# Proxies for Proxies

Why pay scientists?

Maybe you care about science itself. You think that exploring the world should be one of our central goals as human beings, that it “makes our country worth defending”.

Maybe you care about technology. You support science because, down the line, you think it will give us new capabilities that improve people’s lives. Maybe you expect this to happen directly, or maybe indirectly as “spinoff” inventions like the internet.

Maybe you just think science is cool. You want the stories that science tells: they entertain you, they give you a place in the world, they help distract from the mundane day to day grind.

Maybe you just think that the world ought to have scientists in it. You can think of it as a kind of bargain, maintaining expertise so that society can tackle difficult problems. Or you can be more cynical, paying early-career scientists on the assumption that most will leave academia and cheapen labor costs for tech companies.

Maybe you want to pay the scientists to teach, to be professors at universities. You notice that they don’t seem to be happy if you don’t let them research, so you throw a little research funding at them, as a treat.

Maybe you just want to grow your empire: your department, your university, the job numbers in your district.

In most jobs, you’re supposed to do what people pay you to do. As a scientist, the people who pay you have all of these motivations and more. You can’t simply choose to do what people pay you to do.

So you come up with a proxy. You sum up all of these ideas, into a vague picture of what all those people want. You have some idea of scientific quality: not just a matter of doing science correctly and carefully, but doing interesting science. It’s not something you ever articulate. It’s likely even contradictory, after all, the goals it approximates often are. Nonetheless, it’s your guide, and not just your guide: it’s the guide of those who hire you, those who choose if you get promoted or whether you get more funding. All of these people have some vague idea in their head of what makes good science, their own proxy for the desires of the vast mass of voters and decision-makers and funders.

But of course, the standard is still vague. Should good science be deep? Which topics are deeper than others? Should it be practical? Practical for whom? Should it be surprising? What do you expect to happen, and what would surprise you? Should it get the community excited? Which community?

As a practicing scientist, you have to build your own proxy for these proxies. The same work that could get you hired in one place might meet blank stares at another, and you can’t build your life around those unpredictable quirks. So you make your own vague idea of what you’re supposed to do, an alchemy of what excites you and what makes an impact and what your friends are doing. You build a stand-in in your head, on the expectation that no-one else will have quite the same stand-in, then go out and convince the other stand-ins to give money to your version. You stand on a shifting pile of unwritten rules, subtler even than some artists, because at the end of the day there’s never a real client to be seen. Just another proxy.

# Carving Out the Possible

If you imagine a particle physicist, you probably picture someone spending their whole day dreaming up new particles. They figure out how to test those particles in some big particle collider, and for a lucky few their particle gets discovered and they get a Nobel prize.

Occasionally, a wiseguy asks if we can’t just cut out the middleman. Instead of dreaming up particles to test, why don’t we just write down every possible particle and test for all of them? It would save the Nobel committee a lot of money at least!

It turns out, you can sort of do this, through something called Effective Field Theory. An Effective Field Theory is a type of particle physics theory that isn’t quite true: instead, it’s “effectively” true, meaning true as long as you don’t push it too far. If you test it at low energies and don’t “zoom in” too much then it’s fine. Crank up your collider energy high enough, though, and you expect the theory to “break down”, revealing new particles. An Effective Field Theory lets you “hide” unknown particles inside new interactions between the particles we already know.

To help you picture how this works, imagine that the pink and blue lines here represent familiar particles like electrons and quarks, while the dotted line is a new particle somebody dreamed up. (The picture is called a Feynman diagram, if you don’t know what that is check out this post.)

In an Effective Field Theory, we “zoom out”, until the diagram looks like this:

Now we’ve “hidden” the new particle. Instead, we have a new type of interaction between the particles we already know.

So instead of writing down every possible new particle we can imagine, we only have to write down every possible interaction between the particles we already know.

That’s not as hard as it sounds. In part, that’s because not every interaction actually makes sense. Some of the things you could write down break some important rules. They might screw up cause and effect, letting something happen before its cause instead of after. They might screw up probability, giving you a formula for the chance something happens that gives a number greater than 100%.

