The Heart of Matter

It’s back-to-school season, and as emerging minds get to work across the world, it's time to once again laud the physicists who make an effort to reach out to non-scientists: only by corresponding across the esoteric boundary, I think, can the reverberative effects of new information--even new facts--make an impact at a sociological level. Knowledge, after all, doesn't do much in a vacuum; any epistemological system needs feedback and impact and even collapse in order to thrive. Think about classical mechanics, and the ways in which different theoretical evolutions tested and pushed at its tenets: some survived, others were rejected, and still others were incorporated into quantum mechanics but understood as part of an altered paradigm. Entanglements and transfigurations work at a particular level, but also at a discursive one: and my favorite form of discourse, the kinds of texts listed in the library on this site, are often purposefully inclusive, and allow anyone curious enough to participate in the larger social-scientific conversation.

Because of the highly complex and abstract nature of new physics, though, an important sector of the world's population is often overlooked: kids. Can concepts like decoherence or string theory be explained using simple language? It would be tough, because the metaphorical and analogical tools so often relied on by scientists would have no referent to someone in grade school; and moreover, it would be boring. The books I love don't have photos, they don't have texture, and they're not LCD screens. Even though the Higgs boson is the most exciting thing happening in the world right now, it's a tough sell to a person with a 20-second attention span.

Luckily, the folks at Papadakis Publishing have provided us with a clever and charming solution: the gorgeously detailed pop-up book Voyage to the Heart of  Matter: The ATLAS Experiment at CERN by Anton Radevsky and Emma Sanders. From time travel to particle collisions to a history of the universe, the many details of the LHC come to life in colorful and interactive ways. Accompanied by accurate, actual photos of the collider and its parts, and featuring big and intricately constructed cardboard pop-up designs, it's the perfect kid-friendly introduction to our universe's mysteries. After all, future Einsteins are out there, they just need to be inspired; and what better way to catapult young imaginations to new heights than building a miniature version of ATLAS at home? 

And: once the spark is ignited, the World Science Festival, New York Hall of Science, and Brookhaven National Laboratory are all enchanting and engaging places to introduce someone small to the wonders of physics. 

Quote of the day

From Daniel Whiteson, member of ATLAS and professor at the University of California at Irvine. “With the current data, a Standard Model Higgs at 125 GeV is like Mitt Romney: the most likely option, but the least exciting.”


I pulled this from Matt Strassler's excellent blog "Of Particular Significance," where he writes prolifically about the Higgs and other subatomic awesomeness. This week he's reporting from the SEARCH (SUSY, Exotics, And Reaction to Confronting the Higgs) Workshop on the LHC, where a dizzying slate of topics are being discussed by (mostly experimental) physicists. Supersymmetry, the hierarchy problem, dark energy and tons of other stuff are all theoretically implicated in the data pouring from ATLAS and CMS. An SM Higgs could feasibly be just one of many revolutionary discoveries--and at 125 GeV, apparently a boring one. ("The particle decays are the right height." OK, that's a terrible joke. Hey, it's spring outside!)


Anyway, read Strassler's blog, and decide for yourself whether you'd settle for the SM Higgs or hope for something less predictable. (And keep an eye out for possible video from his lecture at the Secret Science Club last week!)

The Lyrical Core of Man: Bits and Bells

From Sergio Bertolucci in yesterday's CERN press release: “Our Standard Model Higgs analysis with data collected so far leaves us in a very exciting position for 2012. With the data we collect this year, we will definitely be able to confirm or rule out a Standard Model Higgs.”

A bold statement ("definitely"!)--and indicative of how strong the December ATLAS/CMS results are. Clarifying whether the Higgs exists, and whether it's the Standard Model version, are two vastly different things, but it's still a huge endorsement for the LHC (and, hopefully, for string theory). 96% of the universe remains unexplained by the Standard Model, so results that don't point past it will be disappointing but still a coup for the collider. ATLAS won't even run at full speed until 2015, so there is a lot of good particle smashing ahead.

And speaking of the 96%, all kinds of tantalizing theories have emerged to explain it. Einstein's much-maligned "cosmological constant" theory has rebounded among some physicists, hinting at reconciliation between cosmology and quantum mechanics, and supersymmetry remains the holy grail of theorists. Plus: Craig Hogan, a physicist at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center, has proposed that space is actually composed of discrete bits of information, not a continuous field; in other words, that the universe is digital! This might sound radical, but it dovetails nicely with what recent theories have predicted about black holes and holograms (both of which rely on the existence of digital information in space to make any sense).

