New Particles?

The other day, Red Baron read two physics articles titled No One in Physics Dares Say So, but the Race to Invent New Particles is Pointless and The Fundamental Problem with Gravity and Quantum Physics. Taken together, they describe pretty well the current situation in physics. However, Sabine Hossenfelder's revelation in the first paper, "In private, many physicists admit they do not believe the particles they are paid to search for, exist – they do it because their colleagues are doing it "or even worse, her statement "No one in physics dares say so, but the race to invent new particles is pointless." poisons the discussion.

Hossenfelder, a former high-energy physicist, has switched to astrophysics and works at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. With changing her field, she is no longer fouling her own nest. With her sharp attack, does she want research funds to be diverted from high-energy physics to astrophysics?

Red Baron has written in the past about the frustration of experimental high-energy physicists working at CERN at the Large Hadron Collider. Whenever the LHC's colliding energy increases, they boil down their results and come to the same conclusions, as illustrated in the following table. 

Comprising three forces: strong, electromagnetic, and weak (©Ethan Siegel)

Each time, the Standard Model is confirmed, but not more.

And so Sabine continues her article, "All experiments looking for new particles have come back empty-handed, in particular those that have looked for particles that make up dark matter, a type of matter that supposedly fills the universe and makes itself noticeable by its gravitational pull. However, we do not know that dark matter is indeed made of particles; even if it is, to explain astrophysical observations, one does not need to know details of the particles' behavior (sic!). "

While experimental physicists keep scratching their heads, their theoretical colleagues refine string theories and come up with or invent (?) new particles that should exist and, therefore, be found.

In a previous blog, Red Baron elaborated on the opposite situation, i.e., those stellar moments in physics when experiments showed unexpected results and theoretical physicists scratched their heads for an explanation.

Did Sabine consider that an experimental high-energy physicist (salary and accelerator time) is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than a theoretical physicist (salary and computing time)? Why not let them calculate and invent new particles and cancel high-energy experiments instead? The CERN accelerator complex uses a large amount of expensive electrical energy.

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The second paper on The fundamental problem with gravity and quantum physics by Ethan Siegel starts, "We have two theories that work incredibly well: in all the years we've been testing them, we've never found a single observation or made a single experimental measurement that's conflicted with either Einstein's General Relativity or with the Standard Model's predictions from quantum field theory."

Where is the catch? The two theories don't work together, which is not essential in our daily experience. Ethan elaborates, "All of the Standard Model calculations we perform are based on particles that exist in the Universe, which means they live in spacetime. The calculations we typically perform are done so under the assumption that spacetime is flat: an assumption that we know is technically wrong, but one that's so useful (because calculations in curved spacetime are so much more difficult than they are in flat space) and such a good approximation to the conditions we find on Earth that we plow ahead and make this approximation anyway."

The effects of gravitation—sometimes called the fourth force—are so small that the interaction of gravitons with other particles cannot be detected under "normal" conditions in the lab. 

The gravitational field near a black hole (©Ethan Siegel)

Effects will only be measurable if the gravitational field becomes strong, e.g., in the case of a black hole.

One good example is the deviation of light in a gravitational field, which was the basis of the famous experiment in 1919 that proved Einstein's General Relativity Theory.

Still, the two theories should come together in GUT, the Grand Unified Theory.

Start working on unification and stop division, Sabine!

Here is what other people thought about Sabine's article: Particle physics – a brief history of time-wasting?

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Starkweather Creek Streambank Repair

©City of Madison

Flooding following strong rainfall in Madison in 2018 showed that the existing creeks did not drain the Starkweather Creek Watershed efficiently.

      

©City of Madison

Therefore the Municipal Council decided to have the streambank of one of those creeks repaired over a certain length in a pilot "flooding improvement project."

©City of Madison

Madison's Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway and Freiburg's Mayor Christine Buchheit
 listen to the explanations of the project leader

When a delegation from Freiburg headed by Lord Mayor Martin Horn and Mayor for the Environment Christine Buchheit came to Madison at the beginning of September, our sister city had organized a visit to the site. The idea behind this project is to renaturalize the creek bed such that higher water flow rates are guaranteed.

  

The Silberbach in Freiburg-Wiehre is fully grown over.

Overgrown plants on the banks are one reason for a reduced water flow.

Note the black plastic sheets laid out.

In Madison, their growth is stopped by covering undesired plants with black plastic sheets.

After the primarily invasive neophytes died, the site was reseeded with native plants.

Bank stabilization with boulders (©City of Madison)

©City of Madison

Non-native trees (Ash trees in red) will be removed from the banks and replaced with native species. 

 Another way to prevent flooding is to create water storage basins. In Freiburg, people reluctantly remember the Bohrerdamm needed to protect the new Dietenbach quarter downstream from flooding.

