A few commenters have complained that I’m too hard on science journalists, who have a tough job; it’s hard to explain difficult concepts in a few words. To paraphrase them: “if it’s so easy, you do it! Rather than merely complain about the erroneous TIME magazine paragraph on the Higgs boson, write your own explanation of the Higgs particle for readers of TIME magazine.”
Well, first of all, I have never once suggested science journalism is easy; far from it! A big part of the challenge is to find ways to explain complex ideas that are simple, compelling and accurate (and not two out of three.)
Second, I have written an article suitable for non-expert readers; it’s just over a page long, and is called Why the Higgs Particle Matters. It’s gotten about 30,000 hits; some people seem to really like it, so try it out on your friends.
And third, for those who point out that the above-mentioned article is much longer than a paragraph, and that I shouldn’t be so critical of the TIME journalist who had to fit so much into a such a small space, here is my version of the TIME paragraph: six sentences rather than five, but scarcely longer. I have borrowed the style and the feel of the TIME journalist’s writing, and I have removed some inaccurate content and replaced it with different accurate content.
Take a moment to thank the Higgs field for all the work it does, because without it, you’d explode. This field pervades the universe and supplies electrons (and many other particles) with their mass, thus preventing ordinary matter from disintegrating into a ghastly vapor. It was in the 1960s that British physicist Peter Higgs (and a few others) first posited the existence of this field. But it was not until last summer that two huge teams of researchers at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider at last sealed the deal by discovering a new particle — the Higgs boson — which confirms the Higgs field exists. You see, the particle is a consequence of the field wiggling a bit; and just as sound, a ripple in the air, can’t be heard unless there’s air in the room, there wouldn’t be Higgs particles to discover unless Higgs and friends were right all along about their famous field. Now the Higgs — as most particles do — decays in an instant to other particles, so it wouldn’t be able to attend the award ceremony; however, the scientists would surely be happy to appear in its stead.
Although not everything I’ve written here is 100% accurate — that would indeed be impossible in a paragraph for a wide readership — I believe none of it is fundamentally wrong (but my colleagues should feel free to complain!) Yes, science journalism is difficult; but is it really inevitable that profound errors concerning the science must appear in articles for the public?
Yes, it was funny, as I hope you enjoyed in my post from Saturday; but really, when we step back and look at it, something is dreadfully wrong and quite sad. Somehow TIME magazine, fairly reputable on the whole, in the process of reporting the nomination of a particle (the Higgs Boson; here’s my FAQ about it and here’s my layperson’s explanation of why it is important) as a Person (?) of the Year, explained the nature of this particle with a disastrous paragraph of five astoundingly erroneous sentences. Treating this as a “teaching moment” (yes, always the professor — can’t help myself) I want to go through those sentences carefully and fix them, not to string up or further embarrass the journalist but to be useful to my readers. So that’s coming in a moment.
But first, a lament.
Who’s at fault here, and how did this happen? There’s plenty of blame to go around; some lies with the journalist, who would have been wise to run his prose past a science journalist buddy; some lies with the editors, who didn’t do basic fact checking, even of the non-science issues; some lies with a public that (broadly) doesn’t generally care enough about science for editors to make it a priority to have accurate reporting on the subject. But there’s a history here. How did it happen that we ended up a technological society, relying heavily on the discoveries of modern physics and other sciences over the last century, and yet we have a public that is at once confused by, suspicious of, bored by, and unfamiliar with science? I think a lot of the blame also lies with scientists, who collectively over generations have failed to communicate both what we do and why it’s important — and why it’s important for journalists not to misrepresent it. (more…)
Much has already been written about the hilarious proposal that the recently-apparently-discovered particle called the Higgs Boson(you know, [what’s a boson?] the one sometimes called “God Particle” by people who don’t know much about particles) be selected as Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2012. Well, I hope it wins, so that, as justice requires, it can finally be allowed to donate unlimited amounts of its money to U.S. election campaigns, just like U.S corporations, which, as you know, are people too. And I think this would also mean that Higgs bosons could finally get married, though I’m not entirely sure about the legality of whether they could marry each other… (recall the Higgs particle is its own anti-particle.)
But the hilarity became that much greater when Time magazine listed its various nominees and (as many have pointed out) described the Higgs particle in five glowing sentences,each of which contains at least one spectacular scientific or historical error.(Indeed, when I saw this, I assumed I was reading the Onion — maybe that’s where Time, following the lead of China’s famous newspaper Particles’ Daily, got this description? — though the Onion has been strangely quiet on the subject of the Higgs up to now.) The Higgs boson is candidate #18 out of 40, and I encourage you, in order to fully appreciate the company that it now keeps in the upper echelons of our society, to look at #17 and #19. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that Time avoids the term “God Particle”, which would be praiseworthy under better circumstances.
So — a quiz for the reader. Can you identify five God-Particle-worthy errors in this piece from Time? Extra credit if you can find six or more. It’s an open-book test; you can use this website for insights.
