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本文译自 Daniel Whiteson. Physics World，2017，（8）：29，发表于《物理》2017第八期，发表时略有删改，此处是原文：
不务正业也有好处（When goofing off is good）
丹尼尔·怀特森（Daniel Whiteson）讲述了他给更多读者解释希格斯玻色子的初衷最后是如何促成了他与PHD Comics幕后的艺术家之间通力合作的。
丹尼尔·怀特森是美国加州大学欧文分校的实验粒子物理学家，与豪尔赫·陈（Jorge Cham）合著有《不知为不知: 带你见识未知的宇宙》（We Have No Idea: a Guide to theUnknown Universe）一书。邮件地址：daniel@uci.edu
有时候好的灵感会在你放着正事不干，四处瞎晃荡时冷不丁冒出来。我和漫画家豪尔赫·陈的合作就是在我偷懒不干正事的时候开始的，并且在最近我们的合作达到了高潮，出版了《We Have No Idea: a Guide to the Unknown Universe》，以幽默漫画的形式来介绍物理学中一些最深奥的未知问题。
豪尔赫就是著名网络漫画PHD Comics的创作者，这部漫画刻画了科研人员生活中的艰辛和工作中的挫折。但豪尔赫最初的职业规划并不是一名漫画家。他九十年代末在斯坦福大学读机械工程专业的研究生，设计模仿蟑螂运动的机器人，而他最初的设想就是走学术研究的道路。在每天绞尽脑汁让自己的机器人动起来之余，豪尔赫会随意画上几笔，劳逸结合。
正式开始研究学习没几个星期，豪尔赫就已经把自己生活中的真实场景编成段子画出来了。其中一个段子就是“教授失灵区”：在他导师身边环绕着一片假想区域，任何正常运行的机器人，一到他想给老板演示的时候就会毫无征兆的突然停止工作。豪尔赫每周利用业余时间在学校的学生报纸《斯坦福日报》上发表三篇漫画，他并没有把这当作未来的职业规划，而是当作一种消遣。
然而他的漫画却在斯坦福的学生圈里备受推崇，并且很快豪尔赫的不务正业踏上了一个新的台阶，他把漫画放到了网络上，传遍了全世界，证明原来豪尔赫发现了全球普适的科研挫折定律。他拿到了机器人技术相关专业的学位，并在加州理工学院得到了教职，却意识到学术界对他漫画的兴趣远超对他机器人研究的兴趣。于是在两千零几年，他离开了学术界，成为了一名职业漫画家。现在，豪尔赫的不务正业的瞎胡闹成了他的新工作。
从实验室的束缚中挣脱以后，豪尔赫迈开脚步，造访美国，欧洲，甚至澳大利亚的各个大学和实验室。他和当地的科学家们讨论他们的研究工作，了解这些科学家试图解决的神秘问题到底是什么，聆听他们的各种八卦。他把旅途中的奇闻异事都画成漫画，展示出科学家们私下里的一面，并且以十分巧妙而又引人入胜的视觉风格对科学家们的研究工作加以诠释。这种科学上的交流沟通将PHD Comics的范围从编生活段子拓展到诠释学术生活的重要意义。
在欧洲核子中心偷懒不务正业
与此同时，我也正在世界另一头的一个实验室里偷懒。我是个正儿八经的粒子物理学家，一直追求通过让粒子飞到一起撞碎的方式来揭示宇宙最小的结构单元或者创造出新奇的物质形态。我在加州伯克利拿到博士学位，但读书时大部分时间呆在费米实验室的Tevatron粒子加速器那边，紧挨着芝加哥。毕业后，我加入了欧洲核子中心大型强子对撞机（the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN）这边的ATLAS实验团队，这个大型强子对撞机当时在寻找希格斯玻色子和其他理论预言的新粒子。
在2009年，当时我的工作时而让人兴奋刺激，时而令人灰心丧气。那是晴朗的一天，我正在撰写一个项目方案，对大量的碰撞数据进行筛选，试图找到少量能够揭示出新粒子的数据，还跟我的学生们头脑风暴，研究如何设计一个新的粒子物理实验来寻找暗物质。不过对于职业粒子物理学家来说，能够有大发现的时候并不多；日常更多的是清早的组会，应付各种杂事和行政事务，以及检查一堆无效的数据。
所以我也有要跳出粒子物理学家日常生活节奏，在其他方面发挥一些主观能动性的欲望。寻找希格斯玻色子当时很热门，并且在大众媒体上吸引了很多公众的注意力。媒体中甚至包括高质量的科学期刊，但我感觉媒体缺乏能够抓住核心要点的东西，也缺少寻找这种难以捉摸的粒子的经验。
