Of Particular Significance

July 4th will never be the same.  As a child growing up in the United States, it meant flags, humidity, Sousa marches, democracy, and fireworks.  Now it means something else: Switzerland, laboratories, technical wizardry, Higgs particles and — fireworks!

ATLASH2e2mu

Yes, this picture is a representation of the data taken by the ATLAS experiment during a 2012 proton-proton collision at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], in which (probably) a Higgs particle was created and swiftly decayed to (i.e. was transformed into) a muon, an antimuon, an electron and an anti-electron [“positron”]. Also flying about are many proton-like particles, called hadrons, the debris always seen in a proton-proton collision.  Boom!  (Admittedly a very quiet boom!)

2012 was a remarkable year that we’ll never forget, and its July 4th, when the Higgs particle’s discovery was announced, was unique.   [And if you’re still confused about what the excitement is all about, or want to learn more, click here for some of my writing and speaking about it all.]

But as we wait for the LHC to start running again in 2015, analysis of the 2011-2012 data continues.  People are working very hard, even on July 4th :-), and the possibility of other discoveries in that data is real!  So stay tuned as more results emerge over the summer and fall and into 2014.

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON July 4, 2013

One year ago today, I arrived, bleary-eyed from my overnight flight, at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, host of the Large Hadron Collider.  Everyone at the lab was very excited, anticipating what promised to be the biggest event during my career in particle physics — the announcement of the discovery, or at least strong evidence, of something resembling a type of Higgs particle.  The following day did not disappoint, nor did the ensuing weeks of thinking and discussion and hard work.  A year later, we no longer wonder whether this is a type of Higgs particle; instead we have moved on to ask which type it is, and whether it has cousins — other types of Higgs particles still waiting to be found.

Since that time, I’ve been working to find new methods of explaining particle physics, and specifically the Higgs field and particle, to a variety of audiences, with a diversity of backgrounds and with different amounts of time to spare.

  • For the average person who wants a short story, I wrote a brief article about “Why the Higgs Particle Matters”, my most popular piece ever.
  • Then I wrote a long sequence of articles — actually two sequences, one about fields and particles, and one specifically about how the Higgs field works — intended for people who have had the equivalent of first-year university physics.
  • I recently gave a set of four 90-minute classes intended for highly interested non-experts, assuming little or no background in math or science.
  • And I developed a new one-hour public talk (see below), entitled “The Quest for the Higgs Boson”, for a general audience, in which I tried to explain, as accurately as possible but with no math at all, what fields and particles are, how a Higgs field can give mass to the known elementary particles, and what finding and studying Higgs particles is all about.

That one-hour talk was first delivered a few months back, as part of the Nick and Maggie DeWolf Public Lecture Series, at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen, Colorado.  It was filmed by a local TV station, GrassRoots Community Television.  And they have made this film available online. Click here to reach the GrassRoots TV page, then click “Watch Now” on the right-hand side. [It’s a .wmv file that should, after a little delay, begin streaming; if it doesn’t, it will laboriously download, which may take quite a while.  In any case you’ll want a good internet connection. And if it is super-slow, try again another day; their server could easily get overloaded, I suspect.]

By the way, the talk is preceded by about 5 minutes of introductory remarks by Professor Howard Haber (a Higgs-particle expert who has been mentioned before on this blog), and concludes with about 20 minutes of questions from the audience, so altogether the film is almost 90 minutes long.

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON July 3, 2013

It is well-known in science that if the title of a post or paper begins with a question, the answer is always “NO”, or at best, “probably not”.  Today we’re working with “very probably not”.

Yes, we’ve found one type of Higgs particle, but there might be two, three, or even more types of Higgs particles in nature.  Such particles might well be discovered eventually at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] or at future experiments hardly dreamt of today.  But at present, there’s no evidence yet for a second Higgs particle.  And all the hullabaloo we’re hearing right now is about old news, reprocessed into new news, which actually wasn’t news anyway and really isn’t now either. (more…)

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON July 2, 2013

A perfect storm of computer trouble (ok, maybe not perfect, but pretty darn good) has kept me from finishing any new articles, though this should come to an end this week. But while waiting for things to improve, I’ve been pointing your attention (here and here) to various signs that China, which is investing heavily in science and engineering, is catching up to the U.S. and its political and economic allies. The course I taught earlier this month, in which I gave an introduction to particle physics and to the Higgs field and particle, was followed by a couple of lectures by an economist teaching at Williams College, and he pointed me to one other article that I had not been aware of. This one is from the New York Times; I can’t vouch for its accuracy, and I don’t know anything about the main authors (Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher), so… buyer beware. The article has to do with the quintessential modern company: Apple.

