It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
The late physicist Joseph Polchinski once said the existence of magnetic monopoles is "one of the safest bets that one can make about physics not yet seen." In its quest for these particles, which have a magnetic charge and are predicted by several theories that extend the Standard Model, the MoEDAL collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has not yet proven Polchinski right, but its latest findings mark a significant stride forward.
The results, reported in two papers posted on the arXiv preprint server, considerably narrow the search window for these hypothetical particles.
At the LHC, pairs of magnetic monopoles could be produced in interactions between protons or heavy ions. In collisions between protons, they could be formed from a single virtual photon (the Drell–Yan mechanism) or the fusion of two virtual photons (the photon-fusion mechanism). Pairs of magnetic monopoles could also be produced from the vacuum in the enormous magnetic fields created in near-miss heavy-ion collisions, through a process called the Schwinger mechanism.
Since it started taking data in 2012, MoEDAL has achieved several firsts, including conducting the first searches at the LHC for magnetic monopoles produced via the photon-fusion mechanism and through the Schwinger mechanism.
In the first of its latest studies, the MoEDAL collaboration sought monopoles and high-electric-charge objects (HECOs) produced via the Drell–Yan and photon-fusion mechanisms. The search was based on proton–proton collision data collected during Run 2 of the LHC, using the full MoEDAL detector for the first time.
The full detector comprises two main systems sensitive to magnetic monopoles, HECOs and other highly ionizing hypothetical particles. The first can permanently register the tracks of magnetic monopoles and HECOs, with no background signals from Standard Model particles. These tracks are measured using optical scanning microscopes at INFN Bologna.
The second system consists of roughly a ton of trapping volumes designed to capture magnetic monopoles. These trapping volumes—which make MoEDAL the only collider experiment in the world that can definitively and directly identify the magnetic charge of magnetic monopoles—are scanned at ETH Zurich using a special type of magnetometer called a SQUID to look for any trapped monopoles they may contain.
In their latest scanning of the trapping volumes, the MoEDAL team found no magnetic monopoles or HECOs, but it set bounds on the mass and production rate of these particles for different values of particle spin, an intrinsic form of angular momentum.
For magnetic monopoles, the mass bounds were set for magnetic charges from 1 to 10 times the fundamental unit of magnetic charge, the Dirac charge (gD), and the existence of monopoles with masses as high as about 3.9 trillion electronvolts (TeV) was excluded.
For HECOs, the mass limits were established for electric charges from 5e to 350e, where e is the electron charge, and the existence of HECOs with masses ranging up to 3.4 TeV was ruled out.
"MoEDAL's search reach for both monopoles and HECOs allows the collaboration to survey a huge swathe of the theoretical 'discovery space' for these hypothetical particles," says MoEDAL spokesperson James Pinfold.
In its second latest study, the MoEDAL team concentrated on the search for monopoles produced via the Schwinger mechanism in heavy-ion collision data taken during Run 1 of the LHC. In a unique endeavor, it scanned a decommissioned section of the CMS experiment beam pipe, instead of the MoEDAL detector's trapping volumes, in search of trapped monopoles.
Once again, the team found no monopoles, but it set the strongest-to-date mass limits on Schwinger monopoles with a charge between 2gD and 45gD, ruling out the existence of monopoles with masses of up to 80 GeV.
"The vital importance of the Schwinger mechanism is that the production of composite monopoles is not suppressed compared to that of elementary ones, as is the case with the Drell–Yan and photon-fusion processes," explains Pinfold. "Thus, if monopoles are composite particles, this and our previous Schwinger-monopole search may have been the first-ever chances to observe them."
The MoEDAL detector will soon be joined by the MoEDAL Apparatus for Penetrating Particles, MAPP for short, which will allow the experiment to cast an even broader net in the search for new particles.
More information: Search for Highly-Ionizing Particles in pp Collisions During LHC Run-2 Using the Full MoEDAL Detector, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2311.06509
B. Acharya et al, MoEDAL search in the CMS beam pipe for magnetic monopoles produced via the Schwinger effect, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2402.15682
New centre specifically focuses on using AI to improve society • Current research is designed to improve transport, health and industry • “There have been a lot of reports focusing on the negative use of AI...this is why the centre is so important now.”
Aston University researchers have marked the opening of a new centre which focuses on harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to improve people’s lives.
Following its official opening, the academics leading it are looking to work with organisations and the public. Director Professor Anikó Ekárt said: “There have been a lot of reports focusing on the negative use of AI and subsequent fear of AI. This is why the centre is so important now, as we aim to achieve trustworthy, ethical and sustainable AI solutions for the future, by co-designing them with stakeholders.”
Deputy director Dr Ulysses Bernardet added: “We work with local, national and international institutions from academia, industry, and the public sector, expanding Aston University’s external reach in AI research and application.
“ACAIRA will benefit our students enormously by training them to become the next generation of AI practitioners and researchers equipped for future challenges.”
The centre is already involved in various projects that use AI to solve some of society’s challenges.
A collaboration with Legrand Care aims to extend and improve independent living conditions for older people by using AI to analyse data collected through home sensors which detect decline in wellbeing. This allows care professionals to change and improve individuals’ support plans whenever needed.
A project with engineering firm Lanemark aims to reduce the carbon footprint of industrial gas burners by exploring new, more sustainable fuel mixes.
Other projects include work with asbestos consultancy Thames Laboratories which will lead to reduced costs, emissions, enhanced productivity and improved resident satisfaction in social housing repairs and a partnership with transport safety consultancy Agilysis to produce an air quality prediction tool which uses live data to improve transport planning decisions.
The centre is part of the University’s College of Engineering and Physical Sciences and its official launch took place on the University campus on 29 February. The event included a talk by the chair of West Midlands AI and Future Tech Forum, Dr Chris Meah. He introduced the vision for AI within the West Midlands and the importance of bringing together academics, industry and the public.
