From: Simona Rolli
Date: Wed Feb 06, 2002 08:36:11 AM US/Mountain
To: George Johnson
Cc: editorial@nytimes.com
Subject: New York Time article

Dear Mr Johnson,

I've read with surprise your article that came out yesterday on the New York Times, Science insert.

As a member of the CDF collaboration and current co-convenor of the Exotics/New Phenomena searches group, I have the following comments:

1) The CDF collaboration has published at least 20 SUSY papers from our run I data, confirming that we don't see anything at current energies, Maria Spiropulu's analysis is just one of these, neither the first nor the last one. I'm afraid the article does not give any credit to the work of a lot of other people in the CDF collaboration.

2) The article implicitely conveys the message that the long author lists on our papers are making them worthless: mention is made that on the author list there are names of people who never read the article or " don't even know about their existence". This is very misleading. Our long author lists are there to aknowledge the effort of a very large team that built a very complicated detector. Without this detector none of the physics analysis could be completed.

As many people doing physics analysis know little of hardware specifics, in the same way the people working on hardware aspects might not be fully aware of every detail in any singles analysis. There might be people who did not read or follow an analysis but who contributed substantially to the hardware that allowed that analysis to be carried out. Statements like the ones in your article are unfair to the rest of the CDF collaboration.

I would suggest that next time you write an article about CDF physics results, you first consult our spokepersons and physics groups convenors.

best regards,

Simona Rolli

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Dr Simona Rolli, CDF/ATLAS, Tufts University, Medford, Ma, USA
Phone : 1 630 840 2639
E-mail Address:
http://ncdf70.fnal.gov:8001/frames/my_frame.html
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From: George Johnson
Date: Wed Feb 06, 2002 09:48:01 AM US/Mountain
To: Simona Roll
Cc: editorial@nytimes.com
Subject: Re: New York Time article

Dear Dr. Rolli,

Thank you very much for your letter. I'm afraid I really don't understand your objections. I first noticed the paper because it was prominently promoted by the American Institute of Physics in a summary for reporters titled "NEW LIMITS ON THE SEARCH FOR MISSING SUSY" (http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/2002/split/574-1.html). But I was also familiar with the work from being in regular touch with Joseph Lykken, who has helped me with many articles on high-energy physics.

Tony Affolder told me himself that he did not contribute anything to Affolder, et. al., a fact I found amusing enough to use as an illustration of the controversial practice of citing so many people on these reports. (It was not I who was criticizing the phenomenon -- as a journalist I am agnostic on the subject -- but Dr. Frisch.)

In addition to explaining the science, I like to give readers a sense of the sociology of a field. And surely you'd concede there is something engagingly peculiar about a short paper a third of which consists of a sprawling expanse of alphabetized names. It's another of those nice details that help make a story come alive. (I guess in my field, the equivalent would be running my short SUSY piece under a byline consisting of me, the Times Science editor and deputy editor, who read the piece, the copy-editor who worked on it, the assistant editor who trimmed it to proper length and wrote the headlines and picture captions, the graphics editor who created the nice chart, the printers who laid out the page, the pressmen who worked the big machines that turned it into print . . .)

I think scientists sometimes do not appreciate that the purpose of a story like this is not to parcel out credit to all the good people who work unsung on a project. That is the job of your scientific journals. My aim here was simply to take an interesting development in high-energy physics and use it as a window to give readers a glimpse of this fascinating work.

As far as Dr. Spiropulu's contribution goes, it was described to me by everyone I interviewed -- including two theorists who disputed the definitiveness of the study -- as a particularly astute analysis. Whenever I can, I like to recognize the work of young physicists. In addition, the drama of the unveiling of the blind analysis is just the kind of detail that draws more readers to appreciate the excitement of scientific research.

To this day some Fermilab scientists still complain about a story written years ago by one of my colleagues that ran under the headline "Physicists Fail to Find Supersymmetry," or something like that. I find it ironic that I have written a piece trying to educate readers about the value of negative results and you're complaining about it.

I hope you'll feel free to pass along my comments.

Sincerely yours,
George Johnson
The New York Times
http://talaya.net