Tag Archives: Jon Butterworth

Prime Minister Trudeau, the quantum physicist

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s apparently extemporaneous response to a joking (non)question about quantum computing by a journalist during an April 15, 2016 press conference at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada has created a buzz online, made international news, and caused Canadians to sit taller.

For anyone who missed the moment, here’s a video clip from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC),

Aaron Hutchins in an April 15, 2016 article for Maclean’s magazine digs deeper to find out more about Trudeau and quantum physics (Note: A link has been removed),

Raymond Laflamme knows the drill when politicians visit the Perimeter Institute. A photo op here, a few handshakes there and a tour with “really basic, basic, basic facts” about the field of quantum mechanics.

But when the self-described “geek” Justin Trudeau showed up for a funding announcement on Friday [April 15, 2016], the co-founder and director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo wasn’t met with simple nods of the Prime Minister pretending to understand. Trudeau immediately started talking about things being waves and particles at the same time, like cats being dead and alive at the same time. It wasn’t just nonsense—Trudeau was referencing the famous thought experiment of the late legendary physicist Erwin Schrödinger.

“I don’t know where he learned all that stuff, but we were all surprised,” Laflamme says. Soon afterwards, as Trudeau met with one student talking about superconductivity, the Prime Minister asked her, “Why don’t we have high-temperature superconducting systems?” something Laflamme describes as the institute’s “Holy Grail” quest.

“I was flabbergasted,” Laflamme says. “I don’t know how he does in other subjects, but in quantum physics, he knows the basic pieces and the important questions.”

Strangely, Laflamme was not nearly as excited (tongue in cheek) when I demonstrated my understanding of quantum physics during our interview (see my May 11, 2015 posting; scroll down about 40% of the way to the Ramond Laflamme subhead).

As Jon Butterworth comments in his April 16, 2016 posting on the Guardian science blog, the response says something about our expectations regarding politicians,

This seems to have enhanced Trudeau’s reputation no end, and quite right too. But it is worth thinking a bit about why.

The explanation he gives is clear, brief, and understandable to a non-specialist. It is the kind of thing any sufficiently engaged politician could pick up from a decent briefing, given expert help. …

Butterworth also goes on to mention journalists’ expectations,

The reporter asked the question in a joking fashion, not unkindly as far as I can tell, but not expecting an answer either. If this had been an announcement about almost any other government investment, wouldn’t the reporter have expected a brief explanation of the basic ideas behind it? …

As for the announcement being made by Trudeau, there is this April 15, 2016 Perimeter Institute press release (Note: Links have been removed),

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the work being done at Perimeter and in Canada’s “Quantum Valley” [emphasis mine] is vital to the future of the country and the world.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau became both teacher and student when he visited Perimeter Institute today to officially announce the federal government’s commitment to support fundamental scientific research at Perimeter.

Joined by Minister of Science Kirsty Duncan and Small Business and Tourism Minister Bardish Chagger, the self-described “geek prime minister” listened intensely as he received brief overviews of Perimeter research in areas spanning from quantum science to condensed matter physics and cosmology.

“You don’t have to be a geek like me to appreciate how important this work is,” he then told a packed audience of scientists, students, and community leaders in Perimeter’s atrium.

The Prime Minister was also welcomed by 200 teenagers attending the Institute’s annual Inspiring Future Women in Science conference, and via video greetings from cosmologist Stephen Hawking [he was Laflamme’s PhD supervisor], who is a Perimeter Distinguished Visiting Research Chair. The Prime Minister said he was “incredibly overwhelmed” by Hawking’s message.

“Canada is a wonderful, huge country, full of people with big hearts and forward-looking minds,” Hawking said in his message. “It’s an ideal place for an institute dedicated to the frontiers of physics. In supporting Perimeter, Canada sets an example for the world.”

The visit reiterated the Government of Canada’s pledge of $50 million over five years announced in last month’s [March 2016] budget [emphasis mine] to support Perimeter research, training, and outreach.

It was the Prime Minister’s second trip to the Region of Waterloo this year. In January [2016], he toured the region’s tech sector and universities, and praised the area’s innovation ecosystem.

This time, the focus was on the first link of the innovation chain: fundamental science that could unlock important discoveries, advance human understanding, and underpin the groundbreaking technologies of tomorrow.

As for the “quantum valley’ in Ontario, I think there might be some competition here in British Columbia with D-Wave Systems (first commercially available quantum computing, of a sort; my Dec. 16, 2015 post is the most recent one featuring the company) and the University of British Columbia’s Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute.

Getting back to Trudeau, it’s exciting to have someone who seems so interested in at least some aspects of science that he can talk about it with a degree of understanding. I knew he had an interest in literature but there is also this (from his Wikipedia entry; Note: Links have been removed),

Trudeau has a bachelor of arts degree in literature from McGill University and a bachelor of education degree from the University of British Columbia…. After graduation, he stayed in Vancouver and he found substitute work at several local schools and permanent work as a French and math teacher at the private West Point Grey Academy … . From 2002 to 2004, he studied engineering at the École Polytechnique de Montréal, a part of the Université de Montréal.[67] He also started a master’s degree in environmental geography at McGill University, before suspending his program to seek public office.[68] [emphases mine]

Trudeau is not the only political leader to have a strong interest in science. In our neighbour to the south, there’s President Barack Obama who has done much to promote science since he was elected in 2008. David Bruggeman in an April 15, 2016  post (Obama hosts DNews segments for Science Channel week of April 11-15, 2016) and an April 17, 2016 post (Obama hosts White House Science Fair) describes two of Obama’s most recent efforts.

