Of course, it would’ve been 0.02 3-4 years ago.

In all frankness what makes me chuckle (I am in a good mood this evening!) is precisely the insistence on math! To me it looks like a rain-man’s way of trying to encapsulate people without even bothering to look them in the eyes, an easy way of trying to say something profound without doing the real home-work which is NOT math but the study of history and sociology. I suspect that any insightful sentences could have been made just as well by simple and honest handwaving (without the math).

no, I believe Knuteson’s paper is the result of some serious thoughts on the matter. Unless his sense of humor is much more evolved than mine. I think the math is sound, and I believe he has a few good points to make.

My criticism is on the very concept of quantifying scientific value – something as ethereal as sanctity. In fact, by the same token we could quantify sanctity – take the piousness factor of the candidate as the quantity of self-punishment multiplied by the square of time spent praying, and work out the Sanctity Bang per Year by dividing the result by the length of the candidate’s life… This, I believe, could be a good candidate for a prank paper, not Knuteson’s.

Cheers,
T.

Jeff

p.s. I contributed to CDF in the 90s and felt at the time that a nobel for the nice top discovery would have been excessive prize for a fully mature discipline that dominated for some time the scene, funding and public interest. By contrast the W and Z nobel a decade earlier made more sense because it really was an impressive establishment of a NEW way of doing particle physics studying very high-pt event at colliders using general purpose detectors. This approach became mainstream in the following years (LEP, SLD, planned detectors at SSC, CDF, D0, and now CMS, Atlas, etc. etc.). The top discovery was mainstream (in the good sense of the word). The UA1 and UA2 were in many ways revolutionary and marked a break with the previous way of doing high energy particle physics. I have a more gut admiration for what CERN did than what was well done at Fermilab.

Cheers,
T.

I guess that it would be very easy to fix these inconsistencies between the results of this method and one own’s preferred order of importance, just by playing with the formulas a bit. Which makes the whole idea behind this paper a huge masturbation: instead of saying “I think that LHC is more important that Tevatron” (which is what I think, indeed) I only have to spend time by tweaking the formulas.

I guess I have been a bit too harsh in reviewing the paper – maybe my respect for Bruce, who is a colleague and a very skilled physicist, has not propagated to the text. However, I did appreciate the point, but I did not agree with it.

I was not suggesting, of course, that we should give no scientific input to the funding committees – just the opposite. Indeed, garbage in, garbage out. It is a tricky business and we should be very wary of what we feed into the system. Imagine you presented those figures of merit to a giant funding agency before the Tevatron Run II and the LHC were finalized. Factors of 5 versus 0.001 ? How could a meaningful discussion arise with such pre-determined biases toward running the Tevatron now and spending the LHC money for the next twenty years in free beer and chips at the users center ?

And you mention trigger bandwidth. It makes me smile, because I have been around at hadron colliders to see so many battles at trigger meetings – indeed, when triggers are discussed the best and the worst of a physicist emerges. But it is the very soul of a collaboration when people argue passionately about doing this or that kind of physics! I do not want this to be replaced with a naked list of numbers. Worse still, I shiver at the thought that people may discuss priors endlessly, without having a clue (unless they cheat) of the final outcome in terms of the SBFB and critical ensuing decisions in running the experiment.

One example ? The Tevatron’s single top discovery is valued, in Bruce Knuteson’s paper, at a ridiculously low value – only inches away from zero, because everybody believes that single tops are indeed produced by EW interaction. In quite the same fashion, the W and Z discoveries had a ridiculously low scientific value a priori if we stand by those tables. By jove, we NEEDED to find them even if we were CERTAIN of their existence. How could we progress in our understanding of electroweak physics if we neglected that maybe redundant but unavoidable step ??

The SBFB gives numbers, and that I fear. Because numbers are hard to argue with, once priors have been agreed upon. 5.0 versus 0.001 ? Forget the LHC!

Cheers,
T.

The point of the paper is that we already prioritize what physics we do based on prejudices and payoff per resource expended. Why so many SUSY studies, and not walking technicolor instead? Because our priors give weight to SUSY discovery. Why Z’ searches? Because the discovery payoff is so large compared to the effort required. If one has a mind of a certain bent, an obvious thing to do is to try to quantify these tradeoffs and prioritizations that everyone does. It’s less romantic, but conceivably more efficient.

At any rate I’m much more concerned with the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ feature of the priors involved than I am with the overall concept…