In Madison, a virtue was made of necessity.

         

Grandview Commons

In Grandview Commons, a new housing area north of Madison, a depression was dredged and flooded, which developed into a biotope.

   

This small lake blends naturally into its surroundings. Not only ducks have adopted the site.

Red Baron had a spontaneous idea. Large amounts of gravel are needed to fill in the Dietenbach marsh. Instead of a future flat lawn in the middle of the new quarter, can't we leave a natural wetland biotope?

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Male Teachers

As my loyal readers know, I went to secondary school in Hamburg. We college students used to rhyme irreverently, "Nichts ist hehrer als ein Lehrer (Nothing is loftier than a teacher)."

Even though I had never attended an elementary school in the Hanseatic city, some school-related news lately electrified me: Today, only 12.7 percent of the staff at Hamburg's elementary schools are men.

So over the years, the nation's Prügelknaben (male scapegoats) have become female (Prügelmädchen). Parents, students, authorities, and all those who in their youth were traumatized in primary schools beat up educators. Red Baron, too joined the chorus.

©Die Zeit

The Hamburg school board wants to change the gender disparity. "It can't be the pay because it's excellent," said Schools Senator Ties Rabe (Social Democrat). "We rather believe that it is role expectations and that the view that children, family, and education are something for women is becoming more and more prevalent. This bad development we want to counteract. We want a gender balance."

 
A student campus is to be held up to twice a school year, providing information about "the varied and sometimes challenging daily work of an elementary school teacher" and studying. The first campus will be at the Bucerius Law School on November 19. The attempt to bring men into the elementary school teaching profession is also about creating role models for young students "because the boys at school should also see and understand that education is not just something for women, but also boys and men," the senator said.

Do I read correctly that education is something for boys and men? After years of more women than men studying, especially in teaching professions, do we eventually need a male quota? Is this a gender gap backward?

By the way, my best teacher was a woman to whom I owe a decent knowledge of English grammar and my love for history.

The Hamburg school board may well reconsider their Einstellung (attitude) and their Einstellungen (recruitments).
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The Concert

As announced in my Hosanna blog, here comes the concert. Two performances were scheduled at the Minster Square for Friday, September 16, at 8 and 9 PM.

Red Baron arrived early and noticed some red lights at the Renaissance Portal of the Minster church. The musicians found refuge in this entrance hall, but the stage was still empty.

The Renaissance Portal: an impressive scenery

Music college professor Bernhard Wulff who composed the bell ringing as a collage from tones of the Hosanna to the chimes of Mozart's Magic Flute, instructed 50 bell ringers, including 20 professionals, to sound cowbells, singing bowls, gongs, glockenspiels, cymbals, elephant bells, tam-tams, tubular and plate bells. All their sounds were to unite on Minster Square with the ringing of the Hosanna, cast in 1258, for a half-hour bell concert.

Ulrich von Kirchbach, Freiburg's mayor for cultural affairs,
 welcomed the participants and visitors

The guest of honor and centerpiece of this "intercultural bell festival" was the more than three-ton Hosanna in the cathedral's belfry with its dark-sounding E-flat. "It speaks to us with a special sound, a touch of melancholy," Professor Wulff said.

 

Listen yourself (©Badische Zeitung).

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Anyone Who Goes on a Journey Will Have Quite a Lot to Tell

… is the beginning of a famous poem* Urians Reise (Urian's Journey) by Matthias Claudius.

I continue with a free translation of the second line:

Therefore I took my passport and trolley case and chose to go traveling.
*Wenn einer eine Reise tut, dann kann er was erzählen, drum nehm ich meinen Stock und Hut tät das Reisen wählen

I am writing about my latest and last trip to Freiburg's partner city in the States, Madison, Wisconsin, which eventually meant 28 hours of travel time to get to Chicago first.

Lufthansa told me it wouldn't be safe to take the direct train ICE202* from Freiburg to Frankfurt Flughafen at 7:54 AM to catch flight LH9150 run by United Air at 12:45 PM to Chicago. So Red Baron took it safe and woke up at 5:20 AM to catch the ICE374 to Frankfort Airport at 6:50 AM, changing trains at Mannheim to arrive in Frankfort at 9:06 AM.
*Intercity Express

It all started badly when I waited for my taxi to Freiburg train station that I had ordered the previous evening to pick me up at 6:20 AM in front of my house. I became extremely nervous and called the TAXI dispatcher three times, only to learn they had difficulties. Eventually, the taxi was late by 10 minutes, but the driver made it to the station in time, and I was safe.

I felt somewhat unsafer when the display panel at the station showed that my train had a delay of 25 minutes, although it would still be well in time to easily catch one of the frequent connecting ICEs from Mannheim to Frankfort airport. Apparently, the delay was due to construction work south of Freiburg between Basel and Müllheim, as the loudspeaker repeated frequently.

