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Interview: Dr. Leon Lederman Answers
This interview with Dr. Leon Lederman was conducted on the morning of 1/12/00 in the Art Gallery at Fermilab. Dr. Lederman was quite gracious despite a couple of technical problems with the camcorder used to capture it, and I want to again thank him for taking time out of his schedule to talk with us. -[rw2 AKA Rich Wellner]
1) What's around the corner?
by Bucko
A century ago it was noted that, "...except for just a few little problems with the hydrogen spectrum, all of physics had been solved."
In your opinion, what are the outstanding problems that are likely to be solved in the foreseeable future?
Dr. Lederman:
Let's stick to physics ok? :)
In physics, there is a feeling of optimism that the problem we've been beating our heads against for the last 20 years or so, the generic problem of the Higgs, might be solved. We proposed the Superconducting Super Collider. The motivating feature was to expose the Higgs or confront the Higgs phenomena with experimental data. We knew from what the Higgs was supposed to do that the energy of the Super Collider would certainly confront that issue. In other words the Higgs would be a failed hypothesis if it didn't show up the energies of that Texas machine. Well, the Texas machine is not being built.
On the other hand, the data that is being accumulated in the interim, for the last five years or so, excites the theorists into thinking that the Higgs might be a lower mass particle. That we don't need that huge machine to begin to confront it. The Higgs may be a placeholder for a class of particles that might go up in mass quite a ways, but at least the lowest mass particles are now believed to not be that heavy. They might even be found at Fermilab in Run II, the next run of the large detectors, or at the machine to be completed in Europe, the Large Hadron Collider. It's supposed to start operating in 2006 so give it another three or four years after that. These are all foreseeable future things.
Higgs is also coupled with ideas of supersymmetry and supersymmetry gives us a plethora of new particles to play with [he chuckles here, as SUSY, by some theories, would introduce hundreds of new particles]. There again, the lowest mass particles may well be in Run II at Fermilab or in the new European machine. It may be fair to say that by 2020 or so if the European machine and the Fermilab machine fail to find supersymmetry that the theory may be dead because the energies then will be high enough to produce the lowest mass supersymmetry particles.
If that's true then that's a big shake up, because, although I don't know enough about the implications of strings, I think that the string theory itself might be in trouble because it does tend to predict the supersymetric particles. No masses, no real numbers, but that would be a shake up of the theory.
There are a lot of interesting things that will happen in the foreseeable future of particle physics.
Now, I know it's hard to believe, but there's physics that isn't particle physics. Some of it is even interesting! :)
For me the more interesting thing is in the complexity of say condensed matter physics and the other fields that it borders, including material science and some pieces of chemistry, is covered by the word emergence. Some complexity experts believe that out of complexity will emerge new laws of physics that can't be reduced to quarks and leptons.
We treat that with a great deal of skepticism. We don't know though, and that would be an interesting thing to see. That would be a first time in science that a theory can't be reduced.
The curious thing about particle physics, this is Steve Wienberg's argument, is you can start with any subject. Why is the sky blue? Why are the clouds white? Why? Why? Why? There's Dennis the Menace in the front row asking all these questions. You continue to ask why. You say why is the cloud white? Because it reflects all colors. Why does it reflect all colors? You get down to a discussion of spectrum and ultimately the questions will end up at the properties of quarks and leptons. All arrows point to quarks and leptons, for any question in any science if you keep asking why. If you ask what is the meaning of love, then it will be a little more difficult, but with enough hand waving you can get down to quarks and leptons.
Unfortunately we can't go the other way. Maybe philosophically that's not quite around the corner. That might not be foreseeable, but someday we might be able to go the other way. We have no clue now as to how to explain a virus starting with quarks and leptons, in fact we can't even explain the curious properties of the carbon atom. Bucky Balls or a girl's best friend. We couldn't have predicted a diamond from knowing everything that we know about carbon. On the other hand once you have a diamond you can reduce that to the proper behavior of quarks and leptons.
Technology of course is open ended, but we'll stay with science.
2) Big $ Projects
by t-money
Prof. Lederman, I am a Ph.D. student in plasma physics, a subfield of physics that has many large scale (both in physical and budgetary size) experimental projects. High Energy experiments tend to be even bigger and require more manpower. I see this having two negative effects: (1) More money means more politics, and (2) experimental physics seems much harder to do in a university campus setting. My question(s) -- what is your forecast of the political status of scientific research and where do you think government research money will go in the future?
Dr. Lederman:
These are reasonable questions. I think that first of all we need to have a better picture of the history.
The history of shared facilities probably began with astronomers. astronomers needed big telescopes and, most of the time, a campus couldn't afford a big telescope, so those were community objects in a sense. Philanthropy and government combined to build these huge telescopes. The astronomers, who were mostly academic, would teach their courses and have to go off to Palomar, or wherever the big telescope was, for their few nights of observations. Another discipline that needed cooperation was oceanography. You can't have an oceanographic row boat. You need a big ship, fully equipped with all the stuff you need to explore the depths of the ocean. Again, shared facilities. Geologists and oceanographers would get their time on the ship, they would get their time off from teaching, go on the ship and get their observations done and reduce the data back at the university.
Particle physics came into this in the 50s. Just after WWII most large universities built their own accelerators, with the help of the government, but they were their own experiments. Those were the good old days. You could teach a class, walk across campus to the laboratory, and run the accelerator for a certain length of time. Usually you and a graduate student would operate the machine.
Then something happened when universities collaborated to build a machine out on Long Island. That was the beginnings of consortia of universities getting together to build machines and share the facilities. That's been going on for 50 years, this idea of sharing expensive facilities. It has it's sociological drawbacks, it has some advantages also.
Fermilab is sort of a frontier of that subject where 80 some odd universities manage Fermilab for the world scientific community. You know you have the flags out there and you go to the playground and you hear the kids playing in a hundred different languages. That itself is an advantage. When the lab opened in '72 the first foreign group that came were Soviets. The came with their equipment and their families and they did one of the first experiments at Fermilab. They lived here and their kids went to school in Batavia and West Chicago. I think they went home different people from when they came, so there are those advantages.
Aside from modest things like world peace, there are other benefits to this. If you go to a large group there are benefits to communication between people of different upbringing. You see the guy from Georgia Tech interacting with the guy from Harvard, so those cultures merge. In addition you have the foreign cultures coming and getting along, so we know each other a lot better. Then you have the virtue that because it's a large group you can afford to have engineers and technicians full time and therefore relieve the physicist from the drudgery of all these technical things. This, of course, also has a dark side because the technical things are useful.
Big science is really growing. There was a report a few years ago from the chemists, sort of a global overview of chemistry, and it showed a graph of shared facilities. Very expensive mass spectrographs or die lasers are in these facilities and the shared facility curve was zooming up. As science gets more sophisticated, as the problems get harder, we tend to collaborate more and share facilities. That's a given. That's going to go on forever. Look at the way universities kick in to Fermilab, it's not as easy as it used to be. Although technology is now allowing people to spend more time on campus. These days you can run a shift from your office, or you can certainly be available to debug that part of the apparatus that only you know about.
There were other hard things like, I'm scheduled to run in January so what I'll do is double teach the semester before so that I'm off in January. Of course, the accelerator is unreliable so if it doesn't work in January, then you have this confusion, but we live with that. Academic life for people involved with high energy physics, astronomy or oceanography or even if you're a social scientist, an area expert, being away from campus is part of the life. If you're an expert on Lower Slobovenia you have to spend a year there once in a while.
Group meetings can be done by video conferencing and we do a lot of that now and that will increase. That's the good news. Countries are going to be involved in research. All we have to do is look at our booming economy and see how much of it is a result of research that was done within the last fifty years. An enormous amount of it. We know that life on this planet is going to involve increasing amounts of technology which is driven by science. It's all an interactive thing, the more technology you have the better science you can do, the better the science you can do the better technology you generate. It's a non-linear curve and developing countries all over the world have gotten the message that science is the way to join the 'have' countries. That's a major problem because we want them to so they can be better customers, and b) take care of themselves better and provide less in the way of grist for mill of the disgruntled who raise a lot of the trouble.
