Here’s a short video, courtesy of NOVA, that we made on our trip to Geneva. Hopefully the excitement of the moment comes through… (Note: might be hard/impossible to view the video outside the US, sorry.)
Watch Higgs Boson Revealed on PBS. See more from NOVA.
Postcard from Geneva Read More »
Back in Los Angeles, after my brief action-packed jaunt to Geneva. Higgsteria continues, and I’ll be on NPR’s Science Friday later today to talk about it. That’s 2pm Eastern, 11am Pacific time. Hope to do justice to the palpable air of excitement at CERN and around the world.
After that, I think certain parts of my book are going to need some re-writes…
One thing I don’t want to get lost in all the hubbub. Amidst all the many impressive aspects of the work the physicists and machine-builders did to make the LHC happen and achieve this fantastic discovery, I was very struck by how eager people were to give credit to other people. In their main talks, both Fabiola Gianotti and Joe Incandela went out of their way to give credit to the machine builders, the technicians who worked on their experiments, and the thousands of colleagues within each collaboration who contributed to the result. But that eagerness to share credit went well beyond the official announcements — everyone we talked to was quick to point out how far-reaching and international the project really was. The very quintessence of a group effort.
Unfortunately, at least in the sciences, large groups can’t win the Nobel Prize. There will be much discussion in days to come about who deserves a prize for inventing the theory behind the Higgs; I think it’s complicated, and I’m not going to push for any particular set of people. When it comes to the experiments, the matter is easier: there’s no fair way to give it to anyone, really. There was a lot of Nobel-quality effort, without question, but I can’t see how it’s possible to narrow it down to just three people, which is the strict Nobel rule. What we really need to do is change that rule, but the folks in charge are (probably correctly) very conservative about such things, so I don’t see it happening soon.
So let me throw out one name that should at least be in the conversation: Lyn Evans, “the man who built the LHC.” Evans was in charge of the project for many years, and it was his dedication and ability that brought it to successful completion. He is now officially retired as a CERN staff member, although he’s still working as a member of the CMS collaboration and the leader of the effort to build a linear collider. He didn’t play a central role in the actual experimental effort to find the Higgs, but there’s no person who deserves more credit for enabling the conditions under which it could be found. People who are much more informed about the detailed history of the LHC and the ATLAS/CMS experiments will be in a better position that I to render such judgments, but I think the Nobel committee could do a lot worse.
Tomorrow (Friday, that is, in case it needed specifying) I’ll be on Science Friday as part of a discussion of dark matter vs. modified gravity, as well as NASA’s new gifts from the spymasters. I think most places SciFri is at 3:00 Eastern/Noon Pacific, and my little segment is scheduled for 20-minutes-past-ish.
Live radio! Anything can happen, really.
Also, I’m embarking on a new campaign to get more content on the blog by turning things I tend to simply Tweet into tiny blogposts. For example.
Science Friday Tomorrow Read More »
Update: here’s the amazon page, where the book is ready for pre-order.
Speaking of writing popular books, I’m at it again. I’m currently hard at work writing The Particle At the End of the Universe, a popular-level book on the Large Hadron Collider and the search for the Higgs boson. If all goes well, it should appear in bookstores at the end of this year or beginning of next. (Ideally, it will go on sale the same day they announce the discovery of the Higgs. I’m trying to bribe the right people to make that happen.) The title is somewhat tentative, so it might change at some point.
This will be a somewhat different book than From Eternity to Here. While both are aimed at a general audience, FETH was a rather lengthy tome that made a careful argument in a hopefully novel way. Anyone could read it, but to get the most out of it you have to really sit and think about certain ideas. Particle, on the other hand, aims to be a fun and narratively gripping page-turner — a book that makes you eager to move quickly to the next chapter, rather than taking a few minutes to let the last one sink into your head. A bodice-ripper, if you will. It will be full of stories and fun anecdotes about the human beings who made the LHC happen and have devoted their lives to searching for the Higgs and particles beyond the Standard Model. A book you would be happy to give to your Grandmom in order to convey some of the excitement of modern physics. (Unless your Grandmom is a particle physicist, in which case she might think it’s at too low a level.)
