Lies, Lies, Nothing but Lies

 Lies, Lies, Nothing but Lies

Charles Jordan

Lying – we all do it. Well,  I mean we don’t say what we think is the truth. If we’re not sure, but we want to make a statement, we insinuate with leading tones what we hope is both convincing and politically correct.  If not, no one will like us. Most people don’t like the truth. Is the solution just not to say anything?  Can we get through life with nobody liking us? Is the idea to get to the end with everybody liking you? Or is it to get to the end having made a difference? Or to have established a memorable identity?

Is the goal for everyone to be equal, the same? How boring! And if being different is all right, what kind of differences are acceptable, the most honorable. More money?  More knowledge?  More baskets per game?  More votes?  Maybe we don’t have to commit. Stay trendy. Ongoing change solves the boredom problem. 

How well off does a person have to be to enjoy life and to contribute (make a difference). An accomplishment (reaching a level) sometimes stifles change. Getting that tenured professorship sometimes stops people from thinking. 

Existentialism would say the best idea is an eternal becoming. My Bohemian Club would say “It’s the process, not the product.” One of the greatest gifts in life is to have something meaningful to do.  Accomplishments are generally enjoyable, but think of the basketball coach after winning the Wild Card elimination game.  “Does this mean you are ready to be world champions?” he is asked.  “I would like to enjoy this one first if you don’t mind,” he responds. Those players from the other leagues are really good.   “But I heard those guys from Jupiter are really tall and hard to beat at the Solar System level.” 

Do we finally just need to satisfy ourselves or must we contribute and make someone else better? How important are the losses in life? What about the losers in life?  What have you done when you give a beggar some money? Normally you can't give him enough to solve all of his problems. How much of your assets is enough? Should you make yourself poor for someone else to become equal? Will there always be poor people?  Do the best you can with what you have? Expect others to do the same?  Is the Golden Rule enough?

Has your path through life had its ups and downs?  What’s up to one is down to another. Does enjoying yourself involve denying others?  Is denying yourself  for the benefit of others the only way to help them?  Is helping others the only way to enjoy yourself? Finally you live with your friends but you die by yourself.

 Life is what you make it, given your abilities, the luck of the draw, and the assistance of others. 

Is the only difference between a scribe in the First dynasty of Egypt and a 21st-century physicist just the result of  changes in technology? Both individuals are from the species homo sapien sapiens. How common (equal) is homo sapien DNA? Is the brain the same? Is the DNA updated every generation so that the ability to succeed improves as well? Breeding brings two different DNA codes together generating a brand new DNA structure. Does interbreeding average out abilities, physical appearance, mental acuity?

Are normal variations due to DNA more important than environmental effects after the fact?  Human brains have many similarities and limitations. Are those limitations visible in the history of tackling the really complicated problems of life?  Why should we think that evolution is over and that a better species won’t come along?

Life is a particular path for an individual. How do we know which path is better? Is it a noteworthy, satisfying experience to just live an enjoyable life? And noteworthy or satisfying to whom?  Or does one have to accomplish some thing for someone else, the Puritan ethic?

Who wants to be average? As soon as the human animal reaches average, he will set his sights on being above average, or, failing that, being eccentric or reclusive or different in someway. It's clear to an ethnologist that the human animal has an instinct for being different, will work against his own self interest to avoid being bored, and needs some security before he can contribute.  Where will that lead us?

Some people think that correct answers aren’t the solution: it’s the correct questions that will guide our thinking. 

A Noble Nobel Experiment Finish

A Noble Nobel Finish

Charles Jordan

My PhD thesis subject at Columbia University in New York was how often a set of three particles (vector mesons called the Rho, the Omega and the Phi) decayed into an electron and its anti-particle, a positron.

Their masses range from .760 to 1.004 times the mass of  the proton, the building block along with the neutron of all the elements. It's not that important for the story, but these decay numbers tell you something about how the protons electric charge is constructed which is very important to our understanding of the electric behavior of matter.

According to Einstein's famous law E equals Mc² , your accelerator beam can only produce so much mass in a collision depending on its maximum energy. The energy at DESY could only barely produce the Phi meson.

We made headlines in the Sunday times in Germany due to our first experiment. That experiment made DESY, new in the business, famous, and our support by the German government very solid..

We had embarrassed a Harvard professor with our experiment. A solid state physicist, he had decided to do a high-energy experiment at the new Harvard accelerator and had made some mistakes which led him to claim that a favorite theory in physics, Quantum Electrodynamics or QED, was wrong. Prof. Pipkin was a dedicated scientist and decided to come over to Germany to understand what he had done wrong. I was appointed his guide to inspect our apparatus. If that wasn't embarrassing enough, he raised up too quickly going under a rigid optical bench with a sharp corner and impaled himself causing extensive bleeding.  “He covered the wound with his handkerchief as I asked whether we should go have it taken care of.  He said “No. No. I’m all right.”  But we couldn’t go on.

