Science and the Media

The Nobel Prize Is Really Annoying

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nobelOne of the chapters in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman is titled “Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake.” The first being dynamite, of course, and the second being the Nobel Prize. When I first read it I was a little exasperated by Feynman’s kvetchy tone — sure, there must be a lot of nonsense associated with being named a Nobel Laureate, but it’s nevertheless a great honor, and more importantly the Prizes do a great service for science by highlighting truly good work.

These days, as I grow in wisdom and kvetchiness myself, I’m coming around to Feynman’s point of view. I still believe that on balance the Prizes are a very good thing, and generally they honor some of the very best work in physics. (Some of my best friends are winners!) But having written a book about the Higgs boson discovery, which is on everybody’s lips as a natural candidate (though not the only one!), all of the most annoying aspects of the process are immediately apparent.

The most annoying of all the annoying aspects is, of course, the rule in physics (and the other non-peace prizes, I think) that the prize can go to at most three people. This is utterly artificial, and completely at odds with the way science is actually done these days. In my book I spread credit for the Higgs mechanism among no fewer than seven people: Philip Anderson, Francois Englert, Robert Brout (who is now deceased), Peter Higgs, Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen, and Tom Kibble. In a sensible world they would share the credit, but in our world we have endless pointless debates (the betting money right now seems to be pointing toward Englert and Higgs, but who knows). As far as I can tell, the “no more than three winners” rule isn’t actually written down in Nobel’s will, it’s more of a tradition that has grown up over the years. It’s kind of like the government shutdown: we made up some rules, and are now suffering because of them.

The folks who should really be annoyed are, of course, the experimentalists. There’s a real chance that no Nobel will ever be given out for the Higgs discovery, since it was carried out by very large collaborations. If that turns out to be the case, I think it will be the best possible evidence that the system is broken. I definitely appreciate that you don’t want to water down the honor associated with the prizes by handing them out to too many people (the ranks of “Nobel Laureates” would in some sense swell by the thousands if the prize were given to the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, as they should be), but it’s more important to get things right than to stick to some bureaucratic rule.

The worst thing about the prizes is that people become obsessed with them — both the scientists who want to win, and the media who write about the winners. What really matters, or should matter, is finding something new and fundamental about how nature works, either through a theoretical idea or an experimental discovery. Prizes are just the recognition thereof, not the actual point of the exercise.

Of course, none of the theorists who proposed the Higgs mechanism nor the experimentalists who found the boson actually had “win the Nobel Prize” as a primary motivation. They wanted to do good science. But once the good science is done, it’s nice to be recognized for it. And if any subset of the above-mentioned folks are awarded the prize this year or next, it will be absolutely well-deserved — it’s epochal, history-making stuff we’re talking about here. The griping from the non-winners will be immediate and perfectly understandable, but we should endeavor to honor what was actually accomplished, not just who gets the gold medals.

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There Is No Classical World

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Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter is a fun place. It’s led by people like John Preskill, Jeff Kimble, and Alexei Kitaev — some of the world’s great scientists — so you know the physics is going to be top-notch. But it’s the youngsters, such as postdoc Spiros Michalakis, who are bringing the fun. Suff like the IQIM blog (where you should read John’s recent post on the Maldadcena/Susskind wormhole proposal) and a successful Kickstarter campaign for science-inspired fashion.

The fun is now being ratcheted up even higher, as IQIM is teaming with Jorge Cham of PhD Comics fame to make a series of animated web videos about quantum mechanics. I ask you, who doesn’t love some good videos about quantum mechanics??

Sensibly, they’ve kicked off by spotlighting an interesting experimental result, rather than diving right into the realms of esoteric theoretical speculation. Of course, this is quantum mechanics we’re talking about, so even the experiments get pretty wild in their implications. The work is by Amir Safavi-Naeini and Oskar Painter, who take a small mirror and put it into a quantum state where its center of mass is as cold as it is possible to be. Classically, of course, the mirror can be perfectly still; quantum-mechanically, there is a ground state wave function that still shows “fluctuations” (i.e. the fact that observations won’t always show zero motion).

