Over the last three days, I’d been having a strange issue with WordPress. If you read a post I published yesterday that briefly discussed WordPress’s pros and cons, you might remember I mentioned that WordPress 4.x seems to be having an identity problem. WordPress’s back-end has been managed by what’s called the WP admin area. About two years ago, the company released a new interface for a section of that area, called ‘My Sites’. This split up was – is – quite confusing because there’s no theme or predictability in terms of which feature can be found in which part of the CMS.
The stark contrast in the UI/UX also indicates that WordPress doesn’t know what kind of a platform it wants to be: does it want to allow users to use ‘My Sites’ to build websites in a clean and admittedly intuitive environment or does it want them to get their hands (relatively) dirty in the WP admin area? If anything, this is a lack of vision. It’s dangerous.
The issue I’ve been having is this: since I launched Synecdoche a few days ago, I’d wanted to move the followers and subscribers on my previous WP blog, gaplogs.net, over. Gaplogs was on a WP account attached with Email A and Synecdoche, on an account with Email B. For this, I had to transfer ownership of Gaplogs to Email B. This step took me over two days for a frustrating reason. Earlier, I had a ‘Standard’ account, so for help with the process, I looked in WP’s documentation, which said: “Contact us and we’ll help you with the migration”. That ‘Contact us’ link turned out to be for the forums. See the loop?
So I dropped my question there, waited a day, and some other user came along and added the tag ‘modlook’. I had no idea that I was supposed to do this. Shortly after, a forum mod showed up and emailed me some guidelines.
Once I transferred ownership of Gaplogs to Email B, I didn’t want to wait around on WP’s forums again not knowing what to do. So I upgraded to the ‘Personal’ plan for $36 and avail chat support. It got weirder. Two people on chat couldn’t help me migrate subscribers/followers from one blog to the other. Between both of them, I’d spent over two hours sitting around, patiently answering their questions. I was eventually told that there was a bug and that they would stay in touch with me over email.
What does the split UI have to do with this? Quite a lot because it made moving Gaplogs from Email A to Email B hell. At one point, the support staff was confused about where to find/do what. I even found out there are two separate dashboards on which to manage your sites: one on the WP admin area (dashboard.wordpress.com) and one on the ‘My Sites’ area (wordpress.com/sites) – with different levels of control on each dashboard. And the almost-last-straw was when I finally received an email this morning saying,
In order to migrate followers/subscribers, you actually don’t need to transfer the source blog to the same account as the destination blog, as you were informed by my colleague through the chat you’d had a couple of hours before chatting with me. He probably misunderstood your request.
Thanks, dude.
I’m pretty sure my original problem was very simple to achieve, and I don’t understand what could go so wrong. I’ve been with WordPress.com for eight years – I’ve never had such terrible experience with support. I’m just glad I didn’t stick around with the forums option or who knows how long this would’ve taken. However, I did cancel my subscription to the ‘Personal’ plan, which took the custom domain upgrade with it.
Update: This morning, a WP Support member offered me a sweet discount on the ‘Personal’ plan should I choose to buy it again. So I went for it. Gah.
Dijet mass (TeV) v. no. of events. Source: ATLAS/CERN
Looks intimidating, doesn’t it? It’s also very interesting because it contains an important result acquired at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this year, a result that could disappoint many physicists.
The LHC reopened earlier this year after receiving multiple performance-boosting upgrades over the 18 months before. In its new avatar, the particle-smasher explores nature’s fundamental constituents at the highest energies yet, almost twice as high as they were in its first run. By Albert Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence (E = mc2), the proton’s mass corresponds to an energy of almost 1 GeV (giga-electron-volt). The LHC’s beam energy to compare was 3,500 GeV and is now 6,500 GeV.
At the start of December, it concluded data-taking for 2015. That data is being steadily processed, interpreted and published by the multiple topical collaborations working on the LHC. Two collaborations in particular, ATLAS and CMS, were responsible for plots like the one shown above.
This is CMS’s plot showing the same result:
Source: CMS/CERN
When protons are smashed together at the LHC, a host of particles erupt and fly off in different directions, showing up as streaks in the detectors. These streaks are called jets. The plots above look particularly at pairs of particles called quarks, anti-quarks or gluons that are produced in the proton-proton collisions (they’re in fact the smaller particles that make up protons).
The sequence of black dots in the ATLAS plot shows the number of jets (i.e. pairs of particles) observed at different energies. The red line shows the predicted number of events. They both match, which is good… to some extent.
One of the biggest, and certainly among the most annoying, problems in particle physics right now is that the prevailing theory that explains it all is unsatisfactory – mostly because it has some really clunky explanations for some things. The theory is called the Standard Model and physicists would like to see it disproved, broken in some way.
In fact, those physicists will have gone to work today to be proved wrong – and be sad at the end of the day if they weren’t.