ETA April 19, 2016: I’ve found confirmation that this Q&A was somewhat staged as I hinted in the opening with “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s apparently extemporaneous response … .” Will Oremus’s April 19, 2016 article for Slate.com breaks the whole news cycle down and points out (Note: A link has been removed),

Over the weekend, even as latecomers continued to dine on the story’s rapidly decaying scraps, a somewhat different picture began to emerge. A Canadian blogger pointed out that Trudeau himself had suggested to reporters at the event that they lob him a question about quantum computing so that he could knock it out of the park with the newfound knowledge he had gleaned on his tour.

The Canadian blogger who tracked this down is J. J. McCullough (Jim McCullough) and you can read his Oct. 16, 2016 posting on the affair here. McCullough has a rather harsh view of the media response to Trudeau’s lecture. Oremus is a bit more measured,

… Monday brought the countertake parade—smaller and less pompous, if no less righteous—led by Gawker with the headline, “Justin Trudeau’s Quantum Computing Explanation Was Likely Staged for Publicity.”

But few of us in the media today are immune to the forces that incentivize timeliness and catchiness over subtlety, and even Gawker’s valuable corrective ended up meriting a corrective of its own. Author J.K. Trotter soon updated his post with comments from Trudeau’s press secretary, who maintained (rather convincingly, I think) that nothing in the episode was “staged”—at least, not in the sinister way that the word implies. Rather, Trudeau had joked that he was looking forward to someone asking him about quantum computing; a reporter at the press conference jokingly complied, without really expecting a response (he quickly moved on to his real question before Trudeau could answer); Trudeau responded anyway, because he really did want to show off his knowledge.

Trotter deserves credit, regardless, for following up and getting a fuller picture of what transpired. He did what those who initially jumped on the story did not, which was to contact the principals for context and comment.

But my point here is not to criticize any particular writer or publication. The too-tidy Trudeau narrative was not the deliberate work of any bad actor or fabricator. Rather, it was the inevitable product of today’s inexorable social-media machine, in which shareable content fuels the traffic-referral engines that pay online media’s bills.

I suggest reading both McCullough’s and Oremus’s posts in their entirety should you find debates about the role of media compelling.

James Clerk Maxwell and his science mashup unified theories of magnetism, electricity, and optics

It’s the 150th anniversary for a series of equations electric charges and electric and magnetic fields that are still being explored. Jon Butterworth in a Nov. 22, 2015 posting on the Guardian science blog network explains (Note: A link has been removed),

The chances are that you are reading this article on some kind of electronic technology. You are definitely seeing it via visible light, unless you have a braille or audio converter. And it probably got to you via wifi or a mobile phone signal. All of those things are understood in terms of the relationships between electric charges and electric and magnetic fields summarised in Maxwell’s [James Clerk Maxwell] equations, published by the Royal Society in 1865, 150 years ago.

Verbally, the equations can be summarised as something like:

Electric and magnetic fields make electric charges move. Electric charges cause electric fields, but there are no magnetic charges. Changes in magnetic fields cause electric fields, and vice versa.

The equations specify precisely how it all happens, but that is the gist of it.

Butterworth got a rare opportunity to see the original manuscript,

 Original manuscript of Maxwell’s seminal paper Photograph: Jon Butterworth/Royal Society [downloaded from http://www.theguardian.com/science/life-and-physics/2015/nov/22/maxwells-equations-150-years-of-light]

Original manuscript of Maxwell’s seminal paper Photograph: Jon Butterworth/Royal Society [downloaded from http://www.theguardian.com/science/life-and-physics/2015/nov/22/maxwells-equations-150-years-of-light]

I love this description from Butterworth,

It was submitted in 1864 but, in a situation familiar to scientists everywhere, was held up in peer review. There’s a letter, dated March 1865, from William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) saying he was sorry for being slow, that he’d read most of it and it seemed pretty good (“decidely suitable for publication”).

Then, there’s this,

The equations seem to have been very much a bottom-up affair, in that Maxwell collected together a number of known laws which were used to describe various experimental results, and (with a little extra ingredient of his own) fitted them into a unified framework. What is amazing is how much that framework then reveals, both in terms of deep physical principles, and rich physical phenomena.

I’m not excerpting any part of Butterworth’s description of how Maxwell fit these equations together for his unification theory as I think it should be read in its totality.

The section on quantum mechanics is surprising,

Now, one thing Maxwell’s equations don’t contain is quantum mechanics [emphasis mine]. They are classical equations. But if you take the quantum mechnical description of an electron, and you enforce the same charge conservation law/voltage symmetry that was contained in the classical Maxwell’s equations, something marvellous happens [emphasis mine]. The symmetry is denoted “U(1)”, and if you enforce it locally – that it, you say that you have to be allowed make different U(1) type changes to electrons at different points in space, you actually generate the quantum mechanical version of Maxwell’s equations out of nowhere [emphasis mine]. You produce the equations that describe the photon, and the whole of quantum electrodynamics.