Using these rules you can play a kind of game. You start out with a space representing all of the interactions you can imagine. You begin chipping at it, carving away parts that don’t obey the rules, and you see what shape is left over. You end up with plots that look a bit like carving a ham.

People in my subfield are getting good at this kind of game. It isn’t quite our standard fare: usually, we come up with tricks to make calculations with specific theories easier. Instead, many groups are starting to look at these general, effective theories. We’ve made friends with groups in related fields, building new collaborations. There still isn’t one clear best way to do this carving, so each group manages to find a way to chip a little farther. Out of the block of every theory we could imagine, we’re carving out a space of theories that make sense, theories that could conceivably be right. Theories that are worth testing.

# The Most Anthropic of All Possible Worlds

Today, we’d call Leibniz a mathematician, a physicist, and a philosopher. As a mathematician, Leibniz turned calculus into something his contemporaries could actually use. As a physicist, he championed a doomed theory of gravity. In philosophy, he seems to be most remembered for extremely cheaty arguments.

I don’t blame him for this. Faced with a tricky philosophical problem, it’s enormously tempting to just blaze through with an answer that makes every subtlety irrelevant. It’s a temptation I’ve succumbed to time and time again. Faced with a genie, I would always wish for more wishes. On my high school debate team, I once forced everyone at a tournament to switch sides with some sneaky definitions. It’s all good fun, but people usually end up pretty annoyed with you afterwards.

People were annoyed with Leibniz too, especially with his solution to the problem of evil. If you believe in a benevolent, all-powerful god, as Leibniz did, why is the world full of suffering and misery? Leibniz’s answer was that even an all-powerful god is constrained by logic, so if the world contains evil, it must be logically impossible to make the world any better: indeed, we live in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire famously made fun of this argument in Candide, dragging a Leibniz-esque Professor Pangloss through some of the most creative miseries the eighteenth century had to offer. It’s possibly the most famous satire of a philosopher, easily beating out Aristophanes’ The Clouds (which is also great).

Physicists can also get accused of cheaty arguments, and probably the most mocked is the idea of a multiverse. While it hasn’t had its own Candide, the multiverse has been criticized by everyone from bloggers to Nobel prizewinners. Leibniz wanted to explain the existence of evil, physicists want to explain “unnaturalness”: the fact that the kinds of theories we use to explain the world can’t seem to explain the mass of the Higgs boson. To explain it, these physicists suggest that there are really many different universes, separated widely in space or built in to the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Each universe has a different Higgs mass, and ours just happens to be the one we can live in. This kind of argument is called “anthropic” reasoning. Rather than the best of all possible worlds, it says we live in the world best-suited to life like ours.

I called Leibniz’s argument “cheaty”, and you might presume I think the same of the multiverse. But “cheaty” doesn’t mean “wrong”. It all depends what you’re trying to do.

Leibniz’s argument and the multiverse both work by dodging a problem. For Leibniz, the problem of evil becomes pointless: any evil might be necessary to secure a greater good. With a multiverse, naturalness becomes pointless: with many different laws of physics in different places, the existence of one like ours needs no explanation.

In both cases, though, the dodge isn’t perfect. To really explain any given evil, Leibniz would have to show why it is secretly necessary in the face of a greater good (and Pangloss spends Candide trying to do exactly that). To explain any given law of physics, the multiverse needs to use anthropic reasoning: it needs to show that that law needs to be the way it is to support human-like life.

This sounds like a strict requirement, but in both cases it’s not actually so useful. Leibniz could (and Pangloss does) come up with an explanation for pretty much anything. The problem is that no-one actually knows which aspects of the universe are essential and which aren’t. Without a reliable way to describe the best of all possible worlds, we can’t actually test whether our world is one.

The same problem holds for anthropic reasoning. We don’t actually know what conditions are required to give rise to people like us. “People like us” is very vague, and dramatically different universes might still contain something that can perceive and observe. While it might seem that there are clear requirements, so far there hasn’t been enough for people to do very much with this type of reasoning.

However, for both Leibniz and most of the physicists who believe anthropic arguments, none of this really matters. That’s because the “best of all possible worlds” and “most anthropic of all possible worlds” aren’t really meant to be predictive theories. They’re meant to say that, once you are convinced of certain things, certain problems don’t matter anymore.