Doing The Impossible

Now, the mirror is tiny — microscopic, it’s fair to say — but it’s not that tiny. It’s a piece of metal, non just an atom or two. (I didn’t catch what the actual size was.) So the implication here is that things don’t miraculously “become classical” when they are made of many atoms rather than just a few. We don’t notice the quantum-ness of the universe in our everyday lives, but that’s because the systems we encounter are noisy and constantly jostled by their environments, leading to rapid decoherence; not because there is a magical transition to classicalness once you get above a certain number of atoms, or a truly distinct “classical realm.”

Of course, no right-minded person really believes that there is a hard and fast transition to a classical realm once objects get big; rather, there is a sense in which the classical approximation becomes more and more accurate, but it’s always just an approximation. The experimental results here are simply affirming the truth of quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, you can still meet people (the wrong-minded ones) who are willing to believe that electrons and photons are governed by quantum mechanics, but not that they are governed by quantum mechanics. Have them watch this video, and hope that the implications sink in.

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New Video Project

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Here’s an experimental project I’m involved in: a prospective web-based video series in which I talk to groups of people about exciting science topics. All very new and untested, but did one recording session, and would love to get feedback.

The topic we tackled was neuroscience, and in particular the idea of brain-machine interfaces. I had three guests, all of whom (unlike me) know something about the field. There was Philip Low, a computational neuroscientist and Founder/CEO of Neurovigil; Crystal Dilworth, a molecular neuroscientist and PhD student at Caltech; and Ricardo Gil da Costa, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Salk Institute. My job was to ask non-expert questions, which shouldn’t have been that hard since I am a complete non-expert.

This is the “main” part of the show, in which we talk about how brains can interface with machines.

Preposterous Universe Episode 1: Thought-Reading in 5 Years?

Then we have a couple of “supplements.” Here we are talking about brain spying:

Supplement: Brain Spying

… and here we’re trying to decide what it means to be a cognitive neuroscientist. (Are there neuroscientists who don’t work on cognition? Of course there are, duh.)

Supplement: What is a cognitive neuroscientist?

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Morgan, Jon, and the Mystifying Balloons

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Morgan Freeman appears on the Daily Show to chat up his new movie, but Jon Stewart just wants to ask questions about physics and physicists. They are both fans! (Hat tip Megan Parlen.)

Freeman doesn’t get all the details right, but his enthusiasm is genuine and infectious, and it’s clear that he’s picked some stuff up from hanging around with scientists (and making Through the Wormhole, of course). The poor man has clearly fallen prey to the dreaded balloon analogy for the expansion of the universe. More harm than good, that little bit of metaphorical imagery has done. It makes you think the universe is expanding into something, which it’s not (as far as we know). Much better to think about the real universe, with galaxies all around you and moving away.

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Nautilus

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nautilusAs the media/communication/intellectual discourse landscape changes rapidly beneath our feet in response to the internet revolution, it’s great to see innovative new projects come to life that seek to enrich and elevate our conversation. Nautilus is one such effort. It’s a magazine — I have held the printed copy in my hand — but also a website and a multimedia effort. The focus is on Big Ideas within science and philosophy. News, essays, blogs, videos, graphics. Should be fun. I’m on the Board of Advisors, but to be honest I haven’t given that much advice as yet.

Every month there will be an issue focused loosely on a single theme. This month is human uniqueness (pro and con). Check out Amos Zeeberg’s nice graphical illustration of how our changing view of the universe has granted we human beings an ever-smaller slice of the cosmological pie.

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CP Violation and the Information/Anti-Information Asymmetry

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Do a physics experiment. Now take that experiment, change all the particles to antiparticles, and reflect the entire apparatus around some fixed plane. If you get an equivalent result, we say that the experiment preserves charge/parity symmetry, or CP for short. Most mid-century physicists originally assumed that CP would be a good symmetry of nature — switching matter with antimatter also requires switching left with right, but why should left-handed particles behave any differently than right-handed antiparticles? But in the 1960’s Cronin and Fitch showed that it was violated by the decays of neutral kaons, for which they picked up a Nobel Prize in 1980.

Since then, studying CP violation has been a fruitful pursuit for particle physicists. The decay of various quarks into each other generically violates CP (as shown by Kobayashi and Maskawa, Nobel 2008), so searching for CP violation gives us a lot of leverage when we try to map out the dynamics of particles in the Standard Model. Which is why it was big news today when CERN announced that the LHCb experiment has observed CP violation in a brand-new system, decays of the Bs meson. (Here’s the paper.) It’s only the fourth known particle to have CP-violating decays, joining the kaon, the D meson, and the regular B meson. (The subscript s means there is a strange quark involved.) A brand-new way to study a mysterious subatomic process, learn more about the Standard Model, and launch an ambitious search for new physics! Should be enough to get anyone excited.