I think science will continue, we'll have to adjust to lives that are a little bit unpredictable, but I think that we may return to an epoch where you can stay on campus a lot longer and still be collaborative. Collaborations will be the answer, big money projects require the national and international collaboration. Perhaps if the SSC had been international in construction it wouldn't have been canceled. That's a big if, but that's one of the lessons we learned. We'll never do that again alone.
3) What will happen to journals?
by Otter
As a biologist, I've been interested to see how rapidly the physics community has embraced new methods of publication. (The WWW being one example.) In the next 20-30 years, do you think that paper journals with online archives will persist as the standard in most sciences or will online-only journals reach the same level of prominence?
Dr. Lederman:
Oh gosh, that's a hard question. We've been predicting the end of books and paper for a long time. In fact the use of paper is increasing. There's more paper around than ever before and you can still go to a bookstore and fondle a book, hold it to your cheek and say how nice, I'm never going to get rid of you, I'm never going to read you from a screen because I want a copy of you. Even if I never touch it, every time I go by the book shelf I look at that rosy red book I think, gee that was fun to read that.
I think in that sense history shows us to be very conservative. I think there will be a lot of online stuff, preprints were the predecessors to the online materials and they were gobbled up immediately by the web. Now we don't have to wait weeks for the preprints. If someone has an idea worth disseminating it's immediately disseminated. The big problem is we don't have these 'Good Housekeeping Seal of Approvals'. I've often thought someone could make a lot of money, I'm throwing this out there for the would-be millionaires or billionaires, in quality assurance. What would save people a lot of time would be a little code. For $10 a year you get access to this code that will tell you this is worth reading. You're an entrepreneur and you hire 100 graduate students on all fields. They may get things wrong, but so what, a few mistakes won't hurt anything. That's what we need though, is something to prune all the material. Now it's done by the network, oh there's Joe and Joe's a good guy, I'm going to read his stuff. That comes from the graduate students sitting in classes with fellow graduate students and then they fan out and you have that connection for life. So, be nice to that guy sitting next to you in class because he's going to be your colleague for the rest of your life.
4) Physics on a shoestring budget
by MAXOMENOS
So...now that Congress has more or less gutted funding for pure science, how can we change the way we do Physics to make up the difference? Could the next Physics breakthrough be done in someone's garage, for example? If this is the case, what advice do you have to offer those who want to conduct (experimental) physics research on a shoestring budget?
Dr. Lederman:
Well, first of all I don't think 20 billion dollars a year is gutted. The basic research budgets sort of squeak through. Again the increases weren't nearly enough to make up for what we need every year, which is inflation at a few percent a year, but more than that it's complexity. Every year the problems get harder, because we solved the easy ones last year. That complexity factor needs to be folded in if you want to keep research at a constant level. I think that whole thing might be somewhere between 5 and 10% a year, some number like that. I don't know what happened this year.
Of course we have the phenomena in the U.S. of the National Institutes for Health. Everyone wants to be healthy, especially congressmen. I'm not saying congress is sick... I guess I am saying congress is sick :) The NIH has been very well managed though, so that they are getting the bulk of the increase. Their budgets have zoomed up. I'm not against that, I think that's fine. I think it's money well spent. I just don't like to see the physical sciences suffering, and they are suffering. Both relatively and absolutely, so we have a fight on our hands to keep the physical sciences budgets growing. It's not a catastrophe though. The high energy budget is up 4% or something like that. It's not what we need, but we can live with that.
The shoestring idea is an interesting one, and I'm not saying that you can't have bright ideas that are possible to check with a moderate amount of equipment, but the shoestring is going to be pretty elaborate, like the table top experiments. If you look at table top experiments, which are often cited as being warmer and fuzzier and more intimate than the huge experiments that are done at particle physics labs or astronomical labs, small science is an enviable thing and I think there ought to be funds available to support good ideas. Good is determined in the usual way, by peer review. In the garage and shoestring is kind of an exaggeration and I would say not very possible. Table top experiments, if the table is reinforced with some i-beams :), can do lots of good physics with small, but also moderately expensive, apparatus. The quintessential small field is condensed matter physics, but condensed matter physics is thriving from these synchrotron light sources and a synchrotron light source is a three or four hundred million dollar device which produces x-rays of enormous intensity. Those are tremendous facilities, but they give you an insight into materials that you couldn't get any other way. Without that i think the field would be crippled.
The tendency is towards bigness because, like i said, we solved the easy problems last year and the harder problems require more equipment, but I'm extremely enthusiastic to keep individual initiatives alive and encouraged. In the big experiments the people that are participating are in small groups. A typical high energy group might be a professor, two or three assistant profs, 4-5 post docs and some grad student beasts of burden. That group will encourage all kinds of initiatives within the group and then when that group sits in this huge hall in a group meeting with one of these huge detectors which have 500 collaborators then it's up to the professor to push the grad student who had the idea and say, ok now it's your turn, get up, raise your hand, tell them what you told me.
Even though these publications have hundreds of names there are 20-30 professors in the group who know the students very well and that compensates for the fact that the publication doesn't advertise your virtues. I think if we can adopt Christmas card technologies we should make the people who had the good ideas have their names flash on and off. :)
Oh yeah, one last question: Cubs fan or Sox fan?
Cubs of course.
5) Propulsion Physics
by aibrahim
I am a member of the contributor network for NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program. The objective of the program is to create new propulsion and energy technologies that would allow mankind to reasonably travel within the solar system and to nearby stars.
Given the staggering problems, what sources of propulsion and energy do you envision that might realistically allow humanity to travel within the solar system with relative ease ?
What solutions do you see for radioactive shielding on such trips? Do you think we will always be bound to using massive shields, or will we become able to use some sort of electromagnetic barrier?
Dr. Lederman:
This is the typical question that's over my salary level. I'm not expert on these things. :)
My own feeling would be pessimistic, but I would tune in my mind on Star Trek and see what ideas they've had. They've been working at this for a long time. Of course antimatter propulsion comes to mind. I think NASA and the military have paid real money to look at antimatter propulsion.
Fermilab is probably the most prolific source of antimatter right now. We have a machine that makes hot and cold running anti-matter and if that machine were made one hundred times more efficient, we made 100x as many anti-protons as we do now, then it would take a at least a few thousand years to make a milligram of anti-matter. We shouldn't hold our breath. No one can predict some huge breakthrough on how to make more antimatter more rapidly and so on, but it doesn't look very promising as a thing to look into. I wouldn't recommend an all out crash program.
Everything else that's dramatic in this business is so speculative that it doesn't call for crash programs. There was a big flap about magnetic poles once. Some of the defense industries took out patents on ideas regarding the usefulness of a magnetic pole for propulsion. You know, it's a little like holding a fish out in front of a horse so the horse chases the fish and pulls the sled.
It doesn't look as if there's anything other than the kinds of things people are working on now. As far as radioactivity, that will be a problem for long term exposures in space and I don't see a solution to that except a burden on the mass that you have to transport.
Unless we can understand the human genome and convert ourselves into small insects for the duration, but you have to remember that if you make a tiny mistake in the DNA, you stay an insect. Or worse. :-)
6) Physics and social responsibility
by pq
Sir: Every physicist seems to have their own personal stance on social responsibility, ranging from "We have none or very little" (a shallow reading of Feynman) to "It is our duty to educate the (possibly uninterested) layperson about our discoveries, and their potential for good and evil."
Where do you place yourself on this continuum? Do you feel that science is inherently agnostic, and we should go ahead and use it in any way we can, since if we don't, someone else will? Or do you believe that scientists have a moral and ethical responsibility to think through the consequences of their research? What do you feel about the collision between public funding of science, the increasing apathy and ignorance of the general public, and the expectation of a return on investment in basic sciences?
Dr. Lederman:
Here I weigh in strongly on ethical and moral responsibility. I think it's clear that science, by itself, is value free. Almost any scientific idea that has any applications at all can be applied for the benefit or to the detriment of the human condition.
