Scandal! Scientists find error in their own results!

Last September, a group of scientists in Italy got some strange results that made headlines around the world. Their results suggested that neutrinos were traveling faster than the speed of light.

I ask you to consider the following excerpt from a BBC article that came out just after their announcement:

"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," the report's author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration told BBC News on Thursday evening.
"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't.
"When you don't find anything, then you say 'well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this'."
Friday's meeting was designed to begin this process, with hopes that other scientists will find inconsistencies in the measurements and, hopefully, repeat the experiment elsewhere.
"Despite the large [statistical] significance of this measurement that you have seen and the stability of the analysis, since it has a potentially great impact on physics, this motivates the continuation of our studies in order to find still-unknown systematic effects," Dr Ereditato told the meeting.
"We look forward to independent measurement from other experiments."

I now ask you to consider the opening of NPR's article reporting the news that the error has probably been found:

Remember last year, when we reported that Italian scientists claimed to have broken the speed of light?

And this, from a blog post headed "That's Embarrassing" that one of my Facebook friends linked to:

Remember CERN's claim that they found neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light? Weeeeeell now they want to renege, blaming a faulty fiber-optic cable and timing gear for the erroneous results. Jesus -- and we're supposed to trust these people to NOT tear open a black hole and swallow earth?

And this, linked to by another friend

Ridiculous: A Loose Cable Caused Those ‘Faster-Than-Light’ Particles

We know that Einstein always has the last laugh, but this is hilarious: the faster-than-light particles that could have wrecked his relativity theory are no more. It was a mistake in the test results caused by a loose cable.
Didn't anyone from the Genius Bar tell them about the first rule of tech support? Check your cables first! Oh, scientists!

I try not to get to whiny in complaining about the state of American science journalism, as I know it is not going to improve any time soon, but this really quite lamentable. The scientists involved were faced with data that could potentially destroy the theoretical underpinnings of their field. The wrong things to do would have been to ignore the data because they are theoretically heretical, or to make a big deal about their irrefutable and earthshaking discovery. Instead they did exactly what they should have done: They announce the situation to their peers and asked for help in evaluating the situation. They did this with full knowledge that their results would probably be shown to be in error, and that when that happened they would be mocked and insulted. This is an example of science working as it should, despite a dysfunctional press. No one, no matter how well established or well funded (or named Einstein), is the High Priest of science, and everyone's conclusions have to be reexamined and reconsidered. This responsibility to skepticism extends especially to one's own conclusions.

Their results have now been shown, by them, to have probably been an error, and the message the average American is getting is that these goofy Italian so-called-scientists were just too comical to even consider the possibility that Einstein was smarter than they are. NPR's science reporting is actually usually better than most, which is why I read their articles. In this case, they went with the invented scandal.

H1: The universe is 96% aliens.

Most good scientists are deeply impressed by, and even excited about, how little we yet know, how much there still is to find out. Our science and technology are impressive accomplishments, but still very much in their infancy as compared to what is possible.

Imagine, if you will, a tremendously technologically advanced civilization, whose technology just continues to advance. What is the end point? What do they and their technology look like after billions of years of rapid technological advance? I think it is safe to say that we don't know. It clearly wouldn't be anything that we currently have the science or technology to understand. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." We wouldn't understand this alien technology or what it did any more than Cro-Magnons would understand a wireless modem. This hyper-advanced civilization would presumably have explored ever nook, cranny and loophole in the physical laws that govern the universe and transformed their technology and themselves beyond recognition. We likely wouldn't even recognize it or them as technology or life. We might not even recognize them or their technology as normal matter or energy, although after billions of years they would likely have transformed large parts of the universe itself.

Which brings me back to how little we currently know. Modern cosmology assigns only 4% of the mass/energy in the universe to "normal" matter, the kind we know anything about. 22% is thought to be "dark matter" and the remainder, 74%, is "dark energy." We know little about dark matter and next to nothing about dark energy, except that they are necessary to make our equations work out. Putting to one side the plausibility that the equations are wrong, we are free to speculate on what is going on with that other 96% that we can't see but suspect is there. My preferred hypothesis is that the universe is 96% aliens. Which is a somewhat silly way of saying that other life-forms may have transformed some large portion of the mass and energy in the universe into forms we don't understand. Why should a civilization with the most advanced technology we can pretend to conceive of be expected to leave things as they found them? If conservation of mass/energy is one of the rules they can't get around, couldn't a big crowded universe of aliens be expected to convert a large portion of its limiting resource into whatever form allows them to use this resource most efficiently? Dark matter releases no detectable radiation, and as such leaks no mass/energy. This would also help to explain why SETI can't detect any aliens. A civilization that hoards mass and energy isn't going to go blaring electromagnetism all over the place.

