Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Frank and Betsy and a bit of CMS

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

File this under W for Wow-I-never-thought-I’d-see-this.

Big article in today’s NYT on the interplay of science discoveries and wild rumors. And…blogs are a big part of the current “God-particle” kerfluffle.

“It is exciting even if you think the chances of it being true are only 0 or 10 percent,” said Tommaso Dorigo, from the University of Padua in Italy, who helped spread the D Zero rumor in June on his blog, A Quantum Diaries Survivor.

Wow, the NY Times expects its readers will know what a blog is.

I do wish, though, that science articles didn’t lean on sports metaphors so heavily. The exciting thing about the Higgs boson is the science, not the “race” to be first to see it.

CERN’s Microcosm garden holds four giant chunks of classic physics equipment. Even if they were unlabelled, which they aren’t, you could guesstimate their chronological sequence using my Star/Wars/Trek Method to diagnose One-ness, Two-ness, and Three-ness.

One-ness: Early members of a high-tech sequence get built on mega-ideas with micro-money, by enthusiasts running on caffeine and pizza. To diagnose one-ness, look for stuff cobbled together. In the CERN garden, their first particle accelerator is built of unshiny sheet metal and old plumber’s pipe on a model developed for Rutherford back in the 1930s. Definite one-ness!

Two-ness: Most great ideas never get past the stage of one-ness, sad to say. But sometimes they do–sometimes the first item was such a big success, you get actual money to do what you love, only better! The best diagnostic for two-ness is craftsmanship plus simplicity. The original wild-eyed dreamer eagerly hires big-unionized workers who already know how to make big shiny things. The goal in stage two is to make something gorgeous that will do all the great stuff you wished you could do at stage one.

In CERN’s Microcosm garden, “two-ness” marks the gorgeously gleaming silver rocket-shippy thing that would look perfect with alien tentacles severed by rayguns mere microns away from the space-maiden’s shiny bikini–but I digress. And this “rocket” is really a CERN bubble chamber formerly known as BEBC, which unpoetically means “Big European Bubble Chamber.”

Three-ness: Three-ness marks the onset of “no more mistakes.” Let’s be responsible here–thousands of people depend on this project’s success. The mark of three-ness is shiny Frankenstein stuff–as if the skilled craftsmen of stage two now get conflicting orders from five different foremen. Let’s build a sphere–no, a tube–ok, a sphere on a tube. Give it lots of portholes–no, give it seams for access–no, both seams and portholes! I’m sure that’s not how the big copper resonator for CERN’s recent LEP experiment got designed, but you have to admit, that is very much how it looks. Definite three-ness.

Giant projects need three-ness, (and four-ness (and five-ness!)) CERN (where are they, ten-ness?) seems to be doing much better on all this than did the Star Wars franchise. No JarJar Binks, yet,–and hey, thanks for that World Wide Web thing, guys, really enjoying that!

There’s a lot of great one-ness that couldn’t get built in the first place if it didn’t have somebody else’s good solid three-ness to build on top of.

p.s. This image is part of a series from a great Fark contest for Star Wars vs Star Trek. This version was uploaded by Fark photo-ninja And-1!

All the world’s a perch

Originally uploaded by carpe icthus

A flock of ungendered sparrows–ungendered to me, that is–swooped into my back yard this evening. One female cardinal, already taking a bath, seemed content with their company.

Male and female cardinals look to an untutored eye like two different species–he metrosexual red, she muted soft buff colors with just that subtle hint on her beak of scarlet. Her bright-red lipstick, my mother used to call it.

Sparrows have gender-signs their mating partners decode–but they don’t broadcast their mating preferences out to the parts of the universe they don’t want to mate with. Energy that could have gone into scarlet feathers or lipstick is leftover for sparrows to do other stuff they care about–seed-crushing muscle maybe, or louder cheep-cheepers.

Now my personal dress-style is much more like Mrs. Cardinal’s than like Ms. Sparrow’s–but one of the things I’ve loved about the Web is that it’s let me try on gender-neutral identities. In places like Slashdot or an IRC chatroom, a woman can jump into the conversation using some “nickname” that doesn’t yell “Hey, I’m a female!”

I’m told that Jane Austen never wrote a scene where men were talking together without any women–because she herself could never witness such happenings. If she could have hung out in IRC, posting as “darcy,” just think how much more fun and trouble she could have created.

rex

Originally uploaded by simbi0tic star bubbles

In 1903, Mark Twain was already poking fun at his era’s version of Intelligent Design. For example…

According to Kelvin’s figures it took 99,968,000 years to prepare the world for man, impatient as the Creator doubtless was to see him and admire him. But a large enterprise like this has to be conducted warily, painstakingly, logically. It was foreseen that man would have to have the oyster. Therefore the first preparation was made for the oyster.