Maintenance work underway at the CMS detector, the largest of the five that straddle the LHC. Credit: CERN
The annoying problem at its heart
The LHC chips in providing two kinds of opportunities: extremely sensitive particle-detectors that can provide precise measurements of fleeting readings, and extremely high collision energies so physicists can explore how some particles behave in thousands of scenarios in search of a surprising result.
So, the plots above show three things. First, the predicted event-count and the observed event-count are a match, which is disappointing. Second, the biggest deviation from the predicted count is highlighted in the ATLAS plot (look at the red columns at the bottom between the two blue lines). It’s small, corresponding to two standard deviations (symbol: σ) from the normal. Physicists need at least three standard deviations (3σ) from the normal for license to be excited.
But this is the most important result (an extension to the first): The predicted event-count and the observed event-count are a match across 6,000 GeV. In other words: physicists are seeing no cause for joy, and all cause for revalidating a section of the Standard Model, in a wide swath of scenarios.
The section in particular is called quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which deals with how quarks, antiquarks and gluons interact with each other. As theoretical physicist Matt Strassler explains on his blog,
… from the point of view of the highest energies available [at the LHC], all particles in the Standard Model have almost negligible rest masses. QCD itself is associated with the rest mass scale of the proton, with mass-energy of about 1 GeV, again essentially zero from the TeV point of view. And the structure of the proton is simple and smooth. So QCD’s prediction is this: the physics we are currently probing is essential scale-invariant.
Scale-invariance is the idea that two particles will interact the same way no matter how energetic they are. To be sure, the ATLAS/CMS results suggest QCD is scale-invariant in the 0-6,000 GeV range. There’s a long way to go – in terms of energy levels and future opportunities.
Something in the valley
The folks analysing the data are helped along by previous results at the LHC as well. For example, with the collision energy having been ramped up, one would expect to see particles of higher energies manifesting in the data. However, the heavier the particle, the wider the bump in the plot and more the focusing that’ll be necessary to really tease out the peak. This is one of the plots that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson:
Source: ATLAS/CERN
That bump between 125 and 130 GeV is what was found to be the Higgs, and you can see it’s more of a smear than a spike. For heavier particles, that smear’s going to be wider with longer tails on the site. So any particle that weighs a lot – a few thousand GeV – and is expected to be found at the LHC would have a tail showing in the lower energy LHC data. But no such tails have been found, ruling out heavier stuff.
And because many replacement theories for the Standard Model involve the discovery of new particles, analysts will tend to focus on particles that could weigh less than about 2,000 GeV.
In fact that’s what’s riveted the particle physics community at the moment: rumours of a possible new particle in the range 1,900-2,000 GeV. A paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint server on December 10 shows a combination of ATLAS and CMS data logged in 2012, and highlights a deviation from the normal that physicists haven’t been able to explain using information they already have. This is the relevant plot:
Source: arXiv:1512.03371v1
The one on the middle and right are particularly relevant. They each show the probability of the occurrence of an event (observed as a bump in the data, not shown here) of some heavier mass of energy decaying into two different final states: of W and Z bosons (WZ), and of two Z bosons (ZZ). Bosons make a type of fundamental particle and carry forces.
The middle chart implies that the mysterious event is at least 1,000-times less likelier to occur than normally and the one on the left implies the event is at least 10,000-times less likelier to occur than normally. And both readings are at more than 3σ significance, so people are excited.
The authors of the paper write: “Out of all benchmark models considered, the combination favours the hypothesis of a [particle or its excitations] with mass 1.9-2.0 [thousands of GeV] … as long as the resonance does not decay exclusively to WW final states.”
But as physicist Tommaso Dorigo points out, these blips could also be a fluctuation in the data, which does happen.
Although the fact that the two experiments see the same effect … is suggestive, that’s no cigar yet. For CMS and ATLAS have studied dozens of different mass distributions, and a bump could have appeared in a thousand places. I believe the bump is just a fluctuation – the best fluctuation we have in CERN data so far, but still a fluke.
There’s a seminar due to happen today at the LHC Physics Centre at CERN where data from the upgraded run is due to be presented. If something really did happen in those ‘valleys’, which were filtered out of a collision energy of 8,000 GeV (basically twice the beam energy, where each beam is a train of protons), then those events would’ve happened in larger quantities during the upgraded run and so been more visible. The results will be presented at 1930 IST. Watch this space.
Featured image: Inside one of the control centres of the collaborations working on the LHC at CERN. Each collaboration handles an experiment, or detector, stationed around the LHC tunnel. Credit: CERN.
It finally happened! The particle-smasher known as the Large Hadron Collider is back online after more than two years, during which its various components were upgraded to make it even meaner. A team of scientists and engineers gathered at the collider’s control room at CERN over the weekend – giving up Easter celebrations at home – to revive the giant machine so it could resume feeding its four detectors with high-energy collisions of protons.