Current research in sectors such as traffic management, social robotics, bioinformatics, health, and virtual humans was highlighted, followed by industry talks from companies Smart Transport Hub, Majestic, DRPG and Proximity Data Centres.
The centre’s academics work closely with West Midlands AI and Future Tech Forum and host the regular BrumAI Meetup.
Artificial intelligence to reconstruct particle paths leading to new physics
THE HENRYK NIEWODNICZANSKI INSTITUTE OF NUCLEAR PHYSICS POLISH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
IMAGE:
THE PRINCIPLE OF RECONSTRUCTING THE TRACKS OF SECONDARY PARTICLES BASED ON HITS RECORDED DURING COLLISIONS INSIDE THE MUONE DETECTOR. SUBSEQUENT TARGETS ARE MARKED IN GOLD, AND SILICON DETECTOR LAYERS ARE MARKED IN BLUE.
Artificial intelligence to reconstruct particle paths leading to new physics
Particles colliding in accelerators produce numerous cascades of secondary particles. The electronics processing the signals avalanching in from the detectors then have a fraction of a second in which to assess whether an event is of sufficient interest to save it for later analysis. In the near future, this demanding task may be carried out using algorithms based on AI, the development of which involves scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the PAS.
Electronics has never had an easy life in nuclear physics. There is so much data coming in from the LHC, the most powerful accelerator in the world, that recording it all has never been an option. The systems that process the wave of signals coming from the detectors therefore specialise in... forgetting – they reconstruct the tracks of secondary particles in a fraction of a second and assess whether the collision just observed can be ignored or whether it is worth saving for further analysis. However, the current methods of reconstructing particle tracks will soon no longer suffice.
Research presented in Computer Science by scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow, Poland, suggests that tools built using artificial intelligence could be an effective alternative to current methods for the rapid reconstruction of particle tracks. Their debut could occur in the next two to three years, probably in the MUonE experiment which supports the search for new physics.
In modern high-energy physics experiments, particles diverging from the collision point pass through successive layers of the detector, depositing a little energy in each. In practice, this means that if the detector consists of ten layers and the secondary particle passes through all of them, its path has to be reconstructed on the basis of ten points. The task is only seemingly simple.
“There is usually a magnetic field inside the detectors. Charged particles move in it along curved lines and this is also how the detector elements activated by them, which in our jargon we call hits, will be located with respect to each other,” explains Prof. Marcin Kucharczyk, (IFJ PAN) and immediately adds: “In reality, the so-called occupancy of the detector, i.e. the number of hits per detector element, may be very high, which causes many problems when trying to reconstruct the tracks of particles correctly. In particular, the reconstruction of tracks that are close to each other is quite a problem.”
Experiments designed to find new physics will collide particles at higher energies than before, meaning that more secondary particles will be created in each collision. The luminosity of the beams will also have to be higher, which in turn will increase the number of collisions per unit time. Under such conditions, classical methods of reconstructing particle tracks can no longer cope. Artificial intelligence, which excels where certain universal patterns need to be recognised quickly, can come to the rescue.
“The artificial intelligence we have designed is a deep-type neural network. It consists of an input layer made up of 20 neurons, four hidden layers of 1,000 neurons each and an output layer with eight neurons. All the neurons of each layer are connected to all the neurons of the neighbouring layer. Altogether, the network has two million configuration parameters, the values of which are set during the learning process,” describes Dr Milosz Zdybal (IFJ PAN).
The deep neural network thus prepared was trained using 40,000 simulated particle collisions, supplemented with artificially generated noise. During the testing phase, only hit information was fed into the network. As these were derived from computer simulations, the original trajectories of the responsible particles were known exactly and could be compared with the reconstructions provided by the artificial intelligence. On this basis, the artificial intelligence learned to correctly reconstruct the particle tracks.
“In our paper, we show that the deep neural network trained on a properly prepared database is able to reconstruct secondary particle tracks as accurately as classical algorithms. This is a result of great importance for the development of detection techniques. Whilst training a deep neural network is a lengthy and computationally demanding process, a trained network reacts instantly. Since it does this also with satisfactory precision, we can think optimistically about using it in the case of real collisions,” stresses Prof. Kucharczyk.
The closest experiment in which the artificial intelligence from IFJ PAN would have a chance to prove itself is MUonE (MUon ON Electron elastic scattering). This examines an interesting discrepancy between the measured values of a certain physical quantity to do with muons (particles that are about 200 times more massive equivalents of the electron) and predictions of the Standard Model (that is, the model used to describe the world of elementary particles). Measurements carried out at the American accelerator centre Fermilab show that the so-called anomalous magnetic moment of muons differs from the predictions of the Standard Model with a certainty of up to 4.2 standard deviations (referred as sigma). Meanwhile, it is accepted in physics that a significance above 5 sigma, corresponding to a certainty of 99.99995%, is a value deemed acceptable to announce a discovery.
The significance of the discrepancy indicating new physics could be significantly increased if the precision of the Standard Model's predictions could be improved. However, in order to better determine the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon with its help, it would be necessary to know a more precise value of the parameter known as the hadronic correction. Unfortunately, a mathematical calculation of this parameter is not possible. At this point, the role of the MUonE experiment becomes clear. In it, scientists intend to study the scattering of muons on electrons of atoms with low atomic number, such as carbon or beryllium. The results will allow a more precise determination of certain physical parameters that directly depend on the hadronic correction. If everything goes according to the physicists' plans, the hadronic correction determined in this way will increase the confidence in measuring the discrepancy between the theoretical and measured value of the muon's anomalous magnetic moment by up to 7 sigma – and the existence of hitherto unknown physics may become a reality.
The MUonE experiment is to start at Europe's CERN nuclear facility as early as next year, but the target phase has been planned for 2027, which is probably when the Cracow physicists will have the opportunity to see if the artificial intelligence they have created will do its job in reconstructing particle tracks. Confirmation of its effectiveness in the conditions of a real experiment could mark the beginning of a new era in particle detection techniques.