The Higgs Boson
By Jeffrey Kluger
Monday, Nov. 26, 2012
Take a moment to thank this little particle for all the work it does, because without it, you’d be just inchoate energy without so much as a bit of mass. What’s more, the same would be true for the entire universe. It was in the 1960s that Scottish physicist Peter Higgs first posited the existence of a particle that causes energy to make the jump to matter. But it was not until last summer that a team of researchers at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider — Rolf Heuer, Joseph Incandela and Fabiola Gianotti — at last sealed the deal and in so doing finally fully confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The Higgs — as particles do — immediately decayed to more-fundamental particles, but the scientists would surely be happy to collect any honors or awards in its stead.
The meaning of the title of Clara Moskowitz’s new article for the public, “Dark Matter Mystery May Soon Be Solved“, all lies in the word “may”. It may. It may not.
According to the article, “the answer to this cosmic mystery could come within the next three or four years, scientists say.”
I have to admit that this kind of phraseology, which one often sees in the press in reports about science, drives me a bit nuts. Which scientists? How many of them? You can’t tell from this line whether this is something that a group of three or four mavericks are claiming, or whether it is conventional wisdom shared by most of the community. And “the answer… could come…”? Interpreted literally it is content-free: yes, the answer could come in the next few years, or not — but you don’t need any scientists to tell you that. If one interprets it more optimistically — that it is intended to imply that the answer will very likelycome within the next three or four years — then I think it is far from clear what fraction of the experts will agree with that statement.
Rather than debate the claim, let’s start with the physics. What will determine how long it takes to discover what dark matter is made from? (more…)
After a hiatus for a hurricane and a trip to a conference in Asia, I am adding one more article to my series on How the Higgs Field Works, following my series of articles on Fields and Particles. (These sets of articles require a little math and physics background, the sort you’d get in your first few months of a beginning university or pre-university physics class. I’m still thinking about how to structure a similar set of articles that require no math or physics; that’s much harder, of course!)
This article contains the most elaborate equations and concepts that I’ve had to introduce to my readers, so it won’t be suitable for everyone (though it still only requires some first-year physics/math.) But on the other hand, it seems necessary for me to write it, since it’s the only place that I’ve explained not only why the Higgs field can give mass to the known particles, but why it (or something very much like it) must do so.
(Note that in these articles I’m mainly concentrating on the simplest type of Higgs, the Standard Model Higgs field and particle. However, most of the basic concepts in these articles apply even for more complicated cases.)
Last week, I promised you I’d fill in the details of my statement that the recent measurement (of the rare process in which a Bs meson decays to a muon and an anti-muon — read here for the physics behind this process) by the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] had virtually no effect on the constraints on any speculative theories, including supersymmetry, contrary to the statements in the press and by a certain LHCb member. Today I’m providing you with some sources for this statement.
A number of my colleagues have tasked themselves with keeping track of how measurements at the Large Hadron Collider and elsewhere are affecting certain subclasses of variants of the supersymmetry. They call themselves the “Mastercode Project”; here’s their website. They’re not the only ones looking at this, but among them is Professor Gino Isidori, whom I was talking to last week, so I’ve gotten this information from him. I quote from the MasterCode website regarding last week’s result from LHCb: “The new measurement provides a valuable new constraint on the supersymmetric parameter space, but the observation of a Standard Model-like branching fraction for the Bs→μ+μ– decay is quite consistent with supersymmetry. In fact, a Standard Model-like branching fraction of this decay was expected in constrained supersymmetric models like the CMSSM or NUHM1 (see, e.g., the recent MasterCode results for further details). As a result, the favoured regions in the parameter space of these models do not change significantly after the inclusion of the new constraint. ”
Now before I explain what this means, it’s important to have some terminology, running from most general to most specific.
Supersymmetry: the general theory that space and time are more subtle than they appear to be, and as a result, for every known particle in nature there is a corresponding superpartner particle with the property that either the particle is a boson and its superpartner a fermion, or vice versa. (Read more about supersymmetry here, and more about fermions and bosons here and here.)
CMSSM (Constrained MSSM): a much smaller subclass of variants of the MSSM in which the masses of the superpartners are assumed to be related to each other in particular ways (the details are technical and not essential, so I’ll skip them.)
NUHM1 (Non-Uniform Higgs Mass variant of the MSSM): another small subclass of the MSSM variants, slightly more general than the CMSSM.
Keep in mind that
ruling out the CMSSM or NUHM1 does not mean that the MSSM is ruled out;
ruling out the MSSM does not mean that supersymmetry at the TeV scale is ruled out;
ruling out supersymmetry at the TeV scale does not mean that supersymmetry is ruled out.
Among the many goals of the LHC is to find or rule out supersymmetry at the TeV scale. (It cannot hope to rule out supersymmetry altogether; that would presumably require a vastly more powerful collider that won’t likely be built for centuries, if ever.) It’s not enough to rule out the CMSSM, or the NUMH1, or even the MSSM. Similar statements apply for other speculative ideas that propose as yet unknown particles and forces; it’s not enough for the LHC to rule out just the simplest variants of these ideas.