Why under this hypothesis would 4% of the matter be left as boring old stars, dust, black holes and light? Perhaps these things serve some function for the dark aliens. Or maybe we, and everything we can see, are a designated nature preserve with strictly enforced limits on poaching. To try to answer this last question is to move from pure speculation to pure fancy, so your guess is as good as mine.

Professional science is hard

Late at night, with a weary brain, I attempted to document some of the process of data analysis, typesetting, and the general level of complexity involved in the production of a moderately novel physics journal article. Using direct-screen-capture video software, I just flipped through the content that I have been staring at for weeks, giving a 4 minute silent film of my work. The production of this low-res video was a greatly refreshing 6 am escape from my writing, and stands as a slightly surreal and fuzzy look at the reality of being a physicist. Do not attempt to understand any technical content, that is not the point, this is just art therapy for the sleep-deprived.

If I had to choose a sound track to this, the first thing that comes to mind is the scene at the end of 2001 where Dave has to float into the airlock, and then slowly, manually deactivate the optic circuits of Hal.

Here it is:

From Data to a Paper

- Let me know any reactions that this may incite,

Stephen

Nobel Intent

I came across an interesting online journal that is worth checking out.


http://origin.arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars


Most relevant to existing lines of thought that have been brought up so far:

Black holes for everyone

Could entangled particles be linked by wormholes?

Family of Science

I won't make a habit of this. But I thought posting this here would give the reader some sense of the environment that leads a young man to grow up and start Blog of Science!
For reasons unclear to me, my family has chosen to comment on my recent post "Not the end of the world" elsewhere, rather than on Blog of Science, so I have reproduced our discussion here. GML is my father, KAL my mother and JAL my brother. The following messages are in approximately chronological order:

The great physicist Enrico Fermi pointed out that interstellar travel is not very difficult for a technologically advanced and rich civilization, as long as it is designed for travel times of decades or centuries (or longer if a big colony is sent in a "generation ship". Each new colony would then grow and develop for some centuries, even a millennium, and then send out new ships (first to scout and then to colonize), and that this process would spread a civilization about our galaxy in a fairly short time, astronomically speaking, perhaps a few million years. Surely, the idea goes, at least one species somewhere would do this. This led to his famous question, "Where is everyone?" Many answers have been suggested, but the relevant one here is self-destruction, probably not by a physics experiment gone wrong, but by war within the species.
Our species has been said to need a "Moral Equivalent of War" to give us some outlet for our natural aggressive and us-them tendencies. This MEOW idea appeals to me, but I am not clear what it would be.
-GML

Dad, correct me if I'm wrong, but it was my impression that ETs wouldn't need to travel between stars for us to notice them. I thought even the level of radio noise that we currently produce would be plenty for us to notice if anyone were producing it within a few zillion light years. So the fact that we haven't heard anything (despite SETI and other projects looking for non-random radio signals) suggests not just that no one out there is traveling, but that no one out there is using radio waves, i.e., is technically advanced at all. Is that not right?
-JAL


There are a lot of assumptions we are making here.
Of which these are a few:
1. We are assuming that an advanced civilization uses radio waves to
communicate. Why do we assume this? We think we are advanced, and we
use radio waves. Perhaps radio is grossly inferior to something else we
ain't thought of yet, so nobody uses it.
2. They don't care if we hear them or not. Why do we assume this? We
don't worry about ETs detecting us, so we think they don't care if they
are detectable or not. Perhaps for one reason or another, many
civilizations consider it unwise or undesirable to broadcast their
presence.
3. We assume that if they are out there broadcasting radio, we would
pick up the signal. I don't know how far off we could pick up
broadcasts from a planet transmitting like Earth, unless we
specifically targeted that point in space, but I assume it is a
relatively small section of the galaxy.
4. We assume that if we picked up their signal, we would recognize it
as nonrandom. Given that we have no idea what form life on other
planets would take, it seems hubristic to assume that we would
recognize their transmissions as a sign of intelligent life.
5. We assume that if they picked up our signals, they would then
continue behaving in a way that would allow us to detect them. Imagine
there are technologically advanced aliens 100 light years away. They
detect rapid environmental change on earth, infer a rapidly developing
early technological civilization that behaves rather voraciously. Until
they know more, do they want the aliens (us) to know they are there?
The overarching point is that we know too little to know anything
except that we don't know. If we assume we are looking for ourselves,
which is what we often assume, we are wrong. The aliens are not going
to be biologically, psychologically or technologically familiar. they
are not going to live in a niche that would be amenable to us, and they
are not going to develop all the same technologies or develop them in
the same order. They are not going to have the same weaknesses and
strengths. They are not going to be in the same phase of develoopment,
or a similar one, to where we are. They are not necessarily going to
match our current definitions of either intelligence or life. It is fun
to speculate about and make up hypotheses, but we don't know enough to
draw any conclusions or moral lessons from. We know that either there
is no one out there, or that they are undetectable given our current
technology, or for one reason or another we have failed to detect them,
or have failed to notice detecting them. Everything else is SciFi.
-DAL