Before the particles enter the LHC itself, they are pre-accelerated to 450 GeV by the Super Proton Synchrotron. At 11.53 am (CET), the first beam of pre-accelerated protons was injected into the LHC at Point 2 (see image), starting a clockwise journey. By 11.59 am, it’d been reported crossing Point 3, and at 12.01 pm, it was past Point 5. The anxiety in the control room was palpable when an update was posted in the live-blog: “The LHC operators watching the screen now in anticipation for Beam 1 through sector 5-6”.
Beam 1 going from Point 2 to Point 3 during the second run of the Large Hadron Collider’s first day in action. Credit: CERN
Finally, at 12.12 pm, the beam had crossed Point 6. By 12.27, it had gone a full-circle around the LHC’s particles pipeline, signalling that the pathways were defect-free and ready for use. Already, as and when the beam snaked through a detector without glitches, some protons were smashed into static targets producing a so-called splash of particles like sparks, and groups of scientists erupted in cheers.
Both Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the CERN Director-General, and Frederick Bordry, Director for Accelerators and Technology, were present in the control room. Earlier in the day, Heuer had announced that another beam of protons – going anti-clockwise – had passed through the LHC pipe without any problems, providing the preliminary announcement that all was well with the experiment. In fact, CERN’s scientists were originally supposed to have run these beam-checks a week ago, when an electrical glitch spotted at the last minute thwarted them.
In its new avatar, the LHC sports almost double the energy it ran at, before it shut down for upgrades in early-2013, as well as more sensitive collision detectors and fresh safety systems. For the details of the upgrades, read this. For an ‘abridged’ version of the upgrades together with what new physics experiments the new LHC will focus on, read this. Finally, here’s to another great year for high-energy physics!
CERN has announced the restart schedule of its flagship science “project”, the Large Hadron Collider, that will see the giant machine return online in early 2015. I’d written about the upgrades that could be expected shortly before it shut down in 2012. They range from new pixel sensors and safety systems to facilities that will double the collider’s energy and the detectors’ eyes for tracking collisions. Here’s a little timeline I made with Timeline.js, check it out.
(It’s at times like this that I really wish WP.com would let bloggers embed iframes in posts.)
This reconstructed image of two high-energy protons colliding at the LHC shows a B_s meson (blue) produced that then decays into two muons (pink), about 50 mm from the collision point. Image: LHCb/CERN
The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory that has been pieced together over the last 40 years after careful experiments. It accurately predicts the behaviour of various subatomic particles across a range of situations. Even so, it’s not complete: it can explain neither gravity nor anything about the so-called dark universe.
Physicists searching for a theory that can have to pierce through the Standard Model. This can be finding some inconsistent mathematics or detecting something that can’t be explained by it, like looking for particles ‘breaking down’, i.e. decaying, into smaller ones at a rate greater than allowed by the Model.
The Large Hadron Collider, CERN, on the France-Switzerland border, produces the particles, and particle detectors straddling the collider are programmed to look for aberrations in their decay, among other things. One detector in particular, called the LHCb, looks for signs of a particle called B_s (read “B sub s”) meson decaying into two smaller particles called muons.
On July 19, physicists from the LHCb experiment confirmed at an ongoing conference in Stockholm that the B_s meson decays to two muons at a rate consistent with the Model’s predictions (full paperhere). The implication is that one more window through which physicists could have a peek of the physics beyond the Model is now shut.
The B_s meson
This meson has been studied for around 25 years, and its decay-rate to two muons has been predicted to be about thrice every billion times, 3.56 ± 0.29 per billion to be exact. The physicists’ measurements from the LHCb showed that it was happening about 2.9 times per billion. A team working with another detector, the CMS, reported it happens thrice every billion decays. These are number pretty consistent with the Model’s. In fact, scientists think the chance of an error in the LHCb readings is 1 in 3.5 million, low enough to claim a discovery.
However, this doesn’t mean the search for ‘new physics’ is over. There are many other windows, such as the search for dark matter, observations of neutrino oscillations, studies of antimatter and exotic theories like Supersymmetry, to keep scientists going.
The ultimate goal is to find one theory that can explain all phenomena observed in the universe – from subatomic particles to supermassive black holes to dark matter – because they are all part of one nature.
In fact, physicists are fond of Sypersymmetry, a theory that posits that there is one as-yet undetected particle for every one that we have detected, because it promises to retain the naturalness. In contrast, the Standard Model has many perplexing, yet accurate, explanations that is keeping physicists from piecing together the known universe in a smooth way. However, in order to find any evidence for Supersymmetry, we’ll have to wait until at least 2015, when the CERN supercollider will reopen upgraded for higher energy experiments.
And as one window has closed after an arduous 25-year journey, the focus on all the other windows will intensify, too.
(This blog post first appeared at The Copernican on July 19, 2013.)