The work of the team of physicists from the IFJ PAN was funded by a grant from the Polish National Science Centre.
The Henryk Niewodniczański Institute of Nuclear Physics (IFJ PAN) is currently one of the largest research institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences. A wide range of research carried out at IFJ PAN covers basic and applied studies, from particle physics and astrophysics, through hadron physics, high-, medium-, and low-energy nuclear physics, condensed matter physics (including materials engineering), to various applications of nuclear physics in interdisciplinary research, covering medical physics, dosimetry, radiation and environmental biology, environmental protection, and other related disciplines. The average yearly publication output of IFJ PAN includes over 600 scientific papers in high-impact international journals. Each year the Institute hosts about 20 international and national scientific conferences. One of the most important facilities of the Institute is the Cyclotron Centre Bronowice (CCB), which is an infrastructure unique in Central Europe, serving as a clinical and research centre in the field of medical and nuclear physics. In addition, IFJ PAN runs four accredited research and measurement laboratories. IFJ PAN is a member of the Marian Smoluchowski Kraków Research Consortium: “Matter-Energy-Future”, which in the years 2012-2017 enjoyed the status of the Leading National Research Centre (KNOW) in physics. In 2017, the European Commission granted the Institute the HR Excellence in Research award. As a result of the categorization of the Ministry of Education and Science, the Institute has been classified into the A+ category (the highest scientific category in Poland) in the field of physical sciences.
SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS:
“Machine Learning based Event Reconstruction for the MUonE Experiment”
The principle of reconstructing the tracks of secondary particles based on hits recorded during collisions inside the MUonE detector. Subsequent targets are marked in gold, and silicon detector layers are marked in blue. (Source: IFJ PAN)
A team of physicists at Rice University led by Wei Li has been awarded a five-year, $15.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Physics, marking a significant leap forward in the realm of high-energy nuclear physics.
This prestigious grant will pave the way for a new frontier of scientific discoveries within the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) program.
The CMS experiment is one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors built on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European organization for nuclear research located on the border of France and Switzerland.
The team from Rice includes co-principal investigator Frank Geurts and researchers Nicole Lewis and Mike Matveev.
Under Li’s guidance, a collaborative effort between Rice, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oak Ridge National Lab, University of Illinois Chicago, and University of Kansas will embark on the development of an ultra-fast silicon timing detector named the endcap timing layer (ETL). This cutting-edge technology forms a crucial component of the CMS experiment’s upgrades and is poised to revolutionize our understanding of fundamental physics.
“The ETL will enable breakthrough science in the area of heavy ion collisions, allowing us to delve into the properties of a remarkable new state of matter called the quark-gluon plasma,” said Li, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice. “This, in turn, offers invaluable insights into the strong nuclear force that binds particles at the core of matter.”
Key features of the ETL include two disks on each side of the CMS detector accounting for half of the entire international ETL project and boasting a time resolution of 30 picoseconds per particle.
The detector will enable unprecedented particle identification capabilities through precise time-of-flight measurements, contributing to the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), an upgrade to the LHC that is scheduled to launch in 2029. The HL-LHC will operate at about 10 times the luminosity of the collider’s original configuration.
Increasing luminosity produces more data, allowing physicists to study known mechanisms in greater detail and observe rare new phenomena that might reveal themselves. For example, HL-LHC will produce at least 15 million Higgs bosons per year compared to around three million collected during LHC operation in 2017.
Upon completion, the ETL will enable the investigation of a wide range of physics, including not only the study of quark-gluon plasma and the search for the Higgs boson, but also for extra dimensions and particles that could make up dark matter.
Beyond its impact on the LHC, the results of the ETL project hold tremendous potential for synergy with other leading-edge facilities like the electron-ion collider at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York. The project is set to shape the scientific landscape in the coming decade.
Li received his Ph.D. in experimental particle and nuclear physics at MIT in 2009. Following a postdoc position at MIT working on the first relativistic heavy ion physics program on the CMS experiment at the LHC, he joined the Rice faculty in 2012. His work has been recognized with a White House Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Early Career Award from the DOE and a Sloan Research Fellowship.
This grant is administered by the DOE (DE-SC0024846).
Wednesday, March 20, 2024
PAKISTAN
May 9 riots: How is carrying out rallies akin to terrorism, asks Justice Mandokhail
This photo combo shows Justice Musarrat Hilali, Justice Jamal Khan Madokhail and Justice Hasan Azhar Rizvi. — SC website
As the Supreme Court on Wednesday granted bail to five suspects detained in a case pertaining to the May 9 riots, Justice Jamal Khan Mandokhail wondered how carrying out rallies was equivalent to terrorism.
While the protests were under way, social media was flooded with footage of rioting and vandalism at various spots, including the Lahore Corps Commander’s residence and General Headquarters, the army’s head office in Rawalpindi.
In August last year, the Rawalpindi police added section 21(1) of the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) to three first information reports (FIRs) registered in the wake of attacks on military installations.
The next month, they arrested 36 PTI activists and detained them in the Adiala jail under Section 16 of the Maintenance of Public Order (MPO) despite the Lahore High Court (LHC) granting them bail.
They have nominated around 150 unknown suspects in the Hamza Camp attack and another 100 in the Museum attack case.
Today, a three-member bench — led by Justice Mandokhail and including Justices Hasan Azhar Rizvi and Musarrat Hilali — took up a bail petition of suspects involved in a case filed by the New Town police for the Hamza Camp attack.
Sardar Abdul Razzaq appeared as the counsel for the petitioners while the investigation officer (IO) and the Punjab government’s lawyer were also present.
During the hearing, Justice Mandokhail asked, “How is carrying out rallies [equivalent to] terrorism?”