It's interesting that we've just lived through a century in which the driving force for research has been, well, you can call it greed and fear. Greed in the sense that much of it was commercial. Fear in the sense that a lot of it was defense. So, defense and commercialism were the main funders of research. Somehow in spite of that there was enough support for what we like to call curiosity driven research. Research which scientists wanted to do because they must know the answers to the questions, so we had probably the most scientific century in history.
The end of the century we were very much aware, it's almost more than a symbolic result of some ancient Roman calendar maker who decided that this is the year 2000, we're at an epoch were technology is growing so rapidly and the effect of the technology is changing human behavior and human characteristics that social responsibility I think is becoming increasingly essential. That means that, as the question implied, I think a much more universal public understanding of science is important. That doesn't mean public appreciation, I think with understanding you're taking your chances. It may be that when the public really understands science they'll say we have too much of it or we don't have the right kind or they'll impose criteria. Nevertheless I think that it's crucial that the popular knowledge of science must increase.
Look at the problems we're facing. Population, that's the number one problem. Can we support 10 billion people and what kind of quality of life can we ensure without destroying the environment? Which is the second problem. There's the environment and population. You can't, I think, ameliorate the bad effects of population and maintain environmental quality without a popular consensus. People have to vote on this and it usually means giving up something. We may have a carbon tax so that we don't have rampant global warming and uncontrollable changes in our climate. Well, people have to pay the tax. They'll pay the tax, I think, if they understand the reasons for it. That again involves a social responsibility. I think that not only should scientists bring to attention the implications of the science that they do, but it's more that the scientists contribute to this public understanding.
How do you do that? Well, by writing books, by getting on television, by influencing the instruments of our culture. Movies, television, print media, radio. All of these things have an influence and scientists ought to tithe their time. 10% of your time ought to be going into the classroom, because schools are another way to get popular understanding of science.
So far our schools are doing a terrible job of graduating science literate people from high school who will then be part of this democratic process. Sweeping democracy is a good thing, but the democratic option must be accompanied by some knowledge of the issues. Some grasp. I like to use the phrase science savvy. Like a street savvy person knows how to negotiate a dangerous street. We have a dangerous world and we need science savvy, we need a sense of science. I'm there to educate even the "uninterested lay persons" about our discoveries and their potential for good and evil. Well said.
7) Is science a rational career choice?
by Hydrophobe
Physics once meant everything to me, but now I'm doing the "greed is good" thing on the Internet.
Many others followed the same path. There's a vast physics diaspora out there. Among many others, consider Dr. Stephen Schutz, MIT graduate and Princeton physics Ph.D. who recently sold his online greeting card company to Excite for nearly a billion dollars.
On the other hand, I know a couple of folks who foolishly persisted in their dreams of a science career well past the age of employability (late 30s), and now they're shipwrecked and facing reality. It seems they have a lot in common with failed actors, musicians, and athletes who didn't make the big leagues. When did scientists become "starving artists?"
Is there any hope of reversing the tremendous attrition rate of potential scientists? In good conscience, should we even be encouraging young people to pursue science careers given their dim career prospects?
Do you share this pessimism, and what changes do you see in the decades to come, for better or for worse?
Dr. Lederman:
Ok. Let's look at this. I think unemployment among scientists, in this country, has been very low. Usually hovering around 2%. Which is sort of unmeasurable. That doesn't tell the whole story I realize, because when you measure career possibilities it's not only whether you don't have a job at all, it's what fraction of the people have jobs which are not up to what their hopes and dreams and ambitions were. That's a harder number to come by, I don't know if we know that.
Once upon a time being a scientist was a rare thing. There weren't many scientists. We didn't need many scientists in some sense. There was an equilibrium of some kind. A young person, captured by the drama and romance of science, said, I want to be a scientist, and nothing could turn him off. If you read the biographies of great scientists you see this. They had to do this, no matter what. They never expected to make a living at it, just somehow to survive.
I remember, in fact you don't have to go back that far, in spite of the color here [motioning towards his wavy white hair], when I was in college. It was the great depression and in the great depression we didn't think we'd get jobs. We used to say, what are you going to be unemployed in? What is your major? I'm going to be unemployed in Chemistry. I'm going to be unemployed in English Literature, it's more fun.
Then came the war and full employment for scientists and more or less we've been on that kick, with some interesting deviations. In the 70's there was a period when research funds were drying up. The governments budgets were down because of the Viet Nam business. The industry was uninterested in science for a while. That lead to some unemployment, but it didn't last very long.
Four years ago we had another bump in which, again for various reasons, the budget was tight, universities were restricting themselves, they were losing money. Harvard was afraid that they would go broke by 4422. :) But other universities were more seriously in arrears so there was some retrenchment. I was trying to get unemployed scientists to become teachers. There's a huge teacher shortage. In other words, what happens is that if you are well trained in science there are all kinds of fall back positions.
Physicists can become computer scientists or they can go to wall streeet. There's a big demand for physicists on wall street. Not just for cleaning and cooking, but for actually using first order differential equations to track money flows and things like that. Many fall back positions which have to do with a technological society that we live in. Some of them are interesting, some may no be so interesting. Not every person who wants to be a scientist will be a professor at Harvard. I'm not sure everyone wants to be a professor at Harvard.
There are all sorts of intermediate activities which are satisfying for scientists. I don't seem very many of them starving. I see a better than nine out of ten chances of ending up in science, if your qualified. Now you know there are people who want be scientists but they don't have the right thing, whether it's the ability to work hard, dedication, imagination, analytical abilities. I didn't get good grades in college. They were ok, but they weren't very spectacular. I wanted to be a scientist because the people I loved most, my friends, were scientists and I wanted to hang out with them. Much to my own surprise some of my abilities that didn't show up in class work were valuable in science. So, I think it's a rational career choice. I think you have much better than even chance at making it in being a scientist in the various categories that we use science in this country.
For the next 10-20 years there is going to be a terrible shortage of teachers, including most severely science teachers. Teaching is a wonderful thing. I love teaching. I think teaching can be as rewarding an activity as anything you can think of which you can be involved with in science. You're learning all the time. If your not learning you're probably not doing it right.
8) Lack of skepticism in American society
by Dast
While having an open mind is one of the most important personality qualities of a scientist, what has happened to skepticism in American society? These days it seems that, for most Americans, anything shrouded in scientific-sounding jargon is probably true, even when absolutely no supporting evidence is given. We believe such unsupported claims as aliens abducting and sexually molesting people, where evidence is replaced by the sheer emotional power of the stories. Why has scientific sounding jargon and emotional testimony become a replacement for hard data? And more importantly, what can we do about it? How can we teach people to be skeptical and to demand hard evidence for claims?
Dr. Lederman:
Very good. This goes back to six and social responsibility. Again, I think it's a failure of our educational system. A deep failure of our educational system. In part, it has to do with this explosion of technology.
The Internet, as an example of what the explosion of technology has done, is produce a certain amount of alienation. People are either techies, they're technically proficient, or they're not. When they're not, they see all these things passing by them. Computer? You know the guy who can't turn on the computer because he doesn't know where the switch is. It's almost that bad. Then you're turned off by that.
Yet people need a belief system. They'll go to someone who assures them. They'll go to Rush Limbaugh. Someone who has no doubts about what he's telling you being the unvarnished truth. They'll feel comfortable with that. The contrast is that if you are scientifically literate, then you're taught to be skeptical, to have doubts. People don't want to have doubts, they want secure systems. That's why I think one of the biggest dangers to civilization is the growth of radical fundamentalism. No doubts. If you don't believe what I say then I'm going to cut off your fingers, or your hand.
There's a big problem in our educational system. I think that requires a deep change in the system and a change in the system is hard to get. One of my favorites is the high school science curriculum. We're teaching it in the same order we did a hundred years ago. If a time traveler comes to us he'll be very comfortable in American high schools. They will take biology in 9th grade, chemistry in 10th grade, physics in 11th grade. It's just the wrong order and it's stupid to be in this wrong order. Yet our school systems are so rigid and so intertwined. It's not just the teacher in the classroom. It's the teacher in the classroom, it's the parents of the kids, the union of the teacher, the school administrators and the legislature and pretty soon you have a system that's so interlocked that it takes nuclear energy to make changes. We have to apply our energies in some judicious way. We have to graduate high school kids that are comfortable with science, so that they can be intelligent citizens. So they won't be taken in be the charlatans and TV evangelists that assure them that their sister was raped by an alien.
