Some thoughts about STEM on Steem - bonus: a complete introduction to particle physics
What can we, scientists, do for Steem, and in particular what can we do that others cannot do as easily? I have thought about it a lot (i.e. more than usual) during this last month (I think some may guess why). There are three parts to the answer to that question, in my opinion.
[image credits: Geni]
First, we can bring Steem in very special places where the general public does not necessarily have easily access.
For instance, SteemSTEM brought Steem underground, in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and I think one can proudly say that this is one of the most unexpected Steem meetup that has ever been organized.
This is our way to promote Steem, as some of us have connections in the academic world allowing this to happen.
Second, and this is what we are really trying hard with @steemstem at this very moment, we can develop a community of STEM-lovers on the Steem blockchain. By community, we both refer to scientists who can share their knowledge and their work, and people who just like the STEM fields and discuss about them. More into details, this includes, among others, helping good STEM content to get visibility on the blockchain, promoting engagement amongst the members of the community and thrive them on taking care of each other, comment the posts of each other, etc.
Finally, as scientists, we can also design lecture material and put it exclusively on Steem. Those lecture notes would be freely available and could be useful for people in particular outside the Steem ecosystem. They could consist of one of the numerous handles to attract people from the outside and grow both our SteemSTEM community and the Steem platform with valuable member.
I personally think those points are where we can make a difference!
I now take the opportunity of this post to summarize below the different chapters of the first lecture notes I delivered on Steem, about introducing particle physics to Steem.
AN INTRODUCTION TO PARTICLE PHYSICS ON STEEM
[image credits: Fermilab]
For the first steemSTEM meetup at the Large Hadron Collider, I created lecture notes that I have posted on the platform. This consists in a complete course that I am usually giving to the general audience when I am invited to do so. These lecture notes had never been written down anywhere outside my mind before 3 months ago. With this (final) post, I provide the table of contents to get them easily.
The structure of matter. In this first post, I break down the atomic structure until its most fundamental level. The 12 fundamental fermions of the Standard Model (and the associated antiparticles) are introduced, together with their connection with atoms.
The fundamental interactions. In this second post, I discuss the fundamental interactions and how we can model the way the elementary particles interact by means of symmetries called gauge symmetries. The so-called gauge boson mediating the fundamental interactions are introduced.
The Higgs boson. This Higgs boson is the star of this third post. I shortly discuss how it has been theoretically introduced and also why it was introduced. Due to its importance, the Higgs deserves his own chapter :)
Theory predictions in the Standard Model. It is now time to explain how theoretical predictions are made. I introduce the concept of Lagrangians and Feynman rules, and I also explain the technicalities lying behind predictions for the LHC, how equations are linked to numbers to be compared to data.
Going beyond the Standard Model. An important part of all particle physics research activities addresses what is going on beyond the Standard Model. In this post, I discuss the limitations of the Standard Model and why we are motivated in going beyond it and unravel new phenomena. And I also explain why it is hard to do at the LHC.
The basics of particle accelerators. It is time to leave away the theory domain and explain how our big accelerators, such as the LHC, work. I also highlight the numerous world records obtained by the LHC.
[image credits: CERN]
7 . Objects to be detected at the LHC. In this post, I adopt the viewpoint of a detector and introduce how the different particles can be detected at a collider experiment, or in other words what are their signatures that can be recorded in detectors like ATLAS and CMS.
8 . Particle physics detectors and their onion-like structure. After discussing the objects, time to discuss the machines that have been built to detect these particles. The ATLAS and CMS detectors have been built as onions, each layer having a dedicated role. Putting all layers together, one gets information about what is actually going on in real collision.
9 . The experimental quest for the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson was one of the main motivations for the LHC physics program and was also the expected milestone on the road to the discovery of new phenomena. In this last post of those lecture notes, I describe how the hunt for the Higgs boson took place during the last 30 years.
If you think any chapter would be missing, please let me know. I would be more than happy to write them!