But it’s not, of course — there are people out there who stubbornly resist the charms of precision electroweak particle physics. So it’s traditional to make an appeal to something nominally more sexy: the matter/antimatter asymmetry of the universe.

I’ve complained about this before, to little avail. The logic is as irresistible as it is faulty: the process of baryogenesis, by which matter came to dominate over antimatter, requires that there be CP violation in the early universe; we are studying CP violation here in the late universe; obviously, what we’re doing helps us understand the matter/antimatter asymmetry. But that’s only true if the kind of CP violation we are studying is actually somehow related to baryogenesis. Which, most experts believe, it is not.

Here’s a piece in Symmetry Breaking which makes the case against itself quite clearly. It starts with:

When the universe was less than a minute old, a tiny difference in the behavior of matter and antimatter led to the matter-dominated existence we experience today. Today, particle physicists on CERN’s LHCb collaboration announced that, for the first time, they have observed particles called strange beauty mesons, or B0s, contributing to this imbalance.

That seems pretty unambiguous: they are saying that physicists have observed a process that contributed to the matter/antimatter asymmetry. It’s only at the end of the article that they admit you’ve been duped:

However, the Standard Model predicts only a tiny portion of the amount of CP violation needed to explain the huge deficit of antimatter in the universe. While these results help scientists understand the mechanics of CP violation, the case of the missing antimatter remains unsolved. “We expected a certain amount of CP violation to be found in the strange beauty system,” says Pierluigi Campana, the LHCb spokesperson. “But finding the missing fraction of CP violation in the early universe will be new physics, which the Standard Model can’t predict.”

That’s the point: baryogenesis requires CP violation, and the Standard Model has CP violation, but almost everyone agrees that the Standard Model by itself can’t possibly explain baryogenesis. But it can explain the new results from LHCb. Chances are extremely high that the CP violation observed at CERN has nothing at all to do with the asymmetry of matter and antimatter. But who wants an inconvenient fact to get in the way of a good story?

What’s going on here is exactly the same bait-and-switch syndrome that’s responsible for the “God Particle” name, or selling a cosmology book by pretending it’s about why there is something rather than nothing, or mixing up time-reversal violation with the arrow of time. I got in trouble for complaining about that last one, too, with folks who thought I was denigrating a good piece of experimental science. But it’s quite the opposite: I’m saying that the truth is interesting enough, there’s no need to try to sell it via dubious connections with something that supposedly is more marketable!

The Higgs boson, modern cosmology, time-reversal invariance, CP violation — these are really interesting topics. It’s our duty to sell them and explain them at the same time; not do the former at the cost of the latter. It doesn’t do any good if people think that what we do is interesting, but only because we’ve misled them about what that actually is. The good folks at LHCb have every reason to be extremely proud that they’ve discovered a new system that violates CP, and launched a new way to study Standard Model physics and hopefully look for phenomena that stretch beyond that. They don’t need to hitch their wagon to the baryogenesis star.

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Volumes of Science

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This weekend featured the latest edition of the LA Times Festival of Books, the largest book festival in the U.S., and a great celebration of the written word. The Saturday and Sunday festivities feature a bounty of author events, especially conversations between different writers, and it’s always a treat to see huge numbers of people (with lots of kids included) come out to hear about words and ideas. Good to be reminded that there really is a community of readers out there.

booksbooksbooks The festival kicked off on Friday night with the annual Book Prizes, which cover categories from history to mystery. For the last couple of years, Jennifer has been on the jury for the Science and Technology prize, which is a lot of work but a good way to become familiar with the science books written during the year. I bet you wouldn’t think it would be possible to become dismayed when more free books were mailed to your door, did you? But when over a hundred come your way over the course of a couple of months, it can get overwhelming pretty fast.