Very well, you cannot make an oyster out of whole cloth, you must make the oyster’s ancestor first. This is not done in a day. You must make a vast variety of invertebrates, to start with — belemnites, trilobites, jebusites, amalekites, and that sort of fry, and put them to soak in a primary sea, and wait and see what will happen. Some will be a disappointments – the belemnites, the ammonites and such; they will be failures, they will die out and become extinct, in the course of the 19,000,000 years covered by the experiment, but all is not lost, .. and at last the first grand stage in the preparation of the world for man stands completed, the Oyster is done.

An oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than a scientist has; and so it is reason ably certain that this one jumped to the conclusion that the nineteen-million years was a preparation for him…

Thanks for sharing to Tingilinde, where you can read the rest of Twain’s inspired nonsense.

Finnish engineer in pink overalls underpins ATLAS

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

I spent today way down under the earth near Geneva, visiting CERN’s big particle detectors (still being built but expecting data in 2008.)

I’m told the engineer in charge of the scaffolding that helps other engineers clamber around building the big ATLAS detector is this woman, said to be from Finland.

Today deep in the earth, tomorrow up in the sky again, headed for home. So much good stuff, no time to blog anything more tonight–our taxi arrives at 7 a.m., groan, groan!

Linnés Hammarby

Originally uploaded by pk01.

On May 23, Sweden says happy 300th birthday to the scientist just quoted–the not-very-modest Carolus Linnaeus.

The bright-red cabinet shown is Linnaeus’s “hard disk,” quips its photographer. Linnaeus’s claim to fame was his simple method for organizing the vast confusion of plant and animal species, using two-part scientific names. One giant step for Homo sapiens!

One could do the math (though I won’t) comparing the complexity of all those genomes to the number of infobits on the Internet. David Weinberger’s new book Everything is Miscellaneous makes a compelling case that we Web 2.0 folk are creating value as each of us mini-adds our own tags, playlists, and hyperlinks to that vast digital pileup of miscellanity.

David says that Linnaeus’s reliance on paper to organize his thoughts fell far short of the tricks computers can do with pixels and bits. Very true–and yet, no matter how smart computers become, there’s still an important role for human beings in finding some simple thread through the world’s vast labyrinth and putting that thread in the hand of a fellow seeker.

As Weinberger himself does — and as Linnaeus did.

Billions invested, a cast of thousands waits for colossal collisions…

No, not Nascar but fans of CERN’s particle-smasher, expecting suicide crashes of proton-on-proton by 2008. (Nice article in the NYT by Dennis Overbye, plus lots of pictures.) Frank and I head to Switzerland May 30 for some tours that I hope will create less controversy than Robert Scoble’s!

I bugged Frank at dinner for a plain explanation of what these new experiments–higher energies than all previous ones–are going to show. Translating his words into my own simplified words–we’re smashing a giant metaphorical goose-egg to find out which of three kinds of stuff might lurk inside.

• Possibility #1: Evidence for supersymmetry(golden goose egg!) A bunch of new particles whose behavior strongly suggests we’ve discovered a matching set to the ones seen before–squarks, gluinos, and similar strange etc.
• Possibility #2: New totally weird stuff (metaphorically–I dunno–mermaids swimming in eggyolk?). Stuff nobody predicted, so we have to go back to zero and re-tool our theories to fit the new mess–maybe with a suspicion that CERN’s detectors weren’t working properly.
• Possibility #3: Just what we’ve seen before (awww, egg yolk and egg white). The same exact particles we already know about, doing the stuff that we already understand.

Bonus links!!!

• I stuck the particle-smashing image from the NYT next to the rose window of the Cathedral of Chartres (a high-minded collaboration on a massive scale that predates CERN by just a bit less than 1000 years) because Frank says that particle colliders are the Gothic cathedrals of our era.
• The very first image on the World Wide Web was those amazing singers Les Horribles Cernettes! (Thanks to Lubos Motl for this info.)
• Cernettes singing “You Only Love Your Collider” in RealMedia video.

Here’s a fun science mystery with surprising ways to catch bad guys and metadata flavor–which makes it hard to know where to begin this blogpost…

Bad guys are juicy–suppose that you’re a bad guy. Suppose you want to fake bookkeeping data or election results. Well, bwa-ha-ha, bad guy, you’re going to leave a mathematical “bad-guys-R-us” slimy trail–because fake random numbers like yours don’t obey Benford’s Law. Real ones do.

