As part of my self-celebrations for having survived 20 years of blogging (the anniversary was a few days ago, see my previous post), I am re-posting a few representative, old articles I wrote in my column over the years. The selection will not be representative of the material I covered over all this time – that would be too tall an order. Rather, I will hand-pick a few pieces just to make a point or two about their content. 

In the first post of this series, which you find in its original format at this link, I describe a bright, failed idea I had 20 years ago, a creative way to do physics outreach while at the same time collecting funds for scientific research in particle physics. I still think my idea was excellent and bold, if probably very hard to implement. I however was very surprised by how little interest my post collected: at the time I was blogging on the Quantum Diaries web site, which had many daily views from physics enthusiasts around the world, plus there was some interaction between the participating bloggers, who were suggested to put up public discussions in the comments thread about each others’ posts. However, none of that happened, and my bold idea was left where it was. Who knows, perhaps we can recycle it? Judge for yourself. I am pasting the text below.

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Particle physics is cool, but being a particle physicist these days is tough. First of all, we live in our own little world, disconnected from the outside, incapable of making headlines, and aching for it: the general public is not interested in science in general, and subatomic interactions do not even score high among scientific attractions. Moreover, we suffer from a chronically tight budget, much smaller than the vast amounts of money thrown into space with Mars probes and other cosmic gizmos (hey don’t get me wrong – I do love the Hubble!). Congressmen just don’t get it why they should give away money for just another particle whatchamacallit, only a bigger whatchamacallit. (That’s how the SSC died, sadly). It just does not excite them enough.

But I have a solution to both these problems at once! The idea hit me one day, when I was considering the smallness of the probability of a proton-antiproton collision producing a rare phenomenon such as the creation of a top quark pair inside our detector. What is our detector, buried 50 feet underground at Fermilab, if not a giant lottery ? The unpredictability of the quantum process of two particles colliding makes it a perfect randomizer. A buried 5000-ton lottery! Here are some dividends one might assign to detected signatures of processes:

• production of a jet with energy above 20 GeV: 1/100
• production of a B meson: 1/1000
• production of a jet with energy above 50 GeV: 1/10,000
• production of a W boson with decay to leptons:1/1,000,000
• production of a Z boson with decay to leptons: 1/10,000,000
• production of a top quark pair: 1/10,000,000,000
• production of a Higgs boson associated with a W, with same-sign trilepton decay (say e+e+mu-): JACKPOT!

Of course, the numbers are actually different (larger, for rare processes) if one considers the subset of collisions that actually get recorded (ones which get an identification number), since the online trigger system makes some selection on the fly exactly with the purpose of enhancing these tiny figures. But one would still be looking at numbers as small as one in a million for tight top pair candidates, and one in a billion for golden Higgs production.

Hence my idea. How to

1. get funds for running and upgrading our experiment ?
2. attract the interest of people, media coverage ?
3. show them how cool particle physics is ?

Simple! People love gambling, especially in the US. And in order to understand how big their chances are of winning a few bucks they will go a long way into understanding the details of the natural system at Blackjack or probabilities of slot machine dividends. So I propose that we sell tickets with event numbers printed on them before we start data taking (events recorded by the detector are numbered by run and event number), say at one dollar per event. We then assign dividends for particular events, based on the selection cuts they would pass at analysis level. These dividends should be honest enough to make the game enticing, but still allow for some margin of gain for the experiment. Let’s live on our own funds, and screw the congress!

As soon as events are collected, people can verify whether the one corresponding to their ticket is a J/psi candidate or what, and get paid in case they won something. (Sure, we’d need a stable reconstruction program… Hehm!)

Imagine what a boost this would give to the knowledge of the general public! You would start hearing the guy next to you at the bar boasting about the event he got, maybe showing a colorful event display to everybody. “See this purple bar here ? This is a 60 GeV electron! A golden W candidate, I’m telling ya! And the darn track here, go**amn failed by an inch the requirement for a second electron! Would’ve won a million…”. It would really be fantastic. The first Higgs candidate event would win several million dollars, and would get media coverage in no time. But people would learn physics, that’s the best thing.

Of course, people who bought the events would be their sole owners. If you were to publish an analysis based on a restricted set of events, and wished to show an event display, you’d need permission from the owner, and maybe cite his name in the Acknowledgements section. “The authors wish to thank John Doe for kindly providing Fig.3″…

And you’d have to invite lottery participants to the trigger meetings as if they were shareholders… You could not change prescales (a prescale is a device that limits the rate of collection of a particular set of events, to keep the total output rate within the writing capabilities of the system) on your triggers without changing dividends, and things could get ugly. For once, we’d have trigger meetings with people screaming at each other for a good reason, MONEY! (People do scream at trigger meetings sometimes… And it just happens in return of minor reductions of their dataset size!).

This idea is too cool to let it go… I need to talk to Ray Orbach at the Office of Science of the DoE, pronto!