A Quantum Diaries Survivor

This just to post a couple of links concerning yesterday’s talk by Ray Orbach at the Fermilab Ramsey auditorium: an article on the event and a video of his presentation.

Our premier in pectore Silvio Berlusconi is known for his sense of humor, which he is usually careful to apply in the least opportune moments. As the day of his new government nears, I am trying to get accustomed to the idea of having to deal with one embarassment after another. But the man is also used to be fast, and in fact he already created a case today, weeks before he becomes a prime minister.

Vladimir Putin is visiting him in his luxurious villa in Sardinia, and a few journalists are interviewing them. A russian lady speaks to Putin, asking him about his new relationship with an ex-model. Putin does not like the question and is embarassed. Berlusconi, to help his friend in trouble, finds nothing better than pointing a fake khalasnikov to the reporter, mimicking an execution. Not particularly hilarious, but also not harmful - if it weren’t for the fact that she would not be the first journalist to die a untimely death by gun blows in today’s Russia.

What to say… Off to a good start.

In a country where the word “communist” has been increasingly used as an insult since 1993 - we have to give unshared credit of this to Silvio Berlusconi, who ever since his descent in politics used it as a synonym of “illiberal” or even worse - it might not come as a surprise that the new parliament after yesterday’s elections does not contain one single person who even loosely defines himself as such.

Despite the derogatory nature that the epiteth had taken in the eyes of many in recent years, however, the disappearance of a radical left in Italy’s political arena has generally not been greeted with enthusiasm. Not even members of National Alliance, the party born on the ashes of the filo-fascist MSI, seemed to rejoice yesterday evening on television post-mortem analyses: a rather confusing stand, and a demonstration that italian politics is not easy to understand by outside observers.

A country with no representation of a radical left in the parliament is drifting towards a policy of consensus that cuts corners and steam-rolls over dissent. Italy is not ready for that. It is not by chance that a veteran like Francesco Cossiga -who was prime minister during the most violent period in the history of the italian republic- warns today in an interview to the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera that political terrorism in Italy has its roots in the total lack of a dialogue of the government with the fringes of society, and that the conditions for a rebirth of violence are ripe again.

But what are the reasons of the incredible defaillance of the left, which presented a coalition of forces which had gathered no less than 11% of votes only two years ago, and is now at 3.1%, well below the 4% threshold which allows a party to be represented in the Camera dei Deputati, Italy’s lower chamber ? Analysts will have their hands full in the forthcoming months to understand fluxes and tendencies, but it is clear that this surprising result comes from at least two effects.

The first is the abstaining of many of the supporters of the radical left, disillusioned by the left parties who did not have anything to show for two full years of participation in Prodi’s 2006 government. One can see a signal of this in the increase of abstention by almost 3% in 2008.

The second is the sheer effect of bipolarism: the choice of a premier was recognized from the start to be only between Berlusconi and Veltroni, and many supporters of the radical left, moved by the wish to avoid a victory of Berlusconi, voted for Veltroni’s Democratic Party.

Veltroni cannot be too happy of this: he did well in convincing voters of center-left area, but he lost his elections because he did not convince any of the traditional voters of the center-right coalition. But one cannot really blame him, since his mission was impossible to achieve: Italy wanted a change from Prodi’s government, who tried hard in the past two years to mend the most grievious problem of Italy’s economy -its trillion-dollar debt- but forgot to protect the lower middle-class from price increases and ridiculous salaries.

I have many worries now. One is that INFN, my employer, will be seen as a conquer ground by the new government, who will cut funding and probably restructure the institute, for a better political control. Another is that Italy may be tempted to show an arrogant face again in the international arena, with military intervention in hot spots of this planet. A third is the stop of the attempts at saving the frail economy in the interest of tax cuts. A fourth is the boost to private schooling system, in a country where public schools work very well despite the ridiculous salaries of teachers. I could go on, but I have better think about research today.

The last votes have been cast minutes ago, and the first exit poll has just arrived. It appears that the fork between PDL (Berlusconi’s coalition) and PD (Veltroni’s party) is thinner than expected: at the lower chamber 42% to 40%, at the Senate 42.5% vs 39.5%.