SteemSTEM is a community-driven project that now runs on Steem for more than 1.5 year. We seek to build a community of science lovers and to make the Steem blockchain a better place for Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
More information can be found on the @steemstem blog, on our discord server and in our last project report. Please also have a look on this post for what concerns the building of our community.
Making lecture notes freely available will have an impact on the STEM community as most academic materials are either for paid members or for sale.
Many lectures (I don't talk about articles) are available for free on personal websites. For instance, you can type your favorite topic and the word lecture on google, and you will get many hits. You will see :)
That's true, but often times I always get the paid websites which can be annoying when looking up things. Thank you.
I can imagine that. I know to handle with my own field but I have no clue how things work for the other fields (as usual).
That would be beneficial for sure.
I think so too!
This is good. Now I can have an idea of what particle physics is like. I need to find time and read them in details. Thanks for sharing such a useful knowledge
Yes, reading all of them will take more than 5 minutes. Videos of me lecturing are available somewhere, but I don't have them so that I can' share them :/
Let's D.tube them on here someday sir
Maybe. I don't have the videos so that there is nothing I can do. Tagging @justtryme90 and @bendelgreco ^^
I have to say I agree completely with your points. A couple of times, I have read amazing stuff on aspects of Stem had no idea about. It was such fun reading about space science, medicine, astronomy etc. on Steemit.
But I have an observation:
As science writers, emphasis must be placed on writing in a simple language such that laymen can understand. If you must include technical jargons, be as simplistic as possible or break done the hard bones.
Thanks for the piece. Cheers
I agree. This is what I try to do in my post. I trust by readers to tell me when it is too hard :)
Oh, no. it's too hard! 😥
Seriously now, I like how simple those articles come. I wouldn't say I have much interest in Particle physics, but I've read a few of yours andI would normally get the main idea behind them. Thank you.
Thanks for this very nice feedback :)
Well said @lemouth, there are many things we as scientists can do for Steem. Personally I believe that immortalizing technical information on the blockchain where there's no censorship involved would result in the creation of a free library available for all internet users, which would in turn promote true justice and freedom of information and at the same time attract more and more investors in the Steem ecosystem.
Of course, as you rightly pointed out, engagement is essential. Caring for one another is what we all should do in all aspects of life anyway. I also strongly agree that tutorials and lectures in the form of blogs would serve the community's best interests.
Regarding your lecture notes, thanks for sharing this as I've missed out on many of those.
Ps. I think the 3rd link (The Higgs Boson) doesn't work.
In physics, we have the arxiv for this. I would keep steem as a very good medium for communicating about science, but I won't use it for publishing actual research paper. You need something made explicitly for scientists (check scipost for instance) that is more controlled. Otherwise, how to distinguish the good from the bad? Who is deciding what is good and what is bad? Blog posts are one thing, but actual research is another thing.
PS: Thanks! I will fix it immediately!
So . . . I would actually post research on Steemit!
Here's why.
;)
It would eventually go into journals when concise and sufficiently rigorous. Elegant. Formatted.
But there's nothing quite like a blockchain printing scientific papers on currency tokens to establish priority in an archived manner. Nobody throws away money. And therefore publish much, much earlier. Yes, earlier than even arXiv.
(I would not do this yet. There's too much spam on Steem at the moment. But we'll see. The front end is being forked by several groups. And there will be no trending page. Then competition from EOS will occur. All very good. When there's no competition everybody gets the worst product at the highest price.)
Publish a good result in journals which have consistent quality and impact. No rush at this point. A well organized, deep, clear, concise paper. One that others will actually read.
Circulate it to get feedback on possible flaws in arguments even before submitting it. That usually takes over a month. If one don't care how many read it or not, it would just go to arXiv exclusively. Not both arXiv and a journal.
It would in that last case possibly be very long. Longer than it has to be.
Conciseness takes time. Pascal apologized long ago that he could not make his letter shorter. He had insufficient time to do that.
Suppose authors could do both? Game changer. Here's why.
