16/03/03 18:12:23

Particle Physics and Society

Popularization of Science

Reminiscences and Remarks

by Pedro Waloschek

Extended version (provisional, not for publication) of an invited talk at the meeting:

‘30 Years of Bubble Chamber Physics’

Bologna Academy of Sciences, on March 18, 2003.

The subject of my contribution has only a kind of romantic personal connection to the main topic of the present meeting. As I will show, the seeds of my activity on popularisation of science, to which I devoted most of my time during the last 25 years, were sown by Gianni Puppi in the few years I enjoyed working under his direction on bubble chamber physics. By the way, when I started teaching in Bologna, Puppi gave me his private advice:

“In every lecture you should tell one joke and loose the thread at least once.”

He meant that you should always show that you are a human being too. I am not good in telling jokes, and in nowadays it is difficult to get lost in your talk because you more or less read your text from transparencies or Power-Point projections.

Let me start with a few personal comments, with the explicit agreement of the organisers. In 1952, the year in which Donald Glaser presented his first successful bubble chambers, I was studying physics at the University of Buenos Aires together with Juan Roederer (later on a well known Geophysicist) and Beatriz Cougnet (his future wife). We were doing some practical work on particle physics and succeeded in publishing our first paper, inspired by the Göttingen Group of Martin Teucher and Klaus Gottstein. It was on cosmic-ray pions we had observed with nuclear emulsions in the Argentine Andes.

During the same year we had the great fortune to meet part of the small but very friendly community of particle physicists of the time at a ‘Simposio de Fisica’ in Rio de Janeiro. Here Beppo Occhialini showed us how to make nuclear plates with liquid emulsion and Ugo Camerini organized for me a trip to the Chacaltaya Cosmic Ray Station in Bolivia. Fascinated by the people and by the subject I decided to do my best to spend the rest of my life in this community, a decision that I never regretted.

In the spring of 1957, after working two years in Göttingen and advised by my friend and tutor Marcello Ceccarelli (he was in Göttingen too), I joined a small group around Gianni Puppi in Bologna to start analysing bubble chamber pictures.

I remember very well our first steps, with Valeria Borelli (now Alles-Borelli), Hiroshi Tanaka, Vittorio Zoboli (now a priest) and a bit later Silvio Bergia (for his PhD thesis). At the same time Pietro Bassi and his group were building a small bubble chamber and preparing some refined equipment to analyse the pictures. Future minded Marcello Ceccarelli started inventing in Bologna the famous ‘Mangiaspago’ digitiser – but later on drifted to astrophysics and built the Medicina radio telescope. Young theoretician Luciano Bertocchi was our adviser in dispersion relations.

We started looking at some bubble chamber pictures provided to us by Gianni's friend Jack Steinberger from the USA. I have no photograph of the adventurous construction we used to project the views, but my sister (she is an artist) once made a drawing for one of my books. And I have still some pictures of the projectors designed by Pietro Bassi. Stereo-reconstruction (based on the three views of the ‘events’) was made by hand, using rulers, curvature templates and a refined 'triangolini method' on drawing paper. Calculations were done with slide-rules and mechanical Monroe adding machines. Later on we punched the measured data on cards and passed them though a noisy IBM 650 drum-computer programmed with the BELL-language. Our first paper, made in collaboration with three other groups, was described this morning by Italo Manelli. It was on the observation of parity violation in hyperon decay.

In the following years several nice people, attracted by the personalities of Gianni Puppi and Jack Steinberger, and obviously also enthusiastic about the physics that was involved, came to spend some time with our Bologna group. I just mention a few of them: Leo Lavatelli and Marion Whitehead from the USA, Ema Perez Ferreira and José Litwak from Argentina and later on, Nino Abbatista, Saverio Mongelli and Aldo Romano from Bari University.

We worked mostly late in the evening, when Puppi had finished his teaching and administrative duties. And in general we went on until Bianca came to collect her husband. They were living in the director’s flat in the institute. Sometimes Gianni tried to explain to Bianca what we were doing. And he told us about his philosophy on that:

“If you are not able to explain to your aunt in less than five minutes

what you are doing in physics, than you have not really understood what you do.”

I took this advice very seriously, interpreting and analysing it’s meaning, as priests or rabbis do with the paragraphs of the bible. And I will use it here to start discussing the relationship between particle physics and society, as announced in the title.

In 1957 we had to explain that ‘parity is not conserved’, which means that some fundamental laws of physics change if we see the world through a mirror. Normal people found that very obvious, since most humans seen in a mirror would be left handed, which really makes a big difference.