Leibniz, in particular, wasn’t trying to argue for the existence of his god. He began the argument convinced that a particular sort of god existed: one that was all-powerful and benevolent, and set in motion a deterministic universe bound by logic. His argument is meant to show that, if you believe in such a god, then the problem of evil can be ignored: no matter how bad the universe seems, it may still be the best possible world.

Similarly, the physicists convinced of the multiverse aren’t really getting there through naturalness. Rather, they’ve become convinced of a few key claims: that the universe is rapidly expanding, leading to a proliferating multiverse, and that the laws of physics in such a multiverse can vary from place to place, due to the huge landscape of possible laws of physics in string theory. If you already believe those things, then the naturalness problem can be ignored: we live in some randomly chosen part of the landscape hospitable to life, which can be anywhere it needs to be.

So despite their cheaty feel, both arguments are fine…provided you agree with their assumptions. Personally, I don’t agree with Leibniz. For the multiverse, I’m less sure. I’m not confident the universe expands fast enough to create a multiverse, I’m not even confident it’s speeding up its expansion now. I know there’s a lot of controversy about the math behind the string theory landscape, about whether the vast set of possible laws of physics are as consistent as they’re supposed to be…and of course, as anyone must admit, we don’t know whether string theory itself is true! I don’t think it’s impossible that the right argument comes around and convinces me of one or both claims, though. These kinds of arguments, “if assumptions, then conclusion” are the kind of thing that seems useless for a while…until someone convinces you of the conclusion, and they matter once again.

So in the end, despite the similarity, I’m not sure the multiverse deserves its own Candide. I’m not even sure Leibniz deserved Candide. But hopefully by understanding one, you can understand the other just a bit better.

# Types of Undergrad Projects

I saw a discussion on twitter recently, about PhD programs in the US. Apparently universities are putting more and more weight whether prospective students published a paper during their Bachelor’s degree. For some, it’s even an informal requirement. Some of those in the discussion were skeptical that the students were really contributing to these papers much, and thought that most of the work must have been done by the papers’ other authors. If so, this would mean universities are relying more and more on a metric that depends on whether students can charm their professors enough to be “included” in this way, rather than their own abilities.

I won’t say all that much about the admissions situation in the US. (Except to say that if you find yourself making up new criteria to carefully sift out a few from a group of already qualified-enough candidates, maybe you should consider not doing that.) What I did want to say a bit about is what undergraduates can typically actually do, when it comes to research in my field.

First, I should clarify that I’m talking about students in the US system here. Undergraduate degrees in Europe follow a different path. Students typically take three years to get a Bachelor’s degree, often with a project at the end, followed by a two-year Master’s degree capped with a Master’s thesis. A European Master’s thesis doesn’t have to result in a paper, but is often at least on that level, while a European Bachelor project typically isn’t. US Bachelor’s degrees are four years, so one might expect a Bachelor’s thesis to be in between a European Bachelor’s project and Master’s thesis. In practice, it’s a bit different: courses for Master’s students in Europe will generally cover material taught to PhD students in the US, so a typical US Bachelor’s student won’t have had some courses that have a big role in research in my field, like Quantum Field Theory. On the other hand, the US system is generally much more flexible, with students choosing more of their courses and having more opportunities to advance ahead of the default path. So while US Bachelor’s students don’t typically take Quantum Field Theory, the more advanced students can and do.

Because of that, how advanced a given US Bachelor’s student is varies. A small number are almost already PhD students, and do research to match. Most aren’t, though. Despite that, it’s still possible for such a student to complete a real research project in theoretical physics, one that results in a real paper. What does that look like?

Sometimes, it’s because the student is working with a toy model. The problems we care about in theoretical physics can be big and messy, involving a lot of details that only an experienced researcher will know. If we’re lucky, we can make a simpler version of the problem, one that’s easier to work with. Toy models like this are often self-contained, the kind of thing a student can learn without all of the background we expect. The models may be simpler than the real world, but they can still be interesting, suggesting new behavior that hadn’t been considered before. As such, with a good choice of toy model an undergraduate can write something that’s worthy of a real physics paper.

