Because Science Matters

[Foto: Michael Sentef]

Another day, another lecture. This time I am in Hamburg, at DESY, Germany’s major particle physics center.

My history with DESY is an odd one, which is none, despite the fact that fifteen years ago I was awarded Germany’s most prestigious young researcher grant, the Emmy-Noether fellowship, to work in Hamburg on particle physics phenomenology. The Emmy-Noether fellowship is a five-year grant that does not only pay the principle investigator but also comes with salaries for a small group. It’s basically the jackpot of German postdoc funding.

I declined it.

I hadn’t thought of this for a long time, but here I am in Hamburg, finally getting to see how my life might have looked like, in that parallel-world where I became a particle physicist. It looks like I’ll be late.

The taxi driver circles around a hotel and insists with heavy Polish accent this must be the right place because “there’s nothing after that”. To make his point he waves at trees and construction areas that stretch further up the road.

I finally manage to convince him that, really, I’m not looking for a hotel. A kilometer later he pulls into an anonymous driveway where a man in uniform asks him to stop. “See, this wrong!” the taxi-man squeaks and attempts to turn around when I spot a familiar sight: The cover of my book, on a poster, next to the entry.

“I’m supposed to give that talk,” I tell the man in uniform, “At two pm.” He looks at his watch. It’s a quarter past two.

I arrive at the lecture hall 20 minutes late, mostly due to a delayed train, but also, I note with some guilty consciousness, because I decided not to stay for the night. With too much traveling in my life already, I have become one of these terrible people who arrive just before their talk and vanish directly afterwards. I used to call it the “In and Out Lecture”, inspired by an American fast food chain with the laxative name “In and Out Burger”. A friend of mine more aptly dubbed it “Blitzkrieg Seminar.”

The room is well-filled. I am glad to see the audience was kept in good mood with drinks and snacks. Within minutes, I am wired up and ready to speak about the troubles in the foundations of physics.

Briefly before my arrival, I learned some particle physicists complained I was even invited. This isn’t the first time this happens. On another occasion some tried to un-invite me, albeit eventually unsuccessfully. They tend to be disappointed when it turns out I’m not a fire-spewing dragon but a middle-aged mother of two who just happens to know a lot about theory development in high energy physics.

Most of them, especially the experimentalists, don’t even find my argument all that disagreeable – at least at first sight. Relying on beauty has not historically worked well in physics, and it isn’t presently working, no doubt about this. To make progress, then, we should take clue from history and focus on resolving inconsistencies in our present description of nature, either inconsistencies between theory and experiment, or internal inconsistencies. So far, they’re usually with me.

Where my argument becomes disagreeable is when I draw consequences. There is no inconsistency to be resolved in the energy range that a next larger collider could reach. It would measure some constants to better precision, all right, but that’s not worth $20 billion.

Those 20 billion dollars, by the way, are merely the estimated construction cost for CERN’s planned Future Circular Collider (FCC). They do not include operation cost. The facility would run for about 25 years. Operation costs of the current machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are about $1 billion per year already, and with the FCC, expenses for electricity and staff are bound to increase. That means the total cost for the FCC easily exceeds $40 billion.

That’s a lot of money. And the measurements this next larger collider could make would deliver information that won’t be useful in the next 100 or maybe 5000 years. Now is not the right time for this.

On the risk of oversimplifying an 80,000 word message, we have better things to do. Figure out what’s with dark matter, quantum gravity, or the measurement problem. There are breakthroughs waiting to be made. But we have to be careful with the next steps or risk delaying progress by further decades, if not centuries.

After my talk, in the question session, an elderly man goes on about his personal theory for something. He will later tell me about his website and complain that the scientific mainstream is ignoring his breakthrough insights.

Another elderly man insists that beauty is a good guide to the development of new natural laws. To support his point he quotes Steven Weinberg, because Weinberg, you see, likes string theory. In other words, it’s exactly the type of argument I just explained is both wrong and in the way of progress.

Another man, this one not quite as old, stands up to deliver a speech about how important particle colliders are. Several people applaud.

Next up, an agitated woman reprimands me for a typographical error on a slide. More applause. She goes on to explain the LHC has taught us a lot about inflation, a hypothetical phase of exponential expansion in the early universe. I refuse to comment. There is, I feel, no way to reason with someone who really believes this.

But her’s is, I remind myself, the community I would have been part of had I accepted the fellowship 15 years ago. Now I wonder, had I taken this path, would I be that woman today, upset to learn the boat is sinking? Would I share her group’s narrative that made me their enemy? Would I, too, defend spending more and more money on larger and larger machines with less and less societal relevance?

I like to think I would not, but my reading about group psychology tells me otherwise. I would probably fight the outsider just like they do.

Another woman identifies as experimentalist and asks me why I am against diversifying experimental efforts. I am not, of course. But economic reality is that we cannot do everything we want to do. We have to make decisions. And costs are a relevant factor.

Finally, another man asks me what experiments physicists should do. As usual when I get this question, I refuse to answer it. This is not my call to make. I cannot replace ten thousands of experts. I can only beg them to please remember that scientists are human, too, and human judgement is affected by group affiliation. Someone, somewhere, has to take the first step to prevent social bias from influencing scientific decisions. Let it be particle physicists.

A second round of polite applause and I am done here. A few people come to shake my hand. The room empties. Someone hands me a travel reimbursement form and calls me a taxi. Soon I am on the way back to the city center and on to six more hours on the train.

I check my email and see I will have to catch up work on the weekend, again. Not only doesn’t it help my own research to speak about problems with the current organization of science, it’s no fun either. It’s no fun to hurt people, destroy hopes, and advocate decisions that would make their lives harder. And it’s no fun to have mud slung at me in return.

And so, as always, these trips end with me asking myself, why?, why am I doing this?

And as always, the answer I give myself is the same. Because it matters we get this right. Because progress matters. Because science matters.

Thanks for asking, I am fine. Keep it coming.