[{"content":"Open Source advocates often use the image of a physical diary with a lock to raise awareness about the nature of lock-in. Imagine you have a diary and you routinely use it to leave a written trace of your ideas, musings, encounters with interesting people, food recipes, beautiful things you have seen… This is content created by you, and you can access it any time. You just need to open your diary and start reading. Some of these diaries come with a physical lock. The idea is that you may not want to share some of this information widely, even if by accident. So you lock your diary and take the key with you. In that way, even if somebody comes across your diary, they do not have access to your sensitive information. Now imagine that the owner of that key were a company, and that you needed to pay them a monthly fee so they lent you the key every time you wanted to access the very content you had created. This may sound ludicrous, but it is exactly what we agree to when we use proprietary software instead of a physical diary to store our work. We have normalised a situation in our digital lives which we would not accept at all in our “analogue” endeavours. Cloud lock-in is a particularly extreme version of this power shift, where your diary is not even sitting physically with you anymore. For example, if your organisation is using MS Exchange Online for email, all your messages are on a server “somewhere” and good luck if you ever try to migrate away from it: MS does not provide an easy way to mass-export your content to some standard format.\nA typical user Most of the people I know use proprietary software without much concern for lock-in. Let us take the example of MS Office. It is a well-designed and maintained software suite. Its users are happy with it for the most part. Some of them have automated large parts of their work using e.g. macros and other time-saving features in Excel. Large spreadsheets with lots of automation are the main way of organising and tracking work in many places. The IT teams in companies typically negotiate licence and support fees with Microsoft every few years, and often provide a bit of local support as well.\nOnce I was talking with one of these happy users, a person I respect a lot, and after having gone through lock-in risks and the pros and cons of MS Office, he looked at me with a friendly-condescending smile and asked: “do we really have a problem?” It made me think. His job has nothing to do with IT. He needs tools that will help him, or at least not get in the way, and he is happy to pay for them. Because MS Office is a bit of a de facto standard as far as office suites go, he does not notice lock-in at all in his daily work. In his company, they have had the occasional struggle negotiating licence prices with Microsoft but in the end they agreed on what he considers a reasonable price. The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) alternatives to MS Office have been lagging in terms of features and maturity for years. He is convinced that, were he to migrate, his productivity would take a serious hit. He understands the current discussions on technological sovereignty, but he is not prepared to sacrifice his very concrete short-term objectives for some vague long-term vision he has difficulty relating to.\nAs I ponder this case, which I think is very representative of a typical user of proprietary software, I cannot help but feel a bit torn. We “raisers of awareness” are bringing bad news to otherwise fully happy people. We should avoid being too grumpy about the state of the world, and instead focus on all the great things we can do together to make it better. But I digress.\nThe “science” of risk assessment When we try to evaluate and control risk at work in the context of a project, we do a relatively simple exercise. On one hand, we try to quantify the probability of something bad happening. On the other hand, we try to assign a number which expresses the impact that bad thing happening would have on the project. The bigger the negative impact, the bigger the number. We then multiply these two numbers: probability and impact. If the result is above a certain threshold, we need to do something about that particular risk factor, something that will drive down the probability, the impact or both.\nCan we apply this same methodology to assess our exposure regarding lock-in? Not really. The impact could be quantified and in many cases would be in the “catastrophic” category. Imagine instantly losing access to all those carefully crafted spreadsheets and macros. Or Microsoft allowing third parties to look at your private documents in order to comply with US law, as happened in a recent case.\nThe probability, however, is much harder, probably impossible, to evaluate meaningfully. A sharp increase in licence costs could be the result of changes in management, priorities and other factors which have very little, if any, correlation with past behaviour. Trying to predict future prices based on past prices is probably worse than admitting the impossibility of the exercise, because it can give you a false sense of security which can drive wrong decisions. One assumption you can make is that a vendor will not push the price beyond the threshold of pain for a client, but that is a very slippery concept. What is that threshold and do you really want to find out?\nThere are other things that could go wrong besides a sharp increase in price. For example, some software could be added to the list of items under export control, as happened recently with some AI models. Or if you are a judge in the International Criminal Court (ICC), the US Government could decide that you should stop having access to technology developed in the US, again something that recent events illustrate. All these sources of risk share a common feature: the probability of them happening is essentially impossible to quantify.\nIt seems to me that the most rational way to manage them is to start preparing an exit strategy, provided that preparation has a reasonable, for some definition of “reasonable”, cost. This is the crux of the matter. Most people understand the reasoning above, but think the way out is too costly, so they choose, more or less consciously, to accept this unquantifiable risk.\nSome numbers Making quantitative assessments and predictions is always risky, but let us make things more concrete by injecting some numbers. The reader is invited to “fork” this article, in the best tradition of Open Source, and modify the reasoning and the numbers to see where that takes us. I am not claiming these numbers are exact, just using some educated guesswork to help make the argumentation more concrete and hopefully more relatable. If you are working in a medium-big company, say with a few thousand employees, chances are your company is paying around 1 M€/year for MS Office licences and support. Let us also assume (and this is the wildest and least justifiable assumption I am making) that 90% of that money is not being used to make MS Office better for you. Let us say that a company providing development and support to you for a perfect FOSS equivalent could do that for 100 k€/year. If this number sounds way off, remember that you are not the only client for this same product. To simplify things with round numbers, and again for the sake of facilitating argumentation, let us assume that creating an average job in an average EU country, including salary and benefits, costs 100 k€/year too.\nAn opportunity Now imagine your company is a bit concerned about the lock-in risks described above, and decides to invest 100 k€/year for five years on a parallel path, getting support for an office FOSS tool (LibreOffice, Collabora, Euro-Office…) while also keeping its MS Office contract running. Why five years? Because in this hypothetical World of Wonders, where Open Source advocates are never grumpy