June 4, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:The words, the lovely lovely words
This article on the new supercollider being built in Europe is really cool. It offers a heavy dose of potential schadenfreude for Americans, particularly American libertarians who find the notion of governments spending zillions of dollars to garner Nobel prizes for domestic scientists really stupid*.
So, if the rumor is true and the standard model Higgs has been found at the Tevatron, the LHC is in big trouble: Immediately, its "guaranteed" success—the final particle of the standard model, not to mention a couple of Nobel Prizes for European scientists—is gone.
But that is not the neat part. This is the neat part:
The irony is that things look just as bleak for the LHC if the rumor is false, and the Europeans end up finding the standard model Higgs themselves. Physicists have developed such a complete description of elementary particles that, once the final piece of the theory is in place, the chances that the LHC will find anything the standard model doesn't predict are almost negligible.Particle theorists talk a big game. They get excited and tell reporters, not to mention government funding agencies, that the Higgs is just the beginning: The LHC, some say, may find examples of a class of particles indicative of a new fundamental property of nature, called supersymmetry. Others say there may be two or three particles, which together perform the job the standard model assigns to the Higgs. The truth is that these alternatives patch up the standard model, should something unexpected happen. If a Higgs-like particle is found, say, but it's too light to be the standard model boson. Or if it decays in a surprising way. In cases like these, the LHC could indeed produce dramatic new discoveries.
But what happens if the Higgs turns out to be just right? Well, then the standard model predicts that you'd need a machine roughly a quadrillion times more powerful than the LHC to find anything new. With current technology, this would mean an accelerator the circumference of the Milky Way. Though some theorists—proponents, for instance, of string theory—speculate about what such an accelerator might find, few other physicists take them seriously.
In fact, finding the "just right" Higgs would be bad news all around. Surely the European Union wants more for its $8 billion than a single particle. But more importantly, it would provide the final proof of the standard model, which happens to be clunky, boring, and infuriatingly silent on the Big Questions that the final theory of physics was supposed to answer. Questions like: Why is there something, rather than nothing? And where does gravity fit in? If the standard model turns out to be a complete description of particle behavior, as the discovery of the Higgs would suggest, these questions may never be answered.
I don't know who this James Owen Weatherall is, (though his photograph suggests that he is cute) but he sure can write.
The problem, of course, is that I have no idea if any of this is true. My ability to assess the accuracy of his article, as opposed to the "Gee-whiz!" factor, is roughly the same as my ability to assess writing on the subject of 18th century Chinese porcelain. Unless they start claiming the Ming empire was in Peru, I'm pretty much gullible putty in their hands. And I have been taken in before; a physicist of my acquaintance confiscated my copies of The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu-li Masters and wouldn't let me have them back even when I threatened to sue.
* Though less stupid than almost any other form of intergovernmental status competition
Slate: Why the rumored discovery of the Higgs boson is bad news for particle physics, apparently.
Eh.
Mass-and-gravity is the big problem in current physics; we've got lots of things that don't make sense going on. The Standard Model contradicts General Relativity on the microscale, observations of galactic movement need "dark matter" and "dark energy" fudges to work with GR on the macroscale, and yet nobody has any better theory of gravity than General Relativity or particle physics than the Standard Model.
So, yeah, the best news will be if the Higgs doesn't match theoretical predictions, but conveniently gives us a handle that allows all physics to be revolutionized into an improved model.
On the other hand, if it's found where the Standard Model predicts, and fits neatly into the Model, study still could give us enough detail to figure out what's going on, too. The current parameters for the Higgs range are pretty wide; something definite will help.
At absolute worst, discovering the Higgs and nailing it down will allow the attention of particle physicists to move on to new things, like trying to find those WIMPs the cosmologists are telling us are most of the universe's matter.
You may like the quality of the writing but the quality of the content leaves something to be desired.
First of all, success or failure in anything at the LHC would not be the result of exclusively European effort. The LHC experiments are international collaborations of thousands of physicists each from practically every country that has particle physics research activity. This includes many, many Americans (full disclosure: like myself).
