Unnecessary spin

A few people have asked me why I have not blogged about the recent announcement about, and publication of, results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which were widely touted as a possible breakthrough in the search for dark matter.

The reason I have not is simply that there are many other better informed commenters who have already done so. In case you have not yet read these accounts, you could do worse than going to Résonaances, or Ethan Siegel, or Stuart Clark in the Guardian, who provide commentary at different levels of technical detail. The simple short summary would be: AMS has not provided evidence about the nature of dark matter, nor is it likely to do so in the near future. The dramatic claims to the contrary are spin, pure and simple. Siegel in fact goes so far as to say "calling it misleading is generous, because I personally believe it is deceitful" (emphasis his own).

So I'm not going to make any more comments about that.

However, since this incident brought it up again, I do want to comment on a related piece of annoying spin, which is the habit of physicists in the business of communicating science to the public of making vastly exaggerated claims about the possible practical applications of fundamental physics. The example that caught my attention this week occurred when Maggie Aderin-Pocock – who is apparently a space science research fellow at UCL – appeared on the BBC's Today programme on Thursday to discuss the significance of the AMS findings.

At one point in the discussion the interviewer John Humphrys asked a slightly tricky question: I understand that dark matter and dark energy are endlessly fascinating, he said, and that learning about the composition of the universe is very exciting. But what practical benefits might it bring? The answer Aderin-Pocock gave was that if we understood what dark matter and dark energy were, we might be able to use them to supply ourselves with energy – dark matter as a fuel source.

I'm sorry, but that is just rubbish.

Unfortunately, it's the kind of rubbish that is increasingly commonly voiced by scientists. You may argue that Aderin-Pocock was simply commenting on something she didn't understand – and if you  listen to the whole interview (available here for a few days; skip to the segment between 1h 23m and 1h 26m), including the cringe-worthy suggestion that dark matter and dark energy are the same thing really (because E=mc², apparently), it's hard to avoid that conclusion. But a few weeks ago I thought I heard Andrew Pontzen and Tom Whyntie suggest something similar about the Higgs boson on BBC Radio 5 (unfortunately this episode is no longer on the iPlayer so I can't check the exact words they used). And here is Jon Butterworth seeming to suggest (in the midst of an otherwise reasonable piece) that the Higgs could be used to power interstellar travel ...

Why do people feel the need to do this? It's patently rubbish, and they know better. Do we as a scientific community feel that continued public support of science is so important that we should mislead or deceive the public in order to guarantee our future access to it? Do we feel that there is no convincing honest case to be made instead? Or are we just too lazy to make the honest case, and so rely on the catchy but inaccurate soundbite instead?

I think the sensible answer to the question John Humphrys posed would go something like this. Discovering the nature dark matter is a fascinating and exciting adventure. Knowing the answer will almost certainly have no practical applications whatsoever. However, on the journey to the answer we will have to develop new technologies and equipment (made of ordinary matter!) which may serendipitously turn out to have spin-off applications that we cannot yet foresee. More importantly, the very fact that the search is fascinating is part of what draws talented and creative young minds to physics – indeed to science – in the first place, from where they go on to enrich our society in a myriad different ways, none of which may later be connected to dark matter at all. I tried to make this case at greater length here in the early days of this blog.

It's a more subtle argument than just throwing empty phrases about "energy source" around, and it might be hard to reduce to a sound-byte. But it is justifiable, and also honest. And since science is after all about careful argumentation, let's have less spin all round please.

Things to Read, 28th July

Physics items:

• New results are in from the dark matter search at the XENON100 detector in Gran Sasso in Italy. See here for technical slides, or read the summaries at Quantum Diaries or Cosmic Variance. Basically, they see no dark matter events above the background expectation, so the exclusion limits on WIMP mass and cross-section are extended. As Sean Carroll points out, the results appear to be in some tension with some other experiments, but these things depend on theoretical assumptions about the nature of dark matter.
• In the Guardian, Jon Butterworth muses about the 'impact' of the discovery of the Higgs, and on the usefulness of 'impact' in general as a guide for deciding what scientific research to fund. There are some worthwhile points there, especially about who should get to decide which science has an 'impact' and which not. But I felt on some issues the piece was rather confused — he first seems to suggest that "a sense of progress" and the satisfaction of simply "adding to the body of human knowledge" are sufficient justification for funding fundamental research that may have no other forseeable benefit, but later says he disagrees with the statement that "the acquisition of knowledge is somehow morally or intellectually superior to the application or dissemination of knowledge". So which is it?
  I wrote about my own views on the justification for funding science research that has no obvious economic, medical or social payoff here. I do think it is justifiable, even if one can safely predict that there will never be any direct benefits from such research (serendipitous spin-offs, like the common examples of the internet or MRI, are a separate issue, but cannot be guaranteed). So it annoys me to see people constantly trying to justify studying the Higgs boson in terms of what hypothetical technological advances it might bring. Face it, there won't be any — if you don't believe me, here is Steven Weinberg saying much the same (among other interesting things!), or click here to see just how hard it is to come up with any remotely plausible technological speculations consistent with known physics.
  The point is that there already exist good enough reasons for funding fundamental research, so let's leave out all the rubbish about Higgs-powered spaceflight and so on, shall we?
• Readers may have already seen elsewhere the story of the physicist Paul Frampton, who has been in an Argentine jail for several months, facing charges of drug smuggling. It's a sad and frankly incredible story; I see (via Peter Woit) that Frampton expects he might be released soon (though he's been wrong about this before).