Under such circumstances, one can foresee four different scenarios.

1) Exit polls are wrong, Berlusconi has a solid majority in both chambers, and Italy is condemned to 5 gloomy years of government by the right.

2) Despite the smaller-than-expected difference, Berlusconi has a majority of seats in both chambers. The numbers in the Senate (which is elected with a baroque system which never grants a solid majority) make his government very difficult to hold. Berlusconi gets blackmailed by Lega Nord from the start, and his government lasts at most two years. After which, the center-left led by Veltroni becomes a more credible alternative and wins.

3) No clear majority in the Senate for PDL forces a coalition of forces to change the electoral law and administer the country for a few months, and new elections happen in six-eight months time, with a unpredictable result.

4) The undecided response of the urns leads to a dismemberment in the big coalitions, and a coalition of forces, led by Pierferdinando Casini’s UDC, attempts to ride the tiger, with pitiful results.

Not a pretty picture in any case. More to come soon.

UPDATE:

At 9PM, about three fourths of votes have been scrutinized, and the result is not equivocal anymore. Indeed, it is a clear win for the right.

At the Camera dei Deputati the partial counts give PDL 46.2% vs PD 38.1%, while at the Senato della Repubblica the difference is even larger, PDL 47.1% vs PD 38.2%.

It remains to be seen how many seats will PDL win in the Senate. Due to a very strange electoral system, at the Senate the prize for majority is assigned on a regional basis - there are 20 regions in Italy. Because of that, the margin will be narrow, but probably still confortable, for Berlusconi.

We will have to wait tomorrow for a clear analysis, but it looks like Berlusconi is condemned to govern our country for five more years. And we are condemned to be led by him.

UPDATE:

It is now clear that Berlusconi has a full mandate to govern Italy. Even in the critical Senate, he collects 171 seats, which guarantee a solid majority. He said today that his first actions as a prime minister will be to abolish ICI, a very annoying tax - the one on the possession of the house one lives in; and to take care of the critical situation of Alitalia. We will judge him by facts this time.

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.

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…

I could not resist playing the vacuous game of putting my opinions on a two-axis plane, offered by kataweb. Below you can see the result.

Unsurprisingly, I am close to Veltroni and Bertinotti, and very far away from Berlusconi. Duh!

Headlines around the world today announced the conversion to catholic creed of ex-muslim Magdi Allam, vice-director of the italian newspaper “Il Corriere della Sera”. Magdi lives in Italy under continuous watch and armed escort due to the several fatwas (death sentences) issued against him by religious leaders because of his articles, where he often expressed a deep criticism of islamic fundamentalism and of the violent nature of islam.

I believe his conversion to christianity -which is, in Magdi’s own words, “the arrival point of a gradual and deep interior meditation”- is indeed interesting and remarkable in a 56-years-old, cultured individual. I however think the real news is the fact that his conversion was so widely publicized, and the fact that the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist were given to Magdi in the spotlights of Easter’s vigil yesterday by none less than Pope Benedict XVI.

Ratzinger’s explicit act is a sort of challenge to islam. Because the catholic church has always tried to handle the conversion of muslims to christianity discreetly, in the knowledge of the risks involved and the wish to avoid a direct confrontation with islamic leaders. In his letter to Il Corriere Magdi explains:

“His Holiness launched an explicit and revolutionary message to a Church that so far has been even too cautious in the conversion of muslims, abstaining from proselitism in countries with an islamic majority and being silent on the reality of conversions in christian countries. For fear. The fear of being unable to protect the converts from their death penalty for apostasy and for fear of retaliation against christians living in islamic countries.”

I wonder whether this kind of putting out fire with gasoline is the right thing to do, in a world increasingly polarized by a clash between catholic and islamic countries. News of clerics stabbed to death in countries with a strong islamic presence, in the meantime, do not make it to the front page any more. If we agree that the West is to speak to the moderate ear of islamic countries in an attempt at damping conflicts, rather than sending bombers and army divisions to the Middle East, we cannot cheer to the choice of Ratzinger. Pope Wojtila would have avoided the provocation.