Other times, the student is doing something concrete in a bigger collaboration. This isn’t quite the same as the “real scientists” doing all the work, because the student has a real task to do, just one that is limited in scope. Maybe there is particular computer code they need to get working, or a particular numerical calculation they need to do. The calculation may be comparatively straightforward, but in combination with other results it can still merit a paper. My first project as a PhD student was a little like that, tackling one part of a larger calculation. Once again, the task can be quite self-contained, the kind of thing you can teach a student over a summer project.

Undergraduate projects in the US won’t always result in a paper, and I don’t think anyone should expect, or demand, that they do. But a nontrivial number do, and not because the student is “cheating”. With luck, a good toy model or a well-defined sub-problem can lead a Bachelor’s student to make a real contribution to physics, and get a paper in the bargain.

# Trapped in the (S) Matrix

I’ve tried to convince you that you are a particle detector. You choose your experiment, what actions you take, and then observe the outcome. If you focus on that view of yourself, data out and data in, you start to wonder if the world outside really has any meaning. Maybe you’re just trapped in the Matrix.

From a physics perspective, you actually are trapped in a sort of a Matrix. We call it the S Matrix.

“S” stands for scattering. The S Matrix is a formula we use, a mathematical tool that tells us what happens when fundamental particles scatter: when they fly towards each other, colliding or bouncing off. For each action we could take, the S Matrix gives the probability of each outcome: for each pair of particles we collide, the chance we detect different particles at the end. You can imagine putting every possible action in a giant vector, and every possible observation in another giant vector. Arrange the probabilities for each action-observation pair in a big square grid, and that’s a matrix.

Actually, I lied a little bit. This is particle physics, and particle physics uses quantum mechanics. Because of that, the entries of the S Matrix aren’t probabilities: they’re complex numbers called probability amplitudes. You have to multiply them by their complex conjugate to get probability out.

Ok, that probably seemed like a lot of detail. Why am I telling you all this?

What happens when you multiply the whole S Matrix by its complex conjugate? (Using matrix multiplication, naturally.) You can still pick your action, but now you’re adding up every possible outcome. You’re asking “suppose I take an action. What’s the chance that anything happens at all?”

The answer to that question is 1. There is a 100% chance that something happens, no matter what you do. That’s just how probability works.

We call this property unitarity, the property of giving “unity”, or one. And while it may seem obvious, it isn’t always so easy. That’s because we don’t actually know the S Matrix formula most of the time. We have to approximate it, a partial formula that only works for some situations. And unitarity can tell us how much we can trust that formula.

Imagine doing an experiment trying to detect neutrinos, like the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. For you to detect the neutrinos, they must scatter off of electrons, kicking them off of their atoms or transforming them into another charged particle. You can then notice what happens as the energy of the neutrinos increases. If you do that, you’ll notice the probability also start to increase: it gets more and more likely that the neutrino can scatter an electron. You might propose a formula for this, one that grows with energy. [EDIT: Example changed after a commenter pointed out an issue with it.]

If you keep increasing the energy, though, you run into a problem. Those probabilities you predict are going to keep increasing. Eventually, you’ll predict a probability greater than one.

That tells you that your theory might have been fine before, but doesn’t work for every situation. There’s something you don’t know about, which will change your formula when the energy gets high. You’ve violated unitarity, and you need to fix your theory.

In this case, the fix is already known. Neutrinos and electrons interact due to another particle, called the W boson. If you include that particle, then you fix the problem: your probabilities stop going up and up, instead, they start slowing down, and stay below one.

For other theories, we don’t yet know the fix. Try to write down an S Matrix for colliding gravitational waves (or really, gravitons), and you meet the same kind of problem, a probability that just keeps growing. Currently, we don’t know how that problem should be solved: string theory is one answer, but may not be the only one.

So even if you’re trapped in an S Matrix, sending data out and data in, you can still use logic. You can still demand that probability makes sense, that your matrix never gives a chance greater than 100%. And you can learn something about physics when you do!

