April 2011

Open Science

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[Note: this post was published prematurely, then deleted, and is now back.]

Michael Nielsen gave a great talk at TEDxWaterloo about the idea of “open science”:

Open science: Michael Nielsen at TEDxWaterloo

There’s a great deal of buzz about “openness” in certain sectors of the science community; largely this has passed physics and astronomy by, because we’re already pretty darn open. It’s hard to image something more open than arxiv, where everyone puts their papers up for free even before they’re published in a journal.

But Michael’s talking about something much more ambitious: opening the process of creating science, not just publishing it. For experimentalists this would be difficult, for obvious reasons. (You think people who sweat to build an experiment are going to invite the public in to take a whirl?) For theory it is also hard, but the reasons are more subtle.

The point is that credit in science is given out on the basis of getting your name on published papers. In the arxiv era, the papers don’t necessarily have to appear in a traditional journal — but that’s a topic for another day. The model is set in stone: you have an idea, you work out its consequences to the point where it’s publishable, and you write a paper. Without that last step, you’re not going to get any credit. (Very occasionally you will see references to “unpublished work” or “private communication,” but it’s rare and not really for big-ticket ideas.)

So if I had an idea, I would either work it out myself or start working with students or collaborators. I certainly would not go around publicizing an undeveloped idea; I wouldn’t get any credit for it, and someone else could take it and develop it themselves. I might give seminars in which I mention the idea, but that’s only recommended once it’s to the point where a paper is on the horizon.

Michael and others want to overthrow that model. Their shining example is this blog post by Tim Gowers. Gowers is a mathematician who proposed attacking an open math problem right there on his blog, by asking for comments from the crowd. If they succeeded, they could publish a paper under a collective pseudonym. He next chose a problem — developing a combinatorial approach to the Hales-Jewett theorem — and, several hundred comments later, announced that they had succeeded. Here’s the paper. Buoyed by this success, people have set up a Polymath Wiki to expedite tackling other problems in this way.

Could this work for theoretical physics? I don’t see why not. But note that Michael spends a lot of his time in the talk pointing out the obvious — crowdsourcing doesn’t always work. I could easily imagine ways in which such a project could fail; too much noise and not enough signal, everyone with good ideas deciding they would rather work on them by themselves rather than sharing openly, etc.

Might be worth a shot, though. I’m thinking of suggesting some ideas here on this blog and seeing whether we get any useful input. Let me sleep on it.

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Science is Hard

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The 3-sigma bump reported by Fermilab on Wednesday has garnered a lot of attention. Understandable, since it might be a precious sign of particle physics beyond the Standard Model — but it’s also just a 3-sigma bump, and usually those go away.

Via Matt Strassler and Lisa Randall, here’s a set of plots that helps indicate exactly how hard this game really is. The plots can all be found on this web page at CERN. In comments Matt and Peter note that they were made by Tommaso Tabarelli de Fatis, as explained on Tommaso Dorigo’s blog. Here is the original plot from the CDF paper:

We’re looking at the number of events that produce a W boson and two jets, as a function of the energy of the jets. The bottom plot is all the data, while at the top they’ve subtracted off most of the Standard Model background, leaving only the predicted red curve from WW/WZ events. You see the extra little bump around 150 GeV, that’s what’s getting everyone so excited. It’s unlikely that the data are a good fit to the prediction; the “KS (Kolmogorov-Smirnov) probability” is given as 5×10-5, which means that it’s not bloody likely.

But, just for giggles, let’s imagine that the energy of the jets wasn’t measured very accurately. Obviously the experimenter worked hard to get it right, and I would trust their judgment over my own any day, but you never know. Jets are complicated things with many particles in them, you can imagine being off by a bit.

So here is the same plot, just scaling the jet energy by two percent: …

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NASA Gives Up on LISA

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Sorry to bump Julianne’s fun post further down the page, but lots of news today. This particular piece of news is not fun: NASA is abandoning LISA, the planned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, as well as IXO, an X-ray satellite observatory (formerly “Constellation X”). Steinn has some of the ugly details. Short story: money is tight, and the James Webb Space Telescope is taking all of it. (Not that JWST is completely immune from danger itself…)

LISA is not completely dead: the European Space Agency will keep the planning alive. But this is a serious step, not just a feint in a budget negotiation; the LISA International Science Team is being disbanded, told to pack up and go home. Hopefully the ESA will continue to push forward, and individual researchers in the US can somehow find money to still think about gravitational-wave astrophysics from space. It’s possible that a smaller mission could be put forward, but it’s not as if NASA has extra money they’re looking to spend right now.