Let me quote from the article, to pique your interest:

It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”

Of course, I’m cherry-picking out of a long article.  While these quotations do capture its dominant thread, that thread is woven together with several others.  I certainly don’t pretend to have the solution to the multi-faceted problems that it explores.  But I do think it is important that citizens of the U.S. and its friends  not have their heads in the sand, pretending nothing  is changing.   China isn’t just a huge, cheap, unskilled labor force; it also has a growing, highly-skilled labor pool, able already to out-compete its U.S. counterparts.  This is not an accident.  The Chinese government is making good choices.  Perhaps the experts in China have learned from South Korea; anyone ever heard of Samsung?  If you think all Samsung does is copy Apple’s phones, your head is in the sand.  Look it up.

We live in a world dominated by science, engineering and technology.  If we lose our edge in these areas, we may, in the long term, find ourselves no longer important players in that world, with economic and political costs that could be very high indeed.

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON June 24, 2013

While we’re on the subject of China… The US has had space stations for decades, and people here now show limited interest, barely caring that the US currently has no rocket that can carry people to space.  Now China has its own rockets and space station, and, with plenty of excitement and national pride, is putting them to good use.

Yesterday, some 60 million Chinese children watched a presentation and discussion from space, involving astronaut Wang Yaping and a Beijing classroom, on basic physics principles: mass versus weight, gyroscopic motion, etc.

I hope she managed to explain that there is gravity in space…

Note Added: The full lecture, with English voice-over, is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUAuZnpoZ58.  Thank you, Yan Wenbin.

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON June 20, 2013

Today, two articles that I found especially interesting and that I recommend to you:

China’s Tianhe-2 retakes fastest supercomputer crownA China-based supercomputer has leapfrogged rivals to be named the world’s most powerful system.

This article caught my eye because I think it highlights the degree to which China is rapidly catching up with Europe, the United States and Japan on certain technologies that matter a great deal.  China, unlike the US, which has been generally cutting its scientific spending since around 2000, is putting a tremendous amount of its money into science and engineering, aiming to surpass the world’s current technology leaders. Though they’re still making their way forward, their efforts are starting to pay off.  Since supercomputers are widely used in developing new technology (e.g., simulating novel aircraft), leadership in supercomputers, should they attain it, will have many benefits for the Chinese economy and military.  Lest you think they are merely copying what others have already done, you should make sure to read the last half of the article. Will it take another Sputnik moment to make anti-scientific politicians properly nervous about the cost of falling behind?

The second article of interest was this one (though the headline is a bit overstated…)

Roman Seawater Concrete Holds the Secret to Cutting Carbon Emissions:  Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues have discovered the properties that made ancient Roman concrete sustainable and durable

This great story evokes the tragic romance of knowledge lost for centuries — along the lines of the Stradivarius violins that no violin maker today can match. And it weaves several interesting strands.  First is the fact that modern concrete begins to fall apart in seawater in half a century, while the Romans managed to make a concrete that can survive seawater for two millenia.  How did they do it?  

Well, that’s the second interesting part: researchers claim to have figured it out, using one of the most modern of scientific techniques — flashes of ultraviolet or X-ray light, emitted by high-energy electrons traveling at nearly light-speed, in a particle accelerator (the Advanced Light Source). The Advanced Light Source is located at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, in the hills above the university we call “Berkeley” (officially the University of California at Berkeley).

The third interesting thing: the researchers learned that the Romans’ concrete, made mainly from lime (from limestone) and volcanic ash (pulverized rock created in abundance during any energetic volcanic eruption), used less lime and was formed at much lower temperatures than modern concrete. If modern concrete were replaced (when appropriate and possible) with a similar material, its production would use much less energy. And since concrete production is a notable contributor to overall energy use, this is not a minor effect.  In short, it’s just possible that this could be one of those rare situations where everyone wins: either the Roman concrete, or, more likely, a modern/ancient hybrid, may turn out to be more durable, more fuel-efficient to produce, and perhaps cheaper than the forms of concrete we use today.  

Thank goodness! The US government is still funding some important research!  Oh.  Right.  I guess it should be mentioned that initial funding for this work came from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.  Apparently they have a lot of volcanic ash lying about…

Picture of POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON June 19, 2013

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