A Quantum Diaries Survivor

I stumbled today into two old booklets advertising a concert. One in Conegliano, on Friday, March 13th 1981; the other in Udine on Wednesday, May 28th, 1980. These were times when I toured north-eastern Italy with the orchestra of the Venice Conservatory, directed by m. Fabio Pirona. I was a teenager, but I could already play the recorder (straight flute) rather well.

I remember that already back then I did not really think that a career in music would suit my taste nor my talents -my interest was not focused on Physics yet but I had a pretty good idea I liked science already- but I nevertheless enjoyed playing the part of the musician. Probably this has been some sort of constant in my life: I have been an amateur musician, an amateur astronomer, an amateur chessplayer, an amateur reporter and photographer, but then I decided to become a professional physicist. In other words I seem to have applied to arts, sports, and intellectual activities what is commonplace to do with sentimental relationships: women and men flirt with the most attractive counterparts, but end up marrying the one which promises more stability.

So what were we playing back then, in Conegliano and Udine (but also in Venice, Mirano, and other places I can’t even recall) ? The offer was a trio of concerts by Johann Sebastian Bach: the Brandemburg Concerts number V, IV, and III. I was the second flutist in the fourth concert, as you can see in the scans I paste below.

Above, the front page of the booklet of Concert season in Conegliano, 1981

…and the page with the three concerts, and a few signatures from my colleagues.

The one above is instead the leaflet advertising the concert in Udine…

…and the back, with the program of the afternoon.

I have warm memories of those concerts. In the one in Conegliano, we performed excellently the fourth concert (I remember I was really pleased of the outcome and by my own performance) until -at the very end of the third movement- my instrument had become soaked with condensed breath, and it literally dripped. The condensed moisture flowed down the hole at the end and, what’s worse, down the hole on the back, which is closed by the left thumb to play bass tones and only closed halfways -by using the fingernail- to play high pitches. And one of those high pitches was needed towards the end of the Presto, when in the culmination of a forte I had to play a high mi. The thumb was unable to close the hole the way it should have, and my instrument let out a broken note which was probably heard even by the ticket seller outside the hall. That evening was spent on a pleasant restaurant on the hills of Conegliano, with the whole orchestra having fun of me -but it was cheerful and I did not resent it.

In the concert in Udine another incident happened. I was rather tense (I think it was the first time we performed the concert outside the walls of our Conservatory) and when the fifth concert was over, the solists came backstage, and I went on stage with my buddy Francesco and the first violin Andrea. As we were about to sit down, I realized I had left my scoresheet backstage! A better player would have acted nonchalantly and played by heart, but I was too nervous -so I rushed back and grabbed it, re-entering on stage with the eyes of the public on me but, what’s worse, those of my director following me like a missile approaches a plane to be taken down.

Ah, memories… I wish I had a recording of those concerts! I remember the one in Conegliano was indeed recorded, and I was promised a copy of the tape which never came.

Here is a selected list of interesting links from blogs I read:

• Bee at Backreaction has the most complete list of reasons why you should not be bothered by the LHC destroying the Earth. Instructive, entertaining, to the point. With useful furthering of the matter in the comments thread.
• Peter at Not Even Wrong has two interesting posts out. In one he reports about Witten’s take on dark energy. In the other the question on what string theorists would do if their pet theory was proven wrong is discussed. Don’t miss the comments thread.
• Carl at Mass explains in detail why the current cosmology does not explain the angular correlations in the fluctuations of cosmic microwave background for large angles, while a changing speed of light would fit the data better. Controversial!
• Lubos at the Reference Frame discusses whether a theory that makes no predictions is to be preferred or disfavored, in relation to one that is more predictive. He also has a poll. Let’s all ask him to add a bullet, “A and B are equally unlikely because they are both favored by Lubos”,
• Jester at Resonaances has a short but poignant post on how to be a good crackpot. Recommended.
• Kea at Arcadian Functor has reached lesson 182 in category theory. Her explanations make you believe you know those things, and there are a bunch of graphs you cannot miss. Esthetically pleasing.
• Chad at Uncertain Principles has one of his imperdible dog dialogues out. Highly recommended.

“The probability that there’s a bomb on your flight is really small, and yet still non negligible for anxious people like me. But the probability that there are two bombs is really ridiculously tiny! That’s why I always take one with me in my carry-on“.