I encourage you to read Butterworth’s Nov. 22, 2015 posting where he also mention two related art/science projects and has embedded a video animation of the principles discussed in his posting.

For anyone unfamiliar with Butterworth, there’s this description at the Guardian,

Jon Butterworth is a physics professor at University College London. He is a member of the UCL High Energy Physics group and works on the Atlas experiment at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider. His book Smashing Physics: The Inside Story of the Hunt for the Higgs was published in May 2014

Liverpool Science Festival

The first Liverpool Science Festival (UK)  is being held June 25 – July 9, 2014 according to a June 6, 2014 Festival announcement, which has a very exciting lineup guests and events,

Liverpool Science Festival was founded with the mission to create a unique platform to engage the public in all things scientific – from natural science to science in its most interdisciplinary and cultural contexts.

For 2014, we are part of the science programme of events during the UK’s inaugural International Festival for Business (IFB 2014). We are also proud to be contributing events to the official 60th Anniversary celebrations of CERN – birthplace of the internet, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), site of the discovery of the Higgs Boson – and home to scientists from more than 100 countries.

Highlights of the festival include:

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Solar System:
1 river, 9 planets, 14 days and 70 miles

An ambitious public engagement project setting off from the source of the Mersey on a journey to the sea, culminating in a series of pop-up astronomy events and happenings which will mark out the positions of the planets and a scale model of the Solar System. The journey begins on 25 June with astronomy at the source of the Mersey (Stockport, Cheshire) and ends on the evening of 9 July on Crosby Beach.

www.liverpoolsciencefestival.com/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-solar-system

This is the second reference to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that I’ve had on this blog in less than one week. Rice University (US) researcher, Nikta Fakhri, referenced the book in a description of her work on carbon nanotubes in a June 5, 2014 post titled, Hitchhikers at the nanoscale show how cells stir themselves. (For anyone unfamiliar with the book and/or its cultural import, here’s a Wikipedia entry devoted to it.)

Next the festival is featuring its physics with two live events, one featuring Jon Butterworth and the other featuring Butterworth and Lyn Evans (from the announcement),

“If you want to know what being a professional scientist is really like, read Smashing Physics!” – Professor Brian Cox

Professor Jon Butterworth (CERN {European Organization for Nuclear Research ], UCL [University College of London] & Guardian Science) at Waterstones Liverpool One on 27 June – one of the UK’s foremost physicists, on Smashing Physics, his smashing new science book about the hunt for Higgs Boson and real life as a real scientist at the cusp of scientific discovery.

www.liverpoolsciencefestival.com/smashing-physics-ft-prof-jon-butterworth  

Dr Lyn Evans (chief engineer at CERN who spent 15 years leading the team constructing the LHC, the most complex machine ever built) flies in from CERN, Geneva, to speak on Engineering the LHCon 28 June at Stanley Dock.

www.liverpoolsciencefestival.com/engineering-the-lhc-ft-prof-jon-butterworth-dr-lyn-evans

Butterworth has a blog, Life and Physics, hosted by the Guardian newspaper as part of its science blog network. I find his writing to be quite approachable. From time to time he starts talking in ‘physics’ but he usually prepares his audience for these brief outbursts by explaining the concept first in plain English and/or approaching the topic from a mundane angle, e.g., ‘it can be lonely being a physicist’.

Evans was in Vancouver, Canada last February 2013 to launch a global project (from a Feb. 18, 2013 news release posted on The Exchange),

… On February 21 [2013], TRIUMF will do its part in fulfilling this role as it plays host to a meeting of the leaders of the major high-energy physics laboratories around the world. The key outcome of this meeting will be the completion of an existing global collaboration and the launch of a new team that will coordinate and advance the global development work for the Linear Collider, the world’s next accelerator project aimed at pulling back the curtain on the secrets of nature’s most innermost workings.

The new Linear Collider Collaboration (LCC) will combine the two next-generation collider projects, the International Linear Collider (ILC) and the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC), under one organizational roof and will be headed by Lyn Evans, former Project Manager of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Some may recognize Lyn Evans as recent co-recipient of the Milner Foundation’s Fundamental Physics Prize. (Evans will give a public science lecture on Wednesday evening at Science World.)

The Linear Collider Board, headed by the University of Tokyo’s Sachio Komamiya, is a new oversight committee for the LCC that will take up office at the same time.

Evans’ public talk mentioned in my Jan. 29, 2013 posting of Vancouver science events features a description that resembles the one for the Liverpool Science Festival (from my posting),

There is a video of the Evan’s February 20, 2013 talk here for anyone who can’t get to Evans’ talk in Liverpool.