Secondly, a light Higgs-like particle discovered at the Tevatron would by no means exclude a supersymmetric Higgs from a "boring" SM Higgs. To exclude the former scenario (or at least make it extremely unlikely) heavier supersymmetric particles would have to be searched for and not found.
Lastly, the author seems to fault the SM for being something its not. What it describes, it describes very well. Sure, it has some ungainly aspects, it isn't a theory of everything, but it's the best we have so far.
We're a long way from determining whether or not we'll have a "just right" Higgs. Give us some time Jim. Physics is hard.
p.s. Jane, your physicist friend did right by you.
They don't comment directly on this at Cosmic Variance (http://cosmicvariance.com/), but they do link to a cool game where You Too can hunt for the higgs:
http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/05/30/hunt-for-the-higgs/
I used to be a physicist, at least I have a BA in it, specializing in astrophysics, so take this as comments by someone looking from the outside with some rusty skilz in the area.
Physics is currently in a crisis. There has always been a tension between the experimentalists and the theoreticians. The first get all the money, the second get all the babes. (Just kidding.) The experimentalists have hit two walls with what is coming out of the theory side. First, most of the experiments to find out what is going on in the micro and macro world takes lots of money to do: building $8 billion particle colliders or putting expensive satellites in orbit for $1-500 milion or so.
Second, string theory, the latest of the Grand Unifying Theories, has produced some great models and lots of papers but nothing to test. Naturally, the experimentalists want something to do, so there has recently arisen a backlash against string theory. The basis is that if there is nothing that can be tested in the theory, we can't see if it is right or wrong - so the theory is just a bunch of equation manipulations by profs and grad students with no real world relevance. (Sort of like much of sociology. I'm six hours short of a BA in it, BTW.)
My understanding of the current state of affairs is that this testability problem has prompted a look at some older theories that were pushed aside in the rush to do string theory work. One of these, a revival of twistor theory, may make some testable predictions. No word yet on how many gigabucks to do the tests.
based on tone I'd think that maybe you think that this is too little bang for the euro, even if we aren't spending tons on it ourselves... but the bottom line is simple. We are at a level of understanding that requires a lot of money to show... and at some level you have to ACTUALLY show things behave the way you say they do. The theory is amazing and a whole master's beyond me, but I do get that there can be contradictions between theories, and approaches. This is one of the realms, to me, that must be publicly funded. That's simply because there is no direct commercial use [yet] and did I mention it costs a LOT? Bill gates isn't interested enough to front it... mores the pity there... If I had billions I could afford to be curious as well as charitable. In any case, there are things to be learned whatever flavor of Higgs is found, including that it exists at all, which will push some key understandings ahead, which form the basis for others, which changes the understanding of someone else, who rips the fabric of space/time and paves the way for something completely different. I'm not saying that all ends justify all means, but things aren't as simple as advertized [mixing my metaphores like a vodka martini]...
after all the super collider in texas that never happend was supposed to shutter fermilab, and then LHC was supposed to shutter fermilab, and won't... the justification for funding these things is difficult, but you just never know what you are going to get...
eh, so I'm a simpleton, what's new? I prefer my Higgs boson in key-lime flavor...
heh, and while I took and Ice-Age to post, ech goes and does a bunch better...
I'm not terribly in the know about physics, but with my BA in philosophy I wonder how Mr. Weatherall expects that any theory of physics could ever say why there is something instead of nothing, a problem firmly located in the domain of metaphysics.
Joshua:
The question that interests physicists is not the metaphysical one. Given a whole bunch of energy and the right conditions, one can create matter. But one is just as likely to create anti-matter. The question of interest to physicists is: why aren't there equal parts matter and antimatter in the universe?
one of the blogs that Weatherall links to responds to the Slate article. Basically, if the rumors are true, then the Higgs found at tevalab isn't the SM Higgs. So, still more to do, experimentally at least.
The "Why is there something rather than nothing?" question is an easy one.