Anonymous

“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.“

(Undisclosed source)

Update: Ok, if you happen to not know the author of the above, a hint: he also said…

“If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it ?“

(courtesy Jeff)

I received this morning the poster of a workshop on Dark Matter searches at the LHC, which will be held in my University on April 22nd. This is a single afternoon of talks addressed to students of Physics, to educate them on the connection between particle physics and cosmology in view of the start of the collider this fall. Upon glancing at it, I immediately sensed the subliminal message it sends to whomever has been reached by the headlines on the recent lawsuit concerning the risk of black hole creation in the high-energy proton-proton collisions… Here is the poster:

The galaxy has of course nothing to do with an expanding black hole, but it still sends a sinister message. Let me say it here again: black holes will NOT be created at LHC. Scientists cannot even assess the chance of that happening, because the probability that 1) Large extra-dimensions exist in nature, 2) the scale of quantum gravity being both fine-tuned to allow black holes to be produced by LHC and not by past colliders, and orders of magnitude smaller than what it is most reasonable to conceive, is too small to be investigated meaningfully.

In any case, even if microscopic black holes were created at LHC, they would evaporate instantly, due to a phenomenon, Hawking radiation, which only rests on general relativity and quantum gravity, and is thus on much more solid ground than the very production of black holes. And in any case, even if black holes were created and they did not evaporate, they would escape the Earth without more than a few nuclear interactions. And in any case, even if scientists were wrong on all the previous counts, collisions like the ones LHC will produce are generated everywhere by cosmic rays, so the black holes generated inside the LHC would be nothing new under the sun.

For a more meaningful discussion of these issues, please visit this instructive post at backreaction.

Just a note to post here the permanent link to the proceedings of a conference I attended in Corfu (Greece) three years ago. This is a long (32 pages) report on “High- Physics: from the Tevatron to the LHC“, now published in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series [Tommaso Dorigo 2006 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 53 163-194]. I think I did post a draft of the paper on this blog a couple of years ago, but then I forgot to post the final version as well.

The paper is a bit dated in some parts, where the most recent (back then) results from the Tevatron are discussed; however, some parts -especially a discussion of the usefulness of Tevatron data for LHC physics- are still readable IMHO. Also worth noting is the fact that the acknowledgments section mentions the late Riqie Arneberg, a friend who passed away last fall, who had accepted the offer I had made to all readers of this blog to proofread the manuscript, and contributed in several places to the clarity of the text.

The publisher has now made available online all its 100 open access volumes through the JPCS home page. Of course I salute this contribution to the free diffusion of science with enthusiasm.

… whether I got tenure or not, read this post.

The exam was the most similar to a coffee machine conversation I have ever had. Not that I expected anything different: I had originally prepared an answer to the question “what were your research accomplishments in the last three years” (which was more or less obligatory by the examining committee) which went like “I sucked mints with my feet on the desk.” The rationale of such an answer was to be consistent with the application, where I had included, together with a copy of my 270+ publications, one of the partially sucked mints. And with the fact that INFN is really little short than forced by law to hire me and a bunch of other souls.

But no, I did not get to answer such a question. The INFN president Petronzio was there, and he started by greeting me with an informal “tu” (in Italian, people who are not acquainted usually talk to each other using the third person), kind words, and a broad smile. I have a high esteem of Petronzio, but I had never met him in person, so I was slightly taken aback by his warm welcome. Maybe he reads this blog and he got to know me before I got to know him ? I guess I will never know, but really, when you run a discreetly trafficked site you really never know whomever knows you, your life, your scientific accomplishments and defeats, and your dirty little secrets better than your mommy does (especially if she, like mine, does not read the language you use in your blog posts).

The discussion was relaxed and brief. They wanted to know my opinions on matters such as whether starting the LHC at 10 rather than 14 TeV is going to facilitate the initial phase of the experiments (no, it isn’t doing much for us: low luminosity helps, a different energy does not); whether from the huge successes of CDF in B-physics one could extrapolate rosy predictions for LHC-B (I said hadronic machines have hard problems to face at the beginning but statistics in the end is a fantastic weapon, as CDF did show, having now results in the B sector which are competitive with BABAR and BELLE on their own ground); and whether italian researchers at CERN will have a chance to excel with respect to their foreign colleagues (and I said that the problem I see is the presence in the lab, since italians tend to travel back and forth there more than they did with Fermilab or SLAC, where longer stays helped integration and responsibilities).