The minutes started to accumulate, and when the delay had increased to one hour, the Deutsche Bahn (DB) simply canceled my train. Instead, they offered to board ICE202 to Cologne via Frankfort Airport. It was the train Lufthansa had told me to avoid! In the meantime, the platform was full of people because all earlier trains running north had been canceled.

The train scheduled for 7:54 AM finally rolled into the station with a delay of more than an hour. I entered the rail car in the first class sector of the platform only to find out that DB had dropped first class for second class carriages with more seats to accommodate all those delayed and stranded passengers.

Suddenly I found myself in an empty wagon while frustrated travelers stormed the rail cars in the usual second-class sectors. On our trip to Frankfurt, some people from other parts of the train diffused into my neighborhood, but until the bitter end, the one seat beside me stayed empty.

Since the train had to load more people during intermediate stops, they took longer to board than usual such that ICE202 accumulated additional delays. So I became nervous again, deliberating whether I would be able to catch the plane in Frankfurt and cross the Atlantic with my six co-travelers of the Freiburg-Madison-Gesellschaft (FMG).

Suddenly my phone rang. On the other end, FMG's president said, "Don't worry. Our flight to Chicago is canceled. We all will be booked on other flights." Luck in misfortune, and one load was off my mind.

With a forced march, I arrived at the United Air counter at 12:15 PM. Together with FMG's vice president Red Baron was booked on UA47 at 1:05 PM from Frankfort to Houston, arriving at 5:50 PM local time.

Upon arrival in Houston, we had to pass immigration, pick up our luggage, and check it in again on flight UA2422 to Chicago. Although we had more than three hours of stopover, time ran short. How lucky I was to have an experienced vice president on my side. She recommended carrying our luggage on the plane to save time on our arrival, scheduled for 12:45 AM the following day. Her glorious idea gave us a little time to spend in the UA lounge.

Although the start of our flight to Chicago was delayed by 20 minutes, we arrived at our destination only 10 minutes late, thanks to the speediness of our pilot.

Ground transport to downtown Chicago was scanty at that time of the day. On the other hand, traffic was light, so we arrived at The Drake hotel at 2 AM. 

The Drake greeted us by Aquila non captat muscas that I translated into The eagle catches no flies, although the significance of the slogan I had to look up: An influential person does not deal with insignificant matters. I dealt with my bed first.

It was the most extended trip in my life, nearly 28 hours from my home in Freiburg to The Drake in Chicago. So it was only a minor mishap that both of us, the vice president and Red Baron, were left with the vegetarian dish on the plane. Anyway, the quality of those menus served has deteriorated over the years.

Near the Chicago River. He is still there.

The next day our FMG group was ready to make the Windy City. Five of us took the architectural tour by boat. I participated in it twice already, so two of us walked the Magnificent Mile instead.

On our way to the Chicago Art Institute, where Georgia O'Keeffe had worked, we looked into Neiman's, and later I bought my Nike Air as usual. When we arrived at the museum, we discovered it was not only closed on Mondays as expected. but on Tuesdays too. With a Keeffe expert on my side, I wanted to deepen my knowledge about Georgia's paintings, and instead was deeply disappointed.

Following a lunch break, we decided to visit Chicago's museum of contemporary art (MCA), which, according to its founders, is different from the general art museum where the values of the past are enshrined. Instead, it
is a place where new ideas are shown and tested.

Well, the work of Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is not new. although it was my first encounter with the artist who held a degree from Stevens Institute of Technology in mechanical engineering. Called an American sculptor, he became mostly known for his innovative mobiles (kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents) that embrace chance in their aesthetic. 

Calder's mobile s are based on perfectly balanced levers on a fulcrum. A mobile disturbed by an air current will rotate. I wanted to embrace him already as a physicus ludens, a playing physicist, when I discovered a blunder.

The statement that when an object is put into motion by another force, inertia slows that movement until it stops is totally wrong. 

Instead, inertia keeps the move on until the drag on the mobile moving through the air eventually stops the movement. Never mind. Aren't Calder's mobiles real works of art?

On my flight back, I noticed that I had no tray in front of me. Somebody must've broken it, and the slot was scotch over. The purser gave the impression of seeing the damage for the first time, but then in a strike of a genius, he covered my knees with a thick cushion on which he placed the tray with the meal, the same procedure in the morning for breakfast. Later he said that United would like to compensate me for my inconvenience. At home, I found a credit note of 200 U$ in my email to be used for my next flight (?) with United ,,,

This time, I caught my connecting train at Frankfort and arrived only 15 minutes late at Freiburg station. At home again.

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