Bias in life and physics (sexism)

My thesis advisor (Prof. Betsy Beise) was a woman physicist, as were both of my postdoctoral supervisors  (Prof. Olga Botner and Prof. Catherine De Clercq), as was one of the co-leaders of my primary experiment as a professor in Chile (Prof. Debbie Harris). Despite this, and the progress it represents, I think that there is a bias that women face and not just societal imbalances relating to parental leave, parental responsibilities and expectations.

My experience in physics is that a bias exists. I have heard numerous male physicists express in private that women physicists were good or acceptable as lecturers, colleagues and even administrators but not as thought leaders or researchers. This wasn't just from elderly physicists, but also from ones from my generation.

Also, being an active and involved father of two young girls has opened my eyes to some of the bias that exists in this world and in myself. My girls always want the story to be about girls or assume that anyone not given a gender is a girl. My observation is that many of the stories give a male gender for the character (unnecessarily) and my own bias comes through in my discussion of stories without explicit gender where I tend to give characters a male gender if an explicit female gender is not given.

It is clear that an explicit effort to attract female talent to physics is necessary and appreciate those such as Prof. Kim (University of Chicago) who do this. Also necessary is a societal rebalancing towards parenting which has started in Sweden (and other places in Europe) and which some in the United States would like to implement here. Part of this rebalancing must include a rebalancing of expectations and responsibilities, like in Sweden, where men have parental leave.

I think a step that hasn't been made anywhere is to make some minimal amount of parental leave (6 months) required.

The Future of Science in America

The Trump Administration has been consistently anti-science. The new proposed budget continues this behavior (Trump's 2021 budget drowns science agencies red ink again). The DOE Office of Science, which funds most of HEP, has a proposed cut of 17%.

I think it is the case that the next 4 years will be a nightmare for science in the US if Trump is re-elected. The Republicans have stopped pushing back against Trump in many areas, and if he wins again in November I doubt the science budget will be important place of resistance for either Republicans or Democrats (and I doubt there will be any resistance left in elected Republicans not named Mitt Romney). It has been this resistance the previous 3 years, and I expect again this year (at least from the Democrats) which have mitigated some of the damage that this administration has tried to do to American Science.

Here is some additional documentation for this, that I have seen just in the last 36 hours:
Trump's new budget cuts all favored few science programs
Climate change once again left out of Trumps federal budget

While HEP hasn't faced nearly the barriers and difficulties that many other areas have faced (like Climate Science), HEP still faces challenges from the leadership of the DOE. One that I didn't see reported elsewhere is that Fermilab faced severe restrictions on collaboration with some foreign nationals soon (June 2017) after the Perry took over which was reduced/eliminated within days of the announcement of Perry's resignation in October 2019. Talking to older people, there were similar restrictions for a short period of time after September 11, 2001.

While the challenges that Science in the US faces due to Trump is minor compared to the challenges immigrants and various other groups face, and the challenges that HEP faces is minor compared to some other sciences, it is still something to think about during this election year.

AMS gets a second life

The repairs to the AMS were apparently successful, which is great news for AMS and the HEP community (https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2020/01/nasa-esa-challenging-ams-repair-spacewalks/). The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is the best idea in HEP that hasn't yet produced an important discovery. I have only heard about their measurements of the positron fraction and searches for anti-matter, but I think they are most promising for a "Who ordered that?" type discovery.

PhD students in physics

I have experience as a graduate and undergraduate student in the United States and as a member of the graduate faculty in Chile. I also have observed as a postdoctoral researcher in Sweden and Belgium.

I read Make science PhDs more than just a training path for academia with interest. First, I think that often advisors and supervisors are more selfish than her committee member was, and the priorities are  the advisors/supervisors publications and the successful graduation of the PhD student. Only the most promising students get guided towards proposal writing. Additionally, the networking required now to be successful with the academic path is a high hurdle and often ignored in favor of the advisor's own needs.

But my core response is that there is just not a lot of time. Most of the time PhD students do really need in additional 2-4 years after the completion of their PhD to develop as a scientist. Cutting short the development would prolong this.

While you can argue that Lecturers, Science Communicators, Applied Scientists and Technicians do not need this development, Research Scientists and Research Professors do. And when I say that an additional 2-4 years are needed, I am only talking about development that the PhD student needs to do good science, the requirements to be successful in a search for an academic position takes additional skills in grant writing and networking which can also be a challenge for some and can take additional time to develop.

