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?

Origins: Science and Faith

http://backreaction.blogspot.cl/2017/11/how-do-you-prove-that-earth-is-older.html

I think this blog post is one of the most relevant to the interplay between science and faith that I have read in some time. While I currently classify myself as someone who doesn’t know how God created the Universe, in the past I was a creationist. I was a creationist in the sense that Sabine presents in this blog post, I thought that God had started the Universe up some 7,000 years ago (because civilised humanity is what He was interested in, it is similar to when I start my simulation at some specific time right before the interesting behaviour starts) but if you ran time backward you would have dinosaurs and so on.

I still think that this is an entirely reasonable position. This is the position that I present as consistent with scientific observations to my creationist family and friends when we discuss origins.

There is a lot of reality out there that is not currently probed by science and there are very solid arguments (The Island of Knowledge) to be sure that a lot of reality can not ever be probed by science, so it is more reasonable than not to have beliefs that science has nothing to say about. And that belief can include a beginning of reality at some t=t_c.

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.

Neutrino talks

I have been extremely busy these last few months, giving 5 talks at international conferences and workshops and working on related papers and proceedings.

There are two workshops/schools with interesting talks available online which I thought would be nice to share.

The first is the workshop Present and Future Neutrino Physics at KITP at Santa Barbara, CA; available here (ongoing): http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/neutrinos14/

The second is the school NuSTEC Training in Neutrino Nucleus Scattering Physics at Fermilab near Chicago; available here (finished): http://nustec2014.phys.vt.edu (look at the program section)

Clarity in dark matter experiments

The experimental status of dark matter searches the last decade has always come down to one point of disagreement: do you believe that the DAMA/LIBRA signal is real or not. If you thought it was real, then you had to come up with dark matter models where a signal would be very apparent (8+ sigma) in DAMA/LIBRA but be non-existent in all the other more sensitive experiments (mostly utilising heavier atoms). If you thought it was not real, you had to really stretch to come up with possible causes that were not "poorly understood systematics" which is experimentalist for "they did not understand their experiment".

A quick note, the signal that DAMA/LIBRA claimed to see was an annual modulation in the very low energy (keV) nuclear recoils. This annual modulation could come from the earth passing through the dark matter halo, due to the alignment of the earth rotation around the sun and the sun rotation around the galaxy.

A new paper out on arxiv gives hypothesis where DAMA/LIBRA did not see a signal of dark matter, but also gives a source for the signal which is not due to a poorly understood systematic. While muons from cosmic rays had been considered as the source of the modulation, the peak from such a signal would be in the wrong place (the modulation would have the wrong phase). However, if the interaction rate of the muons from comic rays is similar to the interaction rate of the highest energy neutrinos from the sun, then the resulting modulation has a shift of phase which ends up being approximately the same as what you would expect from modulation due to dark matter. At the depth of DAMA/LIBRA, the interaction rates are similar.

This hypothesis fits the DAMA/LIBRA data as well as the dark matter hypotheses. Additionally, it fits the total set of direct dark matter searches and is not a claim that the DAMA/LIBRA experiment is poorly performed. These hypotheses can be differentiated and tested in future experiments; this will give direction for the field. And remove a major source of drama.

Those who want to read more can read the paper on the arxiv:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.1052

The amazing earth

The universe is a really amazing place. Who would have thought that the mantle would be a water reservoir and contribute to the Earth’s water cycle? That is what some scientists recently suggested in a Science article. If I understand it, the article does not say that there are oceans in the mantle, rather that water is mixed with the molten rock which descends into the mantle (and which comes up).

It can be found at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6189/1265

For my own projects I have started studying a bit of geophysics recently, so expect another geophysics related post.

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