After my thesis experiment was done, I accepted a position at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and my thesis advisor Sam Ting (Ting Chao Cheung) who had been given a tenured position at MIT for the work done in my thesis experiment among other things, decided to reproduce our experimental set up at a higher energy accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in New York.

“Why did he decide to do that?” you might ask. Since the results of that decision won him the Nobel Prize, the effect of various considerations  might shed some light on the creative process of the search for elementary particles.  A higher energy will definitely be able to produce heavier particles and for the first time if any are there.  The maximum mass at DESY is 2.8 Gev and at Brookhaven it is 7.2 Gev. 

Sam had experience doing this kind of experiment. Experiments are complicated. It’s easy to make a mistake.  At Brookhaven he needed to make some changes anyway.   Instead of looking for electrons and positrons he looked for muons and anti-muons, which are just like electrons and positrons, just 200 times heavier.  He chose them because they are easier to detect in the the background of particles at Brookhaven which has different beams that DESY.   The grand old man of the Columbia physics department was Isidor Isaac Rabi,  also a Nobel prize winner. When he heard about the discovery of the muon he was quoted as saying "Who ordered that?

Experiments take a lot of time and are costly requiring a lengthy confirmation procedure. Sam advised me not to worry about what I should do for my thesis experiment. He said ("just get out as fast as you can so that you can do what you want to do."

Experience, reading, talking to theoreticians generates the possibility of guessing which research direction has the best chance of being productive. He told me when he took the MIT position rather than staying at Columbia, that he was afraid that the leading theorist at Columbia, another physicist named TD Lee  was so smart that he would dominate Sam's choices.

Sam started the set of experiments with muons mentioned before and sure enough by May there seem to be a peak in the mass spectrum around 3.1 Gev never before seen.

Due to the scattering of the muons after they left the target, the peak was pretty broad and Sam, quite aware of the importance of this new resonance, was anxious that he might lose face if the object was just due to equipment malfunction or something. So he didn't publish the results just yet and took some more data. By the end of this summer, he had his paper written and was scheduled to go to SLAC for the yearly review of planned experiments there. The Guidance Council involves professors working at other accelerator's in order to get the best physics results for the Department of Energy's money.

 Meanwhile Marty Breidenbach, working with Burton Richter (Group C, I was in group A.), was looking at a beam energy scan in steps of about 25 Mev. In Sam's experiment a proton beam hits a proton target and then a muon pair plus other things come out. At SLAC, the electron strikes a positron (antimatter going the other way, two colliding beams) and if the energy is right at 3.1 Gev, every pair will make a new particle. The two methods are exactly opposite.  By now, the theoreticians were also guessing what the particle might be. The East Coast theoreticians called them J particles in the West Coast theoreticians called them ψ particles.

The particles have a width in energy or mass which is related to how long they live after being produced. A long life means a narrow width. And the width is not really measurable by Sam's experiment due to his equipment. But if the SLAC experiment was not exactly at3.1 Gev nothing would happen.  Turns out that the width of the ψ just 5.5 kev which is about a millionth of the mass of the ψ.  It is pretty lucky they could hit it at all. 

Marty saw a hint in their May data that their energy steps, set by magnet currents were too large. So he had all the control units of the magnet power supplies upgraded to make the energy steps much finer.

Meanwhile in September Sam had arrived at SLAC and was looking around for some physicists to talk to. I had already left SLAC.  He couldn't find anybody. The next day he came back again worried that something was a foot. Finally he saw the Director of SLAC, Pief Panofsky, walking into his office.

"Pief," he said ruffling his papers, "I have made the most wonderful discovery, a new particle at 3.1 Gev."

"Sam," he responded, "that's great. So have we!"

The previous evening the SLAC energies in the scan had lined up right at 3.1 Gev and almost every collision produced a ψ. In minutes, thousands of the particles were produced while changing the energy just slightly cause the signal to go away. Sam and Burton Richter shared the Nobel prize, for discovering the J/ψ particle,  the only elementary particle with two names.

Just a while ago, I was attending a memorial service for Marty Perl, also Nobel Prize winner for the discovery of an even heavier electron and a thesis advisor of Sam’s.  Sam was there and we were discussing old times when Burt came in and sat across the entrance hall.  Sam was carrying an old heavy Leica he adores.  He got up and told me, his old graduate student, to take a picture of him and Burt. He must not have had a picture of them together.  He lined up the camera and told me exactly where to stand.  When I showed him the picture, he said “No. No. No.  Let me set it up again.”  That time the picture was acceptable, his old graduate student had followed directions correctly.