Benford’s Law describes–oddly, nobody understands why–many if not most huge collections of numbers.* Baseball statistics, lengths of rivers, areas of counties. Half-lives of radioactive isotopes. And vote counts, when those vote counts aren’t tampered with.

Big numbers have nine choices for their first digit–1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9. Right? So you’d expect that one-ninth of all big numbers would start with each of those digits.

Bzzzt, wrong! Almost 1/3 of Benford-law-following numbers start with 1–just for example. Naive human fraudsters, on the other hand, create fake numbers that mostly start with 5 or 6–poking their inventions into what they imagine is anonymity’s forgiving middle.

Now for the dirty math books–I knew you were waiting–Benford’s Law was found, independently, in 1881 (Simon Newcomb) and 1938 (Frank Benford). Lisa Zyga at PhysOrg.com says:

Benford and Newcomb stumbled upon the law in the same way: while flipping through pages of a book of logarithmic tables, they noticed that the pages in the beginning of the book were dirtier than the pages at the end. This meant that their colleagues who shared the library preferred quantities beginning with the number one in their various disciplines…

Yes, dirty library-book pages! Important pre-Google metadata about what people before you found interesting.

Bad guys who created fake election data imagined that they were just creating new data–but Benford’s Law meant they left metadata behind. Forensic teams who want to find election fraud can use Benford’s Law to find out which sets of data have bad guys behind them.

Now, as for you good guys, for deeper insight into metadata, I recommend David Weinberger’s new book, Everything is Miscellanous. Meanwhile, for you bad guys, one message of both David Weinberger and Frank Benford is paraphrased clearly in Matthew 10:26:

…there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.

Uh-oh. And I consider my own self a good guy.

* p.s. Not all data sets follow Benford’s Law. Both Wikipedia and Zyga give counter-examples, such as (to quote Zyga) “data sets that are arbitrary and contain restrictions..For example, lottery numbers, telephone numbers, gas prices, dates, and the weights or heights of a group of people.”

Ah 1999–the summer my husband Frank Wilczek almost blew up the universe, as recently dredged up by the latest New Yorker.

Fans of the universe will be glad to know that you were in no danger, because I was on the job on your behalf.

1999 Betsy: But the universe is not going to blow up, right?
1999 Frank: Of course not.
Betsy: You really thought about it and it’s not.
Frank: Yes, I did. And no, it’s not.
Betsy: Good, because if it blew up I’d be so mad at you…

The New Yorker starts their version of this story when Scientific American decided to publish…

…a letter to the editor about Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, then nearing completion. The letter suggested that the Brookhaven collider might produce a “mini black hole” that would be drawn toward the center of the earth, thus “devouring the entire planet within minutes.” Frank Wilczek, a physicist who would later win a Nobel Prize, wrote a response for the magazine.

Wilczek dismissed the idea of mini black holes devouring the earth, but went on to raise a new possibility: the collider could produce strangelets, a form of matter that some think might exist at the center of neutron stars. In that case, he observed, “one might be concerned about an ‘ice-9’-type transition,” wherein all surrounding matter could be converted into strangelets and the world as we know it would vanish. Wilczek labelled his own suggestion “not plausible,” but the damage had been done. “BIG BANG MACHINE COULD DESTROY EARTH” ran the headline in the London Times. Brookhaven was forced to appoint a committee to look into this and other disaster scenarios. (The committee concluded that “we are safe from a strangelet initiated catastrophe.”)

“I know Frank Wilczek,” Engelen told me. “He is an order of magnitude smarter than I am. But he was perhaps a bit naïve.” Engelen said that CERN officials are now instructed, with respect to the L.H.C.’s world-destroying potential, “not to say that the probability is very small but that the probability is zero.”

One missing piece of this widely-quoted version–The letter Frank wrote for SA was never published. Frank wrote them a carefully detailed reply to a non-physicist’s black-hole concerns. What SA published, with Frank’s name at the end of it, had been edited down to much more a dramatic nub by somebody somewhere inside SA.

If I’d just had a blog then, we could have talked back to this story in real time.

Jim Clash of The Adventurers" with Frank and Betsy

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

…and even more so when hanging out with Jim Clash for his Forbes TV show The Adventurers.

Another adventurer (the one who took this photo) was Kevin O’Brien, whose adventures involve exploring caves and the waters therein. Watch out for Gollum, Kevin!

Before the show, I got to geek out with cool TV studio toys, and afterward we went out to lunch at the Gotham. Now, if only Jim had told us about his own terrible South Pole adventure before I ordered that plate of petit fours…