While I have been focused more on the Research Scientist and Research Professor trajectories, it is obvious to me that the Lecturer trajectory could use additional development after a traditional PhD as well. I think that this has become understood across physics.

It does not surprise me that the Science Communicator and Applied Scientist trajectories could use additional development. And I am sure that often part of the problem is a lack fo respect of other directions by the research professors that guide and mentor the PhD students. However, it seems to me that rather than bifurcating the PhD that the best approach is a combination of the following:

1. There is a certain amount of work in science that is low value and that PhD students usually end up doing as cheap labor. It might make sense to make time for PhD students by keeping them focused on high value labor and hiring more technicians for the low value labor. The PhD students time is valuable even if their labor is cheap. I think the best approach to make this change is a recognition of the problem in the field and maybe PhD student unions.
2. While in physics incoming PhD students are often well prepared for the physics, they are often lacking some fo the technical skills in communication and scientific computation that they need to finish a PhD and follow a good career trajectory after their graduation. This development takes time. It might be a good idea to follow Engineering and recommend that US Science students do 4 years of academic study and a 1 year internship before starting their PhD.
3. Finally, it is important that these other trajectories become more valued. I have begun to see this with Lecturers with the creation of the Teaching Professor position with equivalent pay (and status?) as Research Professor. As part of this, there should be respectable and respectably paid positions which provide additional training towards a trajectory as a Lecturer, Science Communicator or Applied Scientist just as there are postdoctoral researcher positions which provide additional training towards the Research Professor and Research Scientist trajectories. 

Change in Science

Reading Sabine’s recent blog posts (physicists still perplexed I ask for and because science matters), and my own experience, has solidified my perception that fundamental physics has a social problem.

I think it comes down to economics, scientists are trained via incentives in the feedback cycle of publish, get positions and grants so that they can continue to publish. It impacts both experimentalists and theorists, and can cause waste in money and effort and, worst of all, true advances can become accidental.

In 2004 I changed from HEP theory because I thought what was needed, in HEP, was experiment. Today, I am more inclined to think that HEP Theory is needed, but not the sort that results in quick publications.

I have a radical suggestion.

Instead of rewarding publications with tenured positions and significant grants, why not return back to the older model where only a few people are tenured with nice positions and large enough grants to hire junior faculty and scientists (postdocs)?

The idea is to try and reward real advances rather than publications. By real advances I mean advances that would end up in an upper level undergraduate text book. This would fix the incentives.

I am not suggesting that we remove tenure or plum positions from anyone. I am suggesting, going forward, that large grants, tenured positions and the invitation to sit on significant decision making bodies should go to those senior scientists who have made significant advances.

The rest should have some continuing position, like untenured Research Professor, until such a time as their work is proven to be valuable. Or move on into Teaching or Industry. And such positions (untenured Research Professor and Teaching Professor) should be paid respectably.

Graduate school

When I was a freshman, Freeman Dyson visited my college. He taught a class for non-majors and gave a couple of lectures for the physics students. One that I attended had a number of us, including Dyson, leave the lecture hall to go to the theater and watch the Matrix. One thing he said at the time stuck with me, at least the concept (since the words didn’t). That was that physics was something you do and not what you study, that you needed to get involved in research and not just take classes.

I didn’t truly understand this idea and internalize it until I almost dropped out of my third year of graduate school. It has become one of my guiding philosophies as a physicist and physics professor. 

I have observed that online graduate degrees are popular (universities withstood moocs but risk being outwitted by opms). I don’t see the point of them. Even a non-lab undergraduate degree loses out on a lot of value being online only and graduate degrees lose out on most of their value. I think that a good undergraduate degree should be 70-80% course work, a masters degree should be 30-50% coursework and a PhD should be around 10% coursework. The non-coursework component can be done with industrial mentors instead of academic mentors, but the good mentors will generally be at the same location as the good academic mentors. Who is going to do the legwork, and how is that legwork going to be valid, for industrial mentors in a location without the academic mentors?

I think the real signal with these online graduate degrees provide is that new things have been learned. But that isn’t the purpose of a graduate degree.

Since I graduated with my PhD, I have continually learned new things and worked in new fields. I have never taken a course, just reading papers (and books sometimes) to understand where the field is or to find a good technique. I think that instead of doing this that many people are taking a Masters (and spending money on it). They do get a certificate that others can see, but they don’t get the deep knowledge that traditionally comes from a Masters (or PhD).

