Science experts reach out to TV, movies

November 17, 2008 | 3:55 pm

The National Academy of Sciences launched a clearinghouse of experts called the Science and Entertainment Exchange for the movie and television industry to tap into in an effort to make entertainment as scientifically accurate as the general population will tolerate.

This is a great idea. Hopefully, the ease and speed at which the academy can produce informed advice on a variety of scientific fields at minimal cost will remove hurdles that can keep producers and screenwriters from double checking scientific plotlines or instrument usage.

Jennifer Ouellette, author of The Physics of The Buffyverse and the blog “Cocktail Party Physics” has been chosen as the program director. Ouellette has a talent for making dry science entertaining and using everyday analogies to break down the barriers of scientific jargon for movie and television viewers. In her latest blog post, she talks about her new position and the increasing use of scientific themes in popular media.

The trend has created strong emotions among scientists and science purists and spawned blogs, articles, and Web sites pointing out when the media gets it wrong, when it gets science correct but reinforce negative science stereotypes and when the media get it right.

You can even find a Web site devoted to using a rating system to rank the accuracy of the physics in film.

One of the best examples right now of depicting science accurately and doing so within one of the most esoteric fields of science–high-energy particle physics–is the television show Numb3rs, which discusses string theory, the search for the Higgs boson, and has a main character working at the DZero experiment at the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab. The National Science Foundation award the show’s producers a service award in 2007 for helping people understand science.

But accuracy isn’t always the best policy, some people argue. Science has to pick its battles or lose the overall war of trying to re-engage the public with science as a first step toward eventual public scientifc literacy. In some cases, getting people talking about science, even accurately-fuzzy science, is better than not initiating the dialogue at all, according to articles in symmetry magazine and Popsci.com.

What do you think?

Tona Kunz

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CDF's ghosts: The next step and speculation

November 14, 2008 | 7:42 pm

Fermilab’s CDF collaboration has been in the spotlight for a few weeks, thanks to an analysis reporting an unexplained population of muons in its data set. Various science news outlets—including New Scientist, Discover, and Nature—and the blogosphere covered the story including speculation that the muons could be the product of a new particle, which yielded the catch phrase “the ghosts in the machine.” Now theorists and phenomenologists are taking a crack at it. Speculation aside, the CDF collaboration is not making any specific claims about interpretation of the data but is set on solving the mystery, and have offered their analysis to the DZero collaboration, also based at Fermilab’s Tevatron, for comparison.

The original paper popped up on the physics preprint arXiv on October 29, and scientists were waiting in the wings to discuss the results as soon as they could. The CDF detector, which collects collisions of protons and anti-protons, found a population of muons for which the analysts could not identify a source. Not only did the paper admit being unable to find the source, but declined to speculate on possibilities. Such an unexplained spray of particles could be background noise, a systematic error, or it could be a sign of a new particle.

This week, speculation about the muon source has jumped out of the blogosphere and into the arXiv, a place for physicists to post scholarly articles prior to them being accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. At least three papers appeared on the arXiv this week addressing the CDF results (the blog Not Even Wrong discusses a few others); one postulating that the muons are the decay product of a new particle. However, this is merely theory aligning itself with one possibility, and offers no greater insight into the actual data. A paper by Matthew J. Strassler of Rutgers University ends with this philosophical paragraph: “…the challenges that this analysis faces are useful as a springboard for discussion…Opening our minds regarding the possible signatures that nature might provide, and finding new techniques for expanding the range of reasonable searches at hadron colliders, is surely beneficial for the field.”

CDF analysts have been working on the current analysis for more than a year, but can’t explain the surplus of the muons. When the group submitted the paper to internal peer review, it underwent another six months of intense scrutiny by the collaboration. The analysis reached what CDF co-spokesperson Robert Roser calls “a plateau of understanding,” at which point the collaboration agreed they could do no more in the short term.

And this is where CDF received attention it didn’t expect. The particle physics community hotly debates the questions of whether or not to publish a scientific paper that does not offer an explanation of its findings. Some argue, for various reasons, that a collaboration should only publish analysis in which they can fully explain the data. Others support publishing results with unanswered questions to welcome outside assistance. Due to the inconclusive nature of the paper, about one third of the collaboration members chose to omit their names from the authors list. Roser says it’s not uncommon to have a few members decline to sign a collaboration paper, but this percentage is fairly large. Rumors suggested that the collaborators left their names off this CDF paper because of the paper’s results, rather than because of its inconclusive nature.

