has spurred scientific discovery for thousands of years remains an inextinguishable human trait that will always express itself, irrespective of one’s age or background.

In describing the emotions I witnessed, I have neglected to mention the emotions I experienced during my time at AAAS 2012. Being an exhibitor, I suspect I felt more stress than many of the regular attendees. It wasn’t like being stressed about exams; it was more like unveiling a piece of art and stressing about whether people would enjoy it – more butterflies than flop sweat. As my comrades—wartime slang is perfectly appropriate in this situation, I think—and I began to entertain visitors with magnet demonstrations and educate them about cyclotrons, the worry dissipated and gave way to excitement. People were enjoying our booth and I got to test the boundaries of my memory, attempting to recount the entire Wikipedia page for “Cyclotrons” and “Higgs boson.” I’m not a scientist—far from it, in fact—but I enjoyed the lively discussions and even managed to actually learn a thing or two in the process.

 

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