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Re: Reaching toward the Big Bang



See below

Adam was by constitution and proclivity a scientist; I was the same, and
we loved to call ourselves by that great name...Our first memorable
scientific discovery was the law that water and like fluids run downhill,
not up.
Mark Twain, <Extract from Eve's Autobiography>

On Sun, 13 Feb 2000, Larry Cartwright wrote:

Jack Uretsky wrote:
And you think "recreating the big bang" isn't meaningless jargon
to most of us? OK, so give us a layman's description of how high energy
nuclesu-nucleus (what's a 'nucleus', daddy?) collisions recreate the
big bang. And why was the evidence "compelling"? After all, the lay
public has the right to make up its own opinion. Or are pronouncements
from physicists privileged from scrutinity by us six-packers?
[...]
Everyday language? Which words did you mean?

They didn't claim they were "recreating the big bang". They have
claimed that their 33 TeV ion beam created temperatures corresponding to
conditions that should have existed a few microseconds *after* the Big
Bang according to long-standing and widely-accepted cosmological
theories. And that they have have accumulated enough plausible evidence
of the existence of quark-gluon matter to "present strong incentive for
the future planned experiments", i.e. Brookhaven and LHC/ALICE.

So we need to be spared the news that the evidence was
circumstantial, namely, that the saw a depletion of particles, called
"charmed particles" produced in the collisions? And that the depletion
was one predicted signal for the onset of this "new kind of matter"?
Also, that it wasn't important to know that they were merely
summarizing the results of several years of experiments, and not really
announcing a new experimental result?
The announcement as <reported by Reuters> (note that Reuters
was the object of my original posting) amounted to no more than "gee-whiz,
I've done something wonderful." I don't think that that kind
of science reporting should merit the respect of the physics teaching
community.

Everybody within the particle/cosmology community knew this is what CERN
was shooting for when they started the research and they haven't exactly
kept their progress a secret; this announcement should not astound or
even surprise anyone (even a layperson) who has been following the
progress of particle-beam research. This program has roots way back in
the mid-80's when Carlo Rubia headed the CERN proton-antiproton
collision research (electro-weak confirmation) that won him a Nobel.
Even back then Rubia was publicly describing CERN's work as "little
bangs, trying to duplicate for very short periods of time the conditions
in the early universe".

You sound like you don't believe there are any intelligent and
interested lay observers of matters scientific. There are millions of
non-scientists who follow the activities of the professional scientific
community, and that's who I am talking about when I say that the
professional scientific community ought to keep the "general public"
informed. I'm talking about people who read newspapers and magazines
and books and watch TV presentations that bring them in touch with
scientific events. Yes, they won't be able to comprehend a highly
technical presentation of all the details; but I don't think that should
preclude them from receiving an intelligent but general summary of the
current state of knowledge and achievement.

I totally do not understand how the last paragraph responds to
anything I said. I commplained that there wasn't enough meat in the
announcement to warrant comment. I disagree that the Reuters piece was
an "intelligent but general summary".


In yesterday's edition of our little regional newspaper (Lansing State
Journal) there is a lengthy article about Abrams Planetarium including
the introduction of their newest program that will be seen by thousands
of local people, "a multimedia history of life as we know it, starting
with the big-bang theory, leading up to today." The general public are
not all "six-packers". There are a great many people who understand, in
a general way of course, the language of 20th century physics including
nucleus, collider, Big Bang Theory, etc.

Cool. And there are many writers who excel in making esoteric science
understandable without relying on "Gee Whiz" expression.

I realize that, by the traditional "rules of the game", CERN should have
first published in a scholarly forum. Then all the professional players
would have the opportunity of spending weeks or months nitpicking
whether the experimental outcomes were "compelling" (their word), or
"strong evidence" (Jack's words), or "inconclusive" or whatever, before
reports eventually filtered out to the general public.

Wrong. The CERN announcement was made on the occasion of their
submittal of a report to <Physics Letter>. They were following standard
procedures.

Regards,
Jack