What means consistent? Journals where I or the representative consumer of the content reads at least several of the papers in each issue. Like a restaurant with a star. The next two stars, two out of a possible three, are for consistency of the food, of that good food that gave it the first star.
Problem? Solution?
Some of these journals are behind a paywall. Not accessible even to most academics, especially in Europe, where many institutions cannot afford to subscribe to all publishers. That costs millions, and that can be used for other things.
And that is not easy to change. The libraries which purchase the journals are not the end users.
When the consumer of the good and the one who pays for the good are not the same entity, there exists an above threshold number institutions worldwide will continue to buy these journals. Even if all scientists switch. I'm thinking about the United States. The single largest market. It's an above threshold minority. (We'll talk about why that matters so much later.)
The institutions subsidize open access for their faculties and students in such journals where there is desire and initiative. So the incentives to switch to an entirely new platform for a further sufficiently great minority (in this case a majority) of scientists, especially the young and untentured, and early in their career hence poor, not receiving high salaries or having other streams of income, are not yet sufficiently great.
A typical queried data point will declare: Yes, yes! They too want open transparent systems! And having said that, they'll do nothing, submit nothing using the new technology.
What is required is a new use case. A new value proposition for individuals to transition en masse. New algorithms for example that maximize consistency beyond that offered by current platforms.
So what was that about a sufficient minority? I mentioned that why?
Once a sufficient minority transitions, all will transition. Because as Nassim Taleb pointed out again with the minority rule in his latest book, if As will consume Ns or Ms, but Bs will consume only Ms, when scaling up production for a larger population, there are significant economies of scale in producing only Ms. So long as Bs are a sufficiently large minority. Assuming this would not be the case was a major error in the otherwise good post by @dan from two years back.
Let's talk about acceptance models for new technologies. In publishing and in general.
Publishing a partial result on public platforms, possibly anonymously is a win in the sense of providing scientists with a way to transition to open and free platforms by intentionally boosting the reputation of the platforms before they being publishing on it generally. Make it academically necessary to read not just paywall journals. Don't give the competition options. That's one of the things arXiv has done beautifully. Think like arXiv; think strategically, I suggest.
There needs to be a use case in the space, a communications amplifier, that is missing from old sector publishing technology, to get the above threshold minority to switch to the new sector publishing technology.
May be the above is something sufficiently many others would like to do as a transition to something blockchain social media based peer review and publishing. Like to PEvO, as we discussed yesterday.
Otherwise we find, as Richard Gabriel argued in the above link, that we get the improvement, by the market of products and ideas, but at the slowest possible rate. Everything faster requires strategy. Such as a significant use additional case.
Alan Kay argues that plain paper copying by Xerox was more expensive than competing technologies, but it was a communication amplifier and it was easier. So it won. Air travel is still costs more per unit distance than trains in most cases, but it's more convenient in the sense of faster. So people fly.
Returning to the original question: ``In physics, we have the arxiv for this. I would keep steem as a very good medium for communicating about science, but I won't use it for publishing actual research paper. You need something made explicitly for scientists that is more controlled. Otherwise, how to distinguish the good from the bad? Who is deciding what is good and what is bad?''
I said I would. Many in the computer science and mathematics community do that.
The reader must learn to distinguish good from bad. We have waaay too many blind cites in science, researchers reading the abstract or conclusions and assuming the result is valid. This usually creates a broken telephone effect, and confusion results and gets cited.
When anyone references a monograph or a chapter or a paper need to read the whole paper, the whole chapter, the whole book. (That's not currently solved by Steem, as currently most posts have # Reads < # Votes. Maybe improving front ends and competition from EOS will assist.)
Nicolas Rashevsky said it long ago, there's no royal road, no shortcuts in science. Where a paper is published is not sufficient to trust papers. Especially those with technical content. Given twigging and overspecialization, which means the referee is most likely not quite an expert either.
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/i20114445)
Every scientific paper must be carefully read by everyone who wishes to cite it. No shortcuts exist.