In reality, the CDF paper’s claims aren’t controversial, because it hasn’t made any claims at all. It reports an unexplained occurrence, but makes no assumptions about the cause. “As a collaboration we’re not claiming any new physics. We did not feel that there was a clear cut case for any of that and we want to be responsible,” says co-spokesperson Jacobo Konigsberg.

But the spokespersons happily agree that they welcome the speculations of others. “It’s part of science,” says Roser. “Scientists see an effect and try to understand it. They’ll try to fit it to preferred models. But if the speculation turns out to be wrong, the analysis is still right.

“This isn’t the end of story,” continues Roser. The publication of the paper doesn’t end the analysis, but marks the beginning of what could be years of work. DZero might decide to do a similar analysis, offering a comparison study. If DZero could replicate the data set, it would almost certainly rule out the possibility that the muons are merely a phenomenon of the CDF apparatus.

The CDF representatives also emphasize that further data collection could not have assisted the analysis. Neither, they say, might a more energetic particle collider such as the LHC. At this point, they cannot predict where they will find a solution to the problem. Besides the DZero comparison, Konigsberg says CDF might repeat the experiment and analysis with other triggers. “Triggers” are selection mechanisms for weeding out the most interesting data from collisions given that there is too much data to record it all, but they might change what the data sets look like. “We are beginning to consider which other data sets we should look at to see if…this effect shows up or not,” he says.

“If we knew exactly what to do next and how to do it, we would have,” says Roser. “Will we get to the bottom of this in a few months? Probably not. Now we have to effectively peel back the next layer of the onion. There are still things that we can do ourselves, they’re just longer term projects. We’ll keep digging deeper, break the analysis into smaller pieces and examine each piece. Really try to understand what potential effect can explain this.”

Calla Cofield

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Putting the science in science fiction

November 14, 2008 | 3:12 pm

This weekend, people from around the world will travel to Lombard, Ill., for the WindyCon science fiction convention. For some guests, the convention is more about science than fiction.

At least 10 physicists and technicians from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., regularly attend science fiction conventions. Many of them are drawn together by a mutual fascination with the playful side of technology–the science fair experiment, all grown up. These are the kinds of people who, like senior technician Jeff Larson, build seven-foot-tall singing Tesla coils in their garages. With such unusual hobbies, it seems natural they might also have at least a passing interest in reading science fiction.

“Science fiction is the literature of technoculture,” says Bill Higgins, a radiation safety physicist at Fermilab who has been attending conventions since he was in college.

Higgins, an enthusiast of rocket packs and flying cars, will give a lecture at this year’s convention explaining how the scientific study of antimatter inspired science fiction authors.

“I’m a science guy,” Higgins says. “At some point in my life, I realized I knew about a lot of neat things and could tell others about them.”

Higgins has found a cache of people who want to listen and who can teach him as well.

Larson also found a receptive audience. He had been building Tesla coils since high school, but later, once he started working and raising a family, he devoted less and less time to his hobby. He regained interest when friends asked him to demonstrate a Tesla coil for a science fiction convention.

“It was fun to have people have an appreciation for this thing I could do,” Larson says.

Fermilab physicist Todd Johnson found a place in the science fiction convention community through his art and invention. He began attending conventions during college and since has developed a group of friends who share his love of using science creatively.

Johnson specializes in making holograms and Lichtenberg figures, blocks of acrylic with what resemble miniature lightning bolts etched into them in a snowflake pattern. He creates them by using an accelerator to send about a million billion electrons into a piece of insulated plastic. Johnson then pierces the plastic, which releases the electrons. They flood out of the block in a flash of light and leave a pattern of forked trails behind.

Sometimes Johnson gives presentations at the conventions, but often his real motivation for attending is the chance to share new inventions and tweaked gadgetry in his own circle.

“[The convention] is an excuse to get together with friends from out of town,” he says.

Kathryn Grim

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Party for world's largest cosmic-ray observatory

November 13, 2008 | 1:28 pm

This Friday, scientists eager to learn more about the most violent processes in the universe will celebrate. The day marks the official inauguration of the southern site of the Pierre Auger Observatory, a project to study the highest-energy cosmic rays. So far, there is no consensus on what type of cosmic object (perhaps a black hole?) can create the highest-energy cosmic rays, which have energies 10 million times higher than the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator. Physicists don’t even agree on the mechanism that can propel particles to such high energies. It might be some sort of shock wave, but nothing is known for sure.