At the same time, of course, I’m going to try to illuminate the central ideas of the Standard Model in as clear a fashion as I can manage. It won’t just be a list of particles; I’ll cover field theory, gauge bosons, and spontaneous symmetry breaking. All in fine bodice-ripping style. (Maybe get Fabio for the cover?)
If you are a particle physicist yourself, I’m happy to take input. This could take the form of a favorite analogy you like to use to explain some subtle concept, or some physics idea or piece of history you think really doesn’t get the attention it deserves in the popular media. Even better if you have some personal involvement in a fun story — you lost your virginity in the LHC tunnel, or you discovered asymptotic freedom but didn’t get around to publishing it. I’m talking to as many physicists as I can, but I can’t talk to everyone. I’m looking for tales that will make the human side of physics come alive.
Also happy to take input if you’re not a particle physicist! What are the concepts that we don’t do a good job explaining? What are the buzzwords you’ve heard about the don’t make sense? The questions you really want answered?
I sincerely believe the search for the Higgs and whatever might lie beyond is a Big Deal in the history of science, and I hope to convey some of the importance and excitement of this question to as large an audience as possible. I’ll be flitting around the country giving talks when the book comes out, so let me know if you have a big lecture hall full of eager minds that want to hear the latest dispatches from the particle trenches. Should be a fun ride.
The Particle At the End of the Universe Read More »
[Update added below. Further update: here’s the video.]
I’m participating this afternoon in an intriguing event here at Caltech:
Affirming the proposition will be Skeptics Society president Michael Shermer and myself, while negating it will be conservative author Dinesh D’Souza and MIT nuclear engineer Ian Hutchinson. We’ll go back and forth for about two hours, after which Sam Harris will give a talk about his most recent book, Free Will.
Festivities begin at 2pm Pacific time (5pm Eastern). I hadn’t previously mentioned the debate here on the blog, because tickets sold out pretty quickly, and it didn’t seem right to taunt people by mentioning an event they couldn’t come see. But the Skeptics folks have been working hard to set up live-streaming video of the event, and it looks like they’ve succeeded! So you should be able to watch all the fun live on YouTube — and feel free to leave comments here.
[Live-streaming didn’t work, but here’s the video.]
I’ll come back when it’s all over and add some post-debate thoughts.
Update after the debate: first off, very sorry that the live stream didn’t seem to work for many people. (Although the YouTube comments are occasionally funny.) That’s just what sometimes unfortunately happens when you try something new. Pretty sure that video will eventually be available, I’ll link when it appears.
Also I deleted a bunch of comments about string theory from people who don’t take instructions well.
As for the debate, it’s very hard to judge when up on the stage, but I hope there were some enlightening moments. I’m not sure it worked well as a “debate.” I tried to engage a bit with what Ian and Dinesh were saying, but I didn’t feel that they reciprocated — although they might make the same claim about our side. I’m thinking that four people is just too much to have in a debate; it could have been more direct confrontation if there had only been two, with twice as much time for each little speech.
I don’t think I did a very good job in the cross-examinations, but hopefully the actual speeches came across clearly.
The audience was pretty clearly biased toward us from the beginning. Which is great in some sense (go forces of reason!) but I’d actually like to do something similar before an audience that was tilted the other way, or (best of all) completely uncommitted at the start. Preaching to the choir is fun, but doesn’t really change the world.
We had a great crowd, and I very much appreciate everyone who braved the not-that-great-by-Southern-California-standards weather. Would love to hear reactions from people who were actually there.
Science/Religion Debate Live-Streaming Today Read More »
Sorry for the light blogging of late. Actual work intervenes, and it might remain that way for a while. But I’ll try to pop in whenever I can.