I notice that UFOs are big in China now, which will be an interesting problem for the Chinese. I'm glad that they aren't bothering us.
There's so many of these belief systems you know. Astrology for example. Fortunately, I'm a Sagittarius and Sagittarius' don't believe in astrology. :)
9) GUT
by speek
Every pop book on Physics I've read for the past 20 years (sorry, I studied accounting in College) states that we are on the verge of a breakthrough that will allow an understanding of the Grand Unified Theory of Everything [GUT]. Say a GUT is found and verified (as much as possible). What technological breakthroughs would come in the 20 years following such a discovery, that were directly attributable to it? In other words, for everyday people, what are we likely to see as a benefit down the road from a successful GUT?
Dr. Lederman:
Sounds like a question we get from congressmen all the time. :-)
The honest answer is, at the moment, the glamorous Grand Unified Theory is superstrings. That's a hot subject and according to the people who have the mathematical sophistication to appreciate superstrings, it's a beautiful theory. It has no experimental implications right now, so it's not a proven theory. One can imagine that some kid, now in junior high school, not turned off by a poor teacher, will eventually find a way to manipulate the basic idea of superstring and derive from that the standard model of particles and therefore it will have experimental consequences. There are plenty of experiments around the world in which we live. We've been waiting for this theory now for 400 years and when it comes we'll say Hallelujah!
Now, having found this theory, will this have implications of a technological nature which will influence the great unwashed public?
It's hard to see that. All you can do is, in some sense, cite history. Newton was working on this very abstract thing called gravity. I think he would have been surprised more than anybody as to the great implications of his theory. It changed the way people live on this planet. Including the creation of subjects like mechanical engineering, structural engineering, civil engineering and terrestrial mechanics. The whole structure of the solar system and other solar systems.
The same thing happened with Faraday. I mean where did you electricity in 1820? Ball lighting maybe. And yet, Faraday said, it may be as useful as a newborn baby. Which was very profound. Of course, he also predicted that the government would tax it, and 50 years after Faraday the English government put a tax on electricity.
The history of fundamental breakthroughs is universally a history in which there have been profound technological consequences. If Faraday had to compete with Napoleon for a spot on the six o'clock news he wouldn't have had a chance. Yet the invention of electricity was more profound than all the Napoleons, Genghis Khans and Kings of England rolled into one. You can make the same statement up through the very abstract problems that Planck and later Schroedinger, Bohr and Heisenberg were dealing with when data came out of the atom. Out of that came the quantum theory. According to my congressional testimony that accounts for 62.3% of the GNP. :-) If you don't believe me, go check it. I'm confident you won't be able to. :-)
So, who knows. The curious thing is that 20th century physics rests on two pillars. Two is an unstable number, I know, but we have two pillars. Quantum theory, the theory of the atom and smaller, and relativity, the theory of the cosmos and larger. These two theories are independent most of the time, but where they overlap they are incompatible.
Where do they overlap? The only overlap in our imagination when we think about where the universe began and the big bang. In the big bang the huge vastness of the cosmos was compressed into a space the size of an atom, so you have to use quantum theory and relativity and they are incompatible. Superstrings is a way of substituting these two theories so that we have a viable theory which separates the early universe from when the universe expanded and separated into the big things and the little things.
Will it have implications for our everyday life? Even though it's hard to imagine, my guess is yes. It may have, we can't predict for sure, profound implications for everyday life. but technology is changing our lives so rapidly that I don't think we need new sources.
10) patents
by BadERA
Dr. Lederman, What are your thoughts on patents? Particularly, what do you think of the practice of patenting genetic discoveries? Is this not analogous to, and just as ridiculous as, patenting a newly found particle?
Dr. Lederman:
I think all patents are bad... Unless they are mine. :)
Patents of discoveries aren't a good thing. They prevent people from doing more research that expands on the discovery. Think what would have happened if Rutherford had patented the nucleus, or the device used to detect the nucleus. In general they slow further growth on the subject in which they were given.
If they are to exist, they should at least be shorter in duration. Maybe five years or so. The problem is that the tendency seems towards making them last even longer. Companies are able to lobby for the rule changes that benefit them and this leaves the debate on the subject fairly one sided.
11)IMSA +13 years
by [Xorian]
While perhaps not everyone here is aware of it, I remember your involvement with the early history of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.
[For those who don't know, IMSA is a state-wide, residential magnet school for grades 10-12, with less than 1000 total students. It requires an application, recommendations, and the SAT to gain admittance. While math and science take a prominent place in its name, it also has excellent humanities and social studies programs. The idea was to provide a better educational environment for gifted high school students.]
IMSA, which first opened in 1986, is now halfway through it's thirteenth year. It was an experiment when it was first created. Over the years, it has changed and adapted on a number of levels. Now it's more a fixture of the Illinois educational system.
Certainly, improving the education of future generations is as important and controversial a topic today as it was then. Do you feel that the IMSA experiment was a success? Would you now advocate starting more programs like it in other states? Would you say that, over its 13 year history, the institution has maintained the correct focus, or have they perhaps lost sight of their original goals in order to ensure their own survival and continued funding?
Dr. Lederman:
First of all let me say that there are now 13 similar schools around the country. Which is characterized by being concerned with the gifted kids, as well as you can define giftedness, and giving them very special experiences. I think the IMSA experiment is successful.
It's still early to say because what you would like to see out of this is what they are doing when they are 30 and 40 years old. The first class is just getting to 30 now. Indications are very positive.
About 60% of these kids stay in some scientific field, if we accept medicine as a scientific field, which I do. The rest go into everything. All kinds of things, politics, teaching, Peace Corps. We got a $500,000 gift from one of our students who has something to do with the founding of Netscape. None of them were involved with the recent AOL merger though. So they are involved with all kinds of things.
Now would they have been involved anyway? That's a harder question to answer. The only reliable data you can get, I think, is to ask them, was your high school experience meaningful to you? I meet these kids all over the country and they say, hey, you don't remember but I was IMSA graduate from the third class, and rather uniformly the have an extremely positive opinion of their IMSA life. Some say that it prepared them better for graduate school than for college.
There is a lot of reliance on self learning, very strong emphasis on what you might call the inquiry method. Kids are naturally scientists and in science the IMSA kids are gifted so they are good scientists. They do research. They get experience with research all over the place. I feel positive about it. I'd like to see one of these in every state. In Illinois we have no trouble filling 200 seats in each class. We could probably, without suffering standards, be 50% larger. Maybe not twice as large and that's a medium size state of 10 million or so. I think I could see at least one school like this in most states. In states like California and New York you could have two of them. In fact, New York has the Bronx high school of science.
Taking care of giftedness is a very wise investment because there is no question that society will be paid back for this little extra investment in a small number of kids. One of these kids, there's no question about it statistically, will cure some incredible disease. We don't know which one it is, so we have to treat them all as if they are the one. When you yell at a kid you have to remember that he may be the one to cure, say, senility (said the smiling gray haired gentleman :).
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Scheduled next week: Corel President/CEO Michael Cowpland.
Your unwillingness to accept the truth of what I write is a clear indicator of the level of brainwashing you have received at the hands of the socialist liberal science establishment. Do you contest my notion that physics is a complete lie? If so, put your money where your momentum is. Demonstrate that the sort of tripe that is being shamelessly peddled by the Hawkings and Einsteins of the world has any value whatsoever (other than to undermine God's dominion over man.)
Physics has done little more than to damage society. As a result of physics, you have women who believe that they are somehow entitled to put on shoes and leave the home in search of their own careers (in direct conflict with the "barefoot and pregnant" edict levied by the Almighty.) Homosexuals, Wiccans, and Catholics are performing laboratory experiments on a daily basis, the results of which they use to further their own horrible causes. The liberals, united by the laws of physics, conspired to have "Little House on the Prairie" taken off the air, and you can bet they have a similar fate in mind for "Touched by an Angel."