One of the 1600 detector tanks of the Auger Observatory

Auger’s southern observatory is located in Malargüe, Argentina, just east of the Andes Mountains. It consists of an array of 1600 detectors spread over 3000 square kilometers in Argentina’s Mendoza Province. Surrounding the array is a set of 24 fluorescence telescopes that view the faint ultraviolet light emitted by the cosmic-ray shower particles as they cascade through the Earth’s atmosphere. The project’s second phase includes plans for a northern hemisphere site in Colorado, USA, and enhancements to the southern hemisphere site.

The Pierre Auger collaboration already published its first physics results in the fall of 2007, while its array of detectors was still under construction. The collaboration found that the arrival directions of the highest-energy cosmic rays are not evenly distributed across the sky. Instead, the arrival directions correlate with the distribution of nearby galaxies that contain actively radiating black holes. The result made the cover of the Nov. 9, 2007, issue of Science magazine, and the result was selected as one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in 2007 by several publications.

The Auger Web site features a nice program that allows anybody in the world to explore a one-percent sample of the cosmic rays recorded by the southern observatory so far. The site also features photos and videos.

Kurt Riesselmann

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Cash shortage for SESAME project in Middle East

November 12, 2008 | 2:30 pm

Just a week after the inauguration of the SESAME (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East) facility in Jordan, the BBC Radio Science Unit reports that the project is foundering for lack of a few million dollars in funding.

We have reported on SESAME repeatedly in symmetry as it exemplifies the very international nature of particle physics, and demonstrates some of the key values important to many scientists: the breaking down of borders between cultures, using science as the unifier.

SESAME has an interesting history. It started with a donation of the BESSY-I synchrotron from DESY in Germany, after that machine was being dismantled to make room for an upgraded machine. With that foundation, various countries from the Middle East signed on as partners to help build the first synchrotron facility in the region.

Herman Winick, from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and one of the founders of the SESAME concept, told me of attending a meeting in the Middle East and being overwhelmed by seeing high-level representatives from Israel and the Palestinian National Authority sitting at the same table working out details of the SESAME agreement.

That crossing of traditional boundaries is not unique. Last November, we ran a story about a party at CERN which Israeli and Palestinian students organized together.

This year, close on the heels of the French, Dutch, American, Italian, and German-Austrian parties, an Israeli-Palestinian party was held in Building 216. Israeli and Palestinian flags flew side by side, and a banner on the wall proclaimed “Because things can be different.” The word “Peace” was also displayed in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. The party had been organized by four Israelis and one Palestinian, Muhammad Yousef Alhroob; he was the first Palestinian to ever take part in the program.

It seems clear that science has the potential to bring together people in a way that could facilitate more peaceful interactions and that SESAME could be a very effective tool in that process. It would certainly be a shame if the project stalled because of what is a relatively small amount of money. It is US$19 million short and as the BBC reports:

Yasser Khalil, the Egyptian administrative director of Sesame, ruefully recalled a recent online auction for number plates in the Saudi peninsula.

“The number plate 5-5-5-5-5, five 5s, was bought for $15m…” The money, he implies, is clearly there.

David Harris

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Power outage shows strength of Tevatron team

November 11, 2008 | 10:03 am

When most of Fermilab went dark Wednesday, non-essential support staff went home, but many engineers, technicians, and physicists picked up flashlights and buckled down for work.

Instead of their normal jobs–running the cutting-edge machinery in an international race to discovery–the men and women were switching to the role of a high-tech pit crew: inspecting and returning to life the highest-energy particle accelerator currently operating.

At 2:30 p.m. Wednesday, a power arc at a power line on site had brought Fermilab’s accelerator complex and its key component the Tevatron–a 4-mile particle raceway–to a standstill. Two nearly 6000-ton particle detectors reading data from an average of 2.5 million proton-antiproton collisions per second ground to a halt as the engine powering bunches of particles racing toward them silenced.

The outage wasn’t a monumental problem. Outages of up to a few seconds occur several times a year. Outages of up to 10 minutes occur occasionally. They cause little concern because the temperature of the superconducting magnets in the Tevatron particle collider rises slowly.