# At New Ideas in Cosmology

The Niels Bohr Institute is hosting a conference this week on New Ideas in Cosmology. I’m no cosmologist, but it’s a pretty cool field, so as a local I’ve been sitting in on some of the talks. So far they’ve had a selection of really interesting speakers with quite a variety of interests, including a talk by Roger Penrose with his trademark hand-stippled drawings.

One thing that has impressed me has been the “interdisciplinary” feel of the conference. By all rights this should be one “discipline”, cosmology. But in practice, each speaker came at the subject from a different direction. They all had a shared core of knowledge, common models of the universe they all compare to. But the knowledge they brought to the subject varied: some had deep knowledge of the mathematics of gravity, others worked with string theory, or particle physics, or numerical simulations. Each talk, aware of the varied audience, was a bit “colloquium-style“, introducing a framework before diving in to the latest research. Each speaker knew enough to talk to the others, but not so much that they couldn’t learn from them. It’s been unexpectedly refreshing, a real interdisciplinary conference done right.

# At Mikefest

I’m at a conference this week of a very particular type: a birthday conference. When folks in my field turn 60, their students and friends organize a special conference for them, celebrating their research legacy. With COVID restrictions just loosening, my advisor Michael Douglas is getting a last-minute conference. And as one of the last couple students he graduated at Stony Brook, I naturally showed up.

The conference, Mikefest, is at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, just outside of Paris. Mike was a big supporter of the IHES, putting in a lot of fundraising work for them. Another big supporter, James Simons, was Mike’s employer for a little while after his time at Stony Brook. The conference center we’re meeting in is named for him.

I wasn’t involved in organizing the conference, so it was interesting seeing differences between this and other birthday conferences. Other conferences focus on the birthday prof’s “family tree”: their advisor, their students, and some of their postdocs. We’ve had several talks from Mike’s postdocs, and one from his advisor, but only one from a student. Including him and me, three of Mike’s students are here: another two have had their work mentioned but aren’t speaking or attending.

Most of the speakers have collaborated with Mike, but only for a few papers each. All of them emphasized a broader debt though, for discussions and inspiration outside of direct collaboration. The message, again and again, is that Mike’s work has been broad enough to touch a wide range of people. He’s worked on branes and the landscape of different string theory universes, pure mathematics and computation, neuroscience and recently even machine learning. The talks generally begin with a few anecdotes about Mike, before pivoting into research talks on the speakers’ recent work. The recent-ness of the work is perhaps another difference from some birthday conferences: as one speaker said, this wasn’t just a celebration of Mike’s past, but a “welcome back” after his return from the finance world.

One thing I don’t know is how much this conference might have been limited by coming together on short notice. For other birthday conferences impacted by COVID (and I’m thinking of one in particular), it might be nice to have enough time to have most of the birthday prof’s friends and “academic family” there in person. As-is, though, Mike seems to be having fun regardless.

Happy Birthday Mike!

# You Are a Particle Detector

I mean that literally. True, you aren’t a 7,000 ton assembly of wires and silicon, like the ATLAS experiment inside the Large Hadron Collider. You aren’t managed by thousands of scientists and engineers, trying to sift through data from a billion pairs of protons smashing into each other every second. Nonetheless, you are a particle detector. Your senses detect particles.

Your ears take vibrations in the air and magnify them, vibrating the fluid of your inner ear. Tiny hairs communicate that vibration to your nerves, which signal your brain. Particle detectors, too, magnify signals: photomultipliers take a single particle of light (called a photon) and set off a cascade, multiplying the signal one hundred million times so it can be registered by a computer.

Your nose and tongue are sensitive to specific chemicals, recognizing particular shapes and ignoring others. A particle detector must also be picky. A detector like ATLAS measures far more particle collisions than it could ever record. Instead, it learns to recognize particular “shapes”, collisions that might hold evidence of something interesting. Only those collisions are recorded, passed along to computer centers around the world.

Your sense of touch tells you something about the energy of a collision: specifically, the energy things have when they collide with you. Particle detectors do this with calorimeters, that generate signals based on a particle’s energy. Different parts of your body are more sensitive than others: your mouth and hands are much more sensitive than your back and shoulders. Different parts of a particle detector have different calorimeters: an electromagnetic calorimeter for particles like electrons, and a less sensitive hadronic calorimeter that can catch particles like protons.