The bench censured the police and the prosecution for their poor investigation of the case. The hearing
At the outset of the hearing, Justice Mandokhail asked, “Is carrying out rallies or being a worker of a political party a crime?”
Observing that banning student unions and political parties had resulted in “this destruction”, he asked: “Should we accept a former prime minister as a traitor based on the statement of a head constable?
“Have some fear of God. Where are we heading?”.
Here, Justice Rizvi asked what evidence was present against the suspects and whether they had been identified from the CCTV footage.
The IO replied, “The protestors had broken the [CCTV] cameras of the venues, including the Hamza Camp.” Justice Mandokhail then noted, “This means there is no evidence against the suspects; only the police statements.”
The judge went on to ask the reason for including terror charges in the cases, to which the Punjab government lawyer replied that the suspects had “attacked” a camp of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Here, Justice Mandokhail remarked, “Then you do not even know what terrorism is. Terrorism took place in the Army Public School Peshawar incident and the Quetta court.”
“How is carrying out rallies [equivalent to] terrorism?” he asked.
The Punjab counsel informed the court that a head constable of the Lahore Special Branch was also a “witness” in the case, at which Justice Mandokhail remarked, “The incident took place in Rawalpindi and the witness is from Lahore?”
“Is it a huge crime to burn a tyre [in protest] against the government?” the judge wondered. He observed that the government and the state had the “importance of one’s parents”, adding, “If parents slap their children, they later convince them, not kill them.”
“Detaining everyone is not the solution to the problem,” he asserted.
Justice Rizvi then noted that there was no other evidence than the police testimony. The IO informed the court that first the case was registered and then the suspects were arrested, at which Justice Mandokhail asked how the names of the suspects were known before their arrest.
“The police themselves damage the entire case,” the judge remarked.
Here, petitioner’s lawyer Razzaq said his clients were returning to their homes after closing their shops and “got stuck while on their way”.
Justice Hilali noted that the FIR did not mention any attack on an ISI office, adding that “sensitive installations are many”.
Justice Rizvi then said, “CCTV recordings are safe. People also make videos from their mobile phones.” The Punjab counsel then claimed, “Petrol bombs have been recovered from the suspects. There is also the allegation of firing.”
At this, Justice Rizvi asked, “Who brought the petrol bombs and from where? One cannot bring them from their homes. What does the investigation say?” The lawyer responded that the probe “did not reveal this aspect”.
Justice Rizvi then noted, “The suspects are also alleged of firing [but] neither were any arms recovered nor were the police injured.”
Justice Mandokhail then remarked, “The investigation officer is concocting stories on his own.”
Subsequently, the SC approved the petitioners’ bail pleas against surety bonds worth Rs50,000.
Pure science, from a capitalist point of view, is a bit like kissing frogs. You have to kiss a lot of frogs before one turns into a handsome princely profit. Sometimes – rarely – a technical project offers a large and obvious return on investment (ROI), even though the payout might be years or even decades away. With nuclear fusion, for example, the potential ROI is enormous and alluring, but while the boffins swear the idea works in theory, the technical challenges of putting the sun in a box are immense and not always known in advance, which usually means spiralling costs. The €5bn price tag for the experimental Iter fusion plant in southern France has more than quadrupled to €22bn, and now the schedule has been put back a further ten years. This puts European state investors in something of a sunk-cost bind. The risk of fusion never working is not as bad as it working, and China or Russia getting the jump on it. The British state recently managed to Brexit itself out of the Iter project, but Euro-governments generally see no option but to continue shovelling money into it.
Nothing about science is guaranteed. Even if it works, it might never result in any marketable technology. One project that paid off is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, the rarest kind of all-level success story. As is commonly known, protons and neutrons are not fundamental particles, but are made up of combinations of quarks. Such combinations go by the name of hadrons, and smashing them together at super-high speed to see what pops out seemed like a very good idea, from the boffins’ point of view. From a government funding point of view, the ultimate composition of matter promised no ROI that mattered, but since one can never be sure, and because this was leading-edge research, they rolled the dice anyway.
CERN proved to be a smashing success, discovering more than 50 new hadrons, not to mention the Higgs boson in 2012 (tinyurl.com/yeyn92vk). It also unexpectedly spawned a side-bonanza for capitalism that had nothing to do with hadrons, or even physics. Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist working at CERN, came up with the worldwide web, which revolutionised capitalism.
So, CERN has become the poster child for capitalist science in Europe. But the hard questions of physics remain intractable. The ‘standard model’ has gaping holes. Assuming that Einstein’s theory of gravity is correct even at the largest scales, there should be around another 30 percent of ‘stuff’ in the universe to explain why galaxies don’t spin themselves to bits. No current device can detect this ‘dark matter’. Furthermore, nobody can explain why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, except with a putative ‘dark energy’ which represents 70 percent of ‘stuff’ but also can’t be detected.
Since smashing stuff together seems to work, experimental physicists have proposed an obvious solution – smash even more stuff together even more violently with a vastly bigger installation. They want to build the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a €20bn monster that would make the LHC look like a desktop pinball game (tinyurl.com/mr2vj67j). But this proposal to find fundamental answers raises fundamental questions about what investors are willing to stump up for.
The problem is, if the FCC enthusiasts are saying €20bn now, and if Iter is anything to go by, the actual cost could end up being multiples of this estimate. Euro ministers are choking on their lattes at the idea, and even some physicists are calling it ‘reckless’ and questioning whether ‘bigger, faster, harder’ is the best way to go. The biggest possible Earth-based collider could anyway never achieve more than a fraction of the colossal energies released in cosmic rays, meaning such exotic conditions will always be out of reach. And what if dark matter turns out not to exist, and is instead, like phlogiston, a supposition based on a wrong theory? Then, obviously, the FCC won’t find it. Would the boffins then demand even bigger and more expensive colliders, one after another, until they’ve got one the size of the solar system? Besides, with the climate crisis, pandemics, AI and other more immediate concerns, aren’t there bigger priorities for science budgets right now?
