Sunday, June 21, 2020
By:
Pedantic is one way to put it. This week, I learned that every detail counts, and that scientists are not afraid to call someone out when they believe a statement is wrong.
This week at FYI, we published a bulletin detailing the progress of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility and Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (LBNF/DUNE), one of the premier U.S. physics experiments being built today. Eventually, the project will send neutrinos created at Fermilab here in Chicago 800 miles through the Earth to the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. As we say in the bulletin, “by analyzing the elusive particles’ behaviors with unprecedented precision, the project aims to probe the foundations of physics and shed new light on processes that shaped the history of the universe.” Unfortunately, the cost of the project has risen by more than 40% and may result in the project being scaled down, or its full capabilities being set aside for a later upgrade.
The way the article came together was really instructive for me in the journalistic process. The author, Will, had been working on the bulletin for at least three weeks and had multiple moving parts, including conversations with the project’s managers at the Department of Energy. The bulletin went through multiple rounds of editing and revision (parts of which I had a teeny tiny part in). In the end, the bulletin went from a series of coherent ideas about a topic, to a single flowing story about problems at a premier U.S. high energy physics experiment.
By Friday, DOE had responded to us and all of the edits were hashed out; Mitch gave the green light to publish. I took one last look at it and had no problems. It seemed like another bulletin had been pushed out of the office smoothly.
Two hours after publication, I received a cc’d email from Will. In it, he had forwarded a message received from a well-regarded physicist who had taken the time to point out a slight change in wording from a report we had quoted late in the bulletin. In the bulletin, we had said “the 2014 Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) report recommended LBNF/DUNE as the ‘highest-priority large project’ to be pursued over the following 20 years.” The physicist pointed out that the text of the report said “LBNF is the highest-priority large project in its timeframe.” The physicist took great issue in the fact that we had changed the wording of the sentence. In its timeframe was not the same as the following 20 years. The physicist believed that such a discrepancy represented a mischaracterization of the report and that quoting the report out of context did a disservice to its recommendations.
At the end of their email, the physicist added an aside saying “I am sorry if I sound overly didactic, or that I am taking you to task. I am by no means taking you to task. I only mean to inform you of things that you may not know.” I could not help but laugh when reading this, because to me, this statement encapsulates what is so special and increasingly rare in scientists: that they are extremely passionate about the work they do, and that they deeply care about how that work affects others.
Think about it. It takes a special type of person to read a news article and then type out a well written 500-word email to the author telling him why eight of his 1500 words are wrong. The normal person accepts the small imperfection and moves on, but the scientist must fix the error—not because the scientist must always be right, but because the scientist cares how the error affects those who may not know it exists.
I hope you are like me and can both laugh at the preposterousness of the email, and greatly appreciate the type of mind that writes it.
Cheers,
Hale Stolberg