举个例子，虽然几十年前理论就预言了作为粒子物理标准模型拼图的最后一块，希格斯玻色子迟早会被发现，我们对粒子质量本性的思考并没有止步不前。希格斯玻色子和与之关联的场是允许物质粒子拥有的质量的机制所在，但对于单个粒子质量范围并没有给出解释。顶夸克的质量很大，而它的亲戚上夸克相比之下却近乎没有质量。为什么希格斯场这么偏心？我们并不知晓答案，希格斯理论也没有给出回答。可惜，绝大多数媒体关于希格斯玻色子的报道都暗示发现了希格斯玻色子，所有的细节和问题都终结，LHC的物理使命也就此完结了。
和大多数科研工作者一样，我也是豪尔赫漫画的铁粉，当他开始尝试诠释科学知识时，范围涵盖了从古生物学到神经科学，我很受用。他的文字配上有活泼搞笑接地气的图画，在传统的文字配图之外另辟捷径，起到意想不到的效果。我本打算和豪尔赫合作，创作一期描述我们关于希格斯玻色子和寻找暗物质工作的漫画。但跟他合作仿佛白日做梦，遥不可及。毕竟他是深受学术界欢迎的红人；我到访过的几乎每个实验室都在门上贴着他的漫画。
当我老婆建议我给豪尔赫发邮件聊合作时，我还笑话她太天真。这就好比我给布拉德·皮特发邮件，邀请他来参演我的电影一样。不过发个邮件也没啥损失，所以我就发，没指望得到回复。
豪尔赫的迅速回复令我喜出望外。也许是因为他看上了我提出的创作一期漫画来解释欧洲核子中心研究工作的想法，还说不定是因为我答应给他劳务费。八成二者都有。我们相约见面，他从帕萨迪纳跑来跟我待了一天。豪尔赫完全是粒子物理的门外汉，不过他有理工科的思维，并且在提出令人眼花缭乱的问题方面很有经验。我对他领会概念的能力深表佩服。我们一开始的计划是创作一个传统漫画，用图画来解释我们在核子中心都干了点啥，以及我们的工作有啥意思，有啥用。豪尔赫把我们之间的对话录了音，方便复习。
但是当豪尔赫要坐下开始干活时，他又有了另外的注意：与其说做成静态的漫画，倒不如直接做个科学动画片。他把我们的录音剪短，把我的语音加以美化，配上图画。我第一次见到这个作品的时候惊呆了，特别赞！就像在梦里做演讲，当我站在黑板前长篇大论的同时，会有一位艺术家把我的观点都画出来展现给大家。
我们关于希格斯玻色子的视频放上网的时间比2012年七月真正发现希格斯玻色子的时间早那么几个月。发现希格斯粒子的时候，全世界都聚焦于这个谜一样的玻色子——至少那几天是这样——许多科学记者和老百姓找到了我们的视频。它很快就火起来了，点击量噌噌往上升。来自世界各地的朋友都在看这个视频，很多人留言说这是他们见过的最清晰的解释。
随后，当弗朗索瓦·恩格勒特和彼得·希格斯获得2013年度诺贝尔物理学奖时，我很欣慰的发现诺奖委员会把我们的视频加入到了推荐阅读的参考链接中。我谨慎怀疑这可能是诺奖委员会唯一一次提到我的工作，却不是因为我的本职工作，而是不务正业的瞎捣鼓。豪尔赫和我后来还创作了关于引力波的视频，在2016年五月它被宣布发现时也获得了上百万的点击量。
人贵没有自知之明
2015年的时候豪尔赫和我打算来点新鲜的。我们意识到绝大多数大众科学传媒都把关注的焦点放在问题的答案上——去解释我们已经知道的现象。但我觉得我们对这个世界知之甚少。与其说创作漫画来解释已有的科学发现，倒不如写本书聊聊关于宇宙未解决的那些惊天问题来得更有趣。毕竟，还能有什么比做出革命性的发现，颠覆已有认知更让科学家为之癫狂的呢？
我职业生涯中追求的核心问题——“宇宙到底是什么构成的？”——已有了相当的进展，我们身边的万事万物都能用三个最基本的结构单元来诠释：上夸克，下夸克和电子。物理学家还发现了另外九种粒子，但为什么一共是12种？会不会有更多粒子出现？这些粒子的质量和相互作用之间的奇怪关系又作何解释？它们会不会由更小的粒子构成？
更为戏剧性的是，我们对于物质的这种理解只适用于这个宇宙5%的东西。宇宙的27%是看不见的“暗物质”，另外68%是神秘的“暗能量”，贴有“我们不懂”的标签。我们的好奇心不止于此。我们宇宙基本元素的自然属性，诸如空间，时间和质量，依旧令我们抓狂。我们仍不知宇宙有多大，我们有没有邻居。
写这本书和写篇科学论文大不相同。首先，豪尔赫要和我确定问题的范围，挑出一看上去就有意思，三言两语就能解释清楚，不需要特殊知识背景就能理解的。这几条限制把一些有意思的问题剔除掉了，比如中微子震荡。对于有的问题，比如暗物质，这部分内容对我来说是家常便饭，不过另外一些问题，诸如早期的宇宙学，我就得跟更专业的同事进行请教，还得做点功课了。
对于书中每个话题，我都是先打个草稿，把问题的重要点罗列出来，然后去寻找问题的解释。随后豪尔赫和我之间不断的交换意见，直到我们都觉得把问题讲清楚了为止——为了让他能把前沿科学知识做得通俗易懂，我们经常全盘推翻重来。举个粒子，关于引力的章节被一分为二：其一有关空间自身的属性，其二讨论引力这么微弱到底有什么神秘之处。文字定稿后，豪尔赫就会用漫画来进行诠释，还会添加笑料来保持轻快的语气。