Of all the concepts for big astrophysics missions in space, LISA is my favorite. Unlike LIGO, which strains as hard as possible and hopefully will detect something once its upgraded, LISA would be bombarded with gravitational waves, and the trick will be picking out the interesting signals from above the ambient noise. (That’s a problem we don’t mind having.) I was part of the original Beyond Einstein roadmap team (pdf) that packaged LISA and Constellation-X together with a dark energy mission to create an ambitious but realistic plan for NASA cosmology that Congress and the OMB could get behind. That was in 2002, before wars and tax cuts and financial catastrophes sapped the government of its ability to pay for anything. The best-laid plans of mice and men and NASA panels, as the saying goes.

LISA’s science is not just achievable, it’s incredibly interesting. It would detect thousands of binary systems within our galaxy, as well as numerous inspirals of middleweight black holes into supermassive ones in other galaxies, giving us incredibly detailed access to the spacetime metric near a black hole. As a side benefit, the wavelength is just right for looking at gravitational waves that might be produced in the early universe if the electroweak phase transition is especially violent. I remember giving a talk to particle physicists planning the International Linear Collider (another possibly doomed endeavor) back in 2003. It was great to see their eyes light up when I told them about this connection between satellite observatories and particle accelerators — at a meeting dominated by budget worries, it was a tiny oasis of actual science.

Hopefully things will somehow work out, but there’s not a lot of reason for optimism at the moment. We’ll see how things go.

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Anomalies at Fermilab

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The Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab is shutting down soon, for some unavoidable reasons (the LHC is taking over) and some frustrating ones (we’re out of money). But there may be life in the old beast yet; a couple of intriguing anomalies have particle theorists raising their eyebrows in charmingly understated excitement.

Two different anomalies are getting attention right now. One, which has been around for a while but doesn’t seem to be going away, is a forward-backward asymmetry in top quark production. Unlike the LHC, which just smashes protons together, the Tevatron has a proton beam and an antiproton beam. Intriguingly, when collisions produce a top-antitop pair, they seem to be preferentially produced in the direction of the protons rather than the antiprotons. If you want a popular-level account, here’s Ron Cowen at Science News, while Jester gives you the technical details at Résonaances. I’ll just show you a pretty picture; the horizontal axis is “forward” cross section, while the vertical axis is the “backward” cross section, both in units of the Standard Model expectation. The center of the plot is where we should be, and as you can see we are just a bit off.

A completely different anomaly seems to have just cropped up, this time in collisions that produce a W boson as well as two “jets” (particle-physics speak for “bunches of particles typically associated with the production of strongly-interacting stuff). Once again we have explanations in the MSM and on the blogs: Dennis Overbye at the NYT, and Flip Tanedo at US LHC Blogs. What happens here is that you just measure how many events you see as a function of how much energy is in the jets. Then you look for a “bump,” which as John has taught us is often a signature of a new particle that has been produced and then quickly decayed. Do you see the bump?

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Sir Martin Rees Wins the Templeton Prize

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The Templeton Prize has to be the most efficient publicity campaign ever. The Templeton Foundation gives a million British pounds to a scientist who is willing to say that science and religion are compatible, and in return they get many times that value in publicity. (The formal citation is “for making an exceptional contribution to investigating life’s spiritual dimension”) Atheists should really just refuse to talk about it, but — can’t resist!

This year’s winner is Sir Martin Rees, one of the world’s leading theoretical astrophysicists. Like everyone else, I have nothing but enormous respect for Sir Martin’s work. He focuses mostly on “physical” cosmology — that part that involves actual known laws of physics, like galaxy formation — but is more willing than most folks in that game to think about speculative ideas concerning the multiverse and the Big Bang. He describes himself as non-religious but church-going, and would rather science and religion just get along than be constantly at each other’s throats. You can read an extremely awkward interview with him by Ian Sample in the Guardian — it’s clear Rees has no interest at all in talking about science/religion issues, but that’s going to come up when you win the Templeton prize.

But the really telling thing is this companion piece at the Guardian‘s website by Mark Vernon. (Another piece by Jerry Coyne provides some balance.) The real problem with the Templeton Foundation, in my view, is that it works very hard to give people a false impression that science and religion are actually reconciling, not just that they should be. If you want to see the publicity machine at work, this piece is a perfect example. Here’s the money paragraph:

But with Rees’s acceptance, the substantial resources of the Templeton Foundation have, in effect, been welcomed at the heart of the British scientific establishment. That such a highly regarded figure has received its premier prize will make it that little bit harder for Dawkins to sustain respect amongst his peers for his crusade against religion.

There you go — now that such a distinguished and respectable scientist has accepted the Templeton Prize, we may conclude that “the British scientific establishment” is rejecting Dawkins and his fellow noisome atheists in favor of warm and fuzzy Templetonianism. That’s exactly the publicity effect they are hoping for.

In unrelated news, Mark Vernon spent time at Cambridge in a journalism fellowship paid for by the Templeton Foundation. Have to hand it to them, these guys know how to get a message out.

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Poetry Night

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I’m participating in a fun program at the L.A. Central Library tonight — a conversation with poet Jane Hirshfield. It’s part of the ALOUD program, a great series of lectures, discussions and performances. Times are tough for libraries, but I do hope that they find away to stay vibrant; a good library offers an enormous amount to the community that other institutions simply don’t.

