Thoughts after attending a recent conference.

What’s the first sign that you are getting old? Is it the grunt and getting up from a chair more deliberately? Is it a slowing pace up a hill you used to run? Is it thoughts, now deeper and buried among decades of useless knowledge, harder to access and tripping your tongue? Is it that the tools you designed and forged are rusting and the welds weakening? Is it trying a new tool but getting lost and your mind muddled by merely the instructions? Is it in watching others, youthful, vigorous, demonstrate mastery of something you do not know, can’t understand, and can hardly interpret their language? Is it the memories of the problems and solutions and newer problems and almost solutions and the generations on generations of friends that you fought alongside, brothers and sisters in arms against ignorance, that have all left for greener pastures and more favorable winds, leaving you nearly alone? Is it watching history repeat or rhyme or alliterate because there are really only but a handful of stories to tell, isolated yelling at the sky at the claimed novelty and innovation of now, that you had witnessed decades earlier? Is it losing the sense of awe and gaining cynicism at the new ideas, though truly something on the verge of a revolution, a paradigm, but devolved into simply shouted louder and more persistent and more annoying? Or is it just being tired, tired all the time, tired to sleep, tired to think, tired to argue, tired to excite, to never truly be awake again?

Overheard in discussions at a recent conference I attended.

Sneaking out of the auditorium during a less engaging talk for the bathroom, I was surprised to find the pair chatting in the foyer, and though they quickly hushed when they saw me, I assumed they were digesting the additional complaints and criticism heaped on top of the now year-old pile.  While our previous interaction had ended rather heated, I was quick to introduce myself and thank them for the great talks, reemphasizing that I was rather curious to know the reasoning behind their publication choice.  Leads on an experiment that had been shuttered for over a decade, they remained among the few that continued to analyze and probe the data and had some three or four years ago, begun the endeavor of measuring the mass of the W boson, whose value governs the rate of radioactive decay, for example.  The analysis and validation was impressive, details checked and doubled checked, detector misalignment identified and corrected through cosmic rays that sliced through the electronics, and all done blind to reduce human bias.  Then, when the blinds were removed, out came the result, more precise than any measurement before, but an inconceivable 7 standard deviations from expectation, representing a probability of less than one in 300 billion that they were actually consistent.  These two had, after I had asked during their talks, collectively remembered that their Lab had demanded that this result be sent for publication in Science, while perhaps the most prestigious journal throughout the rest of physics, was met with extreme skepticism in particle physics.  Excusing myself after this exchange, a senior physicist long noted for his candor and abrasiveness stepped up and just outright told them, “It seems like you’re hiding something.  That’s the optics.”

Claims and results like this, while rare, do happen, but Occam’s razor, the mantra that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and diligent prodding by others in almost all cases find that fatal flaw.  Further, as experiments in particle physics grew in size, there was less possibility that results could be scooped as there may be but a single experiment at the time that could perform the measurement.  The advent of the internet lowered barriers to collaboration and communication and long had there been a tradition of open science in particle physics, with preprints posted for the world to read sometimes months or a year before a formal publication.  During that time, battles would be fought, confusions addressed, sometimes new studies performed, but by the end of it what was submitted to a journal was always stronger and more rigorous than the raw product.  Long too had traditional particle physics journals, the Physical Reviews, the Journal of High Energy Physics, the European Physics Journals, subscribed to this form of open science, with all publications, under the umbrella of particle physics at least, to be accessible to all.  Science and Nature, never very popular with particle physicists and neither was particle physics very popular with these journals, explicitly prevented open science, enforcing an embargo on all submitted papers to have never been public anywhere else.  The first time that the rest of the particle physics world learned about this implausible 7 sigma measurement was once Science published it, and in some sense by then it was too late.