Neutrino Beams

I am very supportive of DUNE. We need a flagship particle physics experiment, and DUNE is the best one we are getting in the next 10-15 years. In addition to measuring the CP violating phase, it also will provide a reasonable supernova neutrino observatory.

Despite my support of DUNE, neutrinos are very difficult to pin down and part of this is the fact that the current method to produce a neutrino beam produces neutrinos with a broad energy spectrum. That is why I was very interested a few months ago to read Mono-energetic neutrinos with enough energy to produce a muon.

I was very interested in a neutrino factory and other neutrino beam ideas, but this sounds very promising, and may turn out to be necessary to really utilize our neutrino detectors and observatories.

Thinking about "Science has a problem, and we must talk about it"

I initially was writing this as a response to Backreaction: Science has a problem, and we must talk about it but I thought about it again when reading Backreaction: Don’t ask what science can do for you. Warning, this post contains a bit of biography.

The subject of this post is one that I have thought about for some time. It is also presented clearly in PhD comics PhD: Intellectual Freedom' .

A little bit of biographical context is that I was interested in pursuing fundamental physics theory research when I arrived at graduate school at the University of Maryland in 2002. By late 2004, I had lost interest, not because I had lost interest in the field but because it seemed like the theory side was well provisioned. I was sure that we were going to find supersymmetry (and dark matter) at the LHC, and that that would show us which of the already explored theories was the correct one. It just seemed like there wasn't much that needed to be done until the experimental data was there.

After I short period exploring condensed matter theory, I became an experimentalist. In 2009, with PhD in hand and no intention of staying focused on nuclear physics I joined IceCube and shortly jumped into dark matter searches. From my more mature perspective, it seemed like the theoretical approach was more like a shotgun approach with countless theories posited one of which was surely the correct one.

Now, however, I am less sure. It seems that the theories and models explored often share similarities, the most important being that it is easy to get a publication from that exploration. Theories which are difficult to explore often get ignored. I understand why, if someone needs papers to get a position and papers to get tenure and papers to get grant renewal... why should they do anything else other than study the theory space where they are comfortable and where there is a community? And if the community happens to die for some reason, it is probably easier to join another than to invent a new one.

In 2013 I took my current position in Chile primarily for personal reasons. In the first semester there, before I had a course to teach, I gave a couple of introductory lectures about astrophysics, neutrino physics and nuclear physics. During the neutrino physics lecture, after my presentation of neutrino oscillation, I was asked a question about if the neutrino could interact outside of weak interactions. I thought for a few moments and then said that of course it could also interact with a graviton in a quantum gravity interaction and then it wouldn't appear to oscillate. This formed the beginning of https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ahep/2015/381569/ although I and my collaborator ended up including a lot of other ideas and calculations which had initially been planned for followup papers.

So I returned to fundamental physics theory and I thought I had an ideal setup. I was in a situation where I could, depending on the semester, take care of my experimental, teaching and administration requirements (including frequent applications for grant renewals) with 50-75% (75-90% if I had tenure) of my time and could pursue other interests during the rest of my time. This hasn't always been fundamental physics but science isn't only fundamental physics. And I didn't have to worry about being slow or pursuing something where there is no community.

My personal situation has intruded again and I see failings in my setup. But I think the general point stands: at least grant renewal and probably even tenure should not require 100% or 110% effort but should be pretty much given (at some level) for every productive professor/scientist. This probably means grant amounts will decrease. An alternative of making general grant funding for senior tenured professors, after one or two renewals, depend on working in a new area would probably result in only senior professors at elite institutions getting senior grants which seems to create bad incentives.

Physicists on God and Science

The following is based on my recollection, I am sure that details are wrong and the statements "quoted" are a paraphrase of my memory. 

In 2004, I and some UMD graduate students interested in studying particle physics theory attended a series of lectures by Prof. Gates. A group of interested undergraduates from Howard also attended.

One day, I and the other graduate students had spent some time talking about the Anthropic Principle. This continued as we went to the lecture. Gates had something come up and so it continued as the Howard students also arrived. 

Gates ended up very delayed and so the discussion developed into a more general God and Science discussion with ~3 sides: I and a Jewish graduate student taking a general theist perspective, the other graduate students taking a general atheist perspective and most of the Howard students taking a traditional Christian perspective.