No, friend, the truth is that physics has done absolutely nothing to further our society. All it has done is drag us down into a sickening pit of relativism and moral decay. We must being to claw our way out of this pit, and banning the teaching of physics is the right way to start.
...were the McCool brothers, Rob and Mike. Rob was the original author of NCSA httpd, which is pretty dammed amazing considering that he must have been a sophmore at the time. You can read a historical document by Rob describing the early httpd here.
I have to imagine that the fact that IMSA had an internet connection and UNIX and tought these things to high school students had something to do with the McCool brother's skills. And thus had a critical influence on the early development of the web, and on the way that you're reading this document today.
P.S. I feel sort of like James Burke (Of "Connections" fame).
Friends, I am simply unable to read through this popular science tripe and let it pass without comment. Most, if not all, modern science was invented at Berkeley in the 1960s by the liberals in their attempt to destroy the roots of Christianity and God Almighty himself. Well, they may think they've succeeded. In many ways, they have. But as the noble Board of Education in the great state of Kansas has demonstrated, there still exist real Americans who are willing to stand up for what's right. There are still decent people out there, people who are going to defend our way of life from the pseudoscientific liberal establishment that is hellbent on instituting their own left-wing fantasy land of relativism and "tolerance."
The mythology of physics is particularly entertaining to the trained eye. The liberals were particularly inventive when they came up with this stuff. They started with very simple premises about things, premises that seem to make an awful lot of sense to an awful lot of people. The heretic Galileo was the one who got the ball rolling (so to speak) with regards to this. One of the greatest lies of this millennium is the apocraphal story about Galileo and his experiment involving weights dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Friends, this story is made up; the experiment never happened, and there is a reason: the socialist liberal notion that objects fall to the Earth at the same rate is a complete and total lie.
But people accepted it. When they heard of Galileo and his fantasy experiment, they took it at face value. After all, people back in those days were too busy with the noble work of rounding up and burning heretics; how could they possibly be expected to duplicate the phantom experiment for themselves? So, perhaps unwisely, people did not ask for independent verification of Galileo's communist theory, and it was allowed to permeate into the minds of people all around the populated world. In the end, the elders did the correct thing when they imprisoned Galileo, but the damage had already been done! Galileo's well-deserved death in prison did not erase his idea.
So from there, the torch of conspiracy was passed from one generation to the next, until it ended up in the hands of the notorious liberal Isaac Newton. Newton took these tantalizingly simple precepts that Galileo and others had developed, and extended them into a theory that attempted to describe the entire universe! The universe, for pity's sake! Friends, this makes my blood boil! Now you see how dangerous simple ideas are when they fall into the wrong hands. Newton took these simple ideas and formulated them into a device that is still being used to put control of the universe in the hands of science, instead of the hands of God. And people accepted it, without doing any research of their own!
Of course, Newton's theory was a complete and total fraud. Observations of the planet Mercury did not match the predictions made by Newton's theory, and this frightened the liberals to no end. After all, if it became well-known that the theory did not work, people might abandon their support of the socialist scientific conspiracy and return to their rightful, God-inspired roots. That's why the liberals enlisted the help of Albert Einstein, a well-known Communist, to amend Newton's theory so that it matched observations. That's how these heretics work. They just write new theories every time an old one doesn't work.
Einstein's ridiculous theory was that there is something called "space-time", and that it is curved. Hogwash! This is another complete and total fabrication, plucked from the liberal, atheistic ether by the enemies of God. "Relativity", as it is called, is not grounded in science. It is grounded in Communism and homosexuality. It must be rejected at all costs.
So my friends, there you have it: a brief history of science as seen by objective eyes. Don't let these heretics sway you. Demand evidence that is in accordance with Scripture. And remember: the only things that fall at a constant rate of speed are the souls of the damned, liberal scientists as they descend into the depths of Hell.
Air resistance is a factor -ONLY- if you have chosen to ignore it. The acceleration each object experiences, due to the Earth, is the same in both cases, and you can demonstrate this by measuring both the experimental error and the air resistance, and showing that the two are, in fact, vectors of equal magnitude and identical direction.
As for quantum mechanics, I assure you it's a doddle to think in such terms. By picturing it in terms of a "surreal" environment (I take it you never listened to The Beatles), you can turn those numbers into an image. And images are trivial. You can play with them (Schrodinger's Cat), you can carry out thought-experiments (Maxwell's Demon), you have total freedom to do what you like. And, once you're finished, just map back to the numbers to see if what you have makes sense.
If you find day-dreaming hard, or can't understand how Maxwell or Schrodinger got the imagery they did, I can understand the difficulty you have with quantum mechanics.
On the other hand, if you're used to the imagery so often used (sausage instabilities, quark soups, many-world systems, etc), then you're probably very used to using mappings which would convince any "normal" person you were tripping the light fantastic, or at least tripping something.
But, as reality is made from concepts such as these, it is these which are "real" and the "everyday" which is not.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Oh sure, kill my moderations on this interview by forcing me to reply..:]
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As far as recent pop physics books go, check out The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, by Brian Greene. It was released in 1999, I believe.
ISBN# 0393046885
Hardcover version from fatbrain.com
I've just started reading the book myself, and so far it is a great read... if anyone here picks up a copy, send me an email, it's always good to have someone to discuss these things with..
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driph
I think that these interviews are one of the *best* features of Slashdot.
It would be a great service to the world n if those readers blessed with moderator privileges would use their to bump that post up to 5. I want to see it in the top 10.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I don't know about that. I think he has a point. Perhaps you should examine your motives more closely.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The scientific method is appallingly taught, at least in the UK (IMHO).
That's a fairly outrageous claim. What evidence do you offer to back it up? I hope you have some because otherwise, many people with science degrees obtained in the UK are likely fii
FWIW, in the science programmes offered at the two London University colleges I attended back in the eighties: the first year included a mandatory course module in experimental methods (included basic statistics; identifying, measuring and estimating sources of error; standards of proof; experiment design) and the second and third years included a mandatory course module in advanced statistical analysis. My course tutors gave us seminars on the scientific method (as laid out by Sir Karl Popper).
Apart from the principles of software design, just about the only really useful knowledge I *did* get from university was an appreciation of how to do - and evaluate - Science properly.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
That's a fairly outrageous claim. What evidence do you offer to back it up? I hope you have some because otherwise, many people with science degrees obtained in the UK are likely fii
Whoops! I meant to say: otherwise, many people with science degrees obtained in the UK are likely to be unjustly offended.
I fell asleep at my keyboard while I was in the middle of writing that post...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Tidying up confusion (Score:1)
by kojak on 14:22 15th January, 2000 BST (#130)
(User Info)
I meant *in schools*, sorry for the confusion. In terms of method at UK universities, I have no real complaints. I was doing three things at once when I tpyed it, and it was late.
Getting back to the whinge - I just don't see that the current state of GCSE actually promotes public understanding of science. It kind of hero-worships these geeks-as-gods "scientists", somewhat unhelpfully I feel.
...etc.
Well, it appears I completely misunderstood what you were trying to say.
As regards your point about GCSE-level education, I can only agree. It's clear that
high school education in the UK isn't what it used to be. In particular, any attempt
to teach science without the maths to support it is doomed to failure. Unless we can
understand the maths we can assess neither experimental results nor theory, and
the whole subject is indistinguishable from philisophy or religion. No wonder so
many young people today lack faith in science and think it's "just another way of
looking at things" no better than voodooism UFOlogy.
FYI, my high school education in the late 1970's employed the Nuffield syllabus for
the three science subjects and consequently placed a very high emphasis on
hands-on experimentation and analysis. I understand the "traditional" science
syllabus used in most UK schools at the time tended more towards historical
discourse and the handing down of received knowledge. The benefits of the Nuffield
syllabuses (syllabi?) were even more pronounced at 'A' level. You can easily imagine
that 6th-form Nuffield science would have been equivalent to University freshman
science in most other countries, including the US. That's what our teachers at the
time told us anyway.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Errr. I'd be disinclined to imitate slashdot for a serious academic journal. What works for moderating discussion doesn't seem likely to map well to moderating articles. Maybe if you allowed comments on the articles the slashdot model would work, but you still have to consider the articles themselves.