[An aside: NOVA is back on PBS, and it's pretty awesome (if you can stand a few terribly animated interludes). Brian Greene, science hero to the masses, is as engaging as ever and talks through some really tricky stuff.]

But back to digital space, and information theory, which Claude Shannon developed at Bell Labs in 1948. Information theory, in tandem with the transistor, another Bell invention, completely revolutionized electronics and communications and provided a conceptual space within which brilliant thinkers from all disciplines found purchase--most recently, quantum computing, the new frontier of super-fast data computation using QM phenomena like entanglement and superposition. (Check out The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner for more on the interdisciplinary wonderland that was Bell Labs. Full discolsure: my dad worked at Bell in the late '60s!)

Ontologically, conceptualizing human existence within information theory is intimidatingly abstract: how can we reconcile our perception of reality as 1s and 0s? Do photon packets carry digital information, and can we harness or control it? How does this trouble the disctinction between human and nonhuman? And my favorite question: can information theory explain our relationship to consciousness? I could think about this all day.

Death, too, is complicated when the corporeal is deemphasized. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault writes that, once death is understood as one of many manifestations of life, “death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.” If the brain is just a highly sensitive piece of receiving technology interpreting billions and billions of bits--themselves reverberations of subatomic loops--and converting them into emotion and intellect, the "invisible truth" reveals itself: what we think of as spiritual life is transient and unaffected by the death of bodies. The lyrical core of man is an eternity of vibrating strings.

And So It Begins: Narrowing In On 126 GeV

This morning's presentations by Fabiola Gianotti (ATLAS) and Guido Tonelli (CMS) confirmed what many science bloggers were predicting: if the SM Higgs exists, its mass should be in the 115-130 GeV range (probably right around 126 GeV), indicated by data produced by both experiments. CERN is being extremely cautious in their public optimism, and emphasizes that statistic fluctuations may be responsible for some of the bumps, but I hung out with the physics department at NYU this morning, and there was a lot of happy energy...I think today's news is inconclusive, but fully expect that further data analysis will result in a serious announcement sometime this summer.

The questions is: is this the SM Higgs, or something more exotic? As exciting as a discovery of the SM Higgs would be, it's more tantalizing to imagine data that excludes the SM Higgs, opening the door for some really new physics. (Detection of a non-SM Higgs is beyond the LHC's capacity at its current energy, but starting in 2014, it will run at its full design energy, greatly increasing the possibility of data that hints at new particles.) Either way--and perhaps most importantly--these results are substantial, and the LHC delivered even more data, and more quickly, than most people hoped for, which reinforces the worth of the $5.5b LHC price tag as well as a lot of physicsts' life work (and just wait for 7 TeV! The Standard Model only describes 4% of the universe's matter. There is still a lot to uncover).

The live webcast is here; the CERN press release and other info (plus pictures!) is here; Adrian Cho from Science sums up the results here; Lisa Grossman for NewScientist here; and, for fun, Tommaso Dorigo's post on why these results should be considered "firm evidence" of the SM Higgs.

The world's attention will be increasingly focused on CERN for the next year (one scientist wrote that today's press conference was the craziest he's ever witnessed--he likened it to the release of the iPhone). Within the larger spheres of global economic, political, and cultural tumult, it will be interesting to see how a scientific revolution will play a role in shaping the 21st century.

Spotted: The Neutrino Chameleon

A bit of exciting news coming from Italy's OPERA experiment at the INFN's San Grasso Laboratory: for the first time ever, researchers have directly observed a muon-neutrino changing into a tau-neutrino! This is significant because, since the 1960s, physicists have predicted such an oscillation must be the cause of an apparent deficit in muon-neutrinos arriving to earth from the sun. Rolf Heuer says "This is an important step for neutrino physics...we're all looking forward to the new physics this result presages."

This discovery could also have significant impact on string theory research--or, at least, it bolsters the notion that the Standard Model is incomplete by effectively proving that neutrinos have mass (which is required in order to oscillate; the current Standard Model theory holds that neutrinos have no mass). Should scientists uncover the math behind this inconsistency by observing one or many of the "missing" neutrinos at CERN, many of the most profound questions about mass may be resolved, including the tantalizing mystery surrounding dark matter.