I may look more anti-patriotic than I really am but sorry, I can’t help it - down with Alitalia! The airline, which is supported by the italian finances (Italy owns 49% of the company’s shares) and has lived of subsidies for years, is probably at the end of its tether. And I rejoice.

Alitalia is unable to stand on its feet - it has demonstrated that quite clearly during the last years, with huge losses in their balances and plummeting shares - and it is finally on sale. The last offer by Air France is humiliating - a hundred something Alitalia shares in exchange for each one of the french company - but it pictures well the rotten state of the deficitary italian company, and it runs the risk of being accepted, in the absence of any other meaningful offer. The only alternative for Alitalia is simply going broke, since the european union has already warned they will not allow further economical aids by the italian government.

On the other hand, we are assisting these days to the strumental use of the bad situation of Alitalia by Berlusconi, who claims he can guarantee a better, all-italian bid which includes his sons as financers. Just amazing: in a month, italians will have to decide whether to elect Berlusconi as the next premier, and he is offering to buy Alitalia! The conflict of interest of a tycoon who owns three television networks and newspapers is not enough: he now wants to buy the country’s airline, probably reasoning that he can then manouver from the government seat into increasing the company’s profits. In the five years as a premier (2001-2006), Berlusconi’s wealth increased threefold. Guess why. And the guy is doubly smart: he knows italians who love their country also hate to see the selling of Alitalia to France, and so his offer is going to win him more votes at the elections of April 13th.

Anyway, why am I happy about this rotten situation ? Well, if you flew Alitalia enough in the past, and had a chance to compare the service it provides to that offered by other major european airlines, chances are you will agree with me: it sucks. I have only found such a nasty mix of bitchy hostesses and stewards, bad service, and crappy planes in Air India, another company in my black list. I guess any frequent traveler has his or her own antipathies, and I invite you to write below your own experience. I can only tell you what was the last time I flew Alitalia, and what happened.

In May 2000 I had a post-doc position with Harvard and was based at Fermilab. I had to travel to Elba for a conference, “Frontier Detectors for Frontier Physics”, where I would present a poster on the muon system upgrade of the CDF II experiment (the paper, later published to NIM, is available at this link [coming shortly]). I reluctantly bought an Alitalia ticket to go from Chicago to Malpensa and from there to Pisa -Alitalia was not my best choice, but the ticket was the cheapest. The flight was not bad, but as I got into Pisa I waited for my suitcase for a full hour, and only then was notified the suitcase had been left in Malpensa “because it did not fit in the plane”. It was a small suitcase, certainly smaller than the ATR700 with which I had arrived in Pisa, but I did not object. I was told the suitcase would arrive with the afternoon flight and they would take care of bringing it to the Elba island.

Three days later, the suitcase was not there yet. I had been told I could buy some clothing, whose price would be refunded if I kept the receipts. I spent hours on the phone with Malpensa offices: the suitcase was nowhere to be found. Eventually, I found some charitable soul in a private office there, and the person went himself to check some racks where lost luggages had been placed. I got it the next day, and proceeded to put together a letter where I listed the items I had bought: a swimsuit, a pair of trousers, a t-shirt, some slips. I think it was about 150$ worth of goods. I of course could not include my telephone bills for the calls to Malpensa, which probably amounted to a third of that, nor other expenses I had ran into because of the lack of my suitcase. Then, I waited.

Three months later, I finally received a letter from Alitalia. It said they were sorry to be unable to process my request, because my letter -which duly included the ticket information and stubs, the receipts, and everything else- lacked a piece of paper they had attached to the lost luggage (and I never found). A lame excuse!

To summarize: they do not notify me that they voluntarily neglect to load my suitcase in Malpensa. Then they fail to let me know. I lose time in Pisa looking for it. Then they make false promises about the delivery. They are not helpful on the phone. It is only through my endless calls that the suitcase is found. And in the end, they refuse a minimal refund! 

I never flew Alitalia after that incident. And I am considering not flying Air France next - these kinds of cancers tend to spread.