Deeper feedbacks are needed. The reviews made public, and reviews made of reviews. And so on. The result is a fixed point called accuracy. The reviewers would have higher dimensional reputations, several values associated with their account. Regarding the results of each of these feedbacks.
There must be no dominant strategy that incentives gaming the system.
Journals are not there to vouch for the truth of all they publish. That is impossible. Results get falsified all the time. Indeed falsification of existing literature is the most notable result and reason to publish.
Publications are filters. Rather they direct attention given the vast ocean of publications, most of them either redundant or irrelevant or obviously rubbish. The readers get consistent high quality work, and they must then read all the arguments, all the evidence, and judge the paper anyway.
Clifford Truesdell also famously wrote the same in a rather acerbic and witty collection of essays.
The solution is to get a lot of open peer review. Papers might even be anonymous. The system must survive even anonymity as a stress test.
I particularly like what Behavioral and brain sciences does. I also like what Annals of mathematics does.
But it should be larger scale, open, free, transparent, and rapid. Everything cited must be read by everyone who cites it. Whatever system makes that happen will be a game changer. The quality as consistency of the journal or platform will be way up there. And more people will want to publish there, more departments will reward publishing there.
Some of my suggestions. High consistency would within a year result in a large impact. And the platform can go from there.
Update. Made this long comment into a post.
What a long comment! Thanks a lot for bringing this here,
Unfortunately I have not that much time to answer deeply, but let' see that I partially agree. I come from a field where everything is public, can be open access by selecting the right journals and even for free, so... Even all papers are freely available on the arxiv. So my problems are somehow slightly different :)
By the way, everything is open access in particle physics thanks to the Scoap3 initiative where institutes from all over the world pay for it. This is not optimal, but already better than nothing.
But of course, this is not the case for any other field different from particle physics and solution must be built. I hope to be able to witness this in my lifetime.
If I have well understood, you would like to have a kind of steem-based platform like the arxiv (but maybe with different rules on how the tokens are attributed; this is the reputation thing the pevo people are after). But then why not simply the arxiv. I don't really understand the need for the token. Why is not an arxiv-like version enough?
Okay, the weak spot of the arxiv is the referral system that is not existent. Then we have scipost. I actually don't see what we should have in addition to this? Scipost includes mostly everything that you mentioned.
Maybe competitors (like pevo)? But the idea is the best so far, IMO. I still don't see where and how the tokens enter the game, but well... to be discussed.
I really love the idea of making lecture notes on steemstem..that's a brilliant idea..we would follow this footsteps created by Lemouth with pleasure. It would boost Stem on blockchain so much ..impressive Lecture ..prof Lemouth
I don't know if this will boost Stem or not. But I like to think it will ^^
If Lecture notes are posted, I foresee a community where scientists and students can gain full time knowledge on any subject in the blockchain industry.
I think it works in the other way round: the community is already there (and is called steemstem) ;)
Thanks for sharing the notes friend lemount, I will try to take the time to read some, although I am a chemist I like these topics. And as for your thoughts, it seems to me that producing reading material especially for STEEM can have a great impact on the community and attract many more members. Regards.
Thanks for passing by! Any comment on my notes is more than welcome (if by any chance you find the time to read them)! So, don't hesitate to shoot ^^
This is a wonderful idea, and I think it is the fastest way to grow SteemSTEM community visibility.
Thanks for your comment! :)
Science is the only tool that can be used to find solutions to the problems the world is currently facing. Nothing including religion can be an alternative to this. Deep rooted societal issues could be eradicated only by means of science.
I don't find anything wrong in the steemstem community coming to the front. Laymen have gotten the opportunity to interact with scientists. What else can be greater than this for a human's perspectives to get broader!?
The SteemSTEM project is one amongst many steem projects. After almost 2 years of existence, it is clear we still have a long way to go but we are on the good way :)
Yes lemouth..I have known other projects too. But I'm sure nothing else has contributed to the well-being of human like science. So it should be on top in our hearts and also steemit.