Speaking of that elusive stuff (which accounts for about 25% of the universe), this month CERN is releasing the brilliant ATLAS pop-up book in the United States, which colorfully examines what the universe is made of, where it came from, and how it works. It's a wonderful, intricately drawn introduction to the exciting things happening in theoretical physics right now, but also, it's just awesome!

And finally, today marks the start of the 2010 World Science Festival in New York. You'd be remiss not to check out the LIGO telescope at the Broad Street Ballroom, The Search for Life in the Universe at Galapagos Art Space, or The Moth storytellers at Webster Hall. And that's just a tiny sampling of the glut of science events hitting the city--it's a great time to be curious.

Hooray for Physics!

With beams (finally!) colliding at 7 TeV, this week marks the start of real physics at the LHC, and for particle physicists and scientific optimists all over the world, brings the possibility of imminent groundbreaking discovery. Dennis Overbye calls it a "remarkable comeback for CERN", John Conway writes that this "clearly marks the beginning, at long last, of the first major physics run of the new accelerator," and NewScientist reports that "record LHC collisions mark new era for physics."

CERN is giddy: Rolf Heuer, General Director, writes "A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication has started to pay dividends...the LHC has a real chance over the next two years of discovering supersymmetric particles, and possibly giving insights into the composition of about a quarter of the Universe." ATLAS spokeswoman, Fabiola Gianotti, said "With these record-shattering collision energies, the LHC experiments are propelled into a vast region to explore, and the hunt begins for dark matter, new forces, new dimensions and the Higgs boson." See here for the latest mind-blowing videos and images from the LHC. This era is an awesome one, in the most literal sense.

Get up to speed on all the implications of a successful LHC run: The Little Book of String Theory by Steven Gubser; The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider by Don Lincoln; Collider: The Search for the World's Smallest Particles by Paul Halpern; Einstein's Telescope: The Hunt for Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe by Evalyn Gates.

U-S-A! The Higgs Race is Getting Heated

The good folks over at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, where America's particle accelerator is still going strong, claim to be closing in on the Higgs, and with the LHC still months from gathering data, it could be a glorious homecoming for domestic scientific accomplishment. But if Fabiola Gianotti, the new head of ATLAS, has anything to say about it, dark matter will be discovered under her watch: "I would be very, very happy if we discover the particle that explains 20 per cent of the universe's composition. Accelerators like the LHC allow us to study the infinitely small - the basic constituents of matter - and this can tell us about the structure and evolution of the universe, stressing the link between the infinitely small and the infinitely big."

While an international (and there are many US scientists working on the LHC project) effort is symbolic--undiscovered particles bear no racism, so to speak--it would be nice for the US to be able to boast such a significant contribution to (and perhaps beyond) the Standard Model, especially in the wake of such an anti-science administration. I mean, it's seriously embarrassing that Ron Howard is our antiparticle representative, no?

For more on the wonders of Fermilab, check out Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier and Megascience by Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne W. Kolb and Catherine Westfall. Focusing on the first two decades of research at Fermilab, the authors trace the rise of what they call "megascience," the collaborative struggle to conduct large-scale international experiments in a climate of limited federal funding. Good stuff.

2009: The Year of the LHC

CERN starts shooting protons again this year (and they're on twitter!), and after months of delays, the excitement is starting to build. Check out photos of the LHC first beam from September 1o, 2008. Each image shows the debris of particles, or the stuff that results in a collision of proton beams traveling at 99.9999991% the speed of light. All kinds of particles show up on these images (which are recorded at the rate of 600 million collisions per second), most of them already discovered and catalogued, but the elusive Higgs boson is still at large. Its discovery would be a huge coup for theoretical physicists and would provide a key piece of the Standard Model puzzle.

Exploring the Mystery of Matter: The ATLAS Experiment by Claudia Marcelloni, Kerry-Jane Lowery, and Kenway Smith is a history of the LHC as well as a fascinating account of the scientists that made the ATLAS experiment happen. (ATLAS, or A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS, is the largest and, some say, most ambitious of the LHC's six detectors.) Also coming out next month is The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider by Don Lincoln. Both will get you in the mood for proton smashing.