Stephen Hawking is celebrating his 70th birthday today. That in itself is an amazing fact, just as it was amazing when he celebrated his 40th, and 50th, and 60th birthdays, as well as every other day he’s lived and thrived with a debilitating neuron disease. The extra fact that he continues to make contributions to science pushes beyond amazing to practically unbelievable.
Everyone likes to tell Hawking stories, and this blog is no exception. So here is mine, meagre as it is. I’ve gotten more than enough mileage out of this one in person, I might as well put it on the blog so I won’t be tempted to tell it any more.
At the end of 1992 I was a finishing grad student, applying for postdocs. One of the places I applied was Cambridge, to Hawking’s group at DAMTP. There is a slight potential barrier for American students to travel to the UK for postdocs, so they like to get out ahead of things and offer jobs early. Unfortunately I was out of my office the day Hawking called to offer me a position. Fortunately, my future-Nobel-Laureate officemate was there, and he took the call. He explained that Stephen Hawking had called to offer me a job — I was thrilled about the offer, but understood “Hawking called” as metaphorical. But no, Brian later convinced me that it actually was Hawking on the other end of the line, which he described as a somewhat surreal experience. Of course after the initial introduction the phone gets handed over to someone else, but still. …
Happy Birthday, Stephen Hawking Read More »
To celebrate my birthday today, I’m heading back into Second Life to do a chat with Alan Boyle of MSNBC.com fame. Alan has previewed some of the topics we’ll be discussing in a post at Cosmic Log. It’s possible the Nobel Prize will be mentioned. (The physics one. Don’t expect any insight from me on quasicrystals, except that they’re awesome.)
We’ll be chatting at 9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific, at the Stella Nova Theater. If you’re not already on Second Life, it’s super easy (and free) to join. (Here’s some very useful information for beginners.) And you get to design an avatar that looks like you would want to look, rather than your inevitably-disappointing real self.
The chat is part of the Virtually Speaking series hosted by FireDogLake, in this case co-produced with the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics. Alan does a regular series of interviews on science, so you may get hooked. Our chat will be a multi-media extravaganza, so you can choose to listen in various ways:
Yes I know, very complicated. If simplicity is more your bag, here’s a guest video on dark energy that I did for the wonderful Minute Physics series.
Fire Up Your Virtual Realities Read More »
I’ve decided I need to become a programmer again. As an undergrad, and to a lesser extent as a grad student, I wrote code all the time. But since I started doing research, it’s been pencil-and-paper almost all the way through, with occasional dips into Mathematica or plotting programs.
That must end, so I’ve decided to learn Python. I just need something simple for number-crunching and graphics, and everyone in the know seems to have nice things to say about the language. (Secretly I would like to play around with genetic algorithms and cellular automata, but I’m not going to admit that.) I tried to get Fortran, my previous language of choice, up and running on my Mac … it didn’t go well.
So… any tips? Pointers to well-written resources and tutorials (online or in print) would be especially helpful. Keep in mind that the target audience is an aging theoretical physicist who hasn’t programmed in 20 years, and for that matter has been pretty much command-prompt free (working on my Mac) for the last five.
The things I admit in public on this blog, sheesh.
Hello out there in blog-land. I’ve been traveling (and working!) too much to actually blog, most recently at the terrific SciFoo Camp held at Google. This is an informal “unconference,” where on the first night participants scramble to a big whiteboard to suggest events for the next day and a half. I helped organize a session on “Time” that turned out to be popular, featuring short talks by Geoffrey West, Max Tegmark, David Eagleman, Mark Changizi, and Martin Rees. Other interesting sessions I went to talked about sleep, narratives, the brain, the Turing Test, and why the difficulty of putting chiral fermions on a lattice is evidence against the idea that we live in a computer simulation. (That last one was from David Tong.)