There is no reason why alien "life" should be carbon-based, or have discrete "bodies," or use the same senses we do (light, sound), or be on the same size scale as we - they might be miles across or microscopic or made up of filaments - or need the same amount of ambient radiation, heat, pressure, or environmental stability. There need not even be "individuals" with separate lives and separate mortalities. Probably some relatively fluid medium is needed - it would be hard to imagine solid rock being able to assume the complexity necessary for communication and reproduction. Otherwise I think that most human thought about the topic uses way too many chauvinistic assumptions. Long, thin necks and three-fingered hands, indeed!
-KAL

Interesting point. There are several factors to consider. The radio-based SETI and similar programs (mostly piggy-backing onto other equipment since Senator Proxmire made fun of it and got the U.S.Gov't to make it illegal to spend gov't money for it) make various reasonable (but not necessarily correct) assumptions about what frequencies would be used, as most free of background noise, etc., but at moderate interstellar distances such signals would be very hard to sort out, anyway. Also, higher-tech systems than radio (tachyons, gravity waves, links through space warps, etc.??) could be used, so lack of radio broadcasts does not mean lack of high technology. Another thought is that any sensible advanced species would carefully refrain from broadcasting its location, for fear of hostiles killing off possible competitors. No-one really knows, but the pay-off could be so great, technically and intellectually, that it seems worthwhile to put a little money into listening for interesting patterns; even if we do not find ETs, we may hear some natural phenomena worth knowing about. This has already happened, as when the pulsars (at first jokingly termed LGM for Little Green Men) were discovered.
-GML

Dan is quite correct in all his points, except perhaps in regard to our ability to recognize non-randomness. This is based on mathematics, mainly, not on biology or (I hope) human psychology. I certainly think that mathematics is universal; though I have no non-human examples as evidence. I believe that in some sense we discover mathematics, and do not just invent it.
-GML

Once mathematics is applied to trying to recognize patterns in real data, it becomes science, and all the limitations that come with science apply. We have to look at a particular set of time scales on a particular set of frequencies for a deviation from some mathematically defined but psychologically chosen null hypothesis. And all that means we don't really know if we could detect an alien deviation from random.
Regarding mom's point, it is very true, there is no reason to assume life on other planets would be carbon based. I wouldn't dismiss some sort of solid state lifeform though. Silicon can do amazing things.
-DAL

How about my idea that "life" elsewhere may accept very different conditions re solid/not solid "body" (or no actual body at all), tolerance/requirements for temperature conditions or radiation exposure, apparent passage of time per actual time passage, inevitability of mortality, use of other senses than sight/hearing, etc? Perhaps we haven't heard from anyone because we are actually very atypical in our characteristics and wouldn't think of the more common communication modalities. Or maybe no one else is out there and we are truly unique. Sometimes I think we exist only because the universe requires at least one set of observers in order for it to exist.
-KAL

Very true, that any collisions that CERN will make have happened, more powerfully, many times out in space, with no-one to register and measure them.
The Big BAng, from what I read, supposedly did not create any mass-energy, hard as that is to believe. The idea is that the expansion of the universe is, in proper physical book-keeping, measured in negative units, while the mass-energy is in positive units, and that these just cancel each other out. As you note that Stephen said, "on a minute scale the universe is a froth of energymass popping in and out of existence, but that these things were usually so small and numerous they mostly canceled each other out, leaving the energymass in the universe very close to
constant." Larger sized quantum fluctuations are shorter-lived than smaller ones, and if the universe is thought of as a nearly-zero mass virtual particle, it can last a very long time. Mass-energy versus time is one of those complementary trade-offs found in quantum physics, such as (knowledge of?) a particle's momentum vs. (knowledge of?) its position.
-GML