Here’s more from the Liverpool Science Festival announcement,

“Wax has an extraordinary mind, and she has brought it to bear with her trademark wit.” – Stephen Fry

Ruby Wax brings her unique wit to the festival with her Sane New World stage show, at Stanley Dock on the evening of 28 June. Since obtaining a Masters Degree in Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy from Oxford University, Wax has become a respected campaigner for mental illness in the UK.

www.liverpoolsciencefestival.com/sane-new-world-ft-ruby-wax

“As the scouts say – be prepared! Say your prayers that you never need this book” – Bear Grylls

Dr Lewis Dartnell presents The Knowledge, How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch, his guide to everything you need to know to survive the apocalypse, avert another Dark Age and accelerate the rebuilding of civilization. Based on Dartnell’s best-selling book which has been the top-selling science book on Amazon in recent weeks.

www.liverpoolsciencefestival.com/the-knowledge-how-to-rebuild-our-world-from-scratch-ft-dr-lewis-dartnel 

For the last highlight from the festival announcement, we return to physics,

“Mind-blowing.” – New York Times on Particle Fever

Screening of Particle Fever – Liverpool Science Festival has special permission to screen this new movie on CERN and the hunt for the Higgs Boson, three months ahead of its UK general release. The screening will be followed by a Q&A featuring Professor Tara Shears, CERN particle physicist and the University of Liverpool’s first ever female professor of physics. The screening takes place on the evening of 5 July at Stanley Dock.

www.liverpoolsciencefestival.com/particle-fever

“Particle Fever” received its May 16, 2014 Canadian premiere in Vancouver, which included a discussion with a panel of physicists.  (There was a also a showing when the Vancouver International Film Festival was held in Oct. 2013 and that has a separate webpage description. I assume a showing during a film festival is not considered a premiere) Here’s a description of the documentary from the Vancouver International Film Festival theatre’s Particle Fever webpage,

May 16th, 7:00 PM screening will be followed by a panel discussion of physicists, copresented by TRIUMF and supported by Reel Causes.
May 19th, 6:30 PM screening is open to youth, the film is rated PG

Imagine being able to watch as Edison turned on the first light bulb, or as Franklin received his first jolt of electricity. Physicist turned filmmaker Mark Levinson gives us the modern equivalent of those world-changing moments with this as-it-happens front-row seat to our generation’s most significant and inspiring scientific breakthrough—the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva, built to recreate conditions that existed just moments after the Big Bang and to potentially explain the origin of all matter. Following a team of brilliant scientists, Levinson—aided by master editor Walter Murch—crafts a celebration of discovery while revealing the very human stories behind this epic machine.

“Set in crummy offices and towering facilities worthy of a Bond movie, the documentary is edited with the momentum of a thriller by the great Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now), as we follow six scientists. They come across as simultaneously passionate thinkers and endearing nerds: There’s the elegant Italian physicist and classical pianist Fabiola Gianotti, obliviously stepping into traffic while talking excitedly on her phone. Or postdoc student and experimental physicist Monica Dunford, declaring effusively: “It’s unbelievably fantastic how great data is.”

There is a Particle Fever May 14, 2014 review by Ken Eisner in the Vancouver local publication, The Georgia Straight.  Peculiarly and in the midst a poetic movie review, Eisner starts complaining about physics funding in the US,

In the rarefied world of quantum physics, “The ability to leap from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm is the key to success.” This is according to one scientist prominently featured in an absorbing doc that takes as its locus the Large Hadron Collider, in Switzerland, where some pretty amazing breakthroughs—and a few duds—have happened in the past few years.

The subtext is the struggle to keep pure learning alive with no promise of tangible return, except the possibility of knowledge that will forever alter our understanding of life. …

… its main activities take place at the huge site of CERN, near Lake Geneva—built there largely because right-wingers have managed to kill off nonprofit science in the U.S. [emphasis mine] Its hivelike realities, with staff drawn from a hundred nations, make it resemble a space station on Earth. …

I think there may have been a few other important  factors influencing the Large Hadron Collider’s location.

Getting back to Liverpool, if the website is any indication, this science festival has been beautifully conceptualized and thoughtfully implemented. I wish the organizers all the best as they get ready to launch their festival.

Finally, in the description of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Solar System event, I noticed a reference to the Mersey, which brought to mind this song from 1965. Gerry & the Pacemakers sing Ferry Cross the Mersey,

Is a philosophy of the Higgs and other physics particles a good idea?

Michael  Krämer of the RWTH Aachen University (Germany) muses about philosophy, the Higgs Boson, and more in a Mar. 24, 2013 posting on Jon Butterworth’s Life and Physics blog (Guardian science blogs; Note: A link has been removed),

Many of the great physicists of the 20th century have appreciated the importance of philosophy for science. Einstein, for example, wrote in a letter in 1944:

    I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest.

At the same time, physics has always played a vital role in shaping ideas in modern philosophy. It appears, however, that we are now faced with the ruins of this beautiful marriage between physics and philosophy. Stephen Hawking has claimed recently that philosophy is “dead” because philosophers have not kept up with science …

Krämer is part of an interdisciplinary (physics and philosophy) project at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider at CERN [European Particle Physics Laboratory]), The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider. From the project home page (Note: A link has been removed),

This research collaboration works at the crossroads of physics, philosophy of science, and contemporary history of science. It aims at an epistemological analysis of the recently launched new accelerator experiment at CERN, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Central themes are (i) the mechanisms of generating the masses of the particles of the standard model, especially the Higgs-mechanism and the Higgs-particle the LHC has set out to detect; (ii) the ongoing research process with special emphasis on the interaction between a large experiment and a community of theoreticians; and (iii) the implications of an experiment that is characterized by its enormous complexity and the need to be highly selective in data gathering. With the heading “Epistemology of the LHC” the research group intends both a philosophical analysis of the theoretical structures and of the conditions of knowledge production, among them the criteria of acceptance, and a real-time monitoring of the ongoing physical development from the perspective of the history of science. Theresearch group has emerged from a collaboration between a High Energy Working group and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Science and Technology Studies and is based in Wuppertal but also involves external members and collaborators.

