Chilean Unrest

Despite the proximity between my resignation and the social unrest in Chile, the social unrest had nothing to do with my departure. I permanently left Chile in 2018 and not in 2019. The connection is that the social unrest is due to the lack of opportunity, which is one of the reasons for my departure (my family left Chile in 2015, partially due to a lack of opportunity).

While the social unrest appears to be extremely costly, I hope that the structural changes needed will come about and Chile will be in a better place in a decade than it otherwise would have been. There is a constitution vote in April, which is an opportunity for improvement and for a more socially cohesive future.

While my place in the development of human and intellectual capital was at the top (I primarily worked with PhD students), my observation is that Chile’s education system needed an overhaul from the ground up. While I was not an expert at this, I was told that the problems were intrinsic and in the Chilean constitution. 

It seems that the problem with education is similar to what has become a problem in places in the US, where the money and wealthy students go to private schools which provide barriers to the majority and bring the overall level of education down by reducing competition between the wealthy and upper middle class and the majority of the population. In this way it is a disservice to both the upper classes and the masses and the country as a whole.

I observed this was a problem, but because I wanted my kids to compete internationally, if we had stayed in Chile my daughters would have gone to expensive private schools. It is hard to cause the required change without mass action, which is done by government, and in education the current Chilean constitution does not allow this.

It is interesting that in the Economist Ranking, Chile recently moved up to Full Democracy and the US recently moved down to Flawed Democracy (Economist: Global Democracy).

Further information on education in Chile (OECD Summary 2018  ODI Chilean Education).

Editorial from the Times on the protests (NY Times Opinion Chilean Protests).

The Chilean constitution (in English) (Chilean 2012 Constitution).

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?

The future of HEP: international collaboration

I read reports about the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) report, and have skimmed the P5 report itself. I do think that the future of particle physics lies with neutrino physics, but I am sure I am biased.

One thing I am certain of is that future big physics (or big science) should be done under the formality of international agreements as a fundamentally international collaboration. This is not only that such big projects require more funding than any nation desires to provide and requires more expertise than any one nation can provide, but because of the nature of big physics and the nature modern (especially democratic) governments.

The nature of big physics is that projects take 15-60 years from initial concept to completion. This is a large time scale, is a significant fraction of a human life, and is at least greater than one career cycle for the scientists (time spent between a scientist starting the PhD and acquiring a tenure-tracked position after a postdoc). During this time, funding and the interest of scientists (which depends on the prospect of future funding in addition to actual scientific interest) must be maintained above a minimum or the project is a complete failure. There are additional thresholds at which if the interest and funding drops below for even a short time (a year or two) results in significant deficiencies in the program. These deficiencies basically mean that promised results become impossible and significant effort and funding is wasted.

The nature of modern (democratic) governments is that they are made up of politicians whose primary concerns are politics and the next election. As such their vision is only of the next 2, 4, 5, or 8 years. This means that a big physics project is many multiples of a political cycle. Due to the changes of politics (and even the changes in the global situation) there will be times of austerity as well as times of stimulus. The success of long term projects or even the long term efficiency of the political efforts are not of primary concern to governments.

Both times of austerity and stimulus can be damaging for the success of big physics. Times of stimulus might cause a program to be initiated which is too large. Then even normal times can mean that the support of the project is below what is necessary to achieve the desired results and possibly some other project would be a better use of the resources. Times of of austerity are an obvious problem point, here the the support of the project might even drop below the minimum amount and the project becomes a complete waste of resources and effort.

One possible solution is to make projects international. European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) provides a template for how to do this. CERN is set up by treaty between the member states, resulting in an organization whose purpose it is to insure the long term success of the big physics project. This results in states being encouraged by international law to contribute the necessary amount for the success of the project and if some state (due to politics or necessity) does not contribute the necessary amount, the rest of the member states can contribute what is necessary for the successful completion of the project. This structure not only allows bigger projects to be attempted than any one state can realize, and enhances international collaboration, but also protects against the vagaries of modern (democratic) governments.

This is advantageous even for the biggest and richest countries like the United States. I know I was not alone in imagining worse case scenarios for some spectacular physics programs during the recent government shutdown in the United States.

It is the CERN model that researchers in the Latin American countries of Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil have followed in proposing a new underground laboratory in the southern hemisphere. Here in Latin America, the needed expertise for leading research obviously requires an international approach. However, following the CERN model for funding also allows long term scientific projects to not be at the mercy of short term democratic vagaries.

Further reading on P5:
http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2014/05/new-plan-u.s.-particle-physics-go-international
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/may-2014/proposed-plan-for-the-future-of-us-particle-physics
http://www.usparticlephysics.org/p5/

Further reading on ANDES:
http://andeslab.org/

Further reading on CERN:
http://council.web.cern.ch/council/en/governance/Convention.html