You are most like a particle detector, though, in your eyes. The cells of your eyes, rods and cones, detect light, and thus detect photons. Your eyes are more sensitive than you think: you are likely able to detect even a single photon. In an experiment, three people sat in darkness for forty minutes, then heard two sounds, one of which might come accompanied by a single photon of light flashed into their eye. The three didn’t notice the photons every time, that’s not possible for such a small sensation: but they did much better than a random guess.

(You can be even more literal than that. An older professor here told me stories of the early days of particle physics. To check that a machine was on, sometimes physicists would come close, and watch for flashes in the corner of their vision: a sign of electrons flying through their eyeballs!)

You are a particle detector, but you aren’t just a particle detector. A particle detector can’t move, its thousands of tons are fixed in place. That gives it blind spots: for example, the tube that the particles travel through is clear, with no detectors in it, so the particle can get through. Physicists have to account for this, correcting for the missing space in their calculations. In contrast, if you have a blind spot, you can act: move, and see the world from a new point of view. You observe not merely a series of particles, but the results of your actions: what happens when you turn one way or another, when you make one choice or another.

So while you are a particle detector, what’s more, you’re a particle experiment. You can learn a lot more than those big heaps of wires and silicon could on their own. You’re like the whole scientific effort: colliders and detectors, data centers and scientists around the world. May you learn as much in your life as the experiments do in theirs.

# Things Which Are Fluids

For overambitious apes like us, adding integers is the easiest thing in the world. Take one berry, add another, and you have two. Each remains separate, you can lay them in a row and count them one by one, each distinct thing adding up to a group of distinct things.

Other things in math are less like berries. Add two real numbers, like pi and the square root of two, and you get another real number, bigger than the first two, something you can write in an infinite messy decimal. You know in principle you can separate it out again (subtract pi, get the square root of two), but you can’t just stare at it and see the parts. This is less like adding berries, and more like adding fluids. Pour some water in to some other water, and you certainly have more water. You don’t have “two waters”, though, and you can’t tell which part started as which.

Some things in math look like berries, but are really like fluids. Take a polynomial, say $5 x^2 + 6 x + 8$. It looks like three types of things, like three berries: five $x^2$, six $x$, and eight $1$. Add another polynomial, and the illusion continues: add $x^2 + 3 x + 2$ and you get $6 x^2+9 x+10$. You’ve just added more $x^2$, more $x$, more $1$, like adding more strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries.

But those berries were a choice you made, and not the only one. You can rewrite that first polynomial, for example saying $5(x^2+2x+1) - 4 (x+1) + 7$. That’s the same thing, you can check. But now it looks like five $x^2+2x+1$, negative four $x+1$, and seven $1$. It’s different numbers of different things, blackberries or gooseberries or something. And you can do this in many ways, infinitely many in fact. The polynomial isn’t really a collection of berries, for all it looked like one. It’s much more like a fluid, a big sloshing mess you can pour into buckets of different sizes. (Technically, it’s a vector space. Your berries were a basis.)

Even smart, advanced students can get tripped up on this. You can be used to treating polynomials as a fluid, and forget that directions in space are a fluid, one you can rotate as you please. If you’re used to directions in space, you’ll get tripped up by something else. You’ll find that types of particles can be more fluid than berry, the question of which quark is which not as simple as how many strawberries and blueberries you have. The laws of physics themselves are much more like a fluid, which should make sense if you take a moment, because they are made of equations, and equations are like a fluid.

So my fellow overambitious apes, do be careful. Not many things are like berries in the end. A whole lot are like fluids.

# W is for Why???

Have you heard the news about the W boson?

The W boson is a fundamental particle, part of the Standard Model of particle physics. It is what we call a “force-carrying boson”, a particle related to the weak nuclear force in the same way photons are related to electromagnetism. Unlike photons, W bosons are “heavy”: they have a mass. We can’t usually predict masses of particles, but the W boson is a bit different, because its mass comes from the Higgs boson in a special way, one that ties it to the masses of other particles like the Z boson. The upshot is that if you know the mass of a few other particles, you can predict the mass of the W.

