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?

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.