Anybody who wishes to make a career as a scientist has to reckon with the annoying fact that the single most important building block in the whole process is the publication – preferably on a refereed journal. Regardless how much you are brilliant and knowledgeable, you cannot expect to be hired only because of your looks or your speech. This is even more true in systems which do not use the “reference letter” system, such as in Italy – where candidates for a position are not allowed to let illustrious personalities of the field to speak on them behalf, and where any application for a research position has to be complemented with large envelope containing a copy of all one’s publications.

In some cases, publications are analyzed by their “impact factor” which depends on the number of citations the paper generated. Other measures include the so-called H-index, which summarizes in a single two-digit number the scientific production of a candidate: it corresponds to the number H of papers signed by the author which got at least H citations each.

Publishing something worth to be cited is tough. And producing a research worth writing down is only a part of the job: the non-trivial rest is getting it approved by the refereeing process. However, large collaborations such as particle physics experiments make it much easier for individuals to obtain a thick list of articles with one’s name on them: agreements vary, but in most cases anything that is published has to carry the names of all members on it. That is very convenient: by belonging to a collaboration, one feels relieved of the need to self-promote oneself.

Of course, a publication which you directly contribute to –by being one of the main authors of the underlying study, or by having developed a software or hardware tool which is critical for the success of the investigation- is more important for your curriculum, and you will be well-advised to highlight it in the list you attach to your resume. But even in the absence of anything you directly contribute to, you will not come empty-handed in front of the next job search committee.

The mechanism outlined above makes any search committee’s work harder. If they want to do their job properly, search committees need to assess the weight of a candidate’s contribution to any paper presented for consideration, and it is quite hard to do it for publications with 700 names on them – and more so if there are 100 of them, often irrelevant ones, rather than one or two important ones. For that reason, papers with few authors are very valuable: they stand out, and their relevance is easier to recognize, they might run the risk of getting fewer citations –and thus being less valuable – but your contribution to them cannot be questioned any longer. But how does one manage to publish a paper with few authors, if one is a member of a large collaboration where the policy is to have all names on every article.

Well, there are ways to do it.  I can describe what happens in the CDF experiment at the Tevatron as a case on which I am informed. In CDF, a paper describing analysis results usually gets submitted to either Physics Review Letters (PRL) or Physics Review D (PRD). Papers discussing more technical issues typically get submitted to Nuclear Instruments and Methods (NIM), and in the latter case one can propose a short list of names as authors who “specifically contributed” to the work presented. The process of putting names on the article becomes incremental, and the default author list is circumvented. Most collaborators will avoid begging for their name to be inserted in a paper they did not even know had been written, and short lists will result.

Despite the fact that NIM is less “prestigious” a magazine than PRL or PRD, the game is worth playing. But what defines what is technical and what is not ? A technical publication must not contain real physics results, for which a very well-defined approval process is enforced. Hardware descriptions, analysis methods, sub-detector performance studies: these are things that easily pass as “short author list” papers in CDF. However, the system can be gamed to some extent. A recent case in CDF was an analysis which did not look at real data, and only used detector simulations to assess the discovery reach of the experiment for some very exotic new physics process. The work had been produced by a few colleagues collaborating with some theorists which had an idea and wanted to test it in more detail than with a simple “idealized detector” model. They requested a green light to the experiment, but several colleagues of mine objected – and I did too.

The matter is in fact quite debatable. CDF considers his own property not just the data, but –correctly, in my opinion- also its very accurate detector simulation, which required years of unrewarding work to be tuned and perfected. If CDF allowed its members to contact individually a theorist with a good idea and do sensitivity studies on this or that new process, we would be doing a poor service to Science: we would end up with lots of unexploited good ideas. A few individuals would get nice publications in their resume, at the expense of those who did not take part in the process directly. It is much better, in my opinion, if the collaboration as a whole considers a search, produces an analysis on the data, and publishes the model and the results together. The theorist, in the latter case, can be referenced in the paper, or even figure as a visiting scientist and be included in the long author list.

Eventually, though, experiments with strict policies about publication issues like CDF have to reckon with the fact that the data they produce are not private property, but a world heritage. On the sad day when the Tevatron shuts down for good, it will be utterly nonsensical to keep the data private. It will be the time when the Tony Smiths out there will finally have a way to prove their point!