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Dialogue: Communicating Particle Physics in the 21st Century
Dialogue - FermiNews readers express their views: On May 14, Charles Abney from Grand Prairie, Texas, writes: Ms,Sirs:
From my own prespective from what I have learned from this site, other related sites and what books that I have read through our library and or purchased, is that on the very core level the diffrent sciences are all interelated and interdependent on the other. In high school and what colllege based courses that I have taken I only took three basic science classes during that period. I knew very little about particle physics, cosmology, quantum mechanics, string theory, and gravitational waves. The assumption that the average public cannot grasp or understand these sciences is a myth. I am living proof of that. Many of you are excellant teachers as well as good researches.. We appreciate all of your efforts and teaching the rest of us what you have learned even though our math background has a lot to be desired of. Thanks again and take care: Charles Abney Received on May 14, Atwell R. Turquette writes: In his "The Un-Common Languaage of Science", John Womersley gives some very convinceing reasons for describing the family of physical sciences as "cosmic sciences" in much the same way that "life sciences" is now used to describe the family of biological sciences. On the other hand, in dealing with the most basic "highest level" questions, he proposes rejecting "philosophizing" and seeking to understand the cosmos through experiments. Of course, experiment is of vital importance, but talking about raw experimental data free of context is as empty as talking about NU`S and DNA free of context. Meaning is born within the context of interpretation and theory. Therein lies the source of the inescapable ghost of philosophy. Atwell Turquette
Dialogue - FermiNews readers express their views: Submitted on May 11 by Soon Jin (Jim) KIM, PhD, Journalism Professor Emeritus, Towson University (Baltimore) Let me present (1) SEXY-THEORETICAL points, (2) CRITICAL comments and lastly (3) COMPLIMENTS on your "THE Question" article --to leave you with good taste in your mouth(s): (1) THEORETICAL: My visceral-guts feeling/answer --of course-- is physics (particle physics specially) should/must be pursued for its "BEAUTY AND GRANDEUR" OF THE UNIVERSE in Einstein's words. The human urge-instinct is naturally for knowledge for its own sake. NO (repeat, NO) utilitarian results should motivate our quest!!! ====> The only PEEVE I have of ALL the "Western" modern theoretical physics (and physicists) is that they are HELP- LESSLY TINGED with Judeo-Christian-Muslim preconcept of "CREATION" --based on the Bible and Koran's "GENESIS" presupposition. It all began with the "BIG BANG" (or whatever), they say. It is UTTERLY ILLOGICAL...! ====> Then, WHAT was there "BEFORE" the "Bang"//"start"? ====> Buddhism/Hinduism/Taoism do NOT "need" any "start"! (2) CRITICISM (on your "NATIONAL" bias): In science (particle physics in particular) the "NATIONAL" concern should NEVER tinge the search for the truth(s)! The "nation-state" concept is NOT older than 300-400 years, as it came with the advent of capitalism.
Even literary (Shakespeare) and/or musical arts (Puccini)
went beyond the NARROW national boundaries. See
====> Judy, your otherwise WELL-WRITTEN article uses the
words ("NATION" or "NATIONS") 9 (NINE) times! Each time
I did CRINGE!!!
====> You also used the word "interNATIONAL" [my caps] 3
(THREE) times. It should/must be sublimated-upgraded to
"GLOBAL" or "WORLD" --the words you DID use along with
your "interNATIONAL"!!
====> The very "NATIONAL" and "UTILITARIAN" ideologies
motivated Boeotian Ronald Reagan and his ilk (elder Brush,
etc) to cancel the already-begun ACCELERATOR in Texas some
years back. I do NOT lament the $$$-waste, but I so, so
profoundly RESENTED that cancellation...! (Fermi people
did also??) Now, we must await European CERN to come on
line...!
That Texas-accelerator cancellation was ordered by the
RR-Bush and his Cold Warriors who squander $30-40 MILLION
on a copy of F-18 fighters WITHOUT even batting eyes...!
MY AVERSION TO NATIONALISM originates far back --to my
Junior College years in militarist Japan during the 1940s
--when I aspired to be a nuclear physicist. WWII and the
Korean War frustrated my youthful ambitions and turned me
eventually to journalism.
But I still STAR-GAZE --NOT telescope-toting type, but a
COSMOLOGY BUFF, endlessly fascinated by Lederman, Hawking,
Greene, et al.
(3) YOUR SUPERB WRITING:
You do NOT need me to tell you that you are a consummate
writer. But I want to emphasize that from the Missouri-
Journalism perspectives. I pretend to be very, very picky
grammarian and "Science Writing" teacher-practitioner.