Part of the answer is that there can't not be "What Is".
Not What Is in the limited sense of 'self-knotted' {intended to refer to string theory via knot theory) formations that is specific to this or any other universe, since these can unravel (although the lifetime of protons and neutrons might be exceedingly long ;>), but What Is in the sense of a somewhat self-constrained multidimensional infinity (an infinity for which there are mathematical and computational indicators) and ultimately cognitively/conceptually irreducible, universe-spawning, patterning process.
The rest of the answer could be described as "psychoetymological". E.g., when we say nothing we are actually referring to the absence of tangibility as in what is _not 'thingy'_".
So, IMO, far more 'important' (or interesting) questions are to do with aspects of *how* - rather than why or what - What Is is.
Cheers
First, statements like "physics is in a crisis" tend to focus on particle physics and cosmology. The rest of us (e.g. me, a guy interested in optics, biophysics, and complex fluids) are having a fun time right now, with lots of cool problems to work on. I mean, just in the past year or so we've learned that plain old graphite has some of the strangest electrical properties ever discovered. And in the past several years people have been finding all sorts of cool things that happen when you take everything you learned about refraction in freshman physics and turn it on its head.
Second, regarding the Big Questions:
the standard model, which happens to be clunky, boring, and infuriatingly silent on the Big Questions that the final theory of physics was supposed to answer. Questions like: Why is there something, rather than nothing? And where does gravity fit in?
I'd settle for an interpretation of quantum mechanics that doesn't leave my head spinning. No, I'm not one of those crackpots with an "alternative theory" in my back pocket, but that doesn't mean I'm a fan of our standard interpretation. It leaves something to be desired. (The difference between me and the crackpots is that they're convinced they have the secret ingredient to make it work, while I am happy to admit how clueless I am on this.)
Remembering the gigantic hole south of Dallas that was the proposed Superconducting Supercollider 20 years ago is very sobering.
As a geologist, I can assert that the giant "Global Warming" scam (along with its satellite scamoids) is sucking up (and wasting) billions of research dollars, often diverted straight out of the various conventional theoretical science arenas, such as physics.
As Ech said, the crisis in physics - at least for those who are still chasing the cosmic questions, unlike Thoreau - isn't lack of questions and hypotheses, but lack of testability. Apparently they just spent $8 billion to find one particle - and they knew from the beginning that finding it would either just confirm the "standard model" (which leaves a huge gap between quantum mechanics and gravity theory and dozens of untestable hypotheses as to how to close it), or it would require modifications to the model that are beyond the capacity of any accelerator that can be built.
Almost a hundred years ago, physicists started investigating the atom by the atomic-scale equivalent of whacking atoms with a hammer and seeing what came flying out. They moved on to investigating the particles inside the atom by building bigger hammers. But unlike cracking walnuts with a hammer, if your accelerator is powerful enough you don't get pieces of what is in the target, you create whole new particles... And the accelerators kept getting more expensive. Now maybe they can finally admit that they've reached the end of the line, and start thinking about some other technique than "bigger hammers"...
Wouldn't the mid-18th century porcelain be Ching dynasty?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_dynasty
The Standard Theory's reliance on a phlogiston of "dark matter" is a good sign of a fundamental theoretical deficiency.
"The Standard Theory's reliance on a phlogiston of "dark matter" is a good sign of a fundamental theoretical deficiency." hoof in mouth
well it is surely a good sign of an unknown... I am not bothered by a handwave required as a placeholder for something new and different. Even if that something obliterates the whole theory, and indicates something completely different. This is after all the nature of iquiry, yes? phlogiston was wrong because it was disproven, there was no way to pre-theorize their way out of it, because they were grasping for the fundamental process. The standard theory is doing the same. Even when we figure out what the dark-matter and dark energy placeholders are for... they may push out a jenga puzzle piece we were not expecting, and off we go again. It's enough to make the ganglia twitch...
I'd much rather see governments build huge scientific facilities to do massive yet not very useful experiments than ALMOST build huge scientific facilities and then throw in the towel at the last minute (Super Collider?).
