Why is a Sammy
Sosa Home Run Like a Higgs Boson? or What's a Meta For?
Judy Jackson
Everyone
agrees that scientists need to do a better job of communicating what
they do and why it matters. It is a rare science policy speech that
fails to exhort scientists to communicate more and better. A recent
quote from Congressman Vern Ehlers, member of the House Science Committee
and one of two physicists in Congress, captures the prevailing tone.
"The scientists have done very badly," Ehlers
said, "in terms of communicating with Congress and keeping Congress
and the public informedin an explainable waywhat they're doing and
why it is important."
While all scientists are tarred with the bad-communication
brush, it often appears that physicists are tarred the blackest. Physicists
above all others, say those both outside and within the field, are
failing to get their message across. The clear implication is that
the physical sciences would not be experiencing their current funding
troubles if they would simply improve at explaining what they're up
to. As a case in point, many cite the Superconducting Super Collider.
Never mind the gazillion-dollar cost overruns, this line of thinking
goes, if physicists had only done a better job of talking up the Superconducting
Super Collider, we would be smashing protons under Waxahachie today.
It is true that it is critical to communicate from
the science community to the rest of the world, not only for reasons
of funding. It's also true that if it were easy, we would have done
it already. It isn't easy. It's hard. And is it just me, or is it especially
hard for physicists?
Think about it. Biology is easy to sell. Putting aside
the benefits of medical research, it seems obvious that it's a good
idea to study living things: we're alive, aren't we? Cosmology
and astrophysics have a similar advantage: perhaps it's in human genes,
a relic of our nomadic hunter-gatherer days of gazing heavenward for
guidance while we wandered in the wilds, but for some reason, everybody
loves to look at the stars. The geologists have dinosaurs, one of the
branding success stories of all time. True, chemistry's image has a
certain down side, (Does the word "Bhopal" mean anything
to you?) but the chemists surely have one of the great tag lines of
the ages. "Better living through quantum mechanics" just
doesn't have the same ring.
Physics, by contrast, is a hard sell. Why? Because,
from the point of view of general comprehension, when physics left
the realm of the visible at the end of the 19th century,
it entered the world of the abstract. For all practical purposes, to
those outside its own rarefied precincts, physics left reality behind
and became an abstraction.
Of course, quantum mechanics and relativity have as
much to do with the solid reality around us as does the structure of
DNA or the fossil of a dinosaur. Maybe more. And true, quarks are every
bit as real as viruses or stars. Nevertheless, to the average bystander
they don't seem as real. They seem less like things you can
touch and see and more like..math. And, as anyone who has tried will
tell you, if science is a tough sell, math is impossible.
So physicists did what they had to do when faced with
the problem of communicating the abstract to a math-challenged world:
they turned to metaphor. From the football-field-with-the-nuclear-pea-at-the-50-yard-line-and-the-electrons-in-the-stands
atom to the bowling-ball top quark and Campbell's Cream of Primordial
Soup, the search was on for the metaphors that would bring physics
back from incomprehensible equations to understandableand fundablelife.
It's a never-ending search, the metaphor hunt. A recent
spate of news stories prompted by the CERN-Fermilab rivalry for discovery
of the Higgs boson turned up many old favorites, as well as some interesting
new examples. Predictably, a particle accelerator, or "atom smasher," is
compared to "a giant racetrack," or "the world's largest
microscope" or a "time machine" reproducing the Big
Bang (which itself began life as a metaphor but has by now crossed
over into existence as a more or less scientific term for a real phenomenon).
The Higgs, again predictably, is "molasses-like goo" or "cold
molasses" or "subatomic molasses." Peter Higgs, the
physicist who started all this, is "ATLAS, a mythical figure with
the weight of the world on his shoulders," which weight will only
be removed with the discovery of the Higgs, to help shoulder the load.
Particle detectors look like "space ships" or "rockets
on their sides" or "cathedrals" or, in one case, "a
shopping mall." (There's more to that concept than meets the eye.)
Particle collisions produce a "spray like shrapnel" yielding
a "zoo of particles," or a "smashed watch" that
physicists must reassemble from the scrambled springs and gears.
So far, so familiar. However, a recent Chicago Tribune
story by Ron Kotulak yielded this delectable home-grown image of how
physicists detect what comes out of a high-energy particle collision: "It's
like standing on the corner of Waveland Avenue and watching a Sammy
Sosa home-run ball come sailing out of Wrigley Field." The particles
then "fall back into their low-energy state and become invisible
again, just as Sosa's ball is quickly whisked away by a souvenir hunter."
Like Sosa, that description of particle detection
is hard to beat.
One story compared physicists to wild geese, migrating
to the high-energy physics lab with the highest energy. Another evoked
CERN scientists as hungry souls with their noses pressed to the restaurant
window while Fermilab experimenters sit down to dinner inside, presumably
to a feast of roast boson under glass.
"A basic prejudice of the universe" for
matter over antimatter perhaps does as good a job as any of explaining
that peskily difficult concept, CP violation. And I know that I, for
one, have a much clearer idea of how to produce quark-gluon plasma
now that I understand that the interaction regions of Brookhaven's
RHIC accelerator are "75-ton rings of steel, looming like giant
handcuffs."
Hey, some metaphors work better than others.
And, in fact, feelings run high on the subject of
just which metaphors work best for conveying the essence of frontier
(now there's a metaphor that should be receiving overtime pay) physics.
Among particle physicists, sharply different views, verging on dogma,
have emerged about how best to describe high-energy physics. The partisans
of the accelerator-as-giant-microscope school froth at the mere mention
of accelerator-as-recreator-of-Big-Bang; while Big Bang adherents smile
patronizingly at the microscopists. At times, it can feel like metaphor
warfare. Maybe it's a physicist's need to reduce the complex world
to a set of mathematical laws that makes it hard to accept that both
of these metaphors work sometimes, neither works every time, and that
occasionally they even work together.
When Mrs. Bartlett taught my ninth-grade English class
about figures of speech, she used an example of metaphor that has stuck
with me for 40 years, although its source eludes me: "The truth
is a hard deer to hunt."
The truth is a hard deer to hunt. Physics is
all about the hard hunt for truth, and the search for words and images
to communicate the excitement of the chase and why it matters to us
and to society is almost as hard. We're never going to find the single
perfect formula for explaining it. But with a glorious mix of metaphorsstars,
home runs, microscopes, shopping malls, handcuffs, whateverwe'll all
die trying. Metaphorically.
Judy Jackson is the Director
of Fermilab's Office of Public Affairs
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