Why physics and poetry? For purposes of this discussion they’ve been united under the banner of “The Nature of Observation.” That’s not just a saucy provocation — there’s something substantive underneath. We observe the world all the time, in ways both automatic and reflective. Both physics and poetry have as a primary motivation the attempt to improve upon our superficial observations of the world. In physics we simplify and quantify, looking for formal patterns underlying how reality works; in poetry we illuminate and suggest, using the power of metaphor and imagery to draw connections that aren’t immediately obvious. In both cases, we’re trying to deepen our understanding by subjecting the world to closer scrutiny than it ordinarily gets.

That’s my line, anyway. Jane Hirshfield is a wonderful poet, and the discussion should be a lot of fun. I wanted to include one of her poems, but I couldn’t decide which one, so here are two. If you like them, there are more where those came from.
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Debating William Lane Craig

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William Lane Craig is a philosopher and theologian, most famous for advocating the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God. As far as I can tell, he is fairly well-respected in the theology community; I cited him among other people in my recent paper. He’s also a frequent participants in debates against atheists. These are slightly weird events; everyone says they’re a terrible idea, but everyone seems to willingly participate in them. Personally I think they can be a very useful forum, if done well.

Craig recently debated Lawrence Krauss in an event that got a lot of publicity. You can read Craig’s post-mortem reflections here; in response, Krauss has offered his own thoughts on how things went down, which are posted at Pharyngula. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube, but be warned it’s a long multi-part extravaganza.

Evidence for God: William Lane Craig vs Lawrence Krauss (1 of 6) - Introduction

As to who won, it’s a mixed bag. Craig is a very polished debater, and has his pitch honed to a fine sheen; every sentence makes a succinct point. On the other hand, many of his sentences are simply false. For example, he argues that the universe can’t be eternal, because infinity is an self-contradictory notion, because “infinity minus infinity” has no correct answer. This is not an unfair paraphrase.

In response, Lawrence was game, but much more impressionistic, with a style more appropriate to a public talk than to a formal debate. It depends on what you’re looking for, of course; he did have the advantage of being right. Craig is sufficiently good at debating that atheists are now advising each other to stay away from him for fear of looking bad — e.g. here and here. I sympathize with the general message — don’t get into something like this unless you know what’s coming and are truly prepared — but not with the final impression, that atheists should just steer clear. We should be good at presenting our arguments, and ready to do so. Craig is wrong about many things, but he’s not an out-and-out crackpot like Hugh Ross or Ken Ham. A good debate could be very interesting and helpful to thoughtful people who haven’t yet made up their minds. Being correct is already a huge advantage; we should be able to make our side clear using the force of reason, like we’re always telling people we do.

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Lifestyle Choices

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It’s hard to have a clear-eyed discussion about academic jobs and tenure, both because emotions and stakes are very high and because everyone (including me) tends to universalize their personal experience. So let me just jot down some closing thoughts in the interest of clarity.

As Julianne says, there is a worry that passionate young scientists who read about how hard it is to get jobs or tenure will be dissuaded from even trying. I certainly appreciate that, and wouldn’t want to be responsible for scaring anyone away from this job I love so much myself. On the other hand, there is a countervailing worry: that in our attempts to convey our own enthusiasm for this career, we will be insufficiently honest about the difficult challenges it entails. I want to be as clear and open as possible about both the joys and the hurdles, and leave it up to responsible individuals to make their own choices. Of course there are many people who happily violate various of the guidelines I suggested, and nevertheless have no trouble getting tenure. It’s the underlying of the guidelines, not any of the individual points, that I would rather have explicit than hidden.

I sometimes hear people complain that senior scientists paint a rosy picture to lure unsuspecting students into their labs, shielding them from the harsh realities of the job market, just to squeeze a few years of indentured servitude out of them before they are blindsided by the realities of the academic career path. Most such griping, I figure, has to be some kind of defense mechanism; I certainly know that when I was in grad school we were all completely aware of what the job market was really like, and talked about it all the time. I make sure to talk openly about it with prospective students, and with students who want to have me as their advisor. But my sense is that there is not as much open talk about the tenure process, so I thought I could add some perspective. My guidelines were quite purposefully stark, to balance some of the vagueness that often characterizes the topic. As long as the institution of tenure exists, some people will be denied it, which is inevitable; what is not fine is if people are legitimately surprised when it happens. That should never occur.

It shouldn’t come as news that getting tenure at a top place requires a certain amount of focus and dedication to the task at hand. It’s not nearly as bad as, say, a concert violinist or an olympic gymnast. Only a very few people get to have these highly sought-after jobs, and it will naturally be beneficial to try as hard as you can if you want to be one of them. My purpose in the blog post was to emphasize what form that trying should take if that is your goal, not to frighten people with how hard it is.

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