Of Particular Significance

Cutting to the Heart

Well, you know there’s something deeply wrong with the way your country is run when stupid things like this start happening. Take a research program that’s been monitoring several thousand people at a time, focusing on their cardiovascular health, and following them for decades (http://www.framinghamheartstudy.org/about/history.html); and without warning, cut it by over 40%. Not even a phased cut; just “sorry, you have $5 million instead of $9 million this year.”

Oh, that’s a good move. That’ll save the country a lot of cash. And so what if all that money we spent already, over the last decade or so, will now be partially wasted (since the data they’ve been accumulating will be severely compromised.)

It seems likely that the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the government’s NIH, would not have imposed this cut this if they themselves didn’t face severe budget reductions, handed down from the NIH which like all branches of government is suffering cuts. Do any of my readers know the full story?

When you cut government across-the-board by 6%, the consequences for individual programs tend to be much, much steeper, due to fixed costs that can’t be cut. The consequences grow as you go down the bureaucratic chain…

Anyway, I hope a private foundation will pick up some of the slack on this one. But this is happening all over, and not every program that we’ve already spent money on will survive these types of cuts.

[Thanks to Matt Buckley for drawing my attention to this story.]

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON August 7, 2013

First It Was The Political Scientists…

Big changes are coming to the US academic world. It’s a confluence of influences: recession, the climate argument, the online revolution, political gridlock, expensive university education, …

A major accomplishment by one side has been the elimination (more precisely, the attaching of impractical conditions that made a funding process impossible) of all NSF funding of a social science discipline with few external defenders: political science. Here’s a little article with relevant links, by Sean Carroll.

Of course you can see what will happen next; having succeeded, these folks will go down the list of academic disciplines and eliminate a few more. What will be the foreseen and unforeseen consequences?

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON August 6, 2013

Change of Climate on the Right

There is no room for politics when we are playing for keeps. So say four Republicans, who served four Republican presidents as heads of the Evironmental Protection Agency. The climate is changing in Washington D.C., though still more slowly than in the Arctic.

My own view? Our uncontrolled experiments on our one and only planet must be curbed. Scientific evidence from many quarters show definitively that the Earth is warming. Science can give us arguments, strong but not airtight, that we may be responsible (mainly via carbon emissions, and the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide). It cannot tell us reliably how bad the risks of a warmer Earth will be; there are too many uncertainties. But it seems to me that these are risks we shouldn’t be taking, period. We don’t get to mail-order another planet if we mess this one up.

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON August 2, 2013

Some Weird Twists and Turns

In my last post, I promised you some comments on a couple of other news stories you may have seen. Promise kept! see below.

But before I go there, I should mention (after questions from readers) an important distinction. Wednesday’s post was about the simple process by which a B_s meson (a hadron containing a bottom quark and a ~~down~~[typo] strange anti-quark, or vice versa, along with the usual crowd of gluons and quark/antiquark pairs) decays to a muon and an anti-muon. The data currently shows nothing out of the ordinary there. This is not to be confused with another story, loosely related but with crucially different details. There are some apparent discrepancies (as much as 3.7 standard deviations, but only 2.8 after accounting for the look-elsewhere effect) cropping up in details of the intricate process by which a B_d meson (a hadron containing a bottom quark and a down antiquark, or vice versa, plus the usual crowd) decays to a muon, an anti-muon, and a spin-one Kaon (a hadron containing a strange quark and a down anti-quark, or vice versa, plus the usual crowd). The measurements made by the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider disagree, in some but not all features, with the (technically difficult) predictions made using the Standard Model (the equations used to describe the known particles and forces.)

Don't confuse these two processes! (Top) The process B_s --> muon + anti-muon, covered in Wednesday's post, agrees with Standard Model predictions. (Bottom) The process B_d --> muon + anti-muon + K* is claimed to deviate by nearly 3 standard deviations from the Standard Model, but (as far as I am aware) the prediction and associated claim has not yet been verified by multiple groups of people, nor has the measurement been repeated. — Don’t confuse these two processes! (Top) The process B_s –> muon + anti-muon, covered in Wednesday’s post, agrees with Standard Model predictions. (Bottom) The process B_d –> muon + anti-muon + K* is claimed to deviate by nearly 3 standard deviations from the Standard Model, but (as far as I am aware) the prediction and associated claim has not yet been verified by multiple groups of people, nor has the measurement been repeated.