Actually, IMO, this is the sort of thing governments should fund as I seriously doubt any private industry would. I'd rather fund expensive pure research than massive entitlement programs that encourage bad behavior or local pork-barrel projects or artists displaying their bodily wastes.
EI
Of course, the private sector would pick this and many other experiments in theoretical physics up in a heartbeat if only the government dropped funding. I'm sure it would!
And, of course, the marvelous private sector has produced so few Nobel winners in the sciences precisely because corporations have little interest in conducting the sort of cutting-edge research who's outcomes and economic implications, however great, are simply impossible to calculate. The private sector will never too many truly pioneering scientists. Libertarians often seem to think that science can be contingent on economics when, in fact, economics is far more contingent on the products of science. An entire biotechnology industry would be nonexistent today without the government-funded work of Nobel Prize winners Watson and Crick, for example. No private sector entity would have provided cash for work in biology that promised unknown results with unknown payoffs at some unknown point in the future back in the early 50s.
Physics research like this is hardly typical in any case. This is publicly funded science at its most expensive and esoteric. There is certainly room for legitimate debate about whether or not some science is worth funding and to what tune, but libertarians who might be tempted to present this as typical would be dishonest.
The Standard Theory's reliance on a phlogiston of "dark matter" is a good sign of a fundamental theoretical deficiency.
The standard model doesn't rely on dark matter. Indeed, dark matter is very likely something beyond the standard model.
What drives scientists to dark matter is the abundant observational evidence that it is there, including recent stunning gravitation lensing work that pretty much rules out the 'dark horse' competing class of modified gravity theories, MOND.
And, of course, the marvelous private sector has produced so few Nobel winners....with unknown payoffs at some unknown point in the future back in the early 50s.
An enormous exercise in begging the question. We really don't know how much 'science' of this sort would be produced by the private sector for the very reason that private industry has always had the option of letting government-funded research do it for them, then harvest the fruits. Why invest $8B in an atom smashing facility if the governments of Europe will compel 450 million EU residents to do it for you at $17/head?
the flip side anony-mouse... is that the private sector... is in it for the money, for commerce. What kind of business model would you have if there isn't certain profit in it? Ok, so what is the Higgs good for? Is it a key ingredient in a good beer? Perhaps, but can you make better beer by having made a Higgs? Well then, why would anyone sign up to make a LHC, when you can't show a solid business plan for it? I think that it is difficult to think of pure science as being driven by commerce... commerce may be a good after effect. This is one of those areas, IMHO, that should be driven by the public, as a public good... perhaps eventually making a commercial thing, based on how far it pushes knowledge forward...
And, of course, the marvelous private sector has produced so few Nobel winners in the sciences precisely because corporations have little interest in conducting the sort of cutting-edge research who's outcomes and economic implications, however great, are simply impossible to calculate.
Many, if not most, of the Nobel Prize-winning physicists of the 20th century did their Nobel Prize work either privately or while employed at private universities. For-profit corporations have little interest in pure science, generally speaking, but the private sector is more than just for-profit corporations.
Also bear in mind that while the private sector might not be willing to blow $8 billion just to find a subatomic particle, there are a LOT of technologies that (a) are potentially lucrative for the private sector and (b) would have the effect of dramatically reducing the cost of something like the LHC -- superconductors, more efficient forms of energy production, etc. What costs ten billion dollars today might cost ten million dollars a few decades from now.
So it is questionable that the government's involvement is actually necessary for experimental physics. If anything, it probably just allows experimental physicists to do work several decades ahead of where the private sector would let them work. Is it really a "public good" that we prove Higgs bosons exist next year, rather than in 2050? Will the Higgs boson end world hunger or stop global warming or something?
Mind you, of all the things the government blows my money on, I like science the best; I'd much rather buy an LHC than write Social Security checks to rich old people. But I don't think it can plausibly be argued that the public really needs one.
markm makes a good point. In most areas of science, progress is made by cleverness. Yes, there's room for a direct approach, attacking the problem with more and more power. But most areas of science also complement that with heavy doses of cleverness.