In the end, I was welcomed as a tenured researcher in the institute, with the regret that they could not do that earlier. That’s life, I said.

So, unofficial as this still is (and in Italy, you really -really- never know), I am now tenured. Or rather, I will as soon as some other bureaucratic hindrances are cleared. But these should only be paperwork and some delay. Really.

Sorry, but it is a Monday morning and I could not resist posting this pictoresque fertility parade (found in www.repubblica.it):

“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between“

 Oscar Wilde

I receive and gladly paste here, given the interest this topic has aroused (and as some sort of reward, given the fact that it is comment number 100 to the post where it appeared):

The New York Times
Saturday 29 March 2008

Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More

by Dennis Overbye

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.

The lawsuit, filed March 21 in Federal District Court, in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment. It names the federal Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as defendants.

According to a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing the Department of Energy, a scheduling meeting has been set for June 16.

Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland, even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom?

In an interview, Mr. Wagner said, “I don’t know if they’re going to show up.” CERN would have to voluntarily submit to the court’s jurisdiction, he said, adding that he and Mr. Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that a restraining order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and maintain the accelerator’s massive superconducting magnets, would shut down the project anyway.

James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet had no comment on the suit. “It’s hard to see how a district court in Hawaii has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe,” Mr. Gillies said.

“There is nothing new to suggest that the L.H.C. is unsafe,” he said, adding that its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April 6.

“Scientifically, we’re not hiding away,” he said.

But Mr. Wagner is not mollified. “They’ve got a lot of propaganda saying it’s safe,” he said in an interview, “but basically it’s propaganda.”

In an e-mail message, Mr. Wagner called the CERN safety review “fundamentally flawed” and said it had been initiated too late. The review process violates the European Commission’s standards for adhering to the “Precautionary Principle,” he wrote, “and has not been done by ‘arms length’ scientists.”

Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem. But just to be sure, last year the anonymous Safety Assessment Group was set up to do the review again.

“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The others prefer to remain anonymous, Mr. Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due in January.

This is not the first time around for Mr. Wagner. He filed similar suits in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Brookhaven National Laboratory from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. That suit was dismissed in 2001. The collider, which smashes together gold ions in the hopes of creating what is called a “quark-gluon plasma,” has been operating without incident since 2000.

Mr. Wagner, who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, studied physics and did cosmic ray research at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a doctorate in law from what is now known as the University of Northern California in Sacramento. He subsequently worked as a radiation safety officer for the Veterans Administration.

Mr. Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory, lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Mr. Wagner said.

Doomsday fears have a long, if not distinguished, pedigree in the history of physics. At Los Alamos before the first nuclear bomb was tested, Emil Konopinski was given the job of calculating whether or not the explosion would set the atmosphere on fire.

The Large Hadron Collider is designed to fire up protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts before banging them together. Nothing, indeed, will happen in the CERN collider that does not happen 100,000 times a day from cosmic rays in the atmosphere, said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

What is different, physicists admit, is that the fragments from cosmic rays will go shooting harmlessly through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but anything created when the beams meet head-on in the collider will be born at rest relative to the laboratory and so will stick around and thus could create havoc.

The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous?

According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

As a result, Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho contend in their complaint, black holes could really be stable, and a micro black hole created by the collider could grow, eventually swallowing the Earth.

But William Unruh, of the University of British Columbia, whose paper exploring the limits of Dr. Hawking’s radiation process was referenced on Mr. Wagner’s Web site, said they had missed his point. “Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate,” he said. “But it would really, really have to be weird.”

Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist whose work helped fuel the speculation about black holes at the collider, pointed out in a paper last year that black holes would probably not be produced at the collider after all, although other effects of so-called quantum gravity might appear.

As part of the safety assessment report, Dr. Mangano and Steve Giddings of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been working intensely for the last few months on a paper exploring all the possibilities of these fearsome black holes. They think there are no problems but are reluctant to talk about their findings until they have been peer reviewed, Dr. Mangano said.

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

I met Mangano in Perugia at the end of January, and we indeed discussed the issue of black holes at the LHC in that occasion. I only remember Michelangelo mentioning that some evidence against the danger of LHC creating harmful effects came from the existence of neutron stars. I however respect his wish to wait for a review of his report…