Love Your Enemies

Love your Enemies No Pain, no gain. Charles Jordan What would Jesus Christ say about dealing with countries like Russia or China? “But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also… Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you… You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.” This might be tersed into a simple phrase. No pain, no gain. How do we bring reason and solutions to large problems? The United States, in my opinion, has become hugely successful over the years relying on solutions rather than ideology helped by the melting pot idea. Pragmatism is the key to progress. Our centers of thought, the universities, have become part of the problem, They no longer try to find solutions. They think that they have the answer and no longer have to think. Consider the difference between freedom of speech and academic freedom? Freedom of speech is an individual thing. My opinion is as good as any professor about whether Hamas should be supported or rejected. Academic freedom is the right to be free to discuss an academic question in the professor’s chosen field. Relying on an opinion on whether Russia should be bombed by asking the professor of physics should not be seen as representative of his University but his personal opinion, for example. How the bomb should be built is appropriate to the physicist’s expertise and opinions varied in WWII about whether it was dangerous to test an atomic bomb was discussed with academic freedom. And the letter of Albert Einstein to President Truman was important due to the effect of the bomb which clearly was important, but the decision to drop the bomb was clearly the result of contrary considerations. If the University finds that clashes of personal opinion has brought negative controversy to the University, it should have the option of removing the person from the faculty or requiring him to clearly say that his opinion is not the opinion of the University every time he opines in public. News programs regularly require that from non-expert speakers . An example of this problem played out at the University of Illinois which led to the stepping down of the University Chancellor and the University President. The assignment of a Palestinian prospective professor to the Indigenous People Department of 5 people was not approved due to his ongoing diatribe against Israeli bombing on a school inhabited by Hamas which resulted in the death of some students. He was looking for a platform and a salary. But what about the university department of political science or what I would like to call rhetoric, how to write or speak about a subject to convince others of your opinion, independent of whether it is effective policy or not. No opinion is completely true or false. It is hard to consider all the environment of a problem. In physics we’re look for solutions by the KISS method.(Keep It Simple Stupid). My Nobel-Prize-winning group leader at Stanford, Richard Taylor, was of the opinion that any large decision is a partial mistake so it makes sense to delay that decision as long as possible. My word for the art of making those decisions is wisdom, based on a peculiar gene pool of common sense which won’t solve some people’s problems but is solid to a majority of them. It's almost impossible to separate general political strategy from political indoctrination and where does it end? Perhaps political science should be eliminated from the curriculum? Was that ever a part of the learning curriculum in the early University? It’s not really an academic subject. It’s a performing art sort of like music or art, better studied in a separate school. Professors should not be able to portray their expert university standing as an verification of their ideas in areas where they are not expert. In class, a professor shouldn't ever reveal his opinion, but present the case and try to lead his students to analyze it on their own and be able to express their own opinions for a solution. We could call Political Science Civics or Government, if we want to avoid the connotation of politics with power seeking and manipulation. But the intimate connection between good government and simple power seeking makes the successes dependent on who succeeds and the losses dependent on the losers. Finally we come up to a practical decision and that is called an election. As we find in most if not all questions like this, there are the rules for the elections. It might be thought that the simplest and best solution is that all citizens vote. But the tendency of charisma and manipulation is to dominate those who don’t understand what is going on and need the government to solve their problems. My personal opinion is that we need to rely on the citizens who understand the details of governance and have a horse in the race. Literacy tests shortly after the Civil War were seen to be aimed at former slaves and were adjusted accordingly, particularly to those whose primary language was not English, but I don’t see any reason why such a requirement wouldn’t improve the quality of our elections. A pure democracy has many problems since it is so close to mob rule. The result of a logical analysis is normally overwhelmed by the charisma of the politician. With a U.S. population of 350 million people, 1% represents 3.5 million people. And bizarre cases involving one person going viral touch many millions of people and makes the control of democratic principles like majority rule almost impossible to obtain. It often seems that the minority rules more often than not. Whatever your opinion of LSQBT+ groups might be (for example), they have no special rights which should be able to be voted away by the majority in a democratic government. Or by the money involved. Collegiate sports, in my personal opinion (I was a 4 year letterman in track and field at the University of Texas in the Southwest Conference.) has been monetized by sharks of the financial world due to its popularity. Even though the athletes get a token from the system, I suspect that they would just as well play against regional universities in long standing leagues with classic rivalries. That the universities and their presidents have been seduced by the money is not an acceptable excuse for their betrayal of educational principles, Plato aside. I sometimes wonder whether future elections will just be a comparison of the amount of money raised by each party. As we see, this monetary emphasis has generated a new class of people, the influencers, who depend on a platform which is accessible to large numbers of people, social media. We are seeing how politicians need to express themselves through interviews with influencers with large followings due to the guaranteed attention of a large number of voters. Their followers are often people who don't use logic but emotional response to these gurus, and their feelings on a subject are based on their lack of leverage ((victims due to lack of education, money, and organization), pet peeves rather than solutions, details rather than universality. I was interested by a question by Mark Levin on his Fox broadcast as to whether the Congress can vote the US into bankruptcy. Does the executive have a role in blocking spending which would cause that? Is deficit spending legal or ethical? States in general don't allow deficit spending. The Fed has accumulated $37 trillion of debt. Something isn't working. Do we need an amendment to the constitution? We won’t gain a balance again until the government is required to make pragmatic decisions between well meaning options. With our present debt, No pain, no gain.