Government money comes from taxes on profits, which the rich get by exploiting us workers. We don’t get any say in how governments spend this cash, but the rich certainly do have an influence. And it’s a moot question how much the nature of reality actually matters to them, especially when the costs keep going up. Will they get tired of stuffing coins into the fruit machine of physics and watching the lemons whizz by?
Workers, meanwhile, have a more pressing concern, to get rid of capitalism and the rule of the rich. But a socialist society will still have to answer the fundamental question, which is how badly we want to know and how hard we are collectively prepared to work to find out. There’s always the possibility that people in socialism will not be willing to construct mega-colliders, despite what physicists say, and will decide to put their creative efforts into other things like space exploration, or undersea cities, or transhumanism, or rewilding the planet, or creating great art. But there’s no doubt that human beings do value the quest for knowledge for its own sake, in any society that claims to be civilised. The specific problem for science in capitalism is that it has to follow capitalism’s skewed money-agenda, where lofty goals may be celebrated, but the decisive factor is usually the bottom line, the factional advantage, and that all-important ROI.
PJS
Monday, March 11, 2024
Where Do Humans Fit in the Universe? This Physicist Wants to Change Your Perspective
In Waves in an Impossible Sea, Matt Strassler explains how human life is intimately connected to the larger cosmos.
By Isaac Schultz Published Yesterday An artist’s concept of a particle collision.
Illustration: Jurik Peter (Shutterstock)
Pondering the scale of the cosmos can feel as if you’re peering over the edge of the brink; it can be daunting enough to make you want to flee to the comforts of working, commuting, and other quotidian endeavors. But in Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges From the Cosmic Ocean, theoretical physicist and science communicator Matt Strassler doesn’t flinch in the face of the universe.
Published this week, Strassler’s book expands on the ideas he’s explored for years on his blog, Of Particular Significance. Readers are given a window into how the fundamental laws that govern the universe shape our daily experiences, and how even the most exotic phenomena are not as alien to our day-to-day as they may seem.
Strassler recently spoke with Gizmodo about the book’s origins and goals. Below is our conversation, lightly edited for clarity.
Isaac Schultz, Gizmodo: There’s this interesting dichotomy between the physics that’s happening here on Earth, what I call “looking down,” and the physics that’s astronomical observation—“looking up,” so to speak. And I was wondering if you have thought about the same thing, and how you see that relationship.
Matt Strassler: One of the first things I try to do in the book is to break that dichotomy down. Because we do have this tendency to think about the universe writ large, this big place that we live in. And then there’s kind of this tiny stuff going on inside of us or inside of the materials around us, and we don’t really connect them. But of course, they are profoundly connected. And, you know, the universe—we used to call it outer space, and we think of it as mostly a vacuum. It’s emptiness. But the stuff that’s inside of us is also mostly empty. It’s the same emptiness. And so there is no distinction between the outer-ness and the inner-ness. It’s the same stuff doing many of the same things. We’re not disconnected from that larger universe. We’re actually, in some sense, made from it. And so, that is a message which I wanted to be able to convey that I hope will change people’s perspective on how they think about what it is to be alive in this universe. That we don’t just live in it, but we grow from it in a very meaningful sense: not just in a spiritual one, but in a very explicit physics sense.
Gizmodo: Yeah. Whenever I’m slightly stressed out, I remind myself that I am just dying particles.
Strassler: We are much more than that. But even when we say we are particles, we are missing something. In English, by a particle we mean a little localized thing, like a dust particle, that’s not connected to everything else. But when we understand that what we call particles are actually little ripples, little waves in the fields of the universe, and the fields of the universe extend everywhere. Across the entire universe. That’s a very different way of understanding what we’re made from. We’re not made from these little localized things that move around in a universe. We’re made from ripples of a universe, and that is a very different picture.
Gizmodo: The crux of the book is this relationship between our modern understanding of physics and human life, human existence as we experience it. When you were writing the book, did you have a specific reader in mind? Who do you hope will, you know, stumble across this title and pick it up?
Strassler: There are certainly some readers who read a lot of particle physics books already, and I hope that for them, what I’m providing is a way of looking at something they already know. And in particular a way of understanding what the Higgs field is all about. For those readers, it’s something they will not have seen before. But I also had in mind that there are a lot of friends of mine, family members, who don’t read the books about particle physics precisely because they’re rather difficult to understand and often seem irrelevant to their lives. The goal of this book was to strip away, as much as possible, the things that don’t matter to our ordinary daily existence and focus on the things that do. And try to tell a story, which certainly doesn’t explain all of particle physics by any means, but walks a path that takes the reader through all of the things that they would need to know to start from scratch and come out the end with a sense for how the universe works and how we fit in it.
I hope that I’ve provided a path for a reader who is curious but willing to take the time that it requires to understand subjects that are that aren’t hard just because “physics is hard.” They’re hard because the universe is hard. It’s hard for me. I can’t make it any easier than it is for me.
Gizmodo: That’s going to be the headline. “Physicist Confesses: ‘It’s Hard For Me, Too.’”
Strassler: Okay. I’m happy with that.
Gizmodo: How did this book emerge from the work that you’ve been doing for years?
Strassler: I was a full-time academic scientist for a good two decades. I had always been interested in doing public outreach. But I had never had really that much time being a full-time scientist. There was a certain moment in my career where it wasn’t clear what I wanted to do next. And I started a blog at that point. That was just before the expected and then actual discovery of what is known as the particle called the Higgs boson.
Image: Basic Books
The story of the Higgs particle is really a story of a field known as the Higgs field, which is much more important to us than the Higgs particle is. The Higgs field affects our lives in all sorts of ways. But to understand what the Higgs field is and how it does what it does, which is typically what people ask me, requires some understanding of both Einstein’s relativity and quantum physics. There wasn’t any way to write the book without starting with those things. Even though explaining the Higgs field was the original motivation, I discovered that really this is a book about what we know today based on the last 125 years of scientific research in physics: what is the big picture? How does it all fit together? And once you see that—once you understand what particles actually are and how they emerge from relativity on the one hand and quantum physics on the other—then it’s not so hard to explain what the Higgs field is. But you have to spend two-thirds of the book to get to that point.