Let me give you specific accolades on your writing style:
====> Your abbreviations (NOT acronyms, commonly called)
are so well-placed --I mean you used them RIGHT AFTER the
whole phrases, so that readers do not need to be confused.
An example?
HEPAP follows at once "High Energy Physics Advisor Panel"!
====> I, however, saw NO full phrase for DESY (p 5) ??
====> Also, your section on "THE WORLD NEEDS ACCELERATOR
TECHNOLOGY" (p 5) DOES need some transition; it just got
stuck there. (POOR science-feature technique...!)
Hope you have come through thus far in your busy schedules.
Thanks again for this chance to let this off my chest.
Regards, jim
Submitted on May 6th by Ernesto Gasulla, a structural engineer from Chicago:
Instead of providing another not-very-relevant personal view, I'd like
to point out that the answer of the general public -the average tax payer,
who after all shapes most of America's public spending trends- is "nothing
good". With all due respect, the fact that you guys still have to make
yourselves these kind of questions is a sad reminder of how you lost the
PR battle to convince people that what you do is of any good. The much
hyped geneticists did not fare so well just because what they did was
"useful", but because they succeeding in selling their investigation to the common
Americans (by the way, Mr. Ken Lane's envious comparison of DNA and
physics investigation is just too stupid to be published, and assuming he will
not apologize, you should).
Now get a mirror and look at yourselves: for many years particle
physicists kept a lid over their investigations, be it due to the cold war or
whatever other reason, and the most visible results were the A-bomb and the
contamination resulting from nuclear energy. Don't get me wrong: I'm not
saying that these were the only results, I'm just pointing out the fact
that these are the things that first come to our minds when we talk of
particle physics. With this reference frame, how could you expect Joe American to
give you high marks for your work, financed by his tax dollars?
Your next question could be: "Can we revert the tide so that people
would see us as helping them to shape a better future, rather than wasting
their money in dangerous lab games?" I'd bet on a "no". It seems to be a
little late. But you should keep on trying.
And now for my personal opinion, I do believe your investigations are
valuable. Not that anyone else cares much.
On May 6, Jerry Zimmerman wrote:
The article in Ferminews called the question was very interesting to me.
Since I do the cryoshows at schools I to am often asked that question.
But the example I use was not even mentioned in your article and to me
is even more important then any of the wonderful discoveries mentioned.
J.J. Thompson was investigating a phenomenon called cathode rays and not
only discovered electrons but also the basics for particle accelerators,
television and computer monitors. In fact I think one of the greatest discoveries
of all time is the Cathode Ray Tube which is almost the fundamental building block
for the technology of today. The Gutenberg Press was the first discovery that
allowed information to given to the masses but the second one that has allowed
our information age is the CRT. Between Television and Computer displays it
is the one development that has allowed for information age to get the
information to us the masses. When he was investigating Cathode Rays, did he in
vision television or computers, no he was just investigating a high energy
physics question. I believe that his contributions and there connection with
Fermilab are overlooked as an example of using abstract high energy physics for
everyday life changing developments.
On Thursday, April 25, Adolf Schaller, Director OmniCosm Studios wrote us:
To those, like David Kramer, who find particle physics so painfully irrelevant, I would like to suggest these words in addition to those of that "hackneyed" ilk he seems to despise so: The whole and preeminent reason for the existence of biomedicine in the first place is so that human beings can more fully enjoy exploring the deepest nature of their own existence: Particle physics, and the questions it alone addresses, is a big reason why biomedicine is relevant at all.
Leslie Groer, PhD, Columbia University wrote us:
Dear Judy
As I'm sure many of particle physics respondents would point out, an
indirect benefit the whole world is enjoying is the creation of the
World Wide Web at CERN directly as a result of the need for communication
amongst the ever-growing particle physics collaborations. Clearly this
is not the reason for doing the physics but does show some of the immediate
and sometimes completely unpredictable spin-offs that fundamental
research can lead to.
Jim Griffin wrote:
Judy Jackson
Here is a comment that may be useful in some form. Last week my wife
had a PET-scan of her upper body in a search for the source of a perticular
form of cancer. (particular i.e., no upscreen editing from here) So what is a
PET-scan? Positron-Electron-Tomagraphy. We've heard a bit about electrons, but
what is a positron? Of course, a positron is the anti-particle of an electon, an
anti- electron. What is an antiparticle anyway? Do such things exist? Answer,
yes in some circumstances. In this case the anti-electrons can be made to
appear near points of high metabolism in the body, that may exhibit tumor activity.
