Why have the news outlets removed the legend from this graphic?

25 Wednesday Jul 2012

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A comparison of the presentation of data between the Guardian and the original figure shown by NASA.

Today we heard the alarming news that the Greenland Ice Sheet is melting at an unprecedented rate. Over four days the surface went from mostly not melting, to 97% thawing. However that’s not what I initially thought when I initially looked at this figure in the Guardian (right). The caption reads:

The Greenland ice sheet on July 8, left, and four days later on the right. An estimated 97% of the ice sheet surface had thawed by July 12.

Now if I’d been reading this carefully I’d have notices that they mentioned just the ice sheet surface. However, I looked at the graphic and thought that the Greenland Ice Sheet had gone. It wasn’t until I went to NASA and saw the original graphic (left) that I understood the color coding.

Why have the news outlets removed the legend? This isn’t a satellite photo to be added as an attractive image to illustrate a point. It’s a scientific plot. Without the legend it has little meaning and is wide open to misinterpretation. It’s like providing a graph without axes. And it’s not just the Guardian, many other news outlets (BBC, Telegraph, Independent) have all used the right hand image with the legend removed. There’s been some indication this image came via Reuters, which means they might have been responsible for the crop, but 2 minutes of digging on the front page of NASA would have set this right.

Should news organisations crop scientific plots? Am I the only one that misread this story at first?

Here’s the relevant pages:
• NASA
• Guardian

And all credit to Suzanne Goldenberg at the Guardian for the story, it’s a well written piece that gives some important context to this event.

We have a Higgs boson! (but what kind?)

04 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by in Particle Physics News

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Candidate Higgs boson decay with four muons in the final state at ATLAS

At 9am CET this morning, ATLAS and CMS – the two general purpose detectors at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider – presented results that showed the discovery of a new particle. The last particle discovery was the top quark in ’96 but this was an even bigger deal. Today they announced they’d found a particle consistent with the postulated Higgs boson.

The Higgs boson is such a big deal because it’s totally unique in particle physics. Where the top quark is basically just a heavier version of the up quark or the charm quark, the Higgs boson is unlike anything else we’ve ever discovered. It’s an excitation of the Higgs field, an omnipresent field that permeates the universe. The Higgs field interacts with almost everything. The effect of the interaction is that it creates an inertial drag, making some particles harder to accelerate. Those particles are heavier, whereas particles that interact weakly with the field are easier to accelerate and are lighter. Photons, massless particles of light, don’t interact with the Higgs field at all. So discovering a Higgs-like boson is like seeing a whitecap in the sea. By studying the whitecaps, you can begin to understand the workings of the whole ocean.

Until today, the Higgs boson was a hypothetical concept that sat at the heart of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The discovery of the Higgs boson is the capstone on the great achievement of 20th century particle physics, and we hope it will be the stepping stone to answering the mysteries of the 21st.

The Higgs interacts with everything, particles we have discovered and particles that we have yet to discover. Studying the Higgs boson in detail is like talking to the village gossip. It knows about everything but might well need a little encouragement to give up it’s juicy nuggets of information. Hopefully in the coming year we’ll start to see hints of what it knows about the outstanding mysteries such as dark matter. This should be the beginning of a revolution in our understanding of the universe.

Some great links to more coverage of the discovery:

  • Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy has a good round up here.
  • Denis Overbye has a lovely round up of the importance of the discovery and some thoughts from engaged researchers on what this means at the New York Times.
  • Pauline Gagnon at Quantum Diaries has a great, if technical, round up of the results.

More Higgs Rumours

03 Tuesday Jul 2012

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Kate Travis spotted that CERN had uploaded a video claiming discovery of a new particle. It’s gone now, but the Telegraph has a summary of the content of the video here. According to someone at CERN, there were a number of videos made for different eventualities and this is one of them. Apparently the press office do not know what will be in tomorrow’s announcement.

Why the Higgs Boson is like Barack Obama

03 Tuesday Jul 2012

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The Higgs boson at a cocktail partyThe Higgs boson might well show it’s face for the first time tomorrow at a widely anticipated announcement at CERN. So I thought it was a good time to collate a few analogies explaining the Higgs field in one place. First up – this classic explanation by David Miller that relates the Higgs field to the guests at a cocktail party.

Let’s say the guests at the party are all political strategists. As a famous politician enters (then Margaret Thatcher, but these days let’s say Barack Obama) the strategists crowd him. He suddenly finds it hard to move for the press of people, effectively gaining inertia. He’s hard to stop when moving, and hard to get moving when stopped. The press of people have given him a mass. In contrast, an intern can walk through the room to the bar without having to push through a press of interested strategists. The intern has no mass, like a photon.

The Higgs field performs the same function for particles. Some particles (the Obamas of the particle zoo) interact strongly with the Higgs field (like the top quark) and are hard to accelerate. The Higgs field gives them a large mass. Others, like the intern, can pass through the Higgs field without interacting at all – such as the photon.

So what’s the Higgs boson? It’s a an excitation of the Higgs field. In terms of the cocktail party, image the effect of a whisper that Barack Obama was about to arrive. That whisper travels like a ripple through the party, causing people to lean in and pass on the news. That ripple an excitation of the party, just as the Higgs boson is the excitation of the Higgs field.

The original analogy from David Miller (along with lots more of his cartoons) can be found here.