Later on we had to clarify that the small nucleus of the hydrogen atom, the proton, had excited states (we called them ‘isobars’) and therefore was not ‘elementary’ at all. Years later (and practically up to now) the subject for our popular speeches had in general to do with the quark structure of matter.

Most particle physicists are convinced that they have a certain duty to explain to the general public what they are doing. But many of them also think that ‘real understanding’ is only possible if you have a background in physics and mathematics at university level. This is certainly true, but Puppi is not meaning that you should pass this ‘real understanding’ to your aunt. He wants you to leave the ivory tower of pure science and ‘explain’ what you do, so that your aunt can understand it – or at least accept it.

Let me remind you of an old example of such popularisation. Nobody without a good knowledge of the laws of gravity (and some mathematics) can ‘really understand’ why the earth turns around the sun and around itself, which is certainly not an intuitive fact at all. But most people have become used to this idea after being told that, “that’s just the way it is”, over and over again until they believe it.

In a similar way people today also accept the existence of atoms, nuclei and even elementary particles and quarks as facts, thanks to those physicists who have translated the ‘real understanding’ into understandable or so called ‘popular explanations’.

My personal experience with such popular explanations was in general quite good, but every now and then also disappointing. Let me show you an example.

My real aunt wanted to know ‘what I was doing’ in physics and listened with interest to my explanation. When I met her several months later, she asked me again about what I was really doing. I repeated my well-prepared story and quickly realised that she could not remember a word of my first explanation. It was not that my aunt had a bad memory. She just belonged to the kind of human beings, who have no space in their minds for things that have no practical application or don’t at least provide some kind of pleasure or excitement, like the arts.

But the ‘aunt’ in Puppi's advice represents all those non-physicists willing to listen to our popular explanations. This might be because:

(a) they are really interested in knowing what particle physicists do (a minority),

(b) because they are kind, like my real aunt or,

(c) because they need it for their jobs, like some journalists and science writers, some teachers and perhaps a few politicians and expert advisers involved in decision-making processes.

To complete the description of our society we must take into account that a lot of people do not want our explanation at all, arguing that they would not understand it anyway. They are not interested in knowing how matter is built up and what particle physicists do.

On the other side, many of those who know about the existence of particle physics consider it an expensive game played today worldwide by several thousand mad scientists wasting their time. They sometimes argue that progress in nuclear physics has caused nothing but problems, like atomic bombs and the radioactive pollution caused by nuclear reactors. And particle physics, these people suppose, will continue in the same line, probably producing stronger bombs and causing additional and still unsuspected damage. We can insist as much as we like that the only way to improve the situation consists in increasing our knowledge, and that this is just what particle physicists do. They will not believe us. Even Puppi could not help these kinds of people. And they are not included in his concept of ‘aunt’.

As you can see, particle physicists have to deal in our society (depending on the country) with very different types of more or less well disposed listeners and with many who would not listen or understand them at all.

My rather modest experiences with my aunt evolved. I was called in every now and then to talk to visitors (non-physicists) and to write articles for newspapers. My mother and my aunt were very surprised when they saw my full-page contribution to the German high level weekly ‘Die Zeit’.

About 25 years ago, for reasons that would be too long to explain here, I accepted to take over provisionally the direction of public relations for the DESY research centre.

In this position I started writing more and more for journals and newspapers, and to help journalists in their work. This quickly transformed itself into a permanent full-time job, a situation that I did not mind at all. My colleagues and our Directorate found it excellent too. And it also corresponded to another piece of advice that Gianni Puppi gave me at that time, when he had already left particle physics:

“Life is very exciting – but you should change your job every seven years.”

Well, the seven years had not yet elapsed when the German ‘Bundesrechungshof’ (the Federal Audit Office, corresponding to the ‘Corte dei Conti’ in Italy) stopped my public relations activity. Their argument was very simple: My salary as senior scientist at DESY was too high for that job. Probably they were right. So I went back to be #158 of the H1-collaboration, as an ‘honorary member’ not signing papers, but free to do what I wanted.

Just at that time (it was in 1982) I got the opportunity to collaborate with the well known German author and teacher Oskar Höfling to introduce the by then well established knowledge about the quark structure of matter into his physics school books (similar to the Amaldi family books in Italy). This was my introduction to two new activities: On one side, writing popular books on science, and on the other, helping teachers to update their knowledge on physics. These two new ‘jobs’ correspond to the second title of my speech: ‘Popularisation of Science’. And I would like to make a few suggestions for the discussion on some special aspects of these activities:

Particle Physics - Why?