In particle physics, it pretty much amounts to bigger and bigger hammers. Yes, the hammers are very cleverly designed and the analysis is quite sophisticated. Still, at the end of the day, all of the progress comes from reaching a higher energy scale.
In other areas of science, progress comes from looking at things differently, applying tools that have some advantage other than just greater power, putting familiar materials or organisms in new settings, etc.
the flip side anony-mouse... is that the private sector... is in it for the money, for commerce. What kind of business model would you have if there isn't certain profit in it?
As Dan said, the private sector is more than just for-profit corporations. Many research institutions, academia in particular, receive substantial grants from private-sector individuals. My own alma matter, a small but highly respected public institution, lives primarily from its endowment and is seriously considering a complete break from public funding (although I assume they would still seek publicly-funded research grants when available -- if money is available with no odious strings, who wouldn't take it?). And in times past, many great scientists lived and researched off of private sector patronage.
Are any of these arrangements preferable to the current one? I'm of no strong opinion one way or the other, as their are benefits and drawbacks to all approaches. But IMO it is a stroke of fallacy to make the argument tommy provided, especially with so little linear evidence.
Most of what we take for granted right now: Internet, radio, computers, supersonic jets, nuclear and rocket technology, were invented and developed in secret government military labs for purposes of making war.
An interesting thesis of William McNeal's book The Pursuit of War (I think that's the title) is that government-funded military research was the primary force that pushed the technological acceleration in the twentieth century. Almost everything we take for granted now, was invented in a military lab, and eventually adopted for commercial use.
Would the private sector have come up with these inventions? It's a moot and pointless question. Becuase of the exigencies of WWI, WWII, the Cold War, etc. the private sector would never have had the funding or the information (all classified) or the scientists to come up with things like the radio and the nuclear bomb. The government gobbled up all the resources.
When countries grow stronger, governments become bigger and more centralized. We are no exception. Once we become a global power, we have no choice but to accept a larger and more poweful government. Our government is here to stay, Mr. anony-mouse, and there's not much we can do about it.
Er, let me re-write the third sentence of the last paragraph:
Once we CHOSE to become a global power, we have no choice but to accept a larger and more powerful government.
I toured the Atlas detector at LHC recently - and while I understood little of what was explained (though I can now identify a "muon chamber") there is in fact a significant amount of American participation both in terms of finance and expertise.
Our guides were from MIT and UWisconsin and exhibited no ennui whatsoever about particle physics. The exuberant MIT woman shared her excitement about exploring why it is that everything in the universe is "quantized" and how she dreamed of understanding dark matter.
Almost everything we take for granted now, was invented in a military lab, and eventually adopted for commercial use.
Yes indeed. Like the transistor, and the integrated circuit, and the Windows operating system, developed at secret military facilities known as "Bell Labs," "Texas Instruments" and "Xerox," respectively.
Re: bigger hammers v. cleverness. I happen to have a couple of papers and a patent from my grad school days in the field of tabletop high-energy physics, in which a couple hundred grand and a single room's worth of lasers is used to explore similar questions to what you see at big colliders. I was never talented enough to hack it in that world, but there's some really good stuff out there being done for really cheap. Not that it can replace colliders but there is some movement in that general direction.
Of course, most of the money comes from the government.
And I have been taken in before; a physicist of my acquaintance confiscated my copies of The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu-li Masters and wouldn't let me have them back even when I threatened to sue.
The objections to The Dancing Wu-li Masters are what, exactly? (Beyond the usual breakage of a decades-old pop physics book.) I keep hearing how horribly wrong physicists say it is, but no one has ever told me what I need to unlearn.
