Monthly Archives: April 2015

Outreach as the End Product of Science

Sabine Hossenfelder recently wrote a blog post about physics outreach. In it, she identifies two goals: inspiration, and education.

Inspiration outreach is all about making science seem cool. It’s the IFLScience side of things, stoking the science fandom and getting people excited.

Education outreach, by contrast, is about making sure peoples’ beliefs are accurate. It teaches the audience something about the world around them, giving them a better understanding of how the world works.

In both cases, though, Sabine finds it hard to convince other scientists that outreach is valuable. Maybe inspiration helps increase grant funding, maybe education makes people vote better on scientific issues like climate change…but there isn’t a lot of research that shows that outreach really accomplishes either.

Sabine has a number of good suggestions in her post for how to make outreach more effective, but I’d like to take a step back and suggest that maybe we as a community are thinking about outreach in the wrong way. And in order to do that, I’m going to do a little outreach myself, and talk about black holes.

The black hole of physics outreach.

Black holes are collapsed stars, crushed in on themselves by their own gravity so much that one you get close enough (past the event horizon) not even light can escape. This means that if you sent an astronaut past the event horizon, there would be no way for them to communicate with you: any way they might try to get information to you would travel, at most, at the speed of light.

Einstein’s equations keep working fine past the event horizon, but despite that there are some people who view any prediction of what happens inside to be outside the scope of science. If there’s no way to report back, then how could we ever test our predictions? And if we can’t test our predictions, aren’t we missing the cornerstone of science itself?

In a rather entertaining textbook, physicists Edwin F. Taylor and John Archibald Wheeler suggest a way around this: instead of sending just one astronaut, send multiple! Send a whole community! That way, while we might not be able to test our predictions about the inside of the event horizon, the scientific community that falls in certainly can. For them, those predictions aren’t just meaningless speculation, but testable science.

If something seems unsatisfying about this, congratulations: you now understand the purpose of outreach.

As long as scientific advances never get beyond a small community, we’re like Taylor and Wheeler’s astronauts inside the black hole. We can test our predictions among each other, verify them to our heart’s content…but if they never reach the wider mass of humanity, then what have we really accomplished? Have we really created knowledge, when only a few people will ever know it?

In my Who Am I? post, I express the hope that one day the science I blog about will be as well known as electrons and protons. That might sound farfetched, but I really do think it’s possible. In one hundred years, electrons and protons went from esoteric discoveries of a few specialists to something children learn about in grade school. If science is going to live up to its purpose, if we’re going to escape the black hole of our discipline, then in another hundred years quantum field theory needs to do the same. And by doing outreach work, each of us is taking steps in that direction.

String Theorists Who Don’t Touch Strings

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This week I’ve been busy, attending a workshop here at Perimeter on Superstring Perturbation Theory.

Superstrings are the supersymmetric strings that string theorists use to describe fundamental particles, while perturbation theory is the trick, common in almost every area of physics, of solving a problem by a series of increasingly precise approximations.

Based on that description, you’d think that superstring perturbation theory would be a central topic in string theory research. You wouldn’t expect it to be the sort of thing only a few people at the top of the field dabble in. You definitely wouldn’t expect one of the speakers at the workshop to mention that this might be the first conference on superstring perturbation theory he’s been to since the 1980’s.

String perturbation theory is an important subject, but it’s not one many string theorists use. And the reason why is that, oddly enough, very few string theorists actually use strings.

Looking at arXiv as I’m writing this, I can see only one paper in the theoretical physics section that directly uses strings. Most of them use something else: either older concepts like black holes, quantum field theory, and supergravity, or newer ones like d-branes. If you talked to the people who wrote those papers, though, most of them would describe themselves as string theorists.

The reason for the disconnect is that string theory as a field is much more than just the study of strings. String theory is a ten-dimensional universe (or eleven with M theory), where different ways of twisting up some of the dimensions result in different apparent physics in the remaining ones. It’s got strings, but also higher-dimensional membranes (and in the eleven dimensions of M theory it only has membranes, not strings). It’s the recipe for a long list of exotic quantum field theories, and a list of possible relations between them. It’s a new way to look at geometry, to think about the intersection of the nature of space and the dynamics of what inhabits it.

If string theory were really just about strings, it likely wouldn’t have grown any bigger than its quantum gravity rivals, like Loop Quantum Gravity. String theory grew because it inspired research directions that went far afield, and far beyond its conceptual core.

That’s part of why most string theorists will be baffled if you insist that string theory needs proof, or that it’s not the right approach to quantum gravity. For most string theorists, it doesn’t matter whether we live in a stringy world, whether gravity might eventually be described by another model. For most string theorists, string theory is a tool, one that opened up fields of inquiry that don’t have much to do with predicting the output of the LHC or describing the early universe. Or, in many cases, actually using strings.

Who Plagiarizes an Acknowledgements Section?

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I’ve got plagiarists on the brain.

Maybe it was running into this interesting discussion about a plagiarized application for the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Maybe it’s due to the talk Paul Ginsparg, founder of arXiv, gave this week about, among other things, detecting plagiarism.

Using arXiv’s repository of every paper someone in physics thought was worth posting, Ginsparg has been using statistical techniques to sift out cases of plagiarism. Probably the funniest cases involved people copying a chunk of their thesis acknowledgements section, as excerpted here. Compare:

“I cannot describe how indebted I am to my wonderful girlfriend, Amanda, whose love and encouragement will always motivate me to achieve all that I can. I could not have written this thesis without her support; in particular, my peculiar working hours and erratic behaviour towards the end could not have been easy to deal with!”