When theanti-electrons (positrons) appear they very quickly (one million
of a millionth of a second) encounter one of the millions of electron nearby. When that
happens the positron and the electron annihilate each other and give off
two bursts of radiation. By looking from outside the body for the source of
hat radiation the location of possible tumor activity can be defined. So antimatter
matters!
At Fermilab millions of millions of antiprotons are created and
captured each day. They are captured in a large magnetic bottle and later allowed to
met ordinary protons at high energy near huge detectors similar to, but much
larger than those used in a PET-scan. Again we look for the radiation resulting
from these collisions to understand the deep-structure of the stuff the
universe is made of.
But, very simply, the knowledge that antimatter exists and can be used
in medical diagnosis is a direct result of forefront physics research.
Interestingly enough, about 35 years ago, when I was at the Iowa State
Synchrotron, I started a study of the lifetime of positrons deeply
imbedded in metal crystals. We created the positrons using radiation from our small
synchrotron.
Dialogue - FermiNews readers express their views:
On April 8, Sheldon Stone from Syracuse University wrote:
1. Understanding our world at the most elementary level in terms of forces and fundamental objects.
2. Understanding the mystery of flavor, fully understanding the connections between quarks and neutrinos. Understanding the Higgs sector and anything additional such as supersymmetry.
3. I think "Hidden Dimensions" has a much too prominent a place. While an intriguing idea, it is not known if there are any or not. I would put it in a "bubble" as a question "Are there extra dimensions?" I would replace it if possible with something like "Mystery of Flavor" and have the white bands leading into it as "CP violation
in Quarks," and "Neutrino & Quark Mixing," possibly also "Neutrino Mass."
On April 8, Maureen A. McAllister wrote:
Thanks for the opportunity to comment on the Long-Range Plan poster.
1. I think the universe background is fine, but the foreground should be something more clearly identified with physics research....e.g., a picture of bubble chamber trajectories, the guts of a detector, etc.
2. The poster should show the linkage to cosmology, especially understanding the Big Bang, the Big Crash of membranes or something similar. Show this as part of the Cosmic Connections.
3. We need to intertwine some practical benefits of high energy particle research....perhaps along the bottom of the poster....topics like neutron medicine, desk top fusion for the energy crisis, augmented space travel options (e.g. with solar winds) .
On April 3, John Womersley from Fermilab's D0 experiment wrote:
I recently attended a conference with a significant
number of cosmologists, dark matter experimentalists and so on
--- people we don't talk to very much. I gave a typical
talk about the Higgs search at the Tevatron. Afterwards, one of
the cosmologists came up to me during the coffee break and
started asking questions. It took half an hour of the two of us
standing at a whiteboard re-interpreting my talk before we both
understood, in a common language, why what I had just talked about
mattered to him. This brought home to me one of our problems.
Often we like to focus inwards on our experiments, treating them
as closed controlled systems where we can understand all the rules of
a game of particles and forces. As for what this means for the
universe, we just hope that cosmologists will read our
papers and figure out the implications. This compartmentalization
is bad for us all. Any discussion with non-specialists will
make it clear that what we do has relevance only because it
helps us understand
the cosmos. Few people care about understanding proton-antiproton
collisions at 2 TeV; many people care about understanding the
universe.
Moreover, our own physics experience should teach us that we can't
separate
the forces we observe from the symmetries of the cosmos: in a
real sense, they are
the same thing. We should never talk about finding the Higgs as if it's
another particle to add to our list of trophies --- we should talk
about it (and think about it) as a weird property of space-time that
we are trying to explore experimentally. The universe is not an
empty space in which the rules of particle physics apply; the universe
is the rules and the rules are the universe.
My discussion at this conference didn't change the physics that
I did --- we'll still look for the Higgs in the same way. But it
helped to change my appreciation of why we are doing what we do.
I believe it may help to change the public's appreciation too.
One way to foster that is to use a different language. The term "life
sciences" is used to cover biology, medicine, biochemistry, and
genetics, because they seek to understand, and ultimately manipulate,
the processes of life. Recent advances have blurred the boundaries
between them and created new subdisciplines, but life sciences as
a whole are vibrant and active. By analogy, I suggest we refer to
astronomy, particle physics, cosmology, string theory, gravitational
wave searches and so on as "cosmic sciences". They all seek to understand
(and, yes, ultimately manipulate) the processes of the cosmos.