我们的书起名为《不知为不知》是为了表达对物理学未来还有很大发展空间的兴奋之情，而不是为了批评现代物理学的无能之处。在对公众介绍这本书时，我为非专业人士对这些科学前沿问题表现出的强烈好奇心而感到眼前一亮，看起来这些问题碰触到了公众好奇心的神经。甭管是超弦理论，外星人还是早期宇宙，男女老少们都会提出尖锐的问题，渴望得到解答。
尽管我们之间的合作是在不务正业的状态下，通过彼此各自独立的工作建立起来的，它却可能是我们做过的最了不起的事了。
附上原文正文，以为对照：
Sometimes your best ideas come when you are goofing off.
It was just this kind of procrastination that led to my collaboration with cartoonist Jorge Cham and culminated recently in the publication of our new popular-science book, We Have No Idea: a Guide to the Unknown Universe, which uses humour and cartoons to describe some of the deepest unknown questions of physics.
Jorge is the artist behind the popular webcomic PHD Comics, which captures the struggle of life in academia and the frustrating experience of research. But Jorge didn’t start his life planning to be a cartoonist. He first went to graduate school in mechanical engineering at Stanford University in the late 1990s designing robots that could walk in a way that mimics the locomotion of cockroaches, and his original intention was to follow an academic path. But when Jorge needed a mental break from the daily struggles of getting his robot critters to perform, he picked up his pen and starting doodling.
Just a few weeks after starting his graduate studies, he was crafting comic situations that poked fun at the real-life research situations he often found himself in. One was the Professor Negation Zone: a hypothetical region that surrounded his PhD adviser and ensured that any functioning robot would suddenly and inexplicably cease to work when it was time to demonstrate it to his boss. Jorge published these comics three times a week in the campus student newspaper, the Stanford Daily, working on it in his free time and treating it as a fun goof-off rather than the foundations of a future career.