But just between you and me, while staring at the intimidating whiteboard full of interesting possibilities for what to do next, I was struck by a depressing insight: I am tired of data.
This isn’t to say that I am tired of experiments. We can’t learn anything about the world without looking at it, and my favorite areas of physics are bubbling along with provocative new results (or at least hints thereof). When data is taken by an experiment in the cause of deciding some scientific question, that’s fine.
It’s the fetishization of data for its own sake that I find fatiguing. It’s hardly surprising that, surrounded by sci-tech folks at the Googleplex, one would be overwhelmed by talk of data collection, data visualization, data analysis, and so on. And good for them! We are being swamped by data in unprecedented forms and quantities, and it’s a crucially important task to sort it all out and understand how we can use it.
I’m just personally kind of exhausted by it all. (And it’s my blog, so if I want to bust out the occasional irrational rant, who will stop me?) Data — like theory! — is a tool we use in the quest for a higher goal — understanding. If people want to show me that they understand some unanticipated new phenomenon on the basis of some data that they collected and analyzed, I am as enthusiastic as ever. But my standards are rising for simply being impressed by new ways of gathering or visualizing data for its own sake.
At least, for the moment. Next time I see a really pretty picture, I’ll undoubtedly forget I said any of this.
Tonight’s the premiere of Curiosity on the Discovery Channel, featuring Stephen Hawking talking about cosmology and God, followed by the “Curiosity Conversation” panel that I’m on along with David Gregory, Paul Davies, and John Haught. Hawking’s hour-long show is scheduled for 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific, and will then repeat 3 hours later (11E/8P). Our half-hour panel discussion follows immediately afterward — you do the arithmetic.
There’s a lot to say about these shows, and in particular there’s a huge amount that we didn’t have time to say during the panel. So as I sit in front of the TV, I’ll be live-blogging along by adding updates to this post. This will be the early show, so the fun will happen 8pm-9:30pm Eastern. Hey, Nathan Fillion live-tweets during Castle, so why not me? There is also a chat going on at the Discovery site.
The main attraction of Hawking’s program is not that he has disproven the existence of God. Certainly I don’t think he’s going to be changing the minds of many religious believers. His argument is essentially that the universe is self-contained, and doesn’t really have “room” for God (nor any need to invoke a creator). It’s very easy to wriggle free of that conclusion, if you are inclined not to accept it.
But “changing people’s minds” isn’t the only reason to talk about something, even about controversial issues. Religion, like sex and death, is one of those topics where it’s very difficult to simply have a dispassionate discussion without making people uncomfortable. It can happen within a group of similarly-minded people, of course, but once a wider range of views gets involved, it’s hard to maintain comity. (Comedy, on the other hand, is pretty easy.) I don’t mean everyone has to agree — just the opposite. We should be able to talk about things we completely disagree on, while still maintaining level heads.
That’s why I think this episode of Curiosity is potentially important. It’s a forthright statement of a view that doesn’t often get aired in American media. Even if nobody’s mind is changed, simply talking rationally about this issues would be a step forward.
Pre-show update: I should note ahead of time that I was not wearing a tie. Haught, Davies, and Gregory were all wearing ties. But Hawking wasn’t. Maybe atheists don’t wear ties? (Although I’m pretty sure Jesus never wore a tie, either.)
Start: We begin with a disclaimer! These are Stephen Hawking’s opinions, not those of Discovery. 🙂
4 minutes: I hope the analogy here is clear. “People who believe God made the universe are kind of like the Vikings shouting at the Sun to stop a solar eclipse.”
8 minutes: Snark aside, the message here is a fundamental one. Nature obeys laws! Something that’s certainly not a priori obvious or necessary, but a really profound truth.
14 minutes: I wasn’t able to find an independent confirmation of this story about Pope John XXI condemning the idea of “laws of nature.” (It’s true that he did die when the roof collapsed.) Presumably this refers to the Condemnations of 1277.