The bad news about being married to a judge is that your own book doesn’t have a chance to get considered. But that meant I was an easy choice to be the presenter of this year’s prize, which was a lot of fun. Got to meet both Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Lethem, so that was a treat. And I got to announce the finalists and winner, which were some great popular science books. Here’s what I said about each of the finalists:

  • QUIET: THE POWER OF INTROVERTS IN A WORLD THAT CAN’T STOP TALKING, by Susan Cain, conveys one of those ideas that is simple and obvious, but only after someone else has figured it out: it’s okay to be an introvert. Cain explains how a dynamic public speaker might have a strong need to recharge in private after a talk, and how a quiet woman like Rosa Parks can change the world.
  • TURING’S CATHEDRAL: THE ORIGINS OF THE DIGITAL UNIVERSE, by George Dyson, tells a story overflowing with brilliant scientists and world-changing ideas. In the 1930’s Alan Turing explicated the idea behind a universal digital computer; in the 1940’s, John von Neumann led a team that made it a reality. Things, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, were never going to be the same.
  • THE STORYTELLING ANIMAL: HOW STORIES MAKE US HUMAN, by Jonathan Gottschall, links the familiar act of storytelling to the mysteries of biology, psychology, neuroscience, and virtual reality. Our penchant for telling stories is part of our evolved tendency to perceive patterns in the world. Stories aren’t just a way to pass the time, they are a tool for making sense of everything around us.
  • THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE: WHY SO MANY PREDICTIONS FAIL — BUT SOME DON’T, by Nate Silver — who in the 2012 Presidential elections garnered a lot of attention for making predictions that didn’t fail. No magic or deals with the Devil were involved; just a lot of careful and clear-eyed examination of data. The modern world is awash with data, and separating the signal from the noise has never been more important.
  • BREASTS: A NATURAL AND UNNATURAL HISTORY, by Florence Williams, tackles a subject whose cultural or personal interest tends to obscure questions of science and health. Mammals use breasts to feed their young, but only humans have breasts continuously from puberty onwards — and nobody is quite sure why. Science and history mix in a tale of bodies, feminism, and modern life.

And the winner was … Florence Williams, for Breasts. A subject that our culture kind of obsesses about, obviously, but not always in a level-headed and healthy way. A very worthy winner, amidst an intimidating collection of great competitors.

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What “The God Particle” Hath Wrought

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You’ve doubtless heard the joke: We can’t call the Higgs boson the “God Particle” any more, because now we have tangible evidence that it exists.

But the label “God Particle,” attached to the poor unsuspecting Higgs boson by Leon Lederman and Dick Teresi, continues to wreak havoc on physicists’ attempts to clearly explain what is going on. Last week’s announcements from CERN that the new particle discovered last July is looking more and more like the Higgs predicted by the Standard Model generated stories like this one, from CBS news:

The Higgs boson is often called “the God particle” because it’s said to be what caused the “Big Bang” that created our universe many years ago. The nickname caught on so quickly (even though scientists and clergy alike do not care for it) partly because it’s a great explanation of what it’s supposed to do — the Higgs boson is what joins everything and gives it matter.

That might be the worst paragraph I’ve ever read about the Higgs boson, and I’ve read quite a few. (H/t Faye Flam.) Originally I thought the journalist was just making things up, but it turns out that it’s Michio Kaku’s fault. (H/t Matt Strassler on Facebook.) There is a video linked to the article, in which Kaku says that the Higgs helped cause the Big Bang, and that’s why it’s called the God Particle. Another example where it would have been tempting to rag on sloppy popular journalism, where actually it’s a supposed scientist who is largely to blame. (Although the above paragraph is also wrong about things it should be easy to get right.)

For the record, the Higgs had nothing whatsoever to do with causing the Big Bang. (Kaku tries to link it to inflation, but they’re not related.) It also doesn’t “join everything,” whatever that means. It does give mass to elementary particles like electrons and quarks, which isn’t the same as giving “matter” (since that kind of doesn’t make any sense), and besides which it doesn’t give mass to protons and neutrons and therefore most of the mass in ordinary objects.

The “God Particle” label, despite being very catchy and therefore leading to more publicity than most elementary particles manage to muster, has done more harm than good for the public understanding of science. Non-experts, hearing that physicists have named something after God, might actually think they were being serious. Imagine that.

[Update: Matt Strassler adds his take.]