Gizmodo: When you say to someone that you’re going to open with relativity and quantum physics, it’s a great way to end the conversation.
Strassler: There is that risk, right? But that’s part of why I really opened with the questions about those subjects that are not even obviously about them. They are questions about daily life. And the fact is that these subjects, which seem remote and very esoteric... they’re not. They’re deeply ingrained in ordinary human experience. And that was really what I wanted to convey in this book, that these rather strange-sounding subjects that originate with Einstein and are made often in the media and by scientists to seem, “gee whiz”—and they are—they’re more than that. They are the foundations of our daily experiences. And so I wanted to bring that sense of how important these things are to us, to all of us.
Gizmodo: I think that, scientists on the one hand and science communicators on the other, struggle with this issue of, well, it’s not going to be possible to convey all the nuance in, say, a 400-word article. It’s just not going to happen. It’s more about writing the least-wrong thing than the most-right thing. You wrote a book that grapples with complex science. How were you checking to make sure that this would actually grok to the average reader?
Strassler: It helps that I have had the blog for 10 years. I also have some humility about how well I have achieved this goal. That’s partly because I know these are difficult subjects. They’re not difficult in the sense of that you have to know mathematics to grapple with them, but they’re difficult in the sense that they are just strange and difficult for scientists to wrap their heads around. I know that whatever methods I have used in the book, they’re going to work for some people on some pages and for other people on other pages. And so one of the things that I’m doing with my website is, I’m creating a whole wing of the website whose goal is to add additional information. For example, the figures, some will be animated on the website to give greater clarity. The goal is to really explain the science, and I’m not done with that part.
Gizmodo: It’s been over ten years since the Higgs discovery. How do you go about writing this book, thinking about a post-Higgs world and trying to address the next big question?
Strassler: In a sense, the discovery of the Higgs boson and the lack of any immediate discoveries thereafter over the ensuing 10 years—leaving aside gravitational waves, which were discovered in 2015—has put our understanding of the universe into a very interesting place. It’s like having a short story which is complete but has all sorts of loose ends, which fits into a larger narrative which we don’t understand. And so it’s kind of a perfect moment to describe what we know and what we don’t. And really break it into those two parts.
There was a way in which, 10 years after the Higgs discovery, and also with the discovery of gravitational waves, things came out more or less the way we thought they would. There were no huge surprises that completely changed the way we think about things. So it’s a good moment to take stock and to look at what we have learned from Einstein’s relativity, on the one hand, and from quantum physics and all of its realization in particle physics on the other, and see how it all fits together and try to really describe that as a package.
To use a cliche, it’s really more like the end of the beginning here. We have achieved something that is really remarkable in the past 125 years. But we’re clearly also in some ways still at the beginning of our understanding of how the universe really works.
Gizmodo: One question that I was left with was basically, where is this next breakthrough going to come from? Do you have any particular preference for the variety of wonderful experiments going on right now in particle physics, in plans for gravitational wave observatories, all that jazz? What are you most excited about on the physical horizon?
Strassler: All the way up to the discovery of the Higgs boson, there has been a path. But there’s always been something where it’s clear that there are things we need to know that in some way feed into the deepest questions about how the universe works. And for the first time in 150 years, that is no longer true.
We do not now have a clear path. We have many possible paths, and we don’t really know which one is the best one. And this is part of why there is so much controversy about particle physics right now. It’s because there are definitely things that we know give us a decent chance of finding something new. But we don’t have the kind of confidence that we would have had 30 years ago or 60 years ago, that the next wave of experiments definitely will answer one or more of the questions that we have.
So when you ask me what is my preferred direction, I would prefer that the Large Hadron Collider, which has 10 more years to run, discover something. Because that would make it a lot easier to know what to do next. And the machine will run for 10 more years, producing 10 times as much data. So we do have that opportunity. But, I would like a clue from nature before answering that question.
Gizmodo: You mention that the LHC is keeps on ticking and you know, the high-luminosity LHC is on the horizon. Do you anticipate that kind of juicing the the collider will yield results?
Strassler: I’m not a person to express optimism or pessimism about what nature may deliver to us. I mean, I don’t think I have the insights into nature to guess. But what I can say is that there is an enormous amount still to do, even with the data that we have. It is certainly possible that there is something to discover in the existing LHC data, in addition to the opportunities that having 10 times that data will offer. So, I think people are sometimes too quick to imagine that, “oh well, the LHC looked. It’s not there. We’re done.” No, no, no, no. The LHC produces an enormous pile of data, and every analysis you do has to cut through that data in a particular way.
I wouldn’t say optimistic or pessimistic, but I would say I’m cognizant of the fact that there is still a tremendous amount left to do at the LHC, and we should definitely not be writing it off at all at this point. What we can probably say with some certainty is that the most popular ideas for what might be found at the Large Hadron Collider are mostly ruled out or unlikely at this point, but there are plenty of things, plenty of examples in history where the thing that was really interesting was something that no theoretical physicist had imagined. And we may just need to be really imaginative about how we analyze the data at the LHC.
Monday, February 12, 2024
CERN proposes $17 billion particle smasher that would be 3 times bigger than the Large Hadron Collider
Ben Turner Thu, February 8, 2024 A schematic map showing a possible location for the Future Circular Collider.
Researchers at the world's biggest particle accelerator have put forward proposals to build a new, even larger atom smasher.
The $17 billion Future Circular Collider (FCC) would be 57 miles (91 kilometers) long, dwarfing its predecessor, the 16.5-mile-long (27 kilometers) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva.