But an outage of an hour, which occurs only once every one or two years, creates some challenges. Such outages push the system past a temperature threshold that usually requires a day or two of downtime. It’s a speed bump, but it’s also a chance to test how well the divisions of the laboratory work together.

First steps to recovery

Fermilab employees took on their repair roles like a well-oiled machine.

“When the lights went out,” said Bob Mau, head of Accelerator Division Operations, “within minutes, 40 people from all divisions were in the Control Room to find out what was going on and talking about what to do.”

The Accelerator Division’s Controls Department shut down non-essential equipment to conserve backup power, to avoid overheating the now non-air conditioned rooms and to keep key control room systems operating after the power outage.

In the event of an outage, the beams racing through the accelerator complex are aborted to prevent damage to accelerator components.

The helium refrigeration system that cools the magnets to make their coils superconducting shuts down. The helium in the magnet’s cryogenic system warms and some of it escapes as it turns from liquid to gas.

Getting a giant race back on track

To restore lab-wide electricity, Fermilab crews rerouted power from the downed main power station on site to the Kautz Road substation within an hour of the power outage. But that didn’t mean the Tevatron could be turned back on as easily as flipping a light switch.

First, operating systems for the United States’ last large atom smasher have to come back online: computers for use by the control room and cryogenics team, the cryogenic system, the vacuum system, the water must be restored. Then the beam can be turned back on. Beam returned to the neutrino experiments, the test beam area, and neutron therapy by Monday. The Tevatron could return to operation along with the CDF and DZero detectors as early as this evening.

“We have got a lot of dedicated people working a lot of hours right now,” Accelerator Division head Roger Dixon, told a standing-room only crowd of supervisors, technicians, and physicists working to coordinate efforts. “I know they are willing to work until the job is done but it is more important to not to let them work beyond their limits. Getting the job done safely is more important than getting the machine up early.”

What happened?

An anchor-shaped bracket connects the electric lines to the pi-shaped power poles north of Wilson Hall. A metal pin on one of the brackets became loose, causing a static line that serves as a lightening rod to fall and hit the insulator and power lines. The ensuing arc of electricity triggered a shut down of the master power station.  Power to everywhere except the Village and Main Injector vanished.

Crews from Fermilab, Commonwealth Edison, and the city of Batavia, which maintains the lines, inspected all the poles Wednesday night, finding two other loose pins. Experts say the wind combined with either a faulty spring, oversized pinhole, or improper installation likely caused the failures.

“It was like a football game by the poles Wednesday,” said site engineer Prem Mattappally about the large number of bucket and lighting trucks and inspectors. ComEd used a helicopter to further inspect the area Thursday morning.

As soon as power to the site was stabilized, operations people from several divisions and sections huddled together to report on their respective tire kicking of their parts of the laboratory’s machinery. People were assigned repair jobs. Shifts were set up to allow everyone a chance to get into the cramped tunnels and detector halls to tinker under the hoods of the complex systems.

Some items were damaged, but so far, everything has been easily fixable with spare parts on site. Extended outages always cause some damage and the laboratory plans for that.

Sixty percent of the helium inventory was lost but enough remained to refill the Tevatron for operation before reordering more. A water pipe split, a couple leaks formed, a couple computer hard drives were lost, and a turbine sustained damage–all anticipated occurrences.

Rather than waiting for ComEd to finish repairs to the master power station Friday morning, the DZero and CDF collaborations used stored program runs Wednesday to test their detectors’ parts and slowly applied power to sections of their detectors to make sure they could withstand a full startup scheduled for Monday. The MiniBooNE neutrino experiment performed similar checks. So far, there appears to be no damage.

By Thursday morning, the Booster accelerator had cooling water circulating and the ion pumps were back on. The collider detectors were under inspection, and the chiller was restarted for the NuMI target hall.

At the Tevatron, kicker magnets and beam separators were being conditioned, the vacuum system restored and back ups for the computer systems recharged.

Friday started the complicated process of slowly cooling down the Tevatron to minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit—close to absolute zero. It typically takes a minimum of 24 to 48 hours to purify the helium system and then restore the cryogenic system.

Like a fine-tuned race car engine, you can’t just throw the throttle on the Tevatron without warming it up, or in this case cooling it down, but with patience, skill, and dedicated employees you can get even town-sized raceways and three-story particle detectors humming again.