20 minutes: The universe is a big, messy, complicated, and occasionally quite intricate place. On the face of it, the idea that it’s all the working-out of some impersonal patterns of matter and energy, rather than being constructed by some kind of conscious intelligence, is pretty remarkable. (But true nonetheless.)
27 minutes: Hey, a tiny ad for Discovery Retreats!
28 minutes: Hawking says Einstein might be the greatest scientist ever. He has long favored Einstein over Newton, I’m not sure why. Hawking appeared on an episode of Star Trek: TNG, where he was a hologram playing poker with Einstein, Newton, and Data. He actually wrote the script, and Newton doesn’t come off well.
36 minutes: Ah, negative energy. Depends on what you mean by “energy,” but this isn’t the venue to get overly technical, obviously. Roughly, matter has positive energy and gravity has negative energy. That’s hopefully enough to help people swallow the crucial point: you can make a universe for nothing. There isn’t some fixed resource, out of which we can make a universe or two, before we hit Peak Universe. There can be an infinite number of universes.
41 minutes: People on Twitter are asking why Hawking doesn’t have a British accent. He easily could, of course; voice-synthesis technology has come quite a way since he first got the system. But he’s said that he now identifies with that voice he got years ago, and doesn’t want to change it; it’s identified with him.
47 minutes: Okay, here’s the payoff. He’s saying that generally we’re used to effects being caused by pre-existing events. (The first step toward a cosmological argument for God’s existence.) You might think that a chain of causation takes you back to the Big Bang, which then requires God as a cause. But no! The Big Bang can just … be.
50 minutes: The point of the black hole discussion is to get to the idea of a singularity, a conjectural point of infinite curvature and density. The Big Bang, in classical general relativity, is also a singular moment. But classical GR isn’t right. We need quantum gravity. Hawking believes that quantum gravity smooths the singularity and explains how there was no pre-existing time. (At least in the TV show, unlike A Brief History, he doesn’t start talking about “imaginary time.”)
56 minutes: Ultimately Hawking’s argument against God is pretty simplistic. He assumes that if God created the Big Bang, God must have existed before the Big Bang, but there was no “before the Big Bang,” QED. It’s easy enough to simply assert that God doesn’t exist “within time” (if that means anything). It would have been better (IMHO) to emphasize that modern cosmology has many good ideas about how the universe could have come to be, so there’s no need to rely on a divine creator.
58 minutes: Final thought from SWH: no life after death! Enjoy it while you’re around, folks. An important message.
Panel discussion starts: Forgot to mention that Paul Davies has shaved off his moustache. Disconcerting.
4 minutes: Also disconcerting: watching myself on TV. Hate it. But I persevere for the greater good.
5 minutes: Here’s Michio Kaku, not saying very much.
7 minutes: Jennifer Wiseman and I were actually grad students together! She’s good people, even if we disagree about the whole God thing.
9 minutes: I come out in favor of basing purpose and meaning on reality. But I’m pretty sure a longer remark was cut off there. Arrrrgh! Nothing nefarious, we intentionally recorded a bit more than they had time to show. But enormously frustrating that there was so little time.
13 minutes: Not sure why we kept talking about the multiverse. Hawking didn’t bring it up, did he?
17 minutes: I thought a lot of what Haught said was not even really trying to argue in favor of God’s existence, but simply expressing a desire that he exist. “God is the grounding of hope” isn’t evidence for God’s existence.
22 minutes: Haven’t said anything completely silly yet, so that’s good. But so little time…
27 minutes: Always time for more Michio!
30 minutes: Arrrrgh again, this time for real: in the live conversation, I had the last word and it was a pretty good one. In the televised program, not so much. Had to end wishy-washy.
Thanks for tuning in. Wouldn’t it have been wonderful to have the time for a real conversation? But big ups to Discovery for hosting the panel at all — it’s a rare event on TV.
Live-Blogging Curiosity, Hawking, and God Read More »