Personally, I'd be inclined to have an article-pool with all the submitted articles. Authorized reviewers can look through them, and give a rating of 'substantive', 'speculative' or 'erroneous'.
Substantive and speculative both push an article up, and to one side or the other, and erroneous pushes it down. If you only care about 'solid, factual articles' or only care about 'real groundbreaking ideas' you can set your substantive/speculative limits to filter for that kind of article.
Erroneous just marks an article down as 'bad.' Anyone that marks an article erroneous and is later unable to support the assertion should lose moderator privileges.
Any article that gets more than, say, 3 good marks should go into 'publication' to be seen by non-reviewers.
I think, btw, the submission pool should be viewable by anyone curious. The purpose of the change from 'submitted' to 'published' would be just to save readers time in highlighting articles that have been filtered for gross errors.
Anyway, someone who reads more academic journals than I do might come up with better filtering, but I think blindly copying slashdot's moderation into a completely different kind of online-publication would have poor results at best.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
^dis^des
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Celebrate the finer things in life
The code is already there. Some on-line science publisher could easily set this up. Question is, would the science community really like being "moderated" in this way, even if it is by their own selves?
/. site for physics here - having the latest slashdot code available would probably help us get going...
/. seems to. The critical thing is getting enough comments and contributors - if you only get 1 comment or rating for every 100 featured articles (as some trial comment systems out there seem to), you just won't have a statistically valid sampling, no matter how unbiased your pool of moderators attempts to be. Part of the difficulty of doing this (and why Lederman's probably wrong that this will make anybody a pot of money) is that most scientific articles are pretty boring, and you have to motivate reviewers with some sense of duty or something to get even one or two of them to read an article with any degree of care. But it's definitely worth experimenting with - something along these lines has GOT to be the way to go in the long run, we just haven't quite figured out the systemic structures needed yet...
I work for the Physical Review journals of the American Physical Society - we've been strong supporters of some of these new ideas, including creating a new mirror of the Los Alamos XXX/arXiv site. Since it's part of my job to bring up new ideas, I've been thinking of setting up a
I think scientists really would support something that worked as well as
Energy: time to change the picture.
"The code is already there. Some on-line science publisher could easily set this up. Question is, would the science community really like being "moderated" in this way, even if it is by their own selves?"
First, I think it would be very useful. Yet I see some problems with the existing culture around science. The current science community is dominated and led by elderly, earlier successful people. In fact the Nobel prize is usually awarded to people who did their boundary breaking work decades ago.
A democatically (a la slashdot) moderated journal would not favor those leading figures but their boundary breaking disciples (most great scientist publish their greatest work before they're 35). Yet, it is the elderly scientist who create and edit the journals. Why would they choose a formula that does not favor their own work?
Since I'm not yet 30 I like the idea of online, slashdot style moderated journals. I really hate the pace at which journals are published (it takes half a year or more to get an article published). I also dislike the general conservatism in the scientific community about things like publishing. (a few months back I actually had to send in a paper copy of an article! I'm a software engineer! I know about DTP, internet and stuff like that, why do I have to waste dead trees and stamps on somthing simple like this!).
As a counter argument to my own writing I have to admit that the baked in slowness in scientific publishing allows for better and more thorough selecting which leads to higher quality publishing. Somehow this should be compensated by better moderation.
It's the quantity over quality question we're dealing with here. Is it better to have many low quality published articles in which we have to search for meaningfull individual publiations or should we have a system where only few articles get published that are actually worthwhile reading?
I'm inclined to think that the latter option would render the same or a higher level of quality accompanied with a lot of static in the form of low quality bullshit troll/articles like we se on slashdot.
Jilles
Obviously I worded my comment wrong. I also didn't make the smiley large enough.
I was trying to say: "If you are working on a problem and Brainiac says 'That's a hard problem', that doesn't bode well for your future."
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
If his claim is that no behaviour is seen at the higher level whose explanations involve principles specific to the higher level... That is not his claim. His claim is the opposite.
He says: "We have no clue now as to how to explain a virus starting with quarks and leptons, in fact we can't even explain the curious properties of the carbon atom. Bucky Balls or a girl's best friend. We couldn't have predicted a diamond from knowing everything that we know about carbon. On the other hand once you have a diamond you can reduce that to the proper behavior of quarks and leptons." He is clearly stating that, as you say, we "won't have a clue unless (we) step back from the problem (diamonds, the Jet Stream) and apply higher level principles."
When he said "That would be a first time in science that a theory can't be reduced.", he first said "Some complexity experts believe that out of complexity will emerge new laws of physics that can't be reduced to quarks and leptons. We treat that with a great deal of skepticism. We don't know though, and that would be an interesting thing to see. That would be a first time in science that a theory can't be reduced."
He is saying that a) he is skeptical that complexity will produce laws that cannot be reduced and b) if such were discovered it would be the first time.
Therefore I disagree with your statement that "Depending what you mean, this is either a trivial claim that is utterly meaningless, or else it is a strong claim which is complete BS."
In fact, he believes that a) the emergent principles are required (today) for understanding the higher-level phenomena (i.e. we must be presented with the diamond; we cannot first concieve it) and b) once the emergent behavior is exhibited it is consistent with the lower-level principles. In fact, he said exactly the same thing you said.
Jeff
Hope I'm not speaking out of turn, but since I raised my /. reading threshold to 2, I haven't seen _any_ "...static in the form of low quality bullshit troll/articles"..."on slashdot."
Honestly. Try it for a week.
"We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." Dave Clark, IETF
Many people interested in physics who mock common sense fail to see how deeply it runs within them.
;). Your unidentified commen sense tells you that, neglecting air resistance et al., the iron ball and the feather will fall at the same rate (ceteris paribus). Well, that uncommon common sense is wrong. The more massive object will fall faster because there is a secondary effect, similar to induction in wires. Just as an electric current has a magnetic field around it, a 'mass current' (read falling object) has a 'gravito-magnetic' field (one of many names for it). That secondary field, which is practically negligible, will cause the more massive object to fall faster.
Study any modern theory of gravity (Einstein's general theory of relativity is the favorite nowadays
There is much common sense about Aristotle, but often not enough to get people to read what he wrote; even more rare is the sense that one might question a translation. Aristotle describes inertia quite well and MIT has a classics archive in which you can read a translation of what he actually wrote. Even better would be to learn Latin, Greek and Aramaic so you can read earlier translations and perhaps understand the subtleties of language that often obfuscate the ideas being presented. (If you read English very literally and get the Physics is McKeon's Basic Works of Aristotle, you can save yourself a few years of study.)
It's also common sense that physics is hard or (for the slightly more erudite) unintuitive. But if you learn how to use mathematics and quit reading every other (good-physicist/bad-philosopher)'s interpretation of 'what it all means' then it becomes both easy and intuitive. Reading something about the history of the ideas also helps. ( Special relativity is even 'obvious' if you read Maxwell, Heaviside, Poincare, Lorentz and others. J.S.Bell, of Bell's Inequalities and EPR paradox, has a very good paper about that.)
Importance is twice a relative thing. It relates to something and for something. While the laws of nature affect everything, a study of them (e.g., physics) may be completely unimportant to me for I may make little use of what is not 'common sense'. Perhaps by choosing not to study something I show those who do study it more respect by not assuming that such a study could be done trivially.
Perhaps the only thing important to everyone is the pursuit of happiness for that, as Aristotle can show you, is an end in itself.
So... What's a Higgs? I've never heard of it before. If someone could post a brief description of this and other non-described things in the article, it would be a big help to us non-physics guys that would like to understand what the article is talking about.
Thanks.
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
Thank you, Doctor Lederman!
