Category Archives: Public Outreach

Performance Sunday NYC

Posted on May 11, 2012 | 8 Comments

Posts are limited this week and next — partly because a draft of a document about “exotic” Higgs particle decays (which I wrote about here,  here,  here,  here and  here), relevant to how the Large Hadron Collider experiments ATLAS and CMS might collect their data in 2012 (in particular, how they might trigger on such decays), needs to get done right away. (Data’s already coming in! we’re later than I’d like.)   And it really has to get done now since I’m traveling next week with limited internet.

Meantime, a reminder in case you missed it: For those of you in the New York City area: I’ll be joined by the wonderfully talented singer-songwriter-pianist Andrea Wittgens in giving a physics/music joint performance/presentation at the storied Cornelia Street Cafe, Sunday May 13th at 6 p.m., as part of their Entertaining Science series.  It’s entitled Rhapsody for Piano and Universe, and intended for the general public.  The place is pretty small, so get reservations in advance by calling 212.989.9319.

One more heads-up: again in NYC, June 16th, I’ll be giving a lecture:

THE EINSTEIN OBSESSION: SCIENCE, MYTH AND PUBLIC PERCEPTION

June 16th, 2pm

Jefferson Market Library, 425 6th Ave. West Village, NYC

Free and open to the public!

Who hasn’t heard of Einstein? We all know Einstein failed eighth grade math. (Although he didn’t.)  We know he showed energy is the same thing as mass (or was it “matter”?), that he’s the father of the atomic bomb, that he was an old man with frizzy hair, and that he was a patent clerk whose theory was that everything is relative and that nothing can move faster than light.  This messy assortment of half-truths and misconceptions permeates our culture and affects public perceptions of science, at many different levels.  In this talk we’ll consider how our culture’s obsession with Einstein impacts efforts to convey science to the public.

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Posted in LHC News, Public Outreach

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The Stability and Instability of the Neutron

Posted on May 8, 2012 | 16 Comments

One of the strange but crucial features of our world is that every type of atom except hydrogen contains neutrons in its nucleus, even though neutrons, on their own, decay (to a proton, electron and anti-neutrino) within about 15 minutes on average.  At first glance this seems puzzling.  At second glance too.  How can stable matter be made from unstable ingredients?

The reason this is possible has everything to do with Einstein’s special relativity, and the way mass and energy are intertwined there.  A crucial role is played by the energy that is most important for binding things together, which I’ve called “interaction energy”.

I’ve now written an article explaining why neutrons inside of nuclei can be stable, giving the example of the deuteron (one proton bound to one neutron) which is the nucleus of “heavy hydrogen”, or “deuterium”.  If you understand this example, you’ll basically understand the point for other nuclei as well.

[For those of you in the New York City area: I'll be joined by the wonderfully talented singer-songwriter-pianist Andrea Wittgens in giving a physics/music joint performance/presentation at the storied Cornelia Street Cafe, Sunday May 13th at 6 p.m., as part of their Entertaining Science series.  It's entitled Rhapsody for Piano and Universe, and intended for the general public.  The place is pretty small, so get reservations in advance.]

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Posted in Particle Physics, Public Outreach

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Public Talk on Large Hadron Collider Now On-Line

Posted on May 2, 2012 | 63 Comments

My talk for the general public about the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] and the search for the Higgs particle, given online as part of the series of talks put on by MICA (Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics) at Caltech, is now posted.  The pdf of the slides, and the audio, are available here:

http://www.mica-vw.org/wiki/index.php/A_Ring_Of_Truth_-_Seeking_Answers_to_Big_Questions_at_the_Large_Hadron_Collider

And I recommend you take a look at their other talks also; it’s a great list.

http://www.mica-vw.org/wiki/index.php/Popular_Talks

What is MICA?  Here’s what they say at their website.

Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics

  • The Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA) is a professional scientific and educational, non-profit organization based in virtual worlds [VWs]. We are currently using Second Life (SL), and the Intel’s OpenSim-based world ScienceSim, and may expand to other venues as the VWs evolve.

You will sense, if you listen to the talk, that the virtual world is still a little buggy, there are some amusing moments!  But on the whole, the virtual world offers many new opportunities for bringing together large but dispersed communities of people with common interests.

Since particle physicists are dispersed across the globe, in professional settings we use video and audio conferencing all the time.  In fact, in just a few minutes after posting this, I’m going to listen to and watch a presentation at a conference at the CERN Laboratory (which houses the LHC) from the comfort of my office.  I’ve attended conferences in Geneva while in Ontario, and attended conferences in India while in New York.  I’ve even given a talk to a conference in Europe while I was just outside one of our National Parks in California!  (You can either view this as letting work intrude into a vacation, or not allowing work to prevent a vacation; up to you.)  And any experimentalist at the LHC probably attends at least one virtual meeting each day.  So for our especially international and collaborative community, virtual experiences have been the norm for quite a while.