But his comics were wildly popular with the Stanford student population, and soon Jorge took his procrastination to the next level, putting the comics online. They spread around the world, revealing that Jorge had discovered a vein of academic frustration that spanned the globe. He finished his degree in robotics, and took up a teaching position at the California Institute of Technology, but found that academia’s appetite for his comics had outstripped its interest in his robotics research. So in the mid-2000s, he left academia and became a full-time cartoonist. Now, Jorge’s goofing off was his new job.
Freed from the confines of the research lab, Jorge went on the road, visiting universities and research labs around the US, Europe and even Australia. He talked to his hosts about their research, learning about the mysteries they were trying to unravel and hearing about their personal stories. He wrote comics about these experiences, showing the personal side of the scientists and explaining their research in a clever and compelling visual style. This science communication project expanded the portfolio of PHD Comics from making fun of academic life to explaining its significance (see example opposite).
Goofing off at CERN
Meanwhile, in a research lab across the world, I was doing my own goofing off. I’m a particle physicist by training, trying to understand the fundamental nature of matter by smashing particles together to reveal the universe’s smallest building blocks or to create new, exotic forms of matter. I did my PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, but spent most of my time at the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab, just outside Chicago. Later, I joined the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which was then searching for the Higgs boson and other new hypothetical particles.
It was 2009 and while my job was often exciting and fun, it could also be frustrating. On a good day, I was writing programs to sift through the vast number of collisions to hunt for the few that might reveal evidence of a new particle, or brainstorming with my students how to design a new particle-physics experiment to hunt for dark matter. But for a practising particle physicist, the days of dramatic discovery are rare; more common are early-morning meetings, avalanches of e-mails about trivial or bureaucratic issues, and a long parade of null results.
So I too felt a desire to branch out from the traditional activities of a particle physicist and develop a side project that tapped into a different kind of creativity. The search for the Higgs boson was heating up and receiving a lot of public attention in the popular press. Some of this was high-quality science communication, but I felt that most of it lacked something that captured the essential ideas and the experience of searching for this elusive particle.
For example, while the discovery of the Higgs boson was a validation of a decades-old theoretical prediction and the last missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, it did not put to rest all of our simple but deep questions about the nature of particle mass. The Higgs boson and its associated field are the mechanism that allows the matter particles to have mass, but provides no explanation for the puzzling mystery of their peculiar range of masses. The top quark is extraordinarily massive, while its close cousin the up quark is nearly massless in comparison. Why, then, does the Higgs field give so much mass to one and so little to the other? We have no idea and the Higgs theory provides no answer. Unfortunately, most media coverage about the Higgs boson implied that its discovery would complete the physics effort at the LHC, with all details in place and all questions put to rest.
Like most researchers, I was a long-time fan of Jorge’s comics, and enjoyed his forays into explaining science, ranging from paleontology to neuroscience. Something about his combination of text and informal jaunty visuals brought the ideas through in a way that traditional text-plus-figures had not. I was hoping to work together with Jorge to develop a comic that described our research on the Higgs boson and on the search for dark matter. But partnering with him seemed more like a daydream than a possible reality. After all, Jorge is a celebrity among academics; nearly every research lab I have visited has at least one of his cartoons pasted to the door.
When my wife suggested I e-mail him proposing this collaboration, I scoffed at her naivety. It seemed to me as likely to succeed as e-mailing Brad Pitt and asking him to star in a movie about my life. But e-mails cost nothing, so I fired off a brief message, fully expecting never to hear back.
To my surprise and delight, Jorge responded fairly quickly. Maybe he liked the idea of doing a comic explaining the research at CERN, or perhaps it was that I was offering to pay for his skills. Probably a bit of both. We arranged to meet, and he came down from Pasadena to Irvine and spent a day with me. Particle physics was far out of his realm of expertise, but Jorge has a technical mind and lots of experience asking people questions on a dizzying range of topics. I was impressed with how much of the core concepts he was able to grasp and distil. Our initial plan was to produce a traditional static comic, with diagrams explaining what we were doing at CERN and pointing out why it was interesting and important. Jorge recorded our conversation so he could refer back to it later if he had questions.