About the Enormous Costs

Public Relations for Big Science

The Poor Science-Publisher

Better Teaching at Schools

Particle Physics – Why?

The traditional answers to this question are well known (see the CERN-page on the www):

(a) to increase our knowledge on the structure of matter (without telling why),

(b) the need for top-level research for up-to-date university teaching. I think that today this is obvious to most of us. But it was not obvious in some countries like the German Democratic Republic, where young students were kept isolated from top scientists who, in general, were considered politically unreliable,

(c) the innovative interaction with industry and some technological ‘spin-off’. Superconductivity, ultra high vacuum, fast electronic data handling, computing and www are a few examples.

I would like to comment here on point (a), which in my opinion requires clarification. I already mentioned before that a lot of people do not believe that particle physics, or a better understanding of the structure of matter, will lead to any progress. They are even convinced of the opposite. While we will probably not change their opinion, we can at least show them that there is a reason (good or bad) for continuing with our investigations. And this is our ‘natural and healthy instinct of curiosity’. By the way, this applies to all kinds of research or investigation, but particularly to basic research.

Investigators as well as explorers find it extremely exciting to discover something new, something that nobody has seen or understood before. Pleasure and excitement are natural feelings that correspond to some inborn instinct. And I claim that it is the self-preservation instinct, which through experience has evolved into humanity’s healthy instinct of curiosity. This can perhaps be clarified with some historic examples.

Several thousand years of evolution of human societies or groups have shown that, every now and then, the activity of some extraordinary individuals led to useful or unexpected results. Somebody was the first to make fire, to fabricate clothes, to build houses or to understand how to better kill animals or even human beings. A lot of all this was indispensable to survival. In other words, only those groups survived, which learned how to adjust quickly enough to their surroundings, using their ingenuity and in general following the ideas of some extraordinary member of the group. This experience proved that such individuals are often useful and therefore they were (sometimes) tolerated, kept and fed. The healthy instinct of curiosity of a few special members of the society was and is in general the foundation of human progress – and of survival.

Later on sovereigns or princes with enough power would have had an astronomer or even a mathematician in their court, as well as a clown. It was a question of prestige. But it also served to keep alive the healthy instinct of curiosity of extraordinary or not completely normal individuals.

Countries today have elected governments, which maintain the same tradition of keeping fundamental science if their resources allow for it, even if most members of the society cannot understand why it is done. So we are allowed to continue working on particle physics, following our curiosity and probably our self-preservation instinct.

I conclude that most of us do research in particle physics essentially because we like it. We get some additional motivation from the healthy connection to our teaching activity, from our good relations with industry, from technical spin-offs or subsequent applications. But the latter plays only a secondary role. Even our personal income is not an argument. We could do much better in other jobs. Some of us perhaps do it for prestige, keeping in mind a professorship or even the satisfaction of a Nobel Prize some time in the future. But I should mention here that finding a new and better gas mixture for a small drift chamber used in a huge detector built and operated in collaboration with 450 colleagues also provides great satisfaction and is also considered and appreciated as ‘particle physics’.

Why does it cost so much?

The majority of investigators involved in particle physics teach at universities. This alone involves some costs like salaries, expenses for offices, libraries and many other services. Let us suppose that each teaching physicist causes in the mean expenses of about 100,000 euro per year. These physicists need top-level research for the up-to-date training of their students. We should give each teacher a chance to do some research, spending for this an amount comparable in some way to what he costs anyway. It could in principle be even more. With this in mind we can perform some arithmetic exercises about the orders of magnitude.

Before World War II there were perhaps 100 particle physicists all over the world and (transformed to present prices) they would cost society about 10 million euro or US$ per year, ‘just for teaching’. They should have been allowed to spend at least this amount for their research, which in fact they never did. Cerenkov perhaps was an exception: As he told me, the one gram radium he used to discover his radiation did cost 1 million roubles. I do not know the equivalence in US$, but it was a lot at the time.

I have some up-to-date figures from DESY: about 3,400 physicists use the installations, including synchrotron radiation. Their teaching costs perhaps 340 million euro. DESY’s total budget (including Zeuthen) amounts to 160 million euro. An amount of the same order of magnitude is probably spent by the institutes of the participants and should be added. All together, it is still less than 340 million.

The next linear collider to be built could perhaps cost something like 4 billion euro (4 x 10⁹ euro) over 10 years, that is 0.4 billion euro per year, and would keep busy at least 3,000 particle physicists, which already cost the taxpayer about 0.3 billion euro per year, ‘just for teaching’. So one big linear collider is well within our reasonable requirements. The result is obvious: The high number of research workers involved justifies the expenses.

