Last week the New York Academy of Sciences hosted a packed house in its auditorium overlooking Ground Zero in lower Manhattan, to celebrate the release of Voyage to the Heart of the Matter, a pop-up book by writer Emma Sanders that illustrates the inner workings of the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. There was a panel discussion and a reception/book-signing, where attendees could mingle with the guests of honor.
It's no doubt gratifying to the NYAS that there were so many hard-core particle physics fans in New York willing to spend part of their Tuesday evening listening to a panel discussion about the ATLAS experiment. It helped, of course, that the view is spectacular. Also, the moderator was none other than actor Alan Alda -- a longstanding advocate for science -- and the panel featured Harvard physicist and author Lisa Randall (Warped Passages), as well as Sanders herself. Rounding out the panel was Columbia University's Michael Tuts, US operations program manager for ATLAS.
Copies of the pop-up book were on hand for sale, and I got the chance to play with one of the display copies. Sanders worked with pop-up engineer and illustrator Anton Radevsky to produce the book with -- I'm regretful to say -- somewhat mixed results. The pop-ups were nice enough, only one -- depicting the birth of the early universe -- made me sit up and go "ooh!" The priority was clearly on the text... and there's quite a lot of it. I'm sympathetic. It's a huge challenge to condense the inner workings of such a complicated experiment into something more palatable to non-scientists.
Sanders is a highly skilled communicator. It's not that she doesn't explain things clearly (she does), it's just that there's so much information to be conveyed, that the reader is quickly overwhelmed by the dense text packed onto each page. Sanders admitted that she'd really wanted to include a pop-up explaining about the semiconductors used in the experiment, but that idea was nixed during the editorial process. I applaud that decision. Part of the art of successful communication of science to the general public is knowing what information to leave out, lest you lose the reader in a dense thicket of details. I also was hoping for more of a narrative arc to frame all that information -- if you're going to do something as creative as a pop-up book, why not tell a story and weave the facts about ATLAS and the LHC through that? There's already an ATLAS coffee table book.
Nonetheless, I applaud the effort and hope to see more of this sort of thing from the scientific community. CERN does a fantastic job at outreach, which is why the LHC is currently the most recognizable science facility in the world -- even if most people associate it with destroying the world. Or, as Alda quipped, "Is this machine going to create an alternate dimension and we'll all have to move there? Because we're thinking of redecorating...." (Perhaps he's been watching episodes of Fringe....)
The panel discussion proved quite engaging. Sanders gave a "tour" of her pop-up book, peppered with anecdotes about the process of putting it together. Randall talked about the theoretical framework for the discoveries physicists hope to make at the LHC, declaring this to be "a particularly exciting time for physics." Evidence for supersymmetry, extra dimensions, the elusive Higgs boson, the mystery of matter/antimatter asymmetry in the early universe, and yes, the possibility of mini black holes are all possibilities -- and there's always the chance that physicists will be surprised by something they didn't predict.
Tuts focused on the "How" behind the LHC -- which included one of the best illustrations I've yet seen for how scientists know when an observed "event" is statistically significant enough to qualify as a "discovery." Particle accelerators like the LHC analyze massive amounts of data -- and throw out even more, keeping only those events deemed to be of particular interest. Of those selected events, even fewer will turn out to be significant. He showed how tricky this sort of analysis can be, and explained why physicists need many, many such events before they can confidently claim a discovery. It is very easy to be deceived. (Something that looks significant after 100 runs might turn out just to be a statistical anomaly, or noise in the signal, after 1000 runs.)
All in all, it was fun and informative evening. Don't you wish you'd been there? Fortunately, NYAS had a videographer on hand who captured fragments of the festivities:
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