Krämer shares some of his ideas and the type of thinking generated when physicists and philosophers collide (I plead guilty to the word play; from Butterworth’s Guardian science blog),

… The relationship between experiment and theory (what impact does theoretical prejudice have on empirical findings?) or the role of models (how can we assess the uncertainty of a simplified representation of reality?) are scientific issues, but also issues from the foundation of philosophy of science. In that sense they are equally important for both fields, and philosophy may add a wider and critical perspective to the scientific discussion. And while not every particle physicist may be concerned with the ontological question of whether particles or fields are the more fundamental objects, our research practice is shaped by philosophical concepts. We do, for example, demand that a physical theory can be tested experimentally and thereby falsified, a criterion that has been emphasized by the philosopher Karl Popper already in 1934. The Higgs mechanism can be falsified, because it predicts how Higgs particles are produced and how they can be detected at the Large Hadron Collider.

On the other hand, some philosophers tell us that falsification is strictly speaking not possible: What if a Higgs property does not agree with the standard theory of particle physics? How do we know it is not influenced by some unknown and thus unaccounted factor, like a mysterious blonde walking past the LHC experiments and triggering the Higgs to decay? (This was an actual argument given in the meeting!)

The meeting Krämer is referring to is this one (from the meeting/conference website),

The first international conference and kick-off meeting of the German Society for Philosophy of Science/Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsphilosophie (GWP) will take place from 11-14 March 2013 at the University of Hannover under the title:

How Much Philosophy in the Philosophy of Science?

Krämer then highlights some of the discussion that most interested in him (Note: A link has been removed),

… It is very hard for a philosopher to keep up with scientific progress, and how could one integrate various fields without having fully appreciated the essential features of the individual sciences? As Margaret Morrison from the University of Toronto pointed out in her talk, if philosophy steps back too far from the individual sciences, the account becomes too general and isolated from scientific practice. On the other hand, if philosophy is too close to an individual science, it may not be philosophy any longer.

I think philosophy of science should not consider itself primarily as a service to science, but rather identify and answer questions within its own domain. I certainly would not be concerned if my own research went unnoticed by biologists, chemists, or philosophers, as long as it advances particle physics. On the other hand, as Morrison pointed out, science does generate its own philosophical problems, and philosophy may provide some kind of broader perspective for understanding those problems.

It’s well worth reading Krämer’s full post for anyone who’s interested in how physicists (or Krämer) think about the role that philosophy could play (or not) in the field of physics.

The reference to Margaret Morrison from the University of Toronto (U of T) reminded me of the Bubble Chamber blog which is written by U of T historians and philosophers of science. Here’s a July 10, 2012 posting by Mike Thicke about the Higgs Boson and his response to philosopher Wayne Myrvold’s (University of Western Ontario) explanation of the statistics claims being made about the particle at that time,

We can all agree that reasoning and decision making in science is complicated. Scientists reason in many different contexts: in the lab, in their published papers, as career-minded professionals, as interested consumers of science, and as people going about their lives. It’s plausible to think that they reason in different ways in all of these contexts. When we’re discussing their reasoning as scientists, I believe distinguishing between the first three contexts is especially important. While Wayne’s explanation of the statistics behind the Higgs Boson discovery is very interesting, informative, and as far as I can tell correct, I think there are some confusions arising from his failure to make these distinctions.

Thicke does advise reading Myrvold’s July 4, 2012 posting before tackling his riposte.

The smallness of the Higgs mass (finding the Higgs boson)

As I noted last week (in my Dec. 6, 2011 posting), there was a big Dec. 13, 2011 announcement from CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) about the Higgs boson. No, they haven’t found it but researchers believe they’ve discovered a hint of where it might be—this ‘hint’ has made international news.

For anyone who may have some questions about what exactly a Higgs boson is, here’s a video of “Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln [describing] the nature of the Higgs boson. Several large experimental groups are hot on the trail of this elusive subatomic particle which is thought to explain the origins of particle mass” (from the YouTube description),

Here’s a little more about why there’s so much excitement, from the Dec. 13, 2011 news item on Science Daily,

The Standard Model is the theory that physicists use to describe the behaviour of fundamental particles [the smallest discrete entities that make up matter and are not made up of smaller constituent bits of matter themselves] and the forces that act between them. It describes the ordinary matter from which we, and everything visible in the Universe, are made extremely well. Nevertheless, the Standard Model does not describe the 96% of the Universe that is invisible. One of the main goals of the LHC [Large Hadron Collider] research programme is to go beyond the Standard Model, and the Higgs boson could be the key.

A Standard Model Higgs boson would confirm a theory first put forward in the 1960s, but there are other possible forms the Higgs boson could take, linked to theories that go beyond the Standard Model. A Standard Model Higgs could still point the way to new physics, through subtleties in its behaviour that would only emerge after studying a large number of Higgs particle decays. A non-Standard Model Higgs, currently beyond the reach of the LHC experiments with data so far recorded, would immediately open the door to new physics, whereas the absence of a Standard Model Higgs would point strongly to new physics at the LHC’s full design energy, set to be achieved after 2014. Whether ATLAS [research group at CERN] and CMS [research group at CERN] show over the coming months that the Standard Model Higgs boson exists or not, the LHC programme is opening the way to new physics.