If all these physicists were doing any other research, individually proposed by each one, they would probably spend much more. The ministry of research knows that too. But in fact, they prefer to join in big groups to propose the construction of vast installations.

Today there are several tens of thousands active particle physicists worldwide, (40,000 authors according to the international ‘Spires’ list) and they may cost a few billion euro per year ‘just for teaching’.

In 2002 CERN, worldwide the biggest particle physics centre, did have a budget of about 0.65 billion euro (1,068 million Swiss francs).

Another argument consists in comparing these research costs with the enormous expenses for military equipment. The defence budget of the USA is near to 400 billion euro, the bigger European countries add up to about 200 billion. No comment is needed.

I have summarized all in a table:

Each physicist costs anyway ~100,000 euro per year

(salary, rooms, library, services etc)

30,000 physicists 3.00 x 10⁹ Euro / year

3,400 physicists (DESY) .34 “

DESY budget .16 “

CERN budget .65 “

Next linear collider .40 “ (10 years)

USA defence budget ~400.00 “

Europe (D+F+GB+I) ~200.00 “

Let me mention a curious example from the past. The 15-MeV-betatron developed 1943/44 in Hamburg by Rolf Wideröe with the help of Bruno Touschek was built for the German Luftwaffe for 150,000 Reichsmark. At about the same time (1944/45) a total of 5,940 V2-rockets were delivered to the Luftwaffe at exactly 119,600 Reichsmark each (without a warhead), mostly built in underground factories by extremely cheap forced labour, in part from concentration camps.

Public Relations in Big Science

Today, research in experimental particle physics is mostly performed through worldwide collaborations using equipment (accelerators, workshops, computers) provided by big central laboratories, which already have many characteristics of industrial enterprises. Even theorists needs huge centralised computing facilities.

Initially, say after World War II, the new central laboratories were run like traditional university institutes, having a very discrete public appearance with no aggressive ‘publicity’ for their activity. This has gradually changed and public relations is now taken very seriously and includes the advice of commercial or industrial specialists.

The big central laboratories provide equipment and services, which smaller laboratories or institutes could not handle. The requests from these smaller laboratories and their satisfaction are therefore essential to justify the existence of any ‘big centre’. The number of ‘users’ and their qualifications (as scientists and as university teachers) are of capital importance first to create and later on to keep operating a big central laboratory or to approve a new project. A proposal supported by 3,000 competent users is very different from one having only 300. These facts must be made clear to obtain financial support.

The bulk of the population has only an indirect influence on the complicated decisions regarding basic research and their costs. In democratic countries, some leading civil servants or ministers (elected politicians) will take decisions, in general after asking for advice from a group of competent and well informed experts. Experience shows that this process works quite well if enough objective information is available to the decision-making authorities and their expert advisers.

Obviously the experts should be already well informed from the beginning, but the situation can be improved with the help of the media, which are known to be rather critical and selective. And at the same time, as a welcome by-product, the general public is informed too.

Press releases distributed to the media have quite a positive impact in this sense, but only if they are reproduced sufficiently often, therefore demonstrating the agreement of many of the responsible editors and publishers. Journalists, on the other hand, prefer personal advice or help to prepare original contributions. Competent press officers or members of the laboratories involved occasionally write or prepare popular presentations to be reproduced in the appropriate media. Most appreciated are articles written by the directors. But all this must be done through independent and free media.

Most of this activity is at present done and coordinated with nearly professional perfection by the public relations offices of the big centres. Special private press agencies take care of dropping periodically (i.e. several times per week) copies of all published data related to a defined big research centre on the desk of all the interested politicians (ministers) or advisers. Computers select all published data containing the name of the institution and some additional keywords. I had such a service for some time. It is quite interesting.

Through this and similar procedures the media play an interesting role in the decision-making process for research activities. Published information is generally filtered, taking into account the interests and preferences of the readers or listeners, which means that there is a certain participation or influence of the public.

Public relations also includes preparing Information and services for the general public, like colourful brochures, yearbooks or leaflets, interesting visitor services, special public conferences, presence at fairs or travelling exhibitions. All this has the character of self-praise or publicity, which is certainly appreciated as ‘popularisation of science’, but is taken with care and diffidence by the decision-making authorities and their advisers. The costs of these activities have to remain within reasonable limits, otherwise they may have a negative effect.

