Teams from Israel's Weizmann Institute and Cambridge University are the co-winners of a worldwide physics brainteaser competition - a "fun" event with very serious implications. The competing teams were asked to discover several small hints hidden among a simulated mass of millions of non-relevant events and data, interpret them, suggest possible theoretical "new physics" laws, and then "publish" their findings.
The impetus for the competition was the ongoing construction of a new particle accelerator being built in CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research), located on the Swiss-French border. Over 2,000 physicists from some 50 countries are preparing for an experiment that is scheduled to take place there, possibly in 2007. One of the main goals of the experiment will be to find the particle that makes up all mass - a particle that today exists only in theory and is called the Higgs particle - which may lead to "new physics," the laws of which physicists today can only try to imagine. The big challenge, once the accelerator is functional, will be to interpret the data. The particle detector in the device will receive more data at every given moment than all of the world's telephone networks combined.
The organizers of the project decided to conduct a dry run, simulating the extent and possible nature of the data, with a competition as a framework to see how the data is best interpreted. "We learned from CERN's website that we had won," says Ph.D. student Arie Melamed-Katz of the Weizmann Particle Physics Department. The team didn't go to the conference in Prague where the winners were announced, he said, because there was "no time or money." The prize for first place was a three-dimensional wooden puzzle, which the winners have placed on their windowsill.
Taking a major part in the deciphering were Prof. Eilam Gross and Ph.D. students Melamed-Katz, Lidija Zivkovic, and Peter Renkel, as well as post-doctoral candidate Michael Rivline.
The impetus for the competition was the ongoing construction of a new particle accelerator being built in CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research), located on the Swiss-French border. Over 2,000 physicists from some 50 countries are preparing for an experiment that is scheduled to take place there, possibly in 2007. One of the main goals of the experiment will be to find the particle that makes up all mass - a particle that today exists only in theory and is called the Higgs particle - which may lead to "new physics," the laws of which physicists today can only try to imagine. The big challenge, once the accelerator is functional, will be to interpret the data. The particle detector in the device will receive more data at every given moment than all of the world's telephone networks combined.
The organizers of the project decided to conduct a dry run, simulating the extent and possible nature of the data, with a competition as a framework to see how the data is best interpreted. "We learned from CERN's website that we had won," says Ph.D. student Arie Melamed-Katz of the Weizmann Particle Physics Department. The team didn't go to the conference in Prague where the winners were announced, he said, because there was "no time or money." The prize for first place was a three-dimensional wooden puzzle, which the winners have placed on their windowsill.
Taking a major part in the deciphering were Prof. Eilam Gross and Ph.D. students Melamed-Katz, Lidija Zivkovic, and Peter Renkel, as well as post-doctoral candidate Michael Rivline.