The Princeton Physics department colloquium on “New Neutrino Oscillation Results from the MiniBooNE Experiment” scheduled for this Thursday has been canceled. I wonder what is going on with that. Have they not opened the box yet on their result, or did they do so and have a problem with what they found? Other talks about MiniBooNE results are still scheduled for March 14th in Manchester and March 17th in Montreal (the abstract of this last one is ambiguous about whether there will be results “MiniBooNE’s oscillation path and what may lie beyond, will be presented”) [Ooops, that last one was 2006, thanks Marco]. The MiniBooNE colloquium has been replaced by a Nikita Nekrasov talk on “The Mathematics of String Theory”. Not sure if I’ll make a trip down to Princeton that day; Nekrasov’s talks are usually worth hearing, but I’d prefer to hear a more technical talk about his recent work, which is quite interesting.
John Baez’s latest “This Week’s Finds” is largely about the controversy over string theory and my book and Lee Smolin’s. As usual, John’s take is quite level-headed. Faced with people who claim that string theory is “the only game in town”, John advocates leaving town, striking out and looking for another place to live and work, maybe even starting a new one. Some comments about this at his blog.
On Friday at Fermilab Michael Chanowitz gave a talk on Precision Electroweak Data and the Direct Limit on the Higgs Mass. He updates previous work on these fits, including recent CDF and D0 values for the top and W masses. The new, presumably better, top quark mass values from CDF and D0 are lower than those of a couple years ago, with recent CDF results about 170 GeV. The main interest in these fits is that they give you a predicted value of the Higgs mass, although not a very accurate one. The lower top mass drives down the predicted Higgs mass, to the point where it is starting to get in trouble with the fact that LEP showed it had to be heavier than 114 GeV at 95% confidence level. The fits to all data give a most likely value for the Higgs mass of 85 GeV, with only an 18% probability of it being over 114 GeV.
Chanowitz devotes a lot of attention to the one measured value that deviates the most (3 standard deviations) from that predicted by the other data: the forward-backward asymmetry in b-quark production at the Z-pole. If you throw this out from the fit, on the grounds that it is less reliable than the other data since it doesn’t match the SM as well, your Higgs mass really goes down, to a most likely value of 48 GeV, with only a 2% chance of it being above 114 GeV. Hard to know what to make of this, evidently it’s hard to come up with a model that would explain the anomalous forward-backward asymmetry while not ruining the rest of the fit. Maybe this is a first indication that the SM is not the full story….
Update: This just in, from Michael Nielsen. Seems like this is the month for Fields Medalists to become bloggers. First Alain Connes, now it’s Terry Tao. Will Grisha Perelman be next?
Update: Well, not Grisha Perelman, but today the latest mathematician blogger is David Goss. Goss is a specialist in the mathematics of function fields over finite fields, and his first post includes comments about how ideas have entered this very different field from physics, as well as remarks about the work of Bost and Connes that expresses zeta-functions in term of partition functions of statistical mechanical systems.
Update: A couple more. The talks at the recent AAAS session on A New Frontier in Particle Physics are available (some in a weird format I’ve never seen before which works on Internet Explorer, not Mozilla [now fixed, just a powerpoint slideshow]). Also some remarks by DOE’s Raymond Orbach at the HEPAP meeting where he seems to be raising an important question: even if the ILC is built, it may not be ready until the mid-2020s or later, and the Tevatron and SLAC B-factory will be closing down relatively soon, so “I would like to re-engage HEPAP in discussion of the the future of particle physics. If the ILC were not to turn on until the middle or end of the 2020s, what are the right investment choices to ensure the vitality and continuity of the field during the next two to three decades and to maximize the potential for major discovery during that period?”
Update: Fermilab director Pier Oddone discusses the Orbach letter and the need for planning for the possibility of a long wait for the ILC in today’s Director’s Corner at Fermilab Today:
I am requesting a steering group composed of members of our laboratory and the community under the leadership of Deputy Director Kim to produce a detailed plan for positioning the field and Fermilab in the next two decades for a robust program of discovery based on accelerators. I am asking for such a plan by August 1st.
Perhaps you could mention Tommaso’s excellent ongoing commentary on the Higgs.
Maybe this is a first indication that the SM is not the full story…
Well, hardly. Cosmology has been troubling for a while now.
For the last few decades, astrophysicists have been making amazing discoveries in fundamental physics: dark matter, dark energy, neutrino oscillations, maybe even cosmic inflation in the very early universe! — John Baez
Baez should confine his commentary to math. Dark matter, dark energy, and cosmic inflation are still speculative ideas, not confirmed discoveries.
What has happened to scientists? The need to publish and self-promote must never be allowed to overtake the scientist’s responsibility to disseminate accurate information to the public.
Pingback: Infinite Reflections » Blog Archive » Fields Medal and Blogging …
If I read well, the MiniBooNE talk at McGill that you mention already took place in March 2006 (i.e. one year ago).
By the way, I’d be a bit surprised if the collaboration announced results in an individual invited talk at some university. They might choose a more formal way, e.g. at Fermilab, so I am keeping an eye on the Fermilab events list.
Please keep covering news&rumors on this topic, thanks!
why not Grisha Perelman? It would be a nice way for him to spend some of his free time.