The search for the Higgs boson has been ongoing for some 40 or 50 years and this announcement points to a definitive answer as to its existence by late 2012.

Two groups at CERN have reported on the results of their search for the Higgs boson. From the Dec. 13, 2011 news item on physorg.com,

Two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have nearly eliminated the space in which the Higgs boson could dwell, scientists announced in a seminar held at CERN today. However, the ATLAS and CMS experiments see modest excesses in their data that could soon uncover the famous missing piece of the physics puzzle.

The experiments revealed the latest results as part of their regular report to the CERN Council, which provides oversight for the laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

Theorists have predicted that some subatomic particles gain mass by interacting with other particles called Higgs bosons. The Higgs boson is the only undiscovered part of the Standard Model of physics, which describes the basic building blocks of matter and their interactions.

The experiments’ main conclusion is that the Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, is most likely to have a mass constrained to the range 116-130 GeV by the ATLAS experiment, and 115-127 GeV by CMS. Tantalising hints have been seen by both experiments in this mass region, but these are not yet strong enough to claim a discovery.

Scientists (Philip Schuster, Natalia Toro, and Andy Haas) at the Dec. 13, 2011 (9:30 am PST) Perimeter Institute webcast (What the Higgs is going on?), which took place a few hours after the CERN announcement, exhibited a lot of excitement liberally spiced with caution in regard to the announcement.  The webcast is available for viewing and if you’re wondering whether it’s suitable for you, here’s a description from the event webpage,

What is everything in the universe made of? What was the universe like billions of years ago?

These are eternal questions that humans have pondered throughout the ages. Today, we are on the verge of potentially making revolutionary breakthroughs in answering them.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is a 27-kilometre long underground experiment located on the Swiss-French border near Geneva. It smashes subatomic particles together at vast speeds in an effort to learn more about the fundamental building blocks that make up everything around you. It is the biggest, most ambitious scientific experiment in human history.

On December 13, the LHC will announce its latest findings in its search for the last undiscovered particle in our current model of subatomic particles. This particle is the near-mythical ‘Higgs Boson’ — the particle thought to be involved in giving other particles their mass.

This educational event, geared towards high school students, teachers and the general public, will follow CERN’s announcement and discuss its findings and their background and implications in clear, accessible language.

You can view the webcast from here. The description of how scientists choose which events to measure and the process they use to define whether or not an event is significant adds to one’s appreciation of the work being done in these projects.

Jon Butterworth, a physicist who works at CERN and whose blog is one of the Guardian science blogs, wrote a limerick about it all in his Dec. 13, 2011 posting,

A physicist saw an enigma
And called to his mum “Flying pig, ma!”
She said “Flying pigs?
Next thing you’ll see the Higgs!”
He said “Nah, not until it’s five sigma!”

Five sigma is a measure of certainty. The current results have a 2.3 sigma, which is promising but the gold standard is five.

Here’s the live blog that Alok Jha, science correspondent for the Guardain, kept during the Dec. 13, 2011 announcement (excerpted from the live blog),

1.01pm: Cern’s live webcast has begun, but the seminar has yet to start. The expressions on some of the faces in the audience suggests Christmas is about to come early for the physics community.

1.02pm: Ok the seminar has started, but traffic to the webcast is obviously heavy, breaking up the transmission.

TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, held a public seminar at 2:30 pm PST (Dec. 13, 2011) on their site at the University of British Columbia. They also have some information on their website about Canadian scientists who are involved in the CERN experiments ( from the Research Highlights page,  Physicists Smell but Don’t Yet Taste Higgs),

In a seminar held at CERN this morning and then repeated across Canada at multiple partnering institutions, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson. Finding this particle would snap in the last missing puzzle piece of the Standard Model that describes the universe at its most basic level. Tantalizing hints have been seen by both experiments in the same mass region, but these are not yet strong enough to claim a discovery. The main conclusion is that the Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, is most likely to have a mass in the range 115-130 GeV, excluding essentially all other hiding places.

“We are at a crossroads in our understanding of how energy gained mass and became matter in the early universe,” said Rob McPherson, spokesperson of the Canadian team working on the ATLAS project and a professor at the University of Victoria and a research scientist with the Institute of Particle Physics. “If these hints lead to a firm discovery over the coming year, we will be at the start of our investigation of the interactions that lie behind our current theories. If they are not confirmed, we will have to reject our present understanding, throw out our current theories, and start over. It is an extremely interesting time in particle physics.”

So there you have it. They think they observed something but they’re not sure, which makes for a very exciting time (they hope). While I’m not a scientist and cannot fully appreciate this moment, I can remember similar moments in my own work when something seems to be coming into focus. It isn’t my final result but it does hint at what is to come and gives me the resolve (giddy excitement for a few hours or days) I need to continue because a lot of what I do is slogging (I recognize the word play).