I wish that too :)
Well said @lemouth. SteemSTEM is really doing what other groups on the steem blockchain are not doing and it feels great to be part of this great project.
In countries like mine, one limitation in carrying out a study is having access to literatures. Most go for a particular fee(In well developed countries I'm aware the university helps out in this respect). Imagine what happens when you need like 10 or more of them and you still have to spend in other areas of the project.
Having free lecture notes on the blockchain will go a long way to helping people in various ways. Students can better themselves and professionals can expand their knowledge.
Thanks so much for the effort to help people grow.
Highest regards!
Thanks for your comment. You may want to check what I answered to @greenrun with respect to finding lecture notes for free. Lecture notes are indeed in principle easy to find on the web. But I think having a kind of repository here could be helpful, in particular with lecture notes designed for the people using the Steem blockchain!
If only steemit had the option to organise all your posts in lists and categorize them in tabs, things would be so much easier.
Imagine university students turning to steemit for resources. Professors and teachers (primary and high school) using steemit as a pool for material or a place to reach out to other educators and students and work on collaborative projects among universities and schools around the world. And at the same time make money through cryptos to fund those projects.
There is so much potential. Steemit is a medium of great power. Let's hope that people will make the best use of it :)
We will come with something... soon... :)
I can really imagine that, but not for now. A lot of development is still needed to make the platform teacher-friendly... Hmmm maybe this is something we should develop ourselves at the end of the day.
Oh, that sounds exciting! I'm all for anything that can make finding good material on Steem easier :)
Working on it. We will drop some hints about that very soon ^^
Oooh! Now I am anxious!! :D
Soon Soon! ^^
I'm looking forward to finding out what you have planned! Is it a personal project, or something from #steemstem?
This is something from steemstem :)
Rooting for this!
As I said, patience :)
This is a good initiative, I will be happy when steemit finally become a good alternative to researchgate, at least this will generate additional traffic.
I don't use research gate, so that I don't know. I personally use Inspire and its connection to the arxiv database (that are both open access).
Well, another thing we can do is organize occasional stuff to bring science to those who can't afford it. It doesn't have to be big either. Take for example this story I heard today:
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-01/ghana-man-goes-viral-for-teaching-computers-without-computers/9498100?pfmredir=sm
Ok, Microsoft already took over him already but I think it would have been super easy to collect a thousand bucks through donations and 2-3 posts and get him a couple of cheap computers :D
I agree, but we should not create something new when existing associations are already there and seek for help. We should join our forces. For instance, this particle physics one which I will start helping soonish (this is not the one I mentioned in the other post; I am not helping a single organisation) ;)
Doing this would completely revolutionize steemit. Even the ramifications of its success is mind boggling.
Let's see. The future will tell ^^
I'm actually pretty excited about science being intertwined with the blockchain. It only make sense for this symbiosis to take place. Shoutout for the relevant post of the 21st century @lemouth...
STEM has always been part of the Steem blockchain. Just somehow hidden at the beginning. Now it is better ;)
Thanks for the education stunner
My pleasure :)
As a very non 'scientific' person, but appreciating the talents of those who are, may I ask one thing?
...what is the size of that malteser in your photograph? (it is a malteser, right)
Apologies - I'm in a flippant mood...
Lol! This is the best comment ever ^^
Nah, it is not a Malteser! It is the Standard Model of particle physics, but hard to see without zooming a lot :)
I dream quality opensource STEM content coming to the platform. Right now the majority of content in this platform is noise. #steemSTEM is one of the rare gems here.
It is still tough to get rid of the noise, but we have ideas to get there. More info... very soon ^^
nice read!
Thanks. But why self-upvoting such a comment so hard? I disagree with those rewards...
What you did there is great, I read other comments that mentioned the same of what I am about to say but I think it is challenging for users the "discovery" of these posts. It would be great if in the coming months/years we will also have more search and organization tools, for example it would be fantastic if a user was able to make custom lists of posts or add search filters such as "visualize only posts voted by steemstem" or even make shared lists
We are working on it, more information will appear soonish ^^
Hi @lemouth, great article! I'm new to @steemstem and was wondering if I could send you (via telegram or otherwise) an article I've written about batteries to see if it would be something interesting to the SteemSTEM community before I spam?