Pingback: NeverEndingBooks » Archive » noncommutative bookmarks
The hyperlink to David Goss’s first blog post in your second update doesn’t work because “http://” is duplicated…
Q,
Thanks, fixed.
Baez should confine his commentary to math. Dark matter, dark energy, and cosmic inflation are still speculative ideas, not confirmed discoveries.
My experience with the thinking of John Baez tells me that he’s not making the kinds of assumptions about the true nature of our observations that many string theorists make when he says that. Which means that he’ll now step-in to prove that I don’t know what the heck he thinks… 😉
What has happened to scientists? The need to publish and self-promote must never be allowed to overtake the scientist’s responsibility to disseminate accurate information to the public.
It has also been my observation that there is a rather large gap between the rigor that is expected for accepting conclusions made about Relativity, and those of QM.
It isn’t pretty in the latter case… and “Katie bar the door”… beyond that.
It’s kind of nice that experts begin to start blogs. That way the general public can ask questions from them and get expert answers on their time and for free.
The lower top mass drives down the predicted Higgs mass, to the point where it is starting to get in trouble with the fact that LEP showed it had to be heavier than 114 GeV at 95% confidence level. The fits to all data give a most likely value for the Higgs mass of 85 GeV, with only an 18% probability of it being over 114 GeV.
What kinds of bounds will the LHC be able to fix on the mass of the Higgs; and is the maximum mass it will be able to probe at enough that if the LHC doesn’t find the Higgs, we can start asking questions like what if the Higgs as we think of it doesn’t actually exist?
Is there any significant effort in the physics community to develop new accelerator concepts that can get to higher energy without costing as much as a couple of aircraft carriers? I recall reading years ago about plasma-wave concepts, but haven’t heard much since. A physicist (whose identity I can’t remember) once told me that getting that idea to work would be as hard or harder than magnetic-confinement fusion, but I have no way of knowing if that opinion is general among accelerator physicists.
It seems to me that if there are any radical ideas out there, now is the time to break ’em out. The public is daunted by the prospect of building multi-kilometer, multi-billion dollar extravaganzas for such esoteric (to the public) purposes. (Personally, I’d rather build you guys a giant accelerator than pave over more of West Virginia for the glory of Robert Byrd, but my priorities are not shared in the broader political system.) Anything that mght make higher energy more affordable, even if it takes time to develop, strikes me as something the physics community should embrace.
There has been some recent progress with plasma wakefield technology: see here.
srp,
I’ve written about this at least a couple times on this blog, see for instance:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=339
As far as I can tell, turning these exotic ideas into workable HEP accelerators is conceivable, but still a long way off (50 years?). The idea I’ve heard that sounds closest to something that might work is to use this kind of acceleration as an “afterburner”: at the end of a long conventional linac like the ILC, double the beam energy using this kind of technology.
Just found a jewel:
“It is very important that we do not all follow the same
fashion… It’s necessary to increase the amount of
variety… and the only way to do this is to implore you
few guys to take a risk with your lives that you will not
be heard of again, and go off in the wild blue yonder to
see if you can figure it out.” Richard Feynman(1965),
Nobel prize in physics award address.
Take a risk or string yourself up.
SRP,
There’s a lot of work being done on plasma wake acceleration being done right now. See for instance this expository piece in Nature, from Feb 15 2007.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7129/full/445721a.html
Still a lot of problems to be solved, of course, but they’re making progress. And I don’t imagine that the energy losses would be any worse than in synchotrons.
Maybe I’m blind, but I couldn’t find the wild blue yonder text in Feynman’s terrific Nobel lecture. I discovered a slightly expanded version of the quotation elsewhere. It would be nice to have the complete original text.
For obvious reasons, I should have described Feynman’s address as mostly terrific.
Thanks for the references on plasma wakefield technology. Those articles were actually more encouraging than I thought. Problems, but the sort of thing that could actually be solved, and some signs of substantial progress.
So let me ask: Is this research at the point that it is primarily resource limited or idea limited? In other words, if more people and apparatus were directed to developing these technologies, would things get sped up significantly? Or is this still a matter of waiting for inspiration to strike on some currently unsolvable problems?
Because if these technologies could be brought on line much faster with more resources, I would definitely try an argument like, “Well, if you don’t want to fund the ILC, will you at least give us (pick your percentage) of it to work on plasma wakefields and afterburners?” From an advocacy standpoint, it’s a lot easier to sell research on cool new breakthrough technology than on expensive applications of old technology. It also has the advantage that it might be the smarter policy.
The box (MiniBooNe) is still closed. I heard they were on step 2 of a 6 step process to open the box. It will be another month or two…
The LEP results on the forward-backward asymmetry of the b-quark are puzzling. This measurement depends on the product of the electron’s couplings to the Z boson and the b-quark couplings to the Z-boson, and is 3-sigma off from the expected Standard Model value. However, individual measurements of both the electron’s (at both LEP and SLC) and the b-quark’s (at SLC) couplings are bang on the Standard Model expectation.
Pingback: Not Even Wrong » Blog Archive » Short-term and Long-term
Joanne,
Thanks for the MiniBooNE news (or rumors…) and the comment on the anomalous forward-backward asymmetry result. It does sound like this anomaly can’t be new physics, but then, where is the Higgs???
see http://neutrino.pd.infn.it/conference2007/Talks/Shaevitz.ppt for the most recent MiniBooNE talk.