Apparently as toothsome as Mr Weatherall is, his former physics adviser at Harvard Nima Arkani-Hamed is none too impressed with his grasp of this issue:
http://www.stevens.edu/csw/cgi-bin/blogs/csw/?p=42
Yes indeed. Like the transistor, and the integrated circuit, and the Windows operating system
Good calls -- except that "Windows" as such was developed at Microsoft. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) was developed at Xerox PARC, along with the personal computer, the mouse, the laser printer, Ethernet, and a whole host of related computing technologies. (The PC/GUI/mouse concept was then picked up by Steve Jobs and became the core of the Macintosh computer, and Microsoft then subsequently developed the Windows OS for IBM PCs.)
Government programs, whether for war or peace, have developed many useful things. And some fundamental advances. How could they not?
But as Rob and other note the fundamentals of modern life have not come from government labs.
In roughly chronological order:
Photography, telegraphy and telephones, steam engines and turbines, industrial steel and concrete, automatic looms and sewing machines, pulp paper and high-speed presses, rubber and plastics, railroads and steamships, the electrical generator and electical grid, batteries, radio (at first mechanical/electical), data processing, the vacuum tube and amplifier tube, the internal combustion engine, cars, the oil industry and mass food processing, airplanes, air conditioning, the assembly line, practical radio and TV, computers, transistors, lasers, printed circuits, integrated circuits.
NASA didn't invent teflon either. They did fund a pen that writes in zero gravity. It cost plenty. The Russians used a pencil.
The tendency to credit government with nearly ever advances in science and technology is recent. It comes partly from the fact that governments now massively fund so many efforts.
It comes partly because some efforts seem unlikely to produce a profit and are too large to privately fund without profit. (small efforts w/o a prospect of profit are often privately funded).
And it also comes from an increasing belief that distant gods must control our destiny for we cannot. In my locale the common name of the godhead is Washington.
Yet today, when the government wants a new airplane for the military they write some specs, some aircraft manufacturers design and build planes to suit the specs and then have a fly-off to see who wins. These do not come out of some government lab.
Yet today, when the government wants a new airplane for the military they write some specs, some aircraft manufacturers design and build planes to suit the specs and then have a fly-off to see who wins. These do not come out of some government lab.
Almost everything we take for granted now, was invented in a military lab, and eventually adopted for commercial use.Yes indeed. Like the transistor, and the integrated circuit, ...
Although government was involved in the development of the transistor:
On 16 December 1947 William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain succeeded in building the first practical point-contact transistor at Bell Labs. This work followed from their war-time efforts to produce extremely pure germanium "crystal" mixer diodes, used in radar units as a frequency mixer element in microwave radar receivers.The first transistor patent was issued in 1928!
And government was also involved in the development of the integrated circuit earlier than I had thought:
The integrated circuit was first conceived by a radar scientist, Geoffrey W.A. Dummer (born 1909), working for the Royal Radar Establishment of the British Ministry of Defence, and published in Washington, D.C. on May 7, 1952. Dummer unsuccessfully attempted to build such a circuit in 1956.
I won't claim that military spending necessary for technological progress, but it wouldn't surprise me if the military and its contractors (which you can characterize as private if you like, or as military appendages if you prefer) are actually pretty good at encouraging technological progress.
First, every technology needs an early adopter. The military, being rather inefficient, is willing to buy really expensive stuff that civilians would rather pass on until the price comes down. This doesn't mean that the military is the only (or even best) early adopter, but they are a pretty big one. In the absence of a large military I have no doubt that the private sector would find some other pool of early adopters, but I can also believe that the military is an especially convenient early adopter.
Second, deep pockets aren't the only traits conducive to early adoption. The nature of the military's job requires a rather paranoid mindset. They're probably also somewhat desperate to make sure that they don't fall behind on something that companies would look at and say "Call me when you have a useful consumer product."
None of this should be construed as a defense of large military budgets. Just an analysis. There's a difference.
I'd imagine something startling - at least to physicists - will be found at the LHC, as in the past whenever new energy scales have been opened new and often entirely unexpected things have been found. There might well be some practical things invented too. This little thing called "the Web" was invented at CERN to help share research data from the last big accelerator, and I hear that's worth a not insubstantial amount of money now.
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