Physicists want to use the FCC's increased size and power to probe fringes of the Standard Model of particle physics, the current best theory that describes how the smallest components of the universe behave. By smashing particles at even higher energies (100 tera electron volts, compared with the LHC's 14), the researchers hope to find unknown particles and forces; discover why matter outweighs antimatter; and probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy, two invisible entities believed to make up 95 percent of the universe.
"The FCC will not only be a wonderful instrument to improve our understanding of the fundamental laws of physics and nature," Fabiola Gianotti, CERN's director-general, said at a news conference Monday (Feb. 5). "It will also be a driver of innovation, because we will need new advanced technologies, from cryogenics to superconducting magnets, vacuum technologies, detectors, instrumentation — technologies with a potentially huge impact on our society and huge socioeconomic benefits."
Atom smashers like the LHC collide protons together at near light speed while looking for rare decay products that could be clues to new particles or forces. This helps physicists scrutinize their best understanding of the universe's most fundamental building blocks and how they interact, described by the Standard Model of physics.
Though the Standard Model has enabled scientists to make remarkable predictions — such as the existence of the Higgs boson, discovered by the LHC in 2012 — physicists are far from satisfied with it and are constantly looking for new physics that might break it.
This is because the model, despite being our most comprehensive one yet, includes enormous gaps, making it totally incapable of explaining where the force of gravity comes from, what dark matter is made of, or why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe.
To unlock these new frontiers, physicists at CERN will use the sevenfold increase in beam energy of the FCC to accelerate particles to even higher speeds.
But the detector, despite having taken a promising step forward, is far from built. The proposals put forward by CERN are part of an interim report on a feasibility study set to be finished next year. Once it's complete and if the detector plans go ahead, CERN — which is run by 18 European Union member states, as well as Switzerland, Norway, Serbia, Israel and the U.K. — will likely look for additional funding from nonmember states for the project.
Despite the high hopes for what the new collider could find, some scientists remain skeptical that the expensive machine will encounter new physics.
"The FCC would be more expensive than both the LHC and LIGO [Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory] combined and it has less discovery potential," Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, wrote in a 2019 post on the platform X, formerly Twitter. "It would, at the present state of knowledge and technology, not give a good return on investment. There are presently better avenues to pursue than high energy physics."
Member states will meet in 2028 to decide whether to greenlight the project. Then, the first phase of the machine — which would collide electrons with their animatter counterparts, positrons — would come online in 2045. Finally, in the 2070s, the FCC would begin slamming protons into one another.
How the Large Hadron Collider's successor will hunt for the dark universe
Robert Lea
SPACE.COM Thu, February 8, 2024 Planning is well underway for the successor to the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The new "atom smasher," named the Future Circular Collider (FCC), will dwarf the LHC in size and power. It will smash particles together with so much energy, in fact, that scientists say it may be capable of investigating our universe's most mysterious entities: Dark energy and dark matter.
LHC operators at CERN revealed the results of a "midterm review" of their FCC Feasibility Study to the press on Monday (Feb. 5). The feasibility study began in 2021 and is set to conclude in 2025. The findings thus far constitute three years of work, with scientists and engineers from across the globe determining the placement of the new accelerator's ring, the implementation of the FCC facility, concepts for detectors and funding aspects.
The FCC will run under the jurisdiction of France and Switzerland, just like the LHC currently does, but the future accelerator will stretch 56.5 miles (90.7 kilometers), making it over three times the length of CERN's current particle accelerator, which is 16.8 miles (27 kilometers) long. The LHC is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world.
A small stretch of the near 17-mile-long LHC particle accelerator which will be dwarfed by the FCC. (Image credit: Robert Lea)
The FCC will operate in the same way as the LHC, accelerating charged particles around a loop, using superconducting magnets, then smashing them together as they approach the speed of light.
Scientists can probe fundamental physics by observing showers of secondary particles created when particles like protons slam together. But whereas the LHC can attain energies of around 13 terra electronvolts (TeV) when operating at full power, CERN says the FCC should be able to reach energies as great as 100 TeV.
"Our aim is to study the properties of matter at the smallest scale and highest energy," CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti said at the interim report presentation in Geneva on Tuesday (Feb 6.) Why do particle accelerators need more power?
The crowning achievement of the LHC thus far is undoubtedly the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the force-carrying particle of a field called the Higgs Field, which permeates the universe and dictates most other particles' masses.
The breakthrough sighting of the Higgs Boson by two LHC detectors was announced on July 4, 2012, and is credited with completing the Standard Model of particle physics, which is humanity's best description of the universe, its particles and their interactions on a subatomic scale.
Yet, the Standard Model still requires some tweaking — and, since 2012, scientists have been using the LHC to search for physics beyond the model to make those adjustments. Success has been limited. This search will get a boost when the LHC's high luminosity upgrade is completed, which will mean the particle accelerator can perform more collisions and offer scientists more opportunities to spot exotic physics.
THE GOD DAMN PARTICLE A Higgs boson decays recorded in a particle collision recorded by the ATLAS detector at the LHC on May 18, 2012. (Image credit: ATLAS)
The two main outliers of the Standard Model (aka, why some of those tweaks are necessary) are dark matter and dark energy.
Sometimes collectively known as the "dark universe," these phenomena constitute such large mysteries for scientists because dark energy accounts for around 68% of the universe's energy and matter, while dark matter accounts for around 27% of these continents. But neither can be seen because they don't interact with light, and no one has been able to pin them down through other forms of direct detection, either. That means that the matter and energy we understand and can account for comprise no more than 5% of the universe's contents, and we have little idea what around 95% of the universe actually is.
And probing these aspects of the universe may require smashing particles together with much more energy than the high-luminosity LHC is capable of.
To begin with, dark matter can't be "standard matter" like the atoms that make up the stuff we see around us on an everyday basis, like stars, planets and our bodies. Remember how it doesn't interact with light? Well, protons, neutrons and electrons — collectively known as "baryons" — do. So, dark matter must be something else.