Trying to talk about particle physics without talking about the cosmos
is like talking about DNA without
talking about life --- scientifically valid, but devoid of context.
Our accelerator-based particle physics experiments are cosmic science
because the ways in which matter behaves, and which they reveal,
apply everywhere in the universe.
At the highest level, what we are trying to do is to understand
the recipe we would need if we were going to create this universe
from scratch. By recipe, I mean what kind of space, time,
forces, symmetries and matter we would need to use and how to
set them up. For millenia, philosophers have tried to answer
this question, but our goal is to understand things through
experiments, not through philosophizing. Cosmologists are
often criticized because they cannot conduct experiments to
test their hypothesis. That's not true. What we do in the
Tevatron is experimental cosmology --- the experimental
exploration of the structure of the cosmos.
On April 3, Christopher T. Hill from the Fermilab Theory Group wrote:
1. How would you express the highest-level goals and objectives of
particle physics at the start of the 21st century?
Personally I do not see how any of the popular, loftier
and questions of Superstring Theory,
Extra Dimensions, Cosmology
and Dark Matter, etc., can be approached beyond mere speculation,
or even regarded as ultimately relevant to
particle physics, until the question of the origin
of mass is answered. We do not know what the
answer is, and we do not really know
what the next set of relevant questions will be
until we have it.
History has always shown that then current speculations
are replaced by completely different views of the world when the
facts are finally in. Einstein thought quantum mechanics was
flawed and that you could figure out
the entire Universe given only the electron, and Fermi
thought the only elementary particles were the photon, proton
neutron, pion, electron and neutrino.
Neither could ever have guessed the existence of the top quark,
or anticipated the deep questions we are asking now.
I think my generation, no less proud than our great grandfather's, has
a similar notion of grand synthesis that explains the whole
Universe. Yet history suggests that the questions our
great grandchildren will be asking are ones we haven't even
conceived of yet. Perhaps it's all best said by Hamlet to
Horatio: "there are things 'twixt heaven and earth that
are not dreamt of in your philosophy."
Of course, history can be a bad predictor.
It is still possible that "we will
find Supersymmetry at the Weak Scale,
extra dimensions, the LSP as the dark matter particle,
with everthing unified into SU(5)->E_8 x E_8
and CP violation and CKM mixing arising from a Calabi-Yau
manifold at the GUT scale, just below the superstring scale. "
However, we may also find that this theoretical worldview is
the modern equivalent of "phlogiston" or "caloric."
There's only one way to proceed: Use Galileo's
Scientific Method. For us this means: Answer the next question
on the list, and that one is "What is the origin
of mass?"
2. In your best hopes and dreams, what advances will particle physics
achieve in the next 30 years?
We seem to forget that elementary particle physics is the ultimate
material's science.
We are trying to understand matter and the forces that shape and control
it.
We are trying to understand the material question of "what is
the ground state of the world?" ie, what is the structure of the
vacuum? This is where the origin of mass can be understood.
This is the vacuum in my backyard,
or your attic, or Joe's basement... we don't have to go
to NGC-1714, 400 million light years away, to answer it.
These questions are most akin to the
ones that condensed matter physicists ask about high temperature
superconductors, or Mott insulators. They use the same techniques
and the same style of thought that we do. To me, Condensed Matter
Physics is our true sister science.
As such, I think that the material science of elementary particle
physics may lead to things "not dreamt of in your philosophy."
I can only speculate about it, and run the risk of being labeled
a crackpot by my more well-dressed and
callously sophisticated colleagues. Maybe theoretical
physics will one-day stumble into number theory, or
get a handle on why there is only one dimension of
time (is there?) , or understand gravity as
a collective phenomenon and solve the riddle of the
tiny cosmological constant.
In the realm of experiment, suppose we could ultimately
affect the way in which things acquire mass? Could we
envision a new kind of physical material? Or, suppose someday that we
could manufacture magnetic monopoles, or find some new
strange and quasistable elementary particle (perhaps the
harbinger of dark matter)? Could the material science
of elementary particle physics become.....USEFUL?
The fact is, particle physics already IS USEFUL! Particle physics
provided
the unique, possibly the exclusive, global collaborative paradigm in
which the
World-Wide-Web evolved... and with it a $1 Trillion contribution
to the U.S. economy. The positron, which was discovered
by a theorist in 1926, is the basis of a multi-$-billion medical
imaging and diagnostics technology today. The particle accelerator,
likewise,
provides a multi-$-billion economy (and most of the dollars we
consume in particle physics go to build and operate particle
accelerators). Some entreprenuers envison a similar future
new economy for the anti-proton, now some 50 years after its discovery,
the particle that is uniquely manufactured and used as a tool
here at Fermilab. I think this view of anti-protonics
may be realistic. Particle physics pays, and will continue
to pay, for its meal ticket.