So we can get de novo mass-energy as long as we are willing to accept an equal amount of de novo space-time with it?
-DAL

Yes, in a sense, we can get more mass-energy along with more space-time, but only in a new universe, I gather. A prominent current theory is that black holes create new baby big bangs which then expand as full fledged universes; if the characteristics of a given universe leads to lots of black holes, that kind of universe will end up with lots of descendant universes with similar (but not identical) properties, leading to universes with successful characteristics (physical constants, etc.) becoming more numerous and predominating, in a Darwinian fitness paradigm. This theory is supposedly testable by figuring out what set of physical constants, etc., should be most successful in making black holes of the right sorts, and seeing how well this matches our universe.
-GML

But Darwinian evolution requires:
1. Mutations leading to variation
2. Heritability of that variation
3. Fitness differentials based on the heritable mutations
With regard to black holes as baby universes, we have no reason to assume 1 or 2, only that if 1 and 2 were to be true, that 3 could be true.
Also, your last comment implied that in order to be stable, a big bang event would have to result in something that in some strange sort of reckoning had zero mass. Black holes are not known for having zero mass.
There also seems to be the difficulty that black holes are not closed systems. Mass can go in and through quantum variation of location, evaporate off. Universes on the other hand are generally thought to be closed.
-DAL

Not the end of the world

My friend Stephen is one of those physicists who built linear accelerators and EMP generators in his basement as a kid. And he can get all starry eyed talking about string theory and Mbrain theory and cosmic wormballs and other stuff biologists like me don't understand. But it is fun to hear him talk about it because he is so enthusiastic and brilliant.

I used to ask him physics questions that I didn't even know entirely what the question meant, just to get him started. One time, when we were in college, we were talking over nachos and tea at the Upstairs Cafe. It was a bit hard to hear him, given that the noise of the band in the Downstairs Cafe was shaking the floor. But I asked him why energymass (the two being the same) is conserved, and if there are any exceptions. Stephen thought for a while, rambled for a while, then said that they are not exactly conserved, because there is quantum variation. He talked about that for a while, and I got the impression that what he was saying was that on a minute scale the universe is a froth of energymass popping in and out of existence, but that these things were usually so small and numerous they mostly cancelled each other out, leaving the energymass in the universe very close to constant. Then he said something I didn't grok about the Big Bang being, at least in part, an example in which the scale was much larger and a whole bunch of energymass was created all at once.

So the next question I asked, having an environmental bent, was whether it was theoretically possible we could use all this in some way to make energy, and thereby end the need for fossil fuels. This started Stephen on a train of thought that he made me promise not to share with anyone, which is easy because I understood almost none of it. But it ended with me being somewhat concerned that if I understood even a little of what he was saying, he might just accidentally blow up the world. I made him promise that he wouldn't and also wouldn't teach anyone else how to. He saw why I was concerned, but said that he would make sure he fully understood the physics involved before he tried to tap into "quantum energy" whatever that is.

This all came back to me last night when my brother emailed me a NYTImes article about the Large Hadron Collider. The article claims they will recreate "conditions that last prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old." Like the Big Bang all over again. Jason's commentary was, "I can't help but think of that theory that we don't see radio traces of other species because advanced species quickly kill themselves off, perhaps by creating huge toys that destroy their planets accidentally."

This kind of concern has been raised many times, mostly in science fiction. The basic idea is that it requires a lower level of technology to blow ourselves up than to say hi across light years. Possibly true, but I doubt this is that experiment.

I'll write later on my thoughts regarding extraterrestrial life, but sticking with the collider experiment, I think that as usual, the popular media are grossly overstating their case. The accelerator may be designed to recreate something that has certain similarities to the very early universe, but is this really the first time since the Big Bang that particles have collided at these speeds? No. They just don't usually do it in a way that we can predict, control and build giant detectors in anticipation.

Clearly the power input is not on a world destroying scale. So in order to trigger Alderaan, they would either have to set off some novel sort of mass to energy conversion chain reaction, or they would have to accidentally open the taps on quantum energy. And they would have to do this on a scale that would destroy earth, but would not be obviously detectable from the rest of the universe. If colossal amounts of energy came spilling out into the universe from nowhere every time particles collided at certain energies, wouldn't astronomers have noticed something like that?

So sleep peacefully. The Swiss are not about to blow up the world. They own too much of it.