Other items:

• There is a fantastic super-slow-motion video of a lightning strike, shot at 7207 frames per second, available here, with a nice little explanation of the mechanism of the strike. I'd highly recommend it!
• A Canadian wonders whether the Euro is worth saving at all.
• Is there a magic button for the UK government to press? Do they want to press it?
• On a more cheerful note, some time ago Peter Coles posted Patrick Barrington's lovely comic poem I Had A Hippopotamus. It begins like this:

  I had a hippopotamus; I kept him in a shed
  And fed him upon vitamins and vegetable bread.
  I made him my companion on many cheery walks,
  And had his portrait done by a celebrity in chalks.
  
  His charming eccentricities were known on every side.
  The creature’s popularity was wonderfully wide.
  He frolicked with the Rector in a dozen friendly tussles,
  Who could not but remark on his hippopotamuscles.
  
  [...]

  Barrington's best known poem The Diplomatic Platypus is also great fun (and has a strangely similar theme).

Steven Weinberg: The Crisis of Big Science

A few weeks ago, via Peter Woit's excellent blog, I was alerted to a recent article in The New York Review of Books by Steven Weinberg, titled The Crisis of Big Science. Woit added his own thoughts on the article, and there are many interesting opinions expressed in the comments section there. However, I felt that a very important question was not satisfactorily answered, as I will try to discuss here.

Weinberg provides a brief and personal overview of the development of particle physics experiments, starting from Rutherford's pioneering gold foil experiment in 1911 (the "experimental team consisted of one postdoc and one undergraduate [...] supported by a grant of just £70 from the Royal Society of London"), through the invention of cyclotrons, the postwar development of accelerators and the construction of dedicated accelerator facilities at Fermilab and CERN, to the current multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which (we hope) will confirm a detection of the Higgs boson later this year, and might yet — if we are lucky — provide exciting clues about the correct particle physics theory at higher energy scales than we have yet probed.

One of the obvious themes in this short history is the enormous and growing cost of building the experimental facilities required to increase our knowledge about particle physics. Obtaining the money for these facilities is always difficult, and sometimes impossible. Weinberg reflects in particular on the cancellation in the 1990s of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC):

Then in 1992 the House of Representatives canceled funding for the SSC. Funding was restored by a House–Senate conference committee, but the next year the same happened again, and this time the House would not go along with the recommendation of the conference committee. After the expenditure of almost two billion dollars and thousands of man-years, the SSC was dead.  

One thing that killed the SSC was an undeserved reputation for over-spending. There was even nonsense in the press about spending on potted plants for the corridors of the administration building. Projected costs did increase, but the main reason was that, year by year, Congress never supplied sufficient funds to keep to the planned rate of spending. This stretched out the time and hence the cost to complete the project. Even so, the SSC met all technical challenges, and could have been completed for about what has been spent on the LHC, and completed a decade earlier.

(The claim that projected costs only increased because of insufficient spending every year is interesting, and something I hadn't heard before. I don't know whether it is true, but it sounds plausible.)

This is not simply a problem for particle physics. The same pattern holds — though at a somewhat lower cost level — for my own field of astrophysics and cosmology. Recently, the US Congress decided to scrap funding for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the US has also decided to terminate the IXO (X-ray) and LISA (gravitational waves) projects, which caused the European Space Agency to choose to fund a mission to explore Jupiter's moons (known as JUICE) over projects that would have been more relevant to cosmology.

In the end, the point is that the political support for a such massive science experiments is hard to obtain. Weinberg says

During the debate over the SSC, I was on the Larry King radio show with a congressman who opposed  it. He said that he wasn't against spending on science, but that we had to set priorities. I explained that the SSC  was going to help us learn the laws of nature, and I asked if that didn't deserve a high priority. I remember every word of his answer. It was "No."

Now this is the question I'd like to focus on. Let's leave aside for now the question of whether a convincing science case can in fact be made for an SSC-like accelerator or JWST-like space mission (Peter Woit's post discusses this for a new particle accelerator); I will assume that the proposed experiment, whatever it may be, will indeed help us "learn the laws of Nature." Is this justification enough for vast government funding?