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
You did more than "intuit a connection", you said "This leads me to think that you do not have any interest in an objective evaluation of the school but, rather, a desire to say something bad." In the context of your justification for it, which was "your second paragraph then goes on to do nothing other than present two pieces of anecdotal evidence, only one of which has any detail." there are multiple logical fallacies here, but the most glaring one is called "false dilemma". I could have had an interest in an objective evaluation of the school as well as "a desire to say something bad". Indeed, I had a desire to say something true that happened to be bad because I saw so much "desire to say something good" coming from people which contrasted so strongly with the datapoints I had. Since most people have no datapoints on IMSA, I felt is quite appropriate to share the countervailing information I had.
It added signal to the discussion. Your questioning of my "motives" for doing so was rhetorical nonsense which, from what I have been able to gather by examining the IMSA notes groups, is in abudant supply at IMSA (in subjects outside of the mainly math curriculum which appears to be excellent) -- something that I believe contributed to your predisposition demonstrated here. Call this "ad hominem" if you like, but you are another datapoint on IMSA, so your claim that I am indulging in that particular logical fallacy is, itself, fallacious.
Furthermore, indeed I do have an interest in objective evaluation of IMSA's methods, which is why I can relate the following additional anecdote:
IMSA conducted an experiment to illuminate the question of whether females would learn math better if segregated from males. However, in this experiment, the teaching methodologies employed in the female-only class were quite different from those employed outside of that class. If the experiment had been properly conducted, the methodologies would have been the same. Students exposed to this idea of "experimentation" by their own educators, as were IMSA students, are prone to becoming confused about reasoning in natural science if they take seriously the examples set by their educational authorities.
Finally, the story of the two IMSA students, one who went through and became typical and one who was kicked out and became stellar, was quite relevant to the discussion of controls being necessary for the evaluation of IMSA's experiments in education. My anecdote, as small as it was, at least had a control.
Seastead this.
If this is the sort of logic they teach at IMSA, perhaps I should have been motivated "to say something bad".
Seastead this.
Something you don't want a Nobel-prize-winning physicist to say: "Oh gosh, that's a hard question."
As I recall the admission that you are a fool is actually better than no saying you are a fool. If there was a person who had a nobel and he/she said that there was not a question that is hard I would be rather unimpressed with them.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
If many more questions had been asked, it wouldn't have been the Mandrake ISO image people would have downloaded. :)
Well it was only 43k. I can transfer more data in one hour using kermit on a 2400bps modem than that anyway. I think it would take about oh 3 minutes at max to get it all on that setup a standard 56k could do that no sweat.
There's a -lot- of good stuff, there, and congratulations all round for one of the best high-end physics interviews I've read.
I would say it's pretty good considering slashdot could get someone so fameous to speak to us mortals.
Compared to typical news interviews, or documentaries (even on Discovery, TLC, or the BBC), I'd say that the quality of Slashdot's journalism is superior to any of the
"traditional" media outlets.
I disagree with you there. I watched a documentary on a PBS station a while ago about how the producers of 60 minutes actually do their work. All the extensive review and revision and further review are 1,000,000,000,000x more than slashdot could easily do in a year. This has to be done every week and is the only thing they ever do. Slashdot cannot compete with "traditional" media outlets unless they significantly increase their capital and use streaming video segments 24/7/365 with a whole world wide team of anchors and editors.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I once was a "hard" science guy but I have mellowed. I think that Leon's answer may of been long but show very much the brillance of the man. Good to see that /. kept it all
science related because I do not think he would of been happy to answer questions about his what os he uses or does he prefer blondes or brunettes (yes these questions were actually
posted but never asked!)
I am interested in them! If we know what people like this think about OSs and what not then it may be possible to create a better distribution. About women well I guess that's a personal preference but it never hurts to get a couple of questions like these in there.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I'd quibble with point (2). Physics is only difficult, because it tends to not be "common sense". But, in reality, that's a problem with "common sense", not physics.
The math requirements of physics also have something to do with it. Generally math is also not easy for the average person and so therefore it can be inferred that physics is not easy because of it's reliance on it.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Its not really my field, but there are those who argue that the normal calculus we all learn at school and college / university is highly non-intuitive when applied to many physics problems, esp. General Relativity, forming the Schrodinger wavefunciton and electromagnetic field equations.
/ ps/imag_numbs.ps.gz
It is advocated that that people might be re-taught to use Clifford Algebras (e.g. Geometric Algebra) when they get to university. People would find it hard at first, but then it would make everything after that easier, or at least so it is alleged.
To find out more go to:
http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~clifford/
or get the general paper "Imaginary Numbers are Not Real" by Gull, Lasenby and Doran.
http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~clifford/publication
It might, especially at the "special schools" mentioned in the article, be worth teaching this in schools. I'm not even sure its worth teaching phyiscs in the traditional sense at schools - and looking at US Physics 101 textbooks I'm not sure that much is taught. A philosophy and implications of science course might be better. The scientific method is appallingly taught, at least in the UK (IMHO).
While I'm here I might as well mention that I don't agree with Lederman - as someone who's probably about to leave science research I *do* believe there are problems in science, epecially in the UK, because it is underpaid and underrespected. In the US you get much better facilities and about 2-3 times the pay in real terms. This means you'd have to have a bullet in the head not to either go to the US to do your research or move to Finance / Wall St.
Sounds like he's suggesting a moderated on-line science journal with two types of users: those with accounts (graduate students of various fields who have the permissions to moderate within their field) and those without accounts who essentially read-only.
Having habitually waded through the thirty or forty new electronic abstracts available through one of the astronomy preprint servers each morning during my Astronomy PhD, having some sort of moderated, sorted, categorized, up-to-the-minute Science Journal sounds like heaven. Of course, I've now left my astronomy roots to work at IBM Canada, but having spent four years of my life submerged in Astronomy still leaves a significant urge to continue watching the science evolve and mutate.
And herein lies the problem - what one person in a scientific discipline considers to be a good paper may be considered a complete dud by another. A classic example from my subject from a couple of years back is the Hubble Constant. For the uninitiated, this is the constant that represents the ratio of the velocity of a galaxy rushing away from us to the distance to that galaxy. In an expanding universe at one point in time, it's constant at large enough scales... we think ... if the galaxy isn't gravitationally coupled to the viewer, or if it isn't involved in some super-cluster super-flow... But anyway, I digress. The value of the Hubble constant, very much a 'Holy Grail' of observational astronomy, is difficult to measure accurately. Various methods give different results - the lab I worked at used a method based on the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect and had a best fit answer of 42 km s-1 Mpc-1. Various other groups, working from Cepheid variable stars, had values up in the 75 - 100 km s-1 Mpc-1. So our group naturally tended to look more favourably on papers with lower values (say less than 60) and other groups would prefer high values. So any form of moderation is extremely sensitive to who is moderating it - there are egos in science just like any other field!
At the end of the day, this therefore requires some sort of anti-bias measure. Having lots of people moderate the papers is therefore a good thing, but that requires significant man-power. Something similar to the Slashdot scheme might work, but the number of people who are in a position to make intelligent moderation on a highly technical paper is much smaller than those who might moderate more general material, and that small group may have better things to do than read 40 papers a day!
Even so, some sort of moderated online science journal scheme would be interesting, despite the problems ... It might also encourage an increase in the lucidity of scientific papers in order to get moderated up - it might even generate a race to see who could notch up the highest Slashdot^H^H^H^H^H^Hcientific Karma :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
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This is the future. The ability for anyone to submit a (good/ontopic/fun) question to (nobel prize winners/CEOs/past presidents/etc.), and have it answered, is by far and away the most impressive thing I've yet seen about this medium. Dr. Lederman, a big thank you for your time, consideration of the questions, and genuine answers. Rich, well done! Thanks for your effort. And, as usual, much coolness to /. Keep it up. ~.
You might want to try Dr. Lederman's own book, "The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?" It's an entertaining read and is aimed at a very basic level. Might not have everything you're looking for, but it's fun nonetheless.
Scott
While I really did enjoy the article the mention of limited budgets really gets to me.