“I cannot describe how indebted I am to my wonderful wife, Renata, whose love and encouragement will always motivate me to achieve all that I can. I could not have written this thesis without her support; in particular, my peculiar working hours and erratic behaviour towards the end could not have been easy to deal with!”

Why would someone do this? Copying the scientific part of a thesis makes sense, in a twisted way: science is hard! But why would someone copy the fluff at the end, the easy part that’s supposed to be a genuine take on your emotions?

The thing is, the acknowledgements section of a thesis isn’t exactly genuine. It’s very formal: a required section of the thesis, with tacit expectations about what’s appropriate to include and what isn’t. It’s also the sort of thing you only write once in your life: while published papers also have acknowledgements sections, they’re typically much shorter, and have different conventions.

If you ever were forced to write thank-you notes as a kid, you know where I’m going with this.

It’s not that you don’t feel grateful, you do! But when you feel grateful, you express it by saying “thank you” and moving on. Writing a note about it isn’t very intuitive, it’s not a way you’re used to expressing gratitude, so the whole experience feels like you’re just following a template.

Literally in some cases.

That sort of situation: where it doesn’t matter how strongly you feel something, only whether you express it in the right way, is a breeding ground for plagiarism. Aunt Mildred isn’t going to care what you write in your thank-you note, and Amanda/Renata isn’t going to be moved by your acknowledgements section. It’s so easy to decide, in that kind of situation, that it’s better to just grab whatever appropriate text you can than to teach yourself a new style of writing.

In general, plagiarism happens because there’s a disconnect between incentives and what they’re meant to be for. In a world where very few beginning graduate students actually have a solid research plan, the NSF’s fellowship application feels like a demand for creative lying, not an honest way to judge scientific potential. In countries eager for highly-cited faculty but low on preexisting experts able to judge scientific merit, tenure becomes easier to get by faking a series of papers than by doing the actual work.

If we want to get rid of plagiarism, we need to make sure our incentives match our intent. We need a system in which people succeed when they do real work, get fellowships when they honestly have talent, and where we care about whether someone was grateful, not how they express it. If we can’t do that, then there will always be people trying to sneak through the cracks.

What’s the Matter with Dark Matter, Matt?

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It’s very rare that I disagree with Matt Strassler. That said, I can’t help but think that, when he criticizes the press for focusing their LHC stories on dark matter, he’s missing an important element.

From his perspective, when the media says that the goal of the new run of the LHC is to detect dark matter, they’re just being lazy. People have heard of dark matter. They might have read that it makes up 23% of the universe, more than regular matter at 4%. So when an LHC physicist wants to explain what they’re working on to a journalist, the easiest way is to talk about dark matter. And when the journalist wants to explain the LHC to the public, they do the same thing.

This explanation makes sense, but it’s a little glib. What Matt Strassler is missing is that, from the public’s perspective, dark matter really is a central part of the LHC’s justification.

Now, I’m not saying that the LHC’s main goal is to detect dark matter! Directly detecting dark matter is pretty low on the LHC’s list of priorities. Even if it detects a new particle with the right properties to be dark matter, it still wouldn’t be able to confirm that it really is dark matter without help from another experiment that actually observes some consequence of the new particle among the stars. I agree with Matt when he writes that the LHC’s priorities for the next run are

studying the newly discovered Higgs particle in great detail, checking its properties very carefully against the predictions of the “Standard Model” (the equations that describe the known apparently-elementary particles and forces) to see whether our current understanding of the Higgs field is complete and correct, and
trying to find particles or other phenomena that might resolve the naturalness puzzle of the Standard Model, a puzzle which makes many particle physicists suspicious that we are missing an important part of the story, and
seeking either dark matter particles or particles that may be shown someday to be “associated” with dark matter.

Here’s the thing, though:

From the public’s perspective, why do we need to study the properties of the Higgs? Because we think it might be different than the Standard Model predicts.

Why do we think it might be different than the Standard Model predicts? More generally, why do we expect the world to be different from the Standard Model at all? Well there are a few reasons, but they generally boil down to two things: the naturalness puzzle, and the fact that the Standard Model doesn’t have anything that could account for dark matter.

Naturalness is a powerful motivation, but it’s hard to sell to the general public. Does the universe appear fine-tuned? Then maybe it just is fine-tuned! Maybe someone fine-tuned it!

These arguments miss the real problem with fine-tuning, but they’re hard to correct in a short article. Getting the public worried about naturalness is tough, tough enough that I don’t think we can demand it of the average journalist, or accuse them of being lazy if they fail to do it.

That leaves dark matter. And for all that naturalness is philosophically murky, dark matter is remarkably clear. We don’t know what 96% of the universe is made of! That’s huge, and not just in a “gee-whiz-cool” way. It shows, directly and intuitively, that physics still has something it needs to solve, that we still have particles to find. Unless you are a fan of (increasingly dubious) modifications to gravity like MOND, dark matter is the strongest possible justification for machines like the LHC.

The LHC won’t confirm dark matter on its own. It might not directly detect it, that’s still quite up-in-the-air. And even if it finds deviations from the Standard Model, it’s not likely they’ll be directly caused by dark matter, at least not in a simple way.

But the reason that the press is describing the LHC’s mission in terms of dark matter isn’t just laziness. It’s because, from the public’s perspective, dark matter is the only vaguely plausible reason to spend billions of dollars searching for new particles, especially when we’ve already found the Higgs. We’re lucky it’s such a good reason.

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