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God’s not in the Details

Pratik Kanjilal : Sat Jul 07 2012, 00:45 hrs

The CERN coverage was mixed — informed reporting in mystical packaging

It’s 1.20 pm on Wednesday, CERN is wrapping up its Geneva press conference announcing the discovery of the Higgs boson and ‘God particle’ and ‘CERN’ are trending at second and third places on Twitter. What’s taken pole position? #VulgarSlogans. Ah, the sleeping sickness of the hive mind…

But ‘God particle’ was the top trend by late evening, propelled there by the barrage of TV reporting. Flipping through the channels, one was pleasantly surprised to find that while producers and anchors were expectedly moved to absurdity by the ‘divine’ nature of the boson, reporters understood what was afoot. Some channels had correspondents reporting accurately from the venue, saving programmes from the mystical excesses of their producers.

When asked what was the big deal, NDTV’s Noopur Tiwari betrayed the same caution as CERN’s scientists. She said that it was a five sigma finding (a statistical measure of certainty) but clarified that a Higgs boson had been found while several may exist. And she ventured into the mysteries of dark matter, the insensible stuff that makes up all but four per cent of the body of the universe. Until the anchor told her to cut the crap and tell if the scientists were wetting their pants in excitement, though not exactly in those words.

ABP News mashed together astronomical imagery with creationist myth-making: “Who gave birth to the stars and planets, a divine force or a scientific particle?” A strap read, “Science gets a glimpse of God.” But a correspondent in Geneva did a quick but comprehensive interview with CERN physicist Dr Archana Sharma. Meanwhile, IBN-7 had the story in the lead, where it actually belonged at that moment, ahead of the Adarsh scam and Akhilesh Yadav’s automotive profligacy.

Sabse tez Aaj Tak produced the zingiest mash, with stirring background music — Enya meets Star Wars theme with Tchaikovsky setting off cannons to keep time. Highly appropriate for the galactic spectrum that the special of 19 minutes covered. On one hand, Aaj Tak’s reporter Siddharth Tiwari responsibly cautioned that the existence of the Higgs boson was not 100 per cent certain yet — the combined rating of the two sightings reported is actually a fraction under 5 sigma. At the same time, its anchor was mystically convinced that the God particle would explain where volcanoes get their oomph from and make time travel and intergalactic travel possible. Volcanoes?! One correspondent spoke of the “Lord Hadron Collider”— that’s my next World of Warcraft avatar! — and a strap read, God tussi sukshma ho.

Despite weirdness like this conflation of filmi Punjabi and philosophical Sanskrit, the big channels proved to be surprisingly enlightened. Many carried part of the actual Webcast of the CERN conference (To see it in all its si gma giga electron volt magnificence, browse http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/play_higgs.html#). Perhaps it’s experience. The media has had four years to prepare for this discovery since the Large Hadron Collider was commissioned and gone through numerous drills when a sighting of the elusive Higgs boson was declared to be imminent. In journalism, past experience is a great comfort.

One recalls the apocryphal story of the Skylab crash and the editorial writer at the Hindu. In 1979, Skylab was expected to crash as flamboyantly as Krakatoa had erupted and an edit had to be written. Space stations were new, Skylab was the first of its kind and the writer found himself in the great unknown. With nerveless fingers, he reached for his security blanket. He dialled the library and asked the surprised librarian for the file on Skylab crashes. The ‘God particle’ has fared better in the media’s hands.

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Mr. Hawking, you are a magnificent man of tremendous courage and enormous intellect,
and, lol, it is your bet, (for fun) yet could you have conceded your $100 too soon?
[ http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77217296 ]

Aidan Randle-Conde | USLHC | USA

A sigma here, a sigma there…

Whenever we come across a new result one of the first things we ask is “How many sigma is it?!” It’s a strange question, and one that deserves a good answer. What is a sigma? How do sigmas get (mis)used? How many sigmas is enough?

The name “sigma” refers to the symbol for the standard deviation, s. When someone says “It’s a one sigma result!” what they really mean is “If you drew a graph and measured a curve that was one standard deviation away from the underling model then this result would sit on that curve.” Or to use a simple analogy, the height distribution for male adults in the USA is 178cm with a standard deviation of 8cm. If a man measured 170cm tall he would be a one sigma deviation from the norm and we could say that he’s a one sigma effect. As you can probably guess, saying something is a one sigma effect is not very impressive. We need to know a bit more about sigmas before we can say anything meaningful.

The term sigma is usually used for the Gaussian (or normal) distribution, and the normal distribution looks like this:

continued .. http://www.quantumdiaries.org/tag/statistics/