I happen to work at a university and the amount of money spent in questionable ways amazes me. I'm often involved in finding ways to get over and around grant limitations on funding techincal purchases as part of my job. I see grant money spent allowing profs to travel overseas over the summer to attend conferences in places that happen to be ideal vacation spots, to purchase computing equipment that ends up in prof's homes. Heaven forbid they use their own money to purchase personal computers like the rest of us. I've seen grants designed to improve out of date classrooms used to add additions to some of the nicest buildings on campus used by the richest departments (big research grants = political power). I've seen student fees designed to provide better access to technology in our labs resulting in the original departmental budget for those same labs disappearing. So the new fees have increased the lab budget but by far less than what the students are paying.
I'm all for spending money on science. It sickens me to compare a reasearcher's salary to a professional football players. But if this institution is any indication of other research institutions then some honesty in spending grant money and student fees would greatly increase the funds available for hard science.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
There's a -lot- of good stuff, there, and congratulations all round for one of the best high-end physics interviews I've read.
Compared to typical news interviews, or documentaries (even on Discovery, TLC, or the BBC), I'd say that the quality of Slashdot's journalism is superior to any of the "traditional" media outlets.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So long as a person is willing to discard -all- preconceived notions, and look at the world the same way an inquisitive child might, it's really all quite simple. You stop assuming iron balls should fall faster than feathers, because of their weight, and start seeing what's happening.
Aristotle used "common sense" by assuming everything was in rest, unless pushed, and then returned to rest. We now know, through the mind of Newton, that this is not true, for all that "anyone can see that!".
The same goes for extreme physics. The uncertainty principle, matter having 720' symmetry, the peculiar nature of neutrinos, time dilation (and the "Twins Paradox"), the bending of space/time, Black Holes, quark soup, gluons, leptons, Superstring theory, exotic matter, negative energy densities, Quasars, pear-shaped atoms, X-Ray fluorescence, wave/particle duality, etc, are all very much non-intuitive, IF you think in terms of "everyday experience".
By sticking to worlds of plasticine houses and marmalade skies, where "everyday experience" simply isn't important and seeing what's going on -is-, physics actually becomes rather trivial. After all, physics is really only just about knowing what's there, so by dumping all the stuff that -isn't- there which we bog ourselves down with, there's nothing to stop you from concentrating on what's important.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
He says that, "That would be a first time in science that a theory can't be reduced."
Depending what you mean, this is either a trivial claim that is utterly meaningless, or else it is a strong claim which is complete BS.
If his claim is that no behaviour is seen at the higher level which is not in principle explainable from what happens at the lower level, then the claim is true and he misunderstand the concept of "emergent phenomena".
If his claim is that no behaviour is seen at the higher level whose explanations involve principles specific to the higher level, then he is wrong. Plenty of emergent phenomena occur all of the time at all sorts of levels. For instance the Jet Stream is unstable, it spontaneously develops "waves" north and south. (The length of the wave is about twice the width of North America. This is why warm weather on the East Coast of NA is accompanied by cold weather on the West and vica versa.)
In principle from a lower level you can run simulations and every time you will see this feature develop. Why does it develop? You won't have a clue unless you step back from the problem and apply higher level principles.
(I could give other examples ad nauseum, but emergent phenomena are not new things.)
Cheers,
Ben
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Something you don't want a Nobel-prize-winning physicist to say: "Oh gosh, that's a hard question."
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I think Dr. Lederman hit the nail on the head...we need shorter patent durations to encourage further developments in the field. I think a small number like 5 years is a lot more appropriate; it allows the company or individual that funded the development to have a "head start", so to speak; but not to forever dominate the field.
Of course, this doesn't solve the issue of software patents; imagine if someone had patented CGI scripts to generate HTML on the fly way back in 1994, when the Net really started getting big. Only recently would we be free of this encumberance.
I think the ultimate solution is to further educate USPTO and other patent organizations worldwide on the fallacies of far-reaching softwar e patents, and encourage software developers worldwide to open their technology to everyone else. Open-source has proven that being open and free (as in speech) only leads to a bettering of the market, not a stagnation as others predict. I think it's high time we spread this ideology.
It's still early to say because what you would like to see out of this is what they are doing when they are 30 and 40 years old. The first class is just getting to 30 now. Indications are very positive.
When Lederman says "IMSA is successful" based on what students do when they get out, I have to wonder whether he has any control groups. Normally, medical ethics require controls on the experiments -- and when it comes to experimental education, using medications to control student behavior, I have to wonder whether appropriate ethical standards, even by the abysmal ethics of educators, have been followed.
I know two IMSA students who are now in Silicon Valley. Both of these kids were gifted before they went into IMSA and both were gifted when they left, however neither of them went on to college. One of these students was kicked out of IMSA for not taking his behavior modifying drugs. He went on, at the ages of 19-20, to find more security holes in the Netscape browser than any other single organization or individual. Further, he recently won the award for the most promising work in progress at the Hacker's Conference (rated by an applause-o-meter) out of at least 10 presentations. The student who graduated from IMSA (one of its top female students) is clearly gifted not in the same league as the IMSA reject.
Seastead this.
Algebra is often -very- badly taught, with little or no consideration for the fact that it is a very painful concept to learn, if you try and think of it in everyday terms. Which is exactly how it's taught in many schools.
Calculus is OK, if it's taught well, but dx/dy on it's own won't have the same meaning as "the rate at which something changes", and integrating is something people just don't tend to do, on a day-to-day basis.
Once you get to finding roots of nth order polynomials, sqrt(-1) and complex numbers, non-differentiable functions, the curious case of the infinite infinities, dividing by zero, strange attractors, unstable functions, and group theory, you've either discarded everyday experience from the classroom or you're certifiably insane. To mix even maths as simple as this with what you see outside is a mistake you probably won't get to make twice.
In short, if you learn maths and physics -without- trying to bring in oranges and apples, you're probably going to understand it a whole lot more. Yes, no reference to the "outside world" might lead people to believe it's all "irrelevent", but they think that anyway and with probably more justification, given that all they learned about maths to tie it into the "real world" simply wasn't true.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Thanks for a stellar (if not astrophysical :-) interview!
Dr. Lederman's belief in education should be a beacon to all readers. If we continue down the (U.S., anyway) path of deteriorating education, democracy will die. The first job must be to raise children who will be able to discern fact from fiction, evidence from opinion, and tell when the evidence is insufficient for decision, and more evidence must be gathered.
To do those things, it is mandatory that they understand the nature of data-gathering. If I run a (well-designed) experiment five times, and get one result twice and another thrice, what does that tell me about the phenomenon? When their friends all say ``I know a friend who says his buddy saw .... and therefore the world always works that way.'', they must know the importance of separating anecdote from experiment.
To that end, we need to design a series of courses for, I suspect, 9--16-year-olds to demonstrate how often coincidence occurs, how much it costs to accurately sample a population of a given size, what ``5% margin of error'' means, and why ``95% level of confidence'' means one in twenty of those science reports is wrong.
They must be designed so the kids don't just learn it well enough to pass a multiple-choice exam at the end of the year, but so they feel it in their guts.
If we can manage to get such education in place so high-school students know how sampling, chance, and uncertainty affect their knowledge of the world, then we'll be headed on the right track.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
A force-carrier particle. Photons, gluons, W, and Z particles are all bosons. Another type of boson, the Higgs, is proposed as the mechanism by which particles acquire mass.
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I've often thought someone could make a lot of money, I'm throwing this out there for the would-be millionaires or billionaires, in quality assurance. What would save people a lot of time would be a little code. For $10 a year you get access to this code that will tell you this is worth reading
Sounds like he's suggesting a moderated on-line science journal with two types of users: those with accounts (graduate students of various fields who have the permissions to moderate within their field) and those without accounts who essentially read-only.
Rather similar to Slashdot's moderation. The modifications necessary are greater detail in the moderation permission structure (so that say, a physics grad can moderate physics publications, but not medical ones), and a way of verifying users and their qualifications at the time of joining.
The code is already there. Some on-line science publisher could easily set this up. Question is, would the science community really like being "moderated" in this way, even if it is by their own selves?
It'd kind of be like if every Hollywood movie that came out was immediately "moderated" by every actor/producer/director and given a score. I would think Hollywood wouldn't be too keen on that. Maybe scientists are different.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!