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Posted in Higgs, LHC Background Info, Public Outreach

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Some Good Reads

Posted on April 26, 2012 | 20 Comments

I’m preparing an article on a very important type of energy that I’ve avoided writing about so far — the energy that comes from the interaction among fields.  I’ve avoided it because it’s tricky to figure out how to explain it.  But it’s important, for this form of energy is responsible for all the structure in the universe, from atoms to galaxies.  The article’s not quite ready yet, so today I’ve just got some good reading material for you, including the heavy, the weird, the amusing, and the optimistic. Continue reading →

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Posted in Astronomy, Higgs, History of Science, LHC Background Info, Particle Physics, Public Outreach, Science and Modern Society

Question to Laypersons: Your Views on the Neutrino Saga

Posted on April 5, 2012 | 133 Comments

So, many of you have probably been following, to a greater or lesser degree, the story of the OPERA experiment.  This is the one that  found that neutrinos sent from the CERN lab near Geneva, Switzerland to the Gran Sasso lab in Italy (where OPERA is located)  arrived earlier than they expected.  Of course there were, from the beginning, two natural explanations:

  1. Einstein was wrong and neutrinos travel faster than light, or
  2. OPERA made a mistake, and their expectations were off.

The news media made a huge deal out of the first possibility, while the vast majority of professional physicists assumed, for various reasons we can discuss, that the second possibility was almost certainly correct.  It is now pretty clear that possibility #2 was right; first OPERA admitted it had found two mistakes which made its previous results invalid; then its competitor down the lab, ICARUS, announced it had seen neutrinos arriving just as expected from the same CERN neutrino beam; and finally OPERA itself revealed that it had managed to characterize its errors in detail and now, re-analyzing its data, finds (preliminarily) that neutrinos do in fact arrive as expected.

Now, with this backdrop, I would like to ask YOU a question or two.  And by “you”, I mean non-scientists.  I would like to know how seeing this episode unfold changed (or did not change) your view of science, or physics, or particle physics.  Or of science journalism.  What’s your perspective on all of this?  What surprised you most?  What annoyed you or turned you off or excited you?  Are you disappointed in or pleased with the scientific process as you saw it unfold?  Are you more suspicious of or less suspicious of scientists and/or of science now that you’ve seen this happen?  I think these are things that many scientists would be curious to learn.

Granted, since you’re reading this blog, you’re a member of a non-representative sample of the public.  But I still think it would be useful to hear what you have to say.  So, please.  Comment.

[p.s. As BBC reports today, the LHC now has stable data-quality proton-proton collisions at 8 TeV of energy per collision; data taking will start at slow collision rates and ramp up over the year.  Here's a post and a following article on why 8 TeV is better than last year's 7 TeV.  As usual, BBC says correctly that 2012 will be a crucial year for the search for the Higgs particle, but say incorrectly that this will be the year that the Higgs is found or not found; that statement is true only of the Standard Model Higgs particle, the simplest possible form of Higgs particle.  For an overview of what I mean by this, read my guest post at the Cosmic Variance blog.]

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Posted in Particle Physics, Public Outreach, Science and Modern Society, Science News

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A Tale of 2.1 Cities

Posted on March 15, 2012 | 6 Comments

2.1 = 0.1 (Great Barrington) + 1 (Cambridge/Boston) + 1 (Geneva, Switzerland)   The LHC is about to turn on again! news on that below…

Last week I spent a couple of days at my undergraduate college, Simon’s Rock (a very small and little-known school, in the rural town of Great Barrington in Western Massachusetts.) On Thursday I gave a lecture there for a general audience on the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], similar to the one I gave at the Secret Science Club (from which video clips are available here.) Part of what I love about this little school is that classes are small and discussion-oriented.  There are few if any lectures where the professor talks and the students just listen. Also, the students have to write a lot of papers. As a result, they spend a lot of time thinking critically and learn to ask really good questions. I found this to be true not only after my talk but at lunch the following day, when I spent almost three hours in conversation with a good number of them — none of whom are planning to go into particle physics per se, but all of whom had interesting futures to talk about. Another benefit of their small classes and small community is that they’re unafraid of talking to faculty; they understand us for what we are — older students with a love of learning. As far as I am concerned, it’s a terrific educational environment, much better, I’m afraid, than the ones at which I’ve been teaching.  (Oh, and by the way, you can start there after 10th grade; so if you know a kid who hates high school…)

Then I spent the early part of this week visiting Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Even though it is spring break there and a lot of people were away, I found it very stimulating, as always. In addition to it being a great place to think about physics that might lie beyond the Standard Model, there are several experts there on aspects of the Standard Model itself [the equations we use to describe the known particles and forces of nature] , especially the complicated physics of quarks and gluons.

A year of effort at the LHC, as we have learned from the La Thuile and Moriond conferences, has so far turned up nothing obviously unexpected.   Continue reading →

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Posted in Higgs, LHC Background Info, LHC News, Public Outreach