The Poor Science-Writer

Except for a few particular cases (see Hawking), popular books on science have always been difficult to sell compared to fiction literature. And in the last ten years the situation has deteriorated even further. Nowadays only few authors can live by writing popular science books. It is hard to find publishers for new books. In addition, popular science books are very often bought merely as gifts (i.e. for a good pupil) and not really for reading. Writing for television or radio programmes is a bit better, but only a very small fraction of the public listens to popular science programmes.

There are several reasons for the decreasing sales of books. First of all, natural sciences are not ‘in’ for a big part of our society. A second reason is the fact that the number of physics students and secondary school pupils interested in physics (who traditionally bought books) has dropped dramatically. This is probably related to the apparently poor professional opportunities for physicists, as compared to doctors in medicine or business managers. Another factor is that libraries and schools now have less money to buy books.

However, a very important reason is certainly the fact that today it is much easier and productive to consult the INTERNET than to search in a book or even go to a library. And in addition the INTERNET is in general free of charge, as long as you have access, which most young people have. University students need the INTERNET in any case, to get the overhead transparencies from their lectures, which very often are as good as books or even better.

Extreme examples of dropping sales are provided by science dictionaries. Before 1990 about 12,000 copies of a fairly popular dictionary of physics were sold annually in Germany. In 2001 there were just 242 copies sold. I know it, because I am the poor author. The publisher blames the INTERNET for this development. And I agree. But I would add, "if we can’t beat them, join them".

This confronts science writers with a new and very interesting challenge, even if publishers are still reluctant to present their complete books over the INTERNET. I claim that, in the case of my dictionary, sales of the printed book would be improved, if one could also consult it over the INTERNET. The author does not lose much at any rate, as his earnings from royalties are negligible.

INTERNET requires a different way of presentation which most of us have already used and tested. Links and cross-references are easily included. But a lot can still be improved. Text ‘pages’ are often too long and not adjusted to the size of the screens, or it is not possible to make reasonable prints on normal sized paper. All this is getting better, as are the number of good and easy to understand explanations, free from professional jargon.

But the INTERNET is also crowded with wrong, distracting and tendentious information, which is sometimes difficult to separate from serious data. Many sites are anonymous and no responsible author or institution is mentioned. Some texts presented as historic or scientific ‘quotations’, are just invented. Scientific information (popular or not) must therefore be clearly identified, as is the case for the pages of CERN and other research centres. But the search engines (like ‘Google’) provide the reader or ‘surfer’ with plenty of other ‘results’. We should take steps to help easily and quickly discriminate correct information from junk information.

Some other means of presentation are coming up, like CDs and discs of higher capacity, on which complete ‘films’ with sound and pictures can be stored. They are too big to be transmitted through the present INTERNET. However, I think that they can only rarely compete with the advantages of the easily updated and interconnected information provided for free in the INTERNET.

At present, if high level professional quality is required for INTERNET presentations, this should be taken over by a public relations department with the corresponding resources, hopefully helped by scientists devoting to it part of there time. But INTERNET pages without too sophisticated layouts can be easily made and kept updated by the scientists themselves. Many research groups already provide information on their activity and some background in their INTERNET pages, which is also understandable for the general public.

How to Improve Teaching at Schools

Twenty years ago the inclusion of well established physical knowledge, such as the quark structure of matter, into normal teaching in secondary schools posed a problem. Older teachers had not learned about it at university and generally felt too busy to update as time went on, despite the many courses and booklets that were on offer. Clever pupils who read journals would frequently ask embarrassing questions.

Furthermore, the quark structure of matter did not form part of the official school syllabus (at least not in Germany) and therefore was not included in the approved school textbooks, or in the examination system. Probably the main reason for this was that the officials who approved the school syllabus were simply too old.

This has gradually changed and quarks are now as accepted a part of the syllabus as are atoms, electrons and the atomic nucleus. The distribution of leaflets and books, the popularisation in journals and other media and the refresher courses organized by many institutions have made a substantial contribution. In my view, however, the most important factor has been the fact that younger teachers have taken over.

There are still some problems in the way that new knowledge is presented. Think about the complicated quark-antiquark-gluon structure of all hadrons. But this can probably be solved by taking care of the younger teachers who have already been well prepared at university. The Internet can be very useful in this regard.

A very special challenge that faces us is to help improve university teaching, with particular emphasis placed on providing understandable explanations that do not resort to the jargon of physicists. In fact it is not very easy (and sometimes nearly impossible) to use only generally understood terms in a popular explanation. As Puppi told us, everyone who is deeply involved in research should think about how they would describe their activities to their aunt.

And I would like to finish with a big:

“Thank you!”

to Gianni Puppi

and the organizers of this meeting.

16/03/03 18:12:23