M87 Black Hole

Some are not scientifically impressed by the recent BH picture (black hole picture blues black hole picture is mainly triumph of engineering ). While I am interested in tabletop ideas to push GR, as an experimental nuclear physicist and experimental particle astro-physicist, my intuition is to look closely at scattering from an object where GR might break down (most likely a BH).

While there is currently poor resolution in this data, it is a first step towards looking closely at scattering off a BH and so, I think, a step in the right direction.

In a previous post I mentioned the idea of Science as being the intersection between Nature, Mathematics and Technology. This is obviously a scientific advance of Technology. Like with Gravitational Waves, with the current technology we still see Einstein's General Relativity. But it is a new technology and maybe we can push it to discovery. That is why it is promising physics, not just interesting engineering.

I haven’t read the scientific papers, so I don’t know what the limitations are in the resolution. Would we be able to increase resolution significantly with a 20 billion dollar investment? (Observatory on the Moon/Mars) Or is it something we could improve by just building better observatories here on Earth?

Other Blogs

Sometimes you come across someone that has not only done what you wanted to do, but also has succeeded far more in every way. I realized that it was the case for me when I came across Aron Wall's blog a couple of years ago.

I strongly recommend his blog, named UNDIVIDED LOOKING.
Before that, I came across a nice presentation of his about the Fine Tuning argument for the existence of God.

He is a much more successful physicist, a particle theorist (which was my original interest), regularly updates his blog and blogs about Christianity and Physics. We even had some overlap at the University of Maryland, but I think that we didn't meet as I spent most of my time at Jefferson Laboratory starting in January of 2006.

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?

Presidential Politics and Fundamental Science

I think it is obvious that I am not a great blogger. I still have a number of partially written posts and ideas for posts which have not and may never see the light of day. Some of them are bad, like a description of journals in physics, so it is OK if they never come out.

I was asked recently about the current election and what it means to Experimental High Energy Physics (HEP).

Recently there has been limited funding for HEP and fundamental science in general despite both parties saying they support fundamental science. The problem arrises due to the Democrat President and Republican House disagreeing on everything and so not agreeing on a budget, even though both budgets support fundamental science. Later, when an emergency agreement is made, only the priorities are agreed on and fundamental science is not a priority to either party.

Due to this, and the intrinsic power Republicans have in the House, neither of the Democrat candidates would be great for fundamental science.

If we consider the Republican candidates we also run into problems. The chaos of a Trump presidency would result in fundamental science being forgotten. Cruz values enormous tax cuts, beyond anything that Reagan or Bush envisioned, in addition to a balanced Federal budget. This would result in no funding for science of any kind, and little for social programs or the military. That leaves Kasich whose program merely consists of large tax cuts and a move towards a balanced budget. This would result in limited funding for fundamental science.

Most likely Sanders, Clinton and Kasich would continue to support fundamental science including HEP at approximately the current level.

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

The nature of dark matter

I don't regularly read New Scientist, but the article titled "It's crunch time for dark matter if WIMPs don't show" attracted my interest.

My original interest in dark matter as an active researcher began 4 years ago. At that time I had just heard about an experiment searching for dark photons at Jefferson Laboratory. After visiting two workshops/meetings where dark matter was a topic of discussion, I began activity with the IceCube dark matter working group. Dark matter is interesting because it is the most obvious experimental evidence of new physics (physics that wasn't understood before my lifetime) and so is significant.

Since the time I became interested in dark matter as a researcher, I have been mostly interested in dark matter which wasn't the simplest candidate that theorists could invent (basically, the WIMP). Why should we expect all of the universe that we haven't been able to investigate to have some extreme simple phenomenology while the universe that we can investigate displays such rich behaviour?

The main reason why WIMPs are becoming less interesting is that we have failed to find new particles at the LHC. That is because one of the main motivations for WIMPs is that they were in the best motivated supersymmetry models, which are losing their lustre with each new collision at the LHC.

What we are seeing now is that the former paradigm (which existed without direct experimental evidence), that of supersymmetry and WIMPs, is ending. It will be interesting being an active researcher as a new paradigm is formed.

I personally favour theories with a rich dark sector. For many of these, our experiments just are not sensitive. On the other hand, as an experimentalist, what I am interested in is theories which predict some new signature that can be looked for in an experiment. Even if it is a long shot.

New Scientist article:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229712.600-its-crunch-time-for-dark-matter-if-wimps-dont-show.html

Dark matter with rich phenomenology (example):
http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.0753