But when he sat down to pull the ideas together into a comic, Jorge had a different idea: rather than creating a set of fixed images, he was inspired by a few online science videos to make an animated science cartoon. He edited down his recording of our day-long conversation to a few minutes to make me sound smart and on-point, and added animated drawings to accompany my explanations. When I first saw what he had produced, I was amazed and impressed. It was like a lecturer’s dream. Imagine standing in front of a chalkboard and speaking, while someone with much greater artistic skill draws clever and witty diagrams to illustrate your points.
Our video about the Higgs boson was posted online a few months before its actual discovery was announced in July 2012. At the time, the world’s attention was focused on this mysterious boson – at least for a few days – and many science writers and citizens found our video. It soon went viral, receiving millions of views around the world, and many commented that it was one of the clearest explanations of the Higgs boson they’d come across.
Later, when François Englert and Peter Higgs won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics, I was delighted to find that the Nobel Committee for Physics included a link to our video in their list of “further reading”. I suspect it may be the only time my work is mentioned by the Nobel committee, even if it was not the main thrust of my intellectual life, but something I did when goofing off. Jorge and I later collaborated on a video about gravitational waves, which also saw millions of views when the discovery of these subtle ripples in space–time was announced in March 2016.
Unknown unknowns
Sometime in 2015 Jorge and I decided to try something different. Most popular-science communication, we realized, focuses on the answers – explaining what we do know. But I felt there’s so much about the world we still don’t know. So rather than developing comics that explain existing scientific discoveries, we thought it would be fun to write a book discussing some of the biggest unsolved questions in the universe. After all, what bigger thrill is there for a scientist than to make a revolutionary discovery that peels back a layer of reality and reveals that the universe is not as we thought it was?
The mystery at the centre of my professional life – “What is the universe made of?” – has seen a lot of progress, as everything around us can be explained in terms of just three basic building blocks: the up quark, the down quark and the electron. Physicists have discovered nine other particles, but why are there 12 in total? Are there more? What explains the strange patterns of their masses and interactions? Are they all built out of one smaller particle?
Even more dramatically, this understanding of matter only applies to 5% of the stuff in the universe. About 27% of the universe is invisible “dark matter” and the other 68% is enigmatic “dark energy”, which is science code for “we haven’t a clue”. And the large questions don’t stop there. The nature of basic elements of our universe, such as space, time and mass continue to elude us. We don’t know either how big the universe is, or if we are alone in it.
Writing the book turned out to be quite different from writing a scientific article. First, Jorge and I discussed which questions to cover, picking those that were interesting at face value and did not need a long explanation or scientific training. That ruled out some fascinating puzzles, such as neutrino oscillation. In some cases, such as dark matter, the material was second nature to me, but in others, such as early-universe cosmology, I talked to colleagues who have deeper expertise and did background research.
For each topic, I wrote a first draft, detailing the importance of the question and then exploring the current ideas. Jorge and I then passed it back and forth until we felt it was as clear as possible – often totally reorganizing the material to reflect his skill in making cutting-edge science accessible. The chapter on gravity, for example, split into two: one on the nature of space itself and a second on the mystery of gravity’s weakness. Once the text was finalized, Jorge would draw cartoons to illustrate the points or make jokes to keep the tone light.
We titled our book We Have No Idea to convey our excitement for the future revelations that physics holds, not to criticize modern physics for failing to unravel them. In speaking to the public about our book, I have been amazed at the passionate curiosity that non-scientists display for these frontier questions, which seem to touch a nerve of human curiosity. Be it string theory, aliens or the early universe, everyone from young children to senior citizens has penetrating questions they want answered.
And though our collaboration grew out of independent efforts at procrastination and distraction, it might just be the best thing we have ever done.
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