Wat might be most useful of all, would be an oversight body that
is competent to make these points emphatically to a sympathetic
populace, Senate , House, Executive and Judiciary.
Instead we are told that
our science (and astrophysics) has "receded so far from the world
of human action that the details of their
phenomena are no longer very relevant to practical affairs."
This is an extraordinarily unfortunate misstatement.
And, perhaps the most unfortunate misstatement
we've heard recently is that this "joy (of physics) ... is shared
fully by a rapidly declining fraction of the population." It is
evidently
our leadership that is in the state of rapid decline.
Yet, where is the White Paper that
informs a congressional aide what the payback ratio
of a dollar spent on particle physics is in the general economy?
Any economics Ph.D. is competent
to estimate it. Why hasn't the Office of Science at
DOE commissioned it?
I suspect it is a payback ratio of order 10.
If so, our $750 million HEP budget generates about
$7.5 Billion in general economic activity, or, about 75,000 jobs for
non-scientist
American citizens. It's a rough guess, but I'd
be surprised if it isn't close.
So, how does our science function, today,
in the world economy in detail? What would we
tangibly lose without it?
With these facts in hand it is a likely no-brainer
to start construction on the linear collider,
the muon collider and the VLHC tomorrow!
It is one of my personal greatest hopes and dreams
that someday we get a competent and proactive oversight body,
and the quality leadership that the most fundamental of all
sciences, particle physics, deserves.
3. Does this diagram work? How could it be improved?
What does the does the lunar-landscape-like
backdrop have to do with particle physics?
A spiral galaxy? -- maybe but not mainly.
Where are particle accelerators even hinted at
in the picture? Or a particle detector? Or advanced
computing? This looks like an ad
for a summer Sci-Fi flick, not a reason to spend $0.75 Billion
per year to understand nature.
And, why is the MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION, the origin
of mass, or "Higgs" placed under the rubric
"ultimate unification"? How do WE know if there
even is an ultimate unification? How do WE know what the
relationship of unification to a Higgs is? We don't even
know if there exists a HIGGS.
Let me share an experience I've had in communicating
our science to the public. I have discovered that
telling an audience that the answers to the most profound questions
of particle physics lie in cosmology, ie., through telescopes,
confuses them. I think it is also false. Try this little experiment:
Give a popular talk on particle physics, where the raison d'etre is
presented as understanding the moment of creation, the Big Bang.
I have done it many times. The questions you get from
the audience at the end of the
talk go like this: "What was there before the Big Bang?", "Do
you see evidence of God in the Universe? ",
"Are any of those cosmologists at Fermilab single?" and,
unfortunately, "What good
is all of this?"
On the other hand, try telling it like it is: The answers lie
through the world's most powerful microscopes, our accelerators,
and detectors,
and that we are trying to understand the structure and composition
of everything around us. The questions from the audience then go
like this: "How big is a proton?" "How big is a quark?"
"How can you see a quark?" What
will be the magnifying power of the LHC compared to the
Tevatron, or a linear collider?" These are scientific questions.
They are interesting to our neighbors and our friends who
don't do this for a living. Tell the truth, and our neighbors
understand it and us in our terms.
Most remarkably, when presented as a material science,
as the ultimate microscopy, the
audience rarely asks "What good is this?" They instinctively
know it is good, essential, and important.
I suggest you go back to the drawing board on the poster.
You might try something like this:
Show an old woman in a southwestern native american village making a
clay pot with her hands as a faint backdrop. On the
pot could be scrawlings that are the equations of motion
of a Yang-Mills gauge theory, the modern equivalent
of Maxwell's Equations. This conveys the hands-on
quality of our subject as a material science. Our work
is "of this world," as much a part of a clay
pot, as it is in another galaxy a long
time ago. Overlay on this backdrop a foreground
picture of the Tevatron, also of CDF or D0, and a CDF
or D0 top quark event.
This communicates the human and the
traditional qualities of our subject. The subject is
about here and now. It hasn't just begun,
and it is not about to end.
A question rather than a slogan:
What is Matter?
Enough of this. I have some grungy calculations
to do.
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| last modified 5/24/2002 email Fermilab |
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