And according to a recent publication, that prediction is wrong. A team analyzed results from an old experiment called the Tevatron, the biggest predecessor of today’s Large Hadron Collider. They treated the data with groundbreaking care, mindbogglingly even taking into account the shape of the machine’s wires. And after all that analysis, they found that the W bosons detected by the Tevatron had a different mass than the mass predicted by the Standard Model.

How different? Here’s where precision comes in. In physics, we decide whether to trust a measurement with a statistical tool. We calculate how likely the measurement would be, if it was an accident. In this case: how likely it would be that, if the Standard Model was correct, the measurement would still come out this way? To discover a new particle, we require this chance to be about one in 3.5 million, or in our jargon, five sigma. That was the requirement for discovering the Higgs boson. This super-precise measurement of the W boson doesn’t have five sigma…it has seven sigma. That means, if we trust the analysis team, then a measurement like this could come accidentally out of the Standard Model only about one in a trillion times.

Ok, should we trust the analysis team?

If you want to know that, I’m the wrong physicist to ask. The right physicists are experimental particle physicists. They do analyses like that one, and they know what can go wrong. Everyone I’ve heard from in that field emphasized that this was a very careful group, who did a lot of things impressively right…but there is still room for mistakes. One pointed out that the new measurement isn’t just inconsistent with the Standard Model, but with many previous measurements too. Those measurements are less precise, but still precise enough that we should be a bit skeptical. Another went into more detail about specific clues as to what might have gone wrong.

If you can’t find an particle experimentalist, the next best choice is a particle phenomenologist. These are the people who try to make predictions for new experiments, who use theoretical physics to propose new models that future experiments can test. Here’s one giving a first impression, and discussing some ways to edit the Standard Model to agree with the new measurement. Here’s another discussing what to me is an even more interesting question: if we take these measurements seriously, both the new one and the old ones, then what do we believe?

I’m not an experimentalist or a phenomenologist. I’m an “amplitudeologist”. I work not on the data, or the predictions, but the calculational tools used to make those predictions, called “scattering amplitudes”. And that gives me a different view on the situation.

See in my field, precision is one of our biggest selling-points. If you want theoretical predictions to match precise experiments, you need our tricks to compute them. We believe (and argue to grant agencies) that this precision will be important: if a precise experiment and a precise prediction disagree, it could be the first clue to something truly new. New solid evidence of something beyond the Standard Model would revitalize all of particle physics, giving us a concrete goal and killing fruitless speculation.

This result shakes my faith in that a little. Probably, the analysis team got something wrong. Possibly, all previous analyses got something wrong. Either way, a lot of very careful smart people tried to estimate their precision, got very confident…and got it wrong.

(There’s one more alternative: maybe million-to-one chances really do crop up nine times out of ten.)

If some future analysis digs down deep in precision, and finds another deviation from the Standard Model, should we trust it? What if it’s measuring something new, and we don’t have the prior experiments to compare to?

(This would happen if we build a new even higher-energy collider. There are things the collider could measure, like the chance one Higgs boson splits into two, that we could not measure with any earlier machine. If we measured that, we couldn’t compare it to the Tevatron or the LHC, we’d have only the new collider to go on.)

Statistics are supposed to tell us whether to trust a result. Here, they’re not doing their job. And that creates the scary possibility that some anomaly shows up, some real deviation deep in the sigmas that hints at a whole new path for the field…and we just end up bickering about who screwed it up. Or the equally scary possibility that we find a seven-sigma signal of some amazing new physics, build decades of new theories on it…and it isn’t actually real.

We don’t just trust statistics. We also trust the things normal people trust. Do other teams find the same result? (I hope that they’re trying to get to this same precision here, and see what went wrong!) Does the result match other experiments? Does it make predictions, which then get tested in future experiments?

All of those are heuristics of course. Nothing can guarantee that we measure the truth. Each trick just corrects for some of our biases, some of the ways we make mistakes. We have to hope that’s good enough, that if there’s something to see we’ll see it, and if there’s nothing to see we won’t. Precision, my field’s raison d’être, can’t be enough to convince us by itself. But it can help.