No you can't because I am overwhelmed at the moment. Apologies.
But if you want, please join us on discord and I will bug a few mentors who will be super happy to help you along these lines :)
very wide benefits that we can take in steemit, the latest studies we can meet here.
once in the school we've got it, but here as if we find a bomb of science that feels like unlimited!
this community will be great if we help each other and appreciate, the community approach or known by the term communitization is a promising marketing approach.
we can see a bright future here. thank you!
I guess this is already happening :)
Thanks for your comment!
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Help us grow by delegating to us! 100sp, 500SP, 1000SP, ANY SPYou just received 23.29% upvote from @onlyprofitbot courtesy of @etcmike!
Thanks a lot @etcmike ^^
The value of STEM is the first page on Google Search for Steemit!
This is what we can do and how we should promote quality content. If the Steemit = quality content, steem/SBD = something valuable.
In my case: "endemic animals balkans" is the 3rd hit, just below the Wiki. I know, this is very unlikely input for the search engine - but we got it.
Or in case of @lemouth: "crash course particle physics" - the first hit on page 2, because the page 1 is full of YT videos. This is an incredible success.
I could bet that we hodl at least 100 "Page 1" for various scientific topics. That's the value that should be recognized
I was not expected my series to be that successful. I will sleep well tonight. I agree with everything you said by the way, concerning the value. Our content can make the steem/sbd value higher in attracting user to steem.
Wow! With the table of content you provide, I'm honoured to say that I've seen almost all of them. I also commented on posts 1, 3, 5, 6, 9.
I've so much learnt a lot from you. Maybe I could tilt towards particle physics someday. :)
Hehe :)
Thanks for taking the time to read them ^^
Thank you for all your lectures, I'm slowly going through, well I'm about 1/3 through.
I always liked particles physic, as long as it is presented in layman terms. I will not lie that I understand everything, some of it is over my head, but over all I understand good enough. Besides, once I'm done I will re-read everything again. Great stuff, thanks for sharing.
Thanks for commenting. If you want clarifications about anything, please let me know! It will be my pleasure to answer you.
It's good to finally have all articles compiled, I met some though when I joined the blockchain, but I knew was missing out on a few, it's nice what we humans have achieved with regards to Science and technology.
Will get to absorbing them all. Have a wonderful day :)
Oh you posted it twice :)
Oops!!, bad connection :)
Hehe... No worries, it happens :D
It's good to finally have all articles compiled, I met some though when I joined the blockchain, but I knew was missing out on a few, it's nice what we humans have achieved with regards to Science and technology.
Will get to absorbing them all. Have a wonderful day :)
Thanks for passing by. Yes, I agree that the last hundreds years in science development are amazing (without reducing the importance to everything older).
Excellent ideas. I particularly like your concept of .. "Finally, as scientists, we can also design lecture material and put it exclusively on Steem. Those lecture notes would be freely available and could be useful for people in particular outside the Steem ecosystem. They could consist of one of the numerous handles to attract people from the outside and grow both our SteemSTEM community and the Steem platform with valuable member."
Thank you! I hope more will follow :)
you certainly get the discussion rolling, mon ami
don't mind if i resteem every post you make if you dont start popping one out every hour, b/c i think #steemstem is by far one of the best initiatives , ubi aint half bad either, steemstore and the services for hire tag, theres plenty underneath the foam
you have seriously access to CERN ? like THE collider ? i suppose there's no guest passes for the lottery available :D , if i stick around long enough i might actually get a grip on this, thank you very much !!!!!
Please resteem any post you would like to. I have nothing against that. And thanks for the nice word about stemstem :)
Well, I have an office there. That helps :)
For the moment, there is no way to go down as the collider is running. But a long shutdown is coming and there will be plenty of time for visiting!