Now if it turns out that supersymmetry is part of nature, rather few of my colleagues expect the variant we find to be contained within the CMSSM or NUHM1; and personally (though I’m probably in the minority) I have long doubted that it would be contained within the MSSM. Nevertheless, it is instructive to look at how LHC data is impacting the CMSSM and the NUHM1 subclasses of supersymmetry variants. One just must be careful not to over-interpret; the exclusion of most variants in the CMSSM is not an indication that most variants of TeV-scale supersymmetry as a whole are excluded.
Now in this context, let’s see how the new measurement that was announced last week affects the CMSSM and the NUHM1. In Figure 1 is a plot showing the allowed variants of the CMSSM and the NUMH1, as a function of two quantities: on the horizontal axis, MA, which if large is (approximately but essentially) the mass of four of the five Higgs particles in the MSSM, and on the vertical axis, tan β, the ratio of the values of the two non-zero Higgs fields that are required in the MSSM. In solid red and solid blue are the one-standard-deviation and two-standard-deviation allowed regions after the new LHCb measurement is accounted for; any variant of the theory not sitting inside the blue region is excluded by the data. The dashed bands show the same thing before the new LHCb measurement. Since the dashed and solid blue bands are right on top of each other, you see there’s almost no effect at all. That’s what was behind my claim last Friday.
Fig. 1: Constraints on the CMSSM (left) and NUHM1 (right) subclasses of supersymmetric theories, before and after the HCP conference of last week. The quantities on the horizontal and vertical axes are explained in the text. In both plots: solid red (blue) give the constraints at one (two) standard deviations; variants outside the blue curve are excluded. Dashed red (blue) are the same limits before the new LHCb measurement. Notice there is almost no change.
But please, don’t misinterpret what I’m saying (or my colleagues) as suggesting that the LHC’s data has had no impact on the list of possible variants of supersymmetry! Far from it! Many variants are excluded, and many popular (but not necessarily more likely) subclasses of variants of supersymmetry have been pushed into regions that many would consider corners. The only statement in Figure 1 is that the new LHCb measurement didn’t make these corners smaller. But to see how things have changed since before the LHC began, look at Figure 2, which shows how the LHC as a whole — all the measurements from LHCb, ATLAS and CMS taken together — have affected the CMSSM and NUMH1 since 2009. (The CMSSM and NUHM1 also make assumptions about where dark matter comes from, so even effects of the dark matter measurements from the XENON100 experiment are included here.)
Fig. 2: as in Figure 1, except that the dashed lines give the constraints on the CMSSM and NUHM1 before the LHC began taking data, and the solid line gives the constraints after the data taken through early summer 2011 was analyzed. Notice the scale on the horizontal axis is different from that of Figure 1.
Figure 2 is a similar plot to Figure 1 — but this time, solid blue and red indicate the impact of LHC data as of summer 2011, and the dashed blue and red indicate the situation before the LHC started. Now compare the dashed blue line in Figure 2 (before the LHC) with the solid blue line in Figure 1 (now); note the scale on the horizontal axis is different!. You’ll see that in the CMSSM it was possible before the LHC to have MA as low as 350 GeV/c², but now it has to be over 900 GeV/c², which many would consider a rather high value. In the NUHM1 there’s been a similar shift from 150 to about 300 GeV/c², not yet so high but still a significant increase. And meanwhile, while almost any value of tan β from 2 up to 60 was allowed before the LHC, this number is now limited to a smaller range. For example, if MA were below 900 GeV/c², then the CMSSM would be excluded and the NUHM1 would be allowed only for tan β < 30 or so. This upper limit on tan β is mainly caused by the similar LHCb measurement presented back in March (and mentioned by me on Friday), and by similar ones from the CMS, CDF and ATLAS experiments.
But clearly there are plenty of variants within the NUHM1 that remain viable. And the NUHM1 is not representative of the full range of possibilities within the MSSM, so even if the NUHM1 were excluded, we’d still have a long way to go to exclude the MSSM, much less all of TeV-scale supersymmetry. In short, it’s neither all nor nothing.Yes, a lot of progress has been made; LHC data (and data from other sources) have ruled out a lot of variants of TeV-scale supersymmetry. But no, we’re not yet close to ruling out the full range of variants.
Please note that I’m not telling you this because I’m some devotee of supersymmetry who believes deeply in his heart that we’ll someday find it, and is trying to persuade you not to give up. I’m just laying out for you the facts on the ground. Do you imagine that I’m happy that a long, painful slog lies ahead, during which particle physicists — theorists and experimentalists — will painstakingly cover all the possible variants of supersymmetry, and slowly but surely determine whether or not supersymmetry is absent at the TeV scale? Don’t you think my life and that of my colleagues would be a lot easier if we could snap our fingers and with one or two quick measurements settle the question of whether supersymmetry is a fact of nature or not? Unfortunately, things don’t work that way. You should simply ignore the irresponsible grand statements you will see in the press and on various blogs; indeed, sweeping remarks are a sign of careless thinking, and you should beware. The truth is that only through very hard work — by the experts who make the measurements, by those who advise them on which measurements to make, and by those who do the calculations that are the ingredients for studies like the MasterCode Project — can we hope to settle profound questions about nature.