Tona Kunz

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3-D printer puts detector at your fingertips

November 10, 2008 | 5:12 pm

Norman Graf (left) and Marco Oriunno with their model and CAD drawing (background). (Photo by Calla Cofield.)

Blueprints decorate the desk top and design printouts cover the walls of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory physicist Marco Oriunno’s office. They all display plans for a potential particle detector for the International Linear Collider. But to show off the detector, Oriunno goes straight for a pile of colorful plastic. He and SLAC’s Norman Graf stack the pieces together like oversized Legos and voilà! A 3-D version of the detector that can be displayed to scientists, engineers and other project members to help them better understand the massive detector they are trying to build.

Graf and Oriunno are planning the detector as members of the international Silicon Detector Design Collaboration. While design software allows Oriunni and Graf to map out the detector before it is built, Graf says the 3-D model reveals its physical structure in a way that can’t be achieved with software images alone. “It’s another learning tool. To have both the fully developed design in CAD [computer aided design] and the 3-D model makes a good convergence.”

The "printed" 3-D model of the ILC silicon detector. (Photo by Calla Cofield.)

Eight baseball-sized blue trapezoids (painted by Graf and Oriunno) represent a section of the detector used for muon identification, the barrel magnetic flux return. In the real detector, these trapezoids will weigh 400 metric tons each. A magnetic coil (silver) encloses further, central detection equipment, including the 12-sided hadronic calorimeter (purple), the electromagnetic calorimeter (not visible) and the tracking detectors (red).

The model answers questions for engineers about how to assemble the real thing. Graf and Oriunno explain that their detector could possibly share the beam with a second, so they need to make it mobile. The model may help engineers find a way of moving the detector without taking it apart.

The 3-D printer cost SLAC nearly $30,000, but it seems to be earning its keep quickly. For a machinist to create the model by hand would cost at least a few thousand dollars, Oriunno says. The printer produced the 3-D model for just a few hundred dollars. Instead of paying a machinist for every hour it takes to produce the model, the printer only requires manpower for setup and entry of commands. Then the machine runs by itself day and night, taking about one month to produce all the pieces for the detector model.

Graf and Oriunno say the printer is useful for generating rapid prototypes, and making new models if plans change or errors are detected. The two scientists say they will continue to use the printer to make 3-D models of smaller parts of the detector. Depending on the size and number of jobs in the queue, the printer runs non-stop for months, or remains available for immediate use.

This story first appeared in SLAC Today.

Calla Cofield

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LHC a best invention of 2008

November 7, 2008 | 2:25 pm

What’s better than a bionic hand, but not quite as good as an electric sports car? The Large Hadron Collider, according to TIME Magazine. This month the magazine awarded the LHC fifth place in its annual list of the top 50 inventions of the year.

The top invention of 2008 was a retail DNA test that makes personal genotyping available to anyone who can afford the $399 price. Rounding out the top five were a $100,000 electric sports car, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter set to launch in February 2009, and an online hub for network TV shows and movies.

Less highly-ranked, but still notable for physics fans were the Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory (#10); a memristor, a new kind of circuit that remembers its history even when turned off (#13); and an eco-friendly refrigerator design patented by Albert Einstein and a collaborator in 1930 (#31). And notable no matter what you’re a fan of: smog-busting cement and a moving skyscraper.

Of the LHC, TIME makes no excuses for naming it a best invention despite the recent setbacks, noting:

The mammoth machine will send protons wheeling in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light, then smash them together at 6,000 times a second to try to answer such deep questions as why mass exists and whether the universe has extra dimensions. If it takes a few extra months to find out, so what?

You can read about or watch the best inventions at TIME Magazine.

Katie Yurkewicz

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Fun aunt gives children a taste of cutting-edge physics

November 6, 2008 | 7:49 am

Tona Kunz

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Still three physicists in Congress

November 5, 2008 | 5:48 pm

After yesterday’s US elections, all three sitting physicists remain in Congress.

The three Congressmen are: Representative Vern Ehlers, Michigan; Representative Bill Foster, Illinois; and Representative Rush Holt, New Jersey.

The most recent to enter Congress was Bill Foster, ex-Fermilab physicist, who won his seat earlier in 2008 in a special election called after House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert stepped down.

David Harris

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