Currently, the only way scientists can infer the presence of dark matter is via its interaction with gravity and the effect this has on baryonic matter and, in turn, light.
Dark energy is even more problematic. It's the force that scientists see driving the acceleration of the universe's expansion.
It concerns a period of expansion separate from the universe's initial inflation, which was triggered by the Big Bang. After that early expansion slowed to a near halt, in a later epoch, the universe unexplainably started to expand again. This expansion rate is actually speeding up to this day, with dark energy used to account for that action.
Yet, as we've discussed, scientists don't actually know what dark energy is.
To see why that is troubling, imagine pushing a child on a swing. The Big Bang is akin to your first and only push that gets the swing in motion. The swing may keep going for a short while, even without any action from you, then it will come to a half. Then, imagine that it suddenly begins motion again despite you just standing there. And not only that, but it swings faster and faster, reaching higher and higher points. This is similar to what dark energy is doing to the very fabric of space.
CERN hopes the high-energy collisions of the FCC could reveal the nature of this ongoing, late-universe push and the particles that make up dark matter.
However, it will be some time before this future particle accelerator is ready to embark on its investigation of the dark universe. The timeline and cost of the Future Circular Collider
In 2028, three years after the completion of the FCC feasibility study, CERN member states will convene to decide if the FCC will get the go-ahead. Should the future collider get greenlit, CERN says, construction will begin in the mid-2030s.
The FCC will be completed in stages. The first stage is a electron-positron collider (FCC-ee) that will slam together negatively charged electrons, their positive antiparticle counterparts, known as positrons, and other light particles. CERN adds that FCC-ee should start operations in 2045.
The second machine of the FCC will be a proton colliding accelerator (FCC-hh) sitting alongside the FCC-ee in the same evacuated tunnel buried under the French-Swiss Alps and Lake Geneva. This part would come online no sooner than 2070, according to CERN.
At the CERN press conference, Gianotti laid out some of the costs of the FCC, saying that the first FCC-ee stage alone would cost an estimated $17 billion USD.
CERN's Director general justified the cost by adding that the FCC is the only machine that would allow humanity to make the big jump in studying matter needed to crack the secrets of the dark universe.
A four-legged ‘Robodog’ is patrolling the Large Hadron Collider
Mack DeGeurin Thu, February 8, 2024 CERT’s four-legged Robodog can maneuver through cramped spaces and use sensors to spot fires, leaks, or other hazards.
Traversing through the dark, underground areas of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland isn't for the faint of heart. The world’s most powerful particle accelerator violently smashes protons and other subatomic particles together at nearly the speed of light, which can emit radiation at levels potentially harmful to humans. If that weren't enough, long stretches of compact, cluttered areas and uneven surface areas throughout the facility make stable footing a necessity.
Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are turning to four-legged, dog-inspired robots to solve that problem. This week, CERN showed off its recently developed CERNquadbot robot which they said successfully completed its first radiation survey in CERN’s North Area, the facility's largest experimental area. Looking forward, CERN plans to have its “Robodog” trot through other experiment caves to analyze areas and look for hazards.
Why does CERT need a robot dog?
The hazardous, sometimes cramped confines of the LHC’s experiments caverns pose challenges to both human workers and past robot designs alike. Temporary radiation levels and other environmental hazards like fires and potential water leaks can make some areas temporarily inaccessible to humans. Other past CERT robots, while adept at using strong robotics arms to carry heavy objects over distance, struggle to traverse over uneven ground. Stairs, similarly, are a nonstarter for these mostly wheeled and tracked robots.
That’s where CERT’s robot dog comes in. CERTquadbot’s four, dog-like legs allow it to traverse up and down and side to side, all while adjusting for slight changes on the ground's surface. A video of the robot at work shows it tic-tacking its four metal legs up and down as it navigates through what looks like pavement and a metal grated floor, all the while using onboard sensors to analyze its surroundings. A human operator can be seen nearby directing the robot using a controller. For a touch of added flair, the robot can also briefly stand up on its two hind legs. The Robodog had to use all of its various maneuverability during its recent test-run up the North area, which was reportedly filled with obstacles.
“There are large bundles of loose wires and pipes on the ground that slip and move, making them unpassable for wheeled robots and difficult even for humans,” CERN’s Controls, Electronics and Mechatronics robotics engineer Chris McGreavy said in a statement.
Thankfully for the CERN scientists, the Robodog rose to the occasion. And unlike other living dogs, this one didn’t need a tasty treat for a reward.
“There were no issues at all: the robot was completely stable throughout the inspection,” McGreavy added.
Now with the successful test completed, CERN says it's upgrading the robot and preparing it and its successors to deploy in experiment caves, including the ALICE detector which is used to study quark-gluon plasma. These areas often feature stairs and other complex surfaces that would stump CERN’s other, less maneuverable robots. Once inside, the robot dogs will monitor the area for hazards like fire and water leaks or quickly respond to alarms.
CERN directed PopSci to this blog post when we asked for more details regarding the robot.
Dog-inspired dogs are going where humans can’t
Four-legged quadruped robots have risen in popularity across numerous industries in recent years for their ability to nimbly access areas either too cumbersome or dangerous for humans and larger robots to access. Boston Dynamics’ “Spot,” possibly the most famous quadruped robot currently on the market, has been used to inspect dangerous offshore oil drilling sites, explore old abandoned mining facilities, and even monitor a major sports arena in Atlanta, Georgia. More controversially, law enforcement officials in New York City City and at the southern US border have also turned to these quadruped style robots to explore areas otherwise deemed too hazardous for humans.
Still, CERN doesn’t expect its new Robodog to completely eliminate the need for the other models in its family of robots. Instead, the various robots will work together in tandem, using their respective strengths to fill in gaps with the ultimate goal of hopefully speeding up the process of scientific discovery.