On a final note, it seems there was a minor crisis during the presentations in CERN. Lily Asquith, at the Argonne National Laboratory [Chicago, US] writes about it on Jon Butterworth’s blog (Guardian science blogs) in her Dec. 14, 2011 posting,

We have a large windowless meeting room at Argonne with an old-fashioned pull-down projector screen. When I walked in there yesterday morning for the CERN videolink I was greeted by 30-odd ashen-faced physicists. Oh lord, I thought, there has been a terrible accident. …

There stands Fabiola Gianotti [particle physicist in charge of the ATLAS experiment in CERN], our queen, looking fabulous and doing a typically faultless job of presenting a complicated and not-yet-conclusive measurement; taking the work of hundreds of nutty, stressed-out physicists and breathing sense into it.

But I hear only one thing as I walk the corridors of my lab and of the internet:

comic sans [the font Gianotti used for the text in her presentation]

– why‽

Do we need to add an additional systematic uncertainty to all our measurements based on this unwise choice of font? Are any of our results still valid? What does this mean for the speed of light?

Please do read the rest of Asquith’s very amusing piece. Who knew physicists are so concerned with fonts?

For the curious, here’s a sample of Comic Sans along with a history excerpt from its Wikipedia essay,

Microsoft designer Vincent Connare says that he began work on Comic Sans in October of 1994. Connare had already created a number of child-oriented fonts for various applications, so when he saw a beta version of Microsoft Bob that used Times New Roman in the word balloons of cartoon characters, he decided to create a new face based on the lettering style of comic books he had in his office, specifically The Dark Knight Returns (lettered by John Costanza) and Watchmen (lettered by Dave Gibbons).

So the font was originally designed for children and comic books, eh?

Three citizen cyberscience projects, LHC@home 2.0, computing for clean water, and collaborating with UNOSAT for crisis response

I sometimes lose track of how many years there are such as International Year of Chemistry, Year of Science in BC, etc. but here’s one that’s new to me, the European Year of Volunteering.

CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research [I imagine the French version was Centre européen de la recherche scientifique] and the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics) just announced as part of its support for volunteering, a new version of their volunteer computing project, LHC@home, 2.0, From the August 8, 2011 news item on Science Daily,

This version allows volunteers to participate for the first time in simulating high-energy collisions of protons in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Thus, volunteers can now actively help physicists in the search for new fundamental particles that will provide insights into the origin of our Universe, by contributing spare computing power from their personal computers and laptops.

This means that volunteers at home can participate in the search for the Higgs boson particle, sometimes known as the ‘god’ particle or the ‘champagne bottle’ boson. (Despite rumours earlier this year, the Higgs boson has not yet materialized as Jon Butterworth mentions in his May 11, 2011 post on the Guardian Science blogs. Note: Jon Butterworth is a physics professor at University College London and a member of the High Energy Physics group on the Atlas experiment at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider.)

This latest iteration of the LHC@home project is just one of a series of projects and events being developed by the Citizen Cyberscience Centre (which itself is supported by CERN, by UNITAR [United Nations Institute for Training and Research, and by the University of Geneva) for the European Year of Volunteering.

Two other projects just announced by the Citizen Cyberscience Centre (from the Science Daily news item),

Other projects the Citizen Cyberscience Centre has initiated focus on promoting volunteer science in the developing world, for humanitarian purposes. For example, in collaboration with IBM’s philanthropic World Community Grid and Tsinghua University in Beijing, the Citizen Cyberscience Centre launched the Computing for Clean Water project. The project uses the supercomputer-like strength of World Community Grid to enable scientists to design efficient low-cost water filters for clean water.

In a separate project supported by HP, volunteers can help UNOSAT, the Operational Satellite Applications Programme of UNITAR, to improve damage assessment in developing regions affected by natural or human-made disasters, for humanitarian purposes.

More information about these projects is available in the August 8, 2011 news item on physorg.com,

As Sergio Bertolucci, Director of Research and Scientific Computing at CERN, emphasizes: “While LHC@home is a great opportunity to encourage more public involvement in science, the biggest benefits of citizen cyberscience are for researchers in developing regions who have limited resources for computing and manpower. Online volunteers can boost available research resources enormously at very low cost. This is a trend we are committed to promote through the Citizen Cyberscience Center”.

Leading international computer manufacturers such as IBM and HP have contributed their support and expertise to Citizen Cyberscience Center projects including UNOSAT [UNITAR’s Operational Satellite Applications Prorgramme]. Using data from space agencies and satellite operators around the world, UNOSAT can produce maps for humanitarian applications such as damage assessment or monitoring deforestation. The project relies on ‘volunteer thinking’ where participants actively analyse imagery and their results are compared.

“From a development and humanitarian perspective, the potential of citizen-powered research is enormous”, says Francesco Pisano, Manager of UNOSAT, ” Participating in the Citizen Cyberscience Center enables us to get new insights into the cutting edge of crowdsourcing technologies. There is no doubt that volunteers are playing an increasingly central role in dealing with crisis response, thanks to the Internet.”

Well, the current London riots are revealing other less salubrious uses of social media and the internet but I like to think that in the end, creative uses will prove more enticing than destructive uses.

ETA August 10, 2011: I found one more year, 2011 is the International Year of Forests.