It’s not going away any time soon. Leon Lederman and Chris Hill have a sequel to the original book coming out, Beyond the God Particle, due later this year. I’m sure the book will be great at explaining the physics, and I’m equally sure the title will generate a lot more confusion. Get your disclaimers ready!

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Bookanalia

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The annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is always a great event, I highly recommend it to anyone in the area. This year’s edition is on April 20-21. I have a special honor, which really should be reserved for someone older and more distinguished but there you have it: I’ll be presenting the prize for science/technology book of the year. The real honor would be to win the prize, but I’ll take what I can get.

There was no prospect of winning the prize, even though I did write a book, for the sensible reason that my lovely wife was serving on the panel of judges. That’s the bad news; the good news is that, as the spouse of a judge, you benefit from the constant stream of new books arriving on your doorstep. At least you benefit for a little while. Once the number of new science books from the year hits the triple digits, your response is closer to despair. There are a lot of good books out there. Great if you’re a reader, sobering if you’re an author. It’s kind of shocking that anyone found my humble little book at all.

books

One book I can’t help but mentioning, which I don’t think is eligible for the prize since it came out in 2013 rather than 2012 — The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics, by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky.

minimum Amidst the veritable deluge of science books, Susskind and Hrabovsky have done something simple but radical: they explain introductory physics for real, with all the equations, in a book that is not actually a textbook. This volume (everyone hopes there will be more) covers the principles of classical mechanics, with extraordinary concision but wonderful clarity. The fact that they are trying to explain major concepts rather than cover every detail means they can get much further than a textbook would; a hundred pages in you’re learning about the Principle of Least Action, and not long after that it’s on to Poisson Brackets. If you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and follow the authors along, this is a book from which you can learn a great deal.

This book, needless to say, is not for everybody. But no book is for everybody; the question should be whether there are enough people in the appropriate niche that a book like this might be commercially viable. The answer is a resounding yes, apparently. Released just a few days ago, The Theoretical Minimum zoomed to #4 on the Amazon.com bestseller rankings, which is truly amazing. (The highest I ever got was around #100, but I’m not jealous!)

I wonder if now we’ll see a slew of copycat books that throw conventional wisdom to the wind and try to boost sales by having equations on every page. Perhaps not, but readers would certainly benefit. While I am obviously a firm believer in explaining science to as wide an audience as possible, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there is more than one audience out there. Many people might be interested in brushing up on some subject they last took seriously long ago in high school or college, or they might want to fulfill a deferred dream of studying something they regret not taking. The lesson shouldn’t be “equations are okay after all”; it’s “there’s an audience out there for challenging material if it’s presented in an engaging way.”

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Standing in Faraday’s Shoes

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A highlight of my recently-completed visit to England was the honor of giving a public lecture at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London. It’s an honor to give public talks anywhere, of course — I always enjoy seeing people who are not professional scientists nevertheless decide that the best way they can spend a Tuesday evening is to hear a physicist lecture about the Higgs boson and the Large Hadron Collider. But the RI is special. Its leadership in bringing science to a wide audience dates back to 1825, when Michael Faraday inaugurated the famous Christmas Lectures. The lecture hall where I was speaking is the same one where Faraday spoke, happily with more comfortable seats and better audio-visual equipment. The connection was especially appropriate, as the hidden message (not so hidden by the end, really) of my talk was that we need to think about the world in terms of fields rather than particles, and it was Faraday who introduced the concept of an electric field.

Sadly, almost as soon as I left the RI announced that it is in serious financial difficulty. (I don’t think it was my fault — we had a nearly-full house for the lecture.) Their historic building in the tony Mayfair district of London, where the popularity of their events in the nineteenth century led Albemarle Street to become the first one-way street in the city, is now up for sale. Scientists and science lovers are in an uproar, and hope to save the RI building from being sold to an unsympathetic landlord, but it’s unclear whether that’s a feasible scenario. While it’s true that there are many more outlets for good science communication now than in Faraday’s time (I’m sure he would have been an enthusiastic blogger, but the technology wasn’t quite ready yet), it would certainly be a shame to lose or substantially alter such an historic and effective institution.

For the curious, here is the talk I actually gave, complete with location-specific jokes.

The audience Q&A, a lively discussion moderated by Alok Jha, was recorded separately.

And for the impatient, here is a much more brief (7 minutes) interview that I did just ahead of time.

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