The discussion had continued for over half an hour and had become very involved when Gates arrived. He listened for a few moments and then drew a Venn diagram with three circles and labeled them Technology, Mathematics and Nature. He pointed to the intersect of all three and said something like
“This is the part of the universe that we have the technology to make measurements of and the mathematics to describe. This is where we do science.”
He then pointed to the part of the circle that was exclusively Nature and said something like
“I believe that God is here”
and then pointed to the overlap of Nature and Mathematics
“and that String Theory is here, where we have mathematics to describe nature but do not yet have the technology to make measurements yet.”
He then went into his lecture.

This didn’t seem to have a very strong impact me at the time, but retrospectively has had a huge impact on me. I think about his diagram whenever I think about God and Science or Religion and Science and associated issues.

Losing the Nobel Prize

I read with interest the comments to be found both on “BackReAction" ( book-review-losing-nobel-prize-by-brian guest-post-brian-keating-about-his-book ), on “Not Even Wrong” ( Losing the Nobel Prize ) and on “Reference Frame” ( brian-keatings-nobel-prize-obsession ) about “Losing the Nobel Prize” ( Losing the Nobel Prize Losing the Nobel Prize ).

I have spent about 10 years working outside of the US, including 2 years in Sweden. That time was about half spent as a junior facility member and half spent as a postdoc but I definitely have a different perspective than if I had stayed in the US.

First, while I won’t include names because I like everyone involved, I did see a colleague from a nation which did not historically have a well-developed particle physics program talk about their particle physics program in their country and about how if it was successful it could result in the Nobel Prize. This was in Sweden, and I could tell that our Swedish colleagues did not appreciate the implication that the particle physics program was being pursued out of a desire to win the Nobel Prize.

After that story, I wanted to give my observations about the motivation for science funding in countries which are spending on science but have not been leading countries in science over the last 200 years (like Japan, UK, France, US, Germany, etc). The motivation seems to roughly be along 4 lines:

1. The direct production of patents and new applications which may produce new companies and economic improvement.
2. The production of centers of innovation, modeled after the ones in the US (most famously Silicon Valley, but really everywhere where there was a major research university a-better-way-to-revive-america-s-rust-belt and how-universities-make-cities-great )
3. Number of publications as some sort of metric for the bean counters.
4. A Nobel Prize.

Only the last two are directly related to basic science, which is what particle physics is, and only as metric or signal. As metrics or signals they are both very much imperfect, but easy for the non-interested public to appreciate. They also provide very different measurements.

The number of publications in some way represents the number of scientists in the field. For funding agencies, probably a more useful metric is the portion of the total number of publications that the country produces. This is also complicated by the large collaborations in experimental high energy physics, which can result in a large number of publications for the full collaboration every year. This results in countries that value this metric to desire to be part of the flagship LHC experiments of ATLAS or CMS as they can produce a large number of papers with a relatively small local group.

The Nobel Prize is very different as a metric. This is part because only (at most) 3 are awarded in a discipline in a given year, due to this the probability of winning the Nobel actually goes down as the number of scientists goes up. Additionally, for large collaborations rather than everyone getting a paper, only the leader or the prime mover will get the Nobel Prize. Because of this, and the luck involved, for countries which did not historically lead science, the Nobel Prize motivates funding for riskier science where their local scientists are truly leaders.

As you can tell from my description, I think the Nobel Prize may serve a decent job as a motivation for funding agencies to fund basic science. This may be a bit disconcerting for the Scandinavian scientists that do the Nobel Prize selection. And treating it as a metric or signal, just like number of papers, seems very base.

I have a lot less experience in what motivates US or European (or Japanese) funding agencies. I think a lot of it ends up being institutional where the scientists who decide the funding make decisions based on what the scientific community desires rather than on what will produce the most papers for the least investment or what may provide a reasonable shot at a Nobel Prize.

But I did attend a talk this year by US Secretary of Energy Rick Perry and he made it clear that his value system was primarily about the direct production of patents and innovation and that his appreciation for experimental high energy physics was more about the synergistic discoveries and innovation rather than the desire to advance our understanding about the universe. So maybe no real focus on fundamentally meaningless metrics?