Graphene, the Nobel Prize, and levitating frogs

As you may have heard, two  scientists (Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov) who performed groundbreaking research on graphene [Nov. 29, 2010: I corrected this entry Nov. 26, 2010 which originally stated that these researchers discovered graphene] have been awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics. In honour of their award, the journal, Nature Materials, is giving free access to  a 2007 article authored by the scientists. From the news item on Nanowerk,

The 2007 landmark article in Nature Materials “The rise of graphene” by the just announced winners of the 2010 Nobel prize in physics, Andre Geim and Kosta Novoselov, has now been made available as a free access article.

Abstract:

Graphene is a rapidly rising star on the horizon of materials science and condensed-matter physics. This strictly two-dimensional material exhibits exceptionally high crystal and electronic quality, and, despite its short history, has already revealed a cornucopia of new physics and potential applications, which are briefly discussed here.

Here’s a description of the scientists and their work from the BBC News article by Paul Rincon,

Prof Geim, 51, is a Dutch national while Dr Novoselov, 36, holds British and Russian citizenship. Both are natives of Russia and started their careers in physics there.

The Nobels are valued at 10m Swedish kronor (£900,000; 1m euros; $1.5m).

They first worked together in the Netherlands before moving to the UK. They were based at the University of Manchester when they published their groundbreaking research paper on graphene in October 2004.

Dr Novoselov is among the youngest winners of a prize that normally goes to scientists with decades of experience.

Graphene is a form of carbon. It is a flat layer of carbon atoms tightly packed into a two-dimensional honeycomb arrangement.

Because it is so thin, it is also practically transparent. As a conductor of electricity it performs as well as copper, and as a conductor of heat it outperforms all other known materials.

The unusual electronic, mechanical and chemical properties of graphene at the molecular scale promise ultra-fast transistors for electronics.

Some scientists have predicted that graphene could one day replace silicon – which is the current material of choice for transistors.

It could also yield incredibly strong, flexible and stable materials and find applications in transparent touch screens or solar cells.

Geim and Novoselov first isolated fine sheets of graphene from the graphite which is widely used in pencils.

A layer of graphite 1mm thick actually consists of three million layers of graphene stacked on top of one another.

The technique that Geim and Novoselov used to create the first graphene sheets both amuses and fascinates me (from the article by Kit Eaton on the Fast Company website),

The two scientists came up with the technique that first resulted in samples of graphene–peeling individual atoms-deep sheets of the material from a bigger block of pure graphite. The science here seems almost foolishly simple, but it took a lot of lateral thinking to dream up, and then some serious science to investigate: Geim and Novoselo literally “ripped” single sheets off the graphite by using regular adhesive tape. Once they’d confirmed they had grabbed micro-flakes of the material, Geim and Novoselo were responsible for some of the very early experiments into the material’s properties. Novel stuff indeed, but perhaps not so unexpected from a scientist (Geim) who the Nobel Committe notes once managed to make a frog levitate in a magnetic field.

I’ll get to the levitating frog in a minute but first the bit about using regular adhesive tape to peel off single sheets only atoms thick of graphite from a larger block of the stuff reminds me of how scientists at Northwestern University are using shrinky dinks (a child’s craft material) to create large scale nanopatterns cheaply (my Aug. 16, 2010 posting).

It’s reassuring to me that despite all of the high tech equipment that costs the earth, scientists still use fairly mundane, inexpensive objects to do some incredibly sophisticated work. The other thing I find reassuring is that Novoselov probably was not voted ‘most likely to be awarded a Nobel Prize’. Interestingly, Novoselov’s partner, Geim, was not welcomed into a physics career with open arms. From the news item on physoorg.com,

Konstantin Novoselov, the Russian-born physicist who shared this year’s Nobel prize, struggled with physics as a student and was awarded a handful of B grades, his university said Wednesday.

The Moscow Physics and Technology University (MFTI) posted report cards on its website for Novoselov, who at 36 won the Nobel prize for physics with his research partner Andre Geim.

The reports reveal that he gained a handful of B grades in his term reports for theoretical and applied physics from 1991 to 1994.

He was also not strong on physical education — a compulsory subject at Russian universities — gaining B grades. And while he now lives in Britain, he once gained a C grade for English.

The university also revealed documents on Nobel prize winner Geim, who studied at the same university from 1976 to 1982. His brilliant academic career was only marred by a few B-grades for Marxist political economy and English.

Geim was turned down when he applied first to another Moscow university specialising in engineering and physics, and worked as a machinist at a factory making electrical instruments for eight months.

Given the increasing emphasis on marks, in Canadian universities at least, I noticed that Novoselov was not a straight-A student. As for Geim, it seems the fact that his father was German posed a problem. (You can find more details in the physorg.com article.)

As for levitating frogs, I first found this information in particle physicist Jon Butterworth’s October 5, 2010 posting on his Guardian blog,

Geim is also well known (or as his web page puts it “notorious”) for levitating frogs. This is a demonstration of the peculiar fact that all materials have some magnetism, albeit very weak in most cases, and that if you put them in a high enough magnetic field you can see the effects – and make them fly.

Why frogs? Well, no frogs were harmed in the experiments. But also, magnetism is a hugely important topic in physics that can seem a little dry to students …

I hunted down a video of the levitating frog on youtube,

As a particle physicist, Butterworth notes that the graphene work is outside his area of expertise so if you’re looking for a good, general explanation with some science detail added in for good measure, I’d suggest reading his succinct description.