A few theorists have even gone so far as to claim this discrepancy is clearly a new phenomenon — the end of the Standard Model’s hegemony — and have gotten some press people to write (very poorly and inaccurately) about their claim. Well, aside from the fact that every year we see several 3 standard deviation discrepancies turn out to be nothing, let’s remember to be cautious when a few scientists try to convince journalists before they’ve convinced their colleagues… (remember this example that went nowhere? …) And in this case we have them serving as judge and jury as well as press office: these same theorists did the calculation which disagrees with the data. So maybe the Standard Model is wrong, or maybe their calculation is wrong. In any case, you certainly musn’t believe the news article as currently written, because it has so many misleading statements and overstatements as to be completely beyond repair. [For one thing, it’s a case study in how to misuse the word “prove”.] I’ll try to get you the real story, but I have to study the data and the various Standard Model predictions more carefully first before I can do that with complete confidence.

Ok, back to the promised comments: on twists and turns for neutrinos and for muons… (more…)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON August 2, 2013

A Couple of Rare Events

Did you know that another name for Minneapolis, Minnesota is “Snowmass”? Just ask a large number of my colleagues, who are in the midst of a once-every-few-years exercise aimed at figuring out what should be the direction of the U.S. particle physics program. I quote:

The American Physical Society’s Division of Particles and Fields is pursuing a long-term planning exercise for the high-energy physics community. Its goal is to develop the community’s long-term physics aspirations. Its narrative will communicate the opportunities for discovery in high-energy physics to the broader scientific community and to the government.

They are doing so in perhaps the worst of times, when political attacks on science are growing, government cuts to science research are severe, budgets to fund the research programs of particle physicists like me have been chopped by jaw-dropping amounts (think 25% or worse, from last year’s budget to this year’s — you can thank the sequester).. and all this at a moment when the data from the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments are not yet able to point us in an obvious direction for our future research program. Intelligent particle physicists disagree on what to do next, there’s no easy way to come to consensus, and in any case Congress is likely to ignore anything we suggest. But at least I hear Minneapolis is lovely in July and August! This is the first Snowmass workshop that I have missed in a very long time, especially embarrassing since my Ph.D. thesis advisor is one of the conveners. What can I say? I wish my colleagues well…!

Meanwhile, I’d like to comment briefly on a few particle physics stories that you’ve perhaps seen in the press over recent days. I’ll cover one of them today — a measurement of a rare process which has now been officially “discovered”, though evidence for it was quite strong already last fall — and address a couple of others later in the week. After that I’ll tell you about a couple of other stories that haven’t made the popular press… (more…)

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON July 31, 2013

A Short Break

Personal and professional activities require me to take a short break from posting. But I hope, whether you’re a novice with no knowledge of physics, or you’re a current, former, or soon-to-be scientist or engineer, or you’re somewhere between, that you can find plenty of articles of interest to you on this site. A couple of reminders and pointers:

* If you haven’t yet seen my one-hour talk for a general audience, “The Quest for the Higgs Boson”, intended to explain accurately what the Higgs field and particle are all about, while avoiding the most common misleading short-cuts, it’s available now, along with a 20-minute question and answer session.

* If you want a slightly more technical and written discussion of the Higgs field and particle, complete with animated images, and suitable for people who may once have had a semester or two of university physics and math, try this series of articles first, and then go to this series.

* If you’d like to better understand the language of “matter”, “mass”, and “energy” that is everywhere in popular explanations of science, but eternally confusing because of how different authors choose to talk about these subjects, you might find some useful tips in these articles: #1, #2, #3, #4.

* If you need a reminder about what “ordinary matter” (i.e. things like pickles, people and planets) is made of, try this series, which goes all the way from molecules down to quarks.

* If you’re curious about what “particle/anti-particle annihilation” does and doesn’t mean, try this article.

* And here are the types of particles and forces of nature that we know about, and (for the moderately advanced reader) here’s how they’d be rearranged if the Higgs field were turned off.

Hopefully there’s something on that list that interests you, and many links within those articles to other things that may even interest you more. Have fun exploring! And stay tuned; I’ll be writing more in the near future…

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON July 15, 2013

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Cutting to the Heart

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

First It Was The Political Scientists…

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

Change of Climate on the Right

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Some Weird Twists and Turns

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A Couple of Rare Events

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

A Short Break

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

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