Strategy and Responsiveness in Science

Posted on 19/01/2010 by Jon Butterworth

One strand in the disastrous history of the Science and Technology Facilities council (STFC) is a tension between “top-down” and “bottom-up” research funding. The science minister and the chair of STFC are currently reviewing the structures; this tension is something they should take into account.

Most scientists I know are driven by a desire to solve problems and learn how nature works; the mechanisms of life, galaxy formation, why things have mass; questions on the frontiers of knowledge. The sudden thrill, and long-term satisfaction, of extending the sum of human knowledge is what keeps people working through the less rewarding bits. I am not sure those who control science policy and administer resources always realise this. Of course people are motivated also by desire for money, approval, power, fun, as with other jobs, but the ability to follow your hunches and your curiosity is fundamental. Without it research is vastly poorer, and much more expensive. The thrill of knowledge may be our equivalent of the banker’s bonus.

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Posted in Politics, Science, Science Policy | Tagged | 6 Comments

Safety First?

Posted on 06/01/2010 by Jon Butterworth

Material from this post features in Chapter 2.4 of Smashing Physics.

Hopefully this is a dead issue for most people and the last thing I want to do is reignite a debate, but there are still people out there who should know better (you know who you are), still frightening people who don’t know better.

So: imagine doing something new, for the first time. Say a new experiment. Say, oh I don’t know, the LHC. Or RHIC, or the Tevatron, or one of the previous machines some people have got agitated about. Then take the worst consequence imaginable, even if it is in contradiction to all experimental evidence, theory and even logic. Science has a hard time proving a negative, so you might conclude that there is an infinitesimally small chance of the bad thing happening and be inclined not to go ahead. But before deciding you have a duty to consider also the risk of not doing it.

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Posted in Particle Physics, Philosophy, Physics, Science, Science Policy | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

UK (and/or EU) Research Grant Prioritisation Pro – Forma

Posted on 01/01/2010 by Jon Butterworth
  1. I got onto a quango by mistake. Tell me why I should be bothered reading this technical crap?
  2. How will your research directly subsidise the UK/EU business community?
  3. How will your research covertly subsidise the UK/EU business community?
  4. How much of this benefit will be after the next election?
  5. How much fuss will the public make when we cut you off at the knees?
  6. Even if I agree with you, what can I do about it?
  7. Guess what our strategy is this week, and mark yourself against it on a scale of one.
  8. Why don’t you just shut up and do as you are told like I do?

Please answer in less than three sentences in Microsoft Comic Sans. Use long words if you like.

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Posted in Politics, Science Policy | Tagged | 1 Comment

The Physics behind the paper behind “Colliding Particles”

Posted on 29/12/2009 by Jon Butterworth

This post is also at The Guardian, and is expanded in Chapter 1.7 of Smashing Physics.

This is a bit of a niche post but there was recently a review in Physics World of these videos I’m in about research at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). While generally positive, the review pointed out that although the videos are partially based around a particular scientific paper about how one might find the Higgs boson (referred to in the films as the “Eurostar paper”), they don’t really explain the physics behind it, being focussed more on “how science works” than a specific result. Fair comment. So here is my attempt to explain the physics behind this paper to an intelligent but non-specialist audience.

I’ll concentrate on explaining the new ideas in the paper rather than giving a summary of why the Higgs is interesting or what the LHC is. I wrote something about that at the end of this article for the BBC, and might try again at some point. But I’ll assume some familiarity with what the LHC is. For now, you need to know that if the Higgs boson exists, and if its mass (which we normally express in units of energy using E=mc2) is what seems to be the most likely value (around 120 GeV*)  then lots of them will be produced at the LHC, and the realtrick is to be able to pick them out from all the other things going on when the LHC collides its protons.

Now you see it, now you don’t

If the Higgs is there, it is responsible for giving mass to all the other particles because of the way it “couples” or sticks to them. Because it couples to the mass of the particle, it is very likely to decay into the heaviest particle it can. These decays happen super-quickly so all we see is the things into which it has decayed. We have to work out from them that there was, briefly, a Higgs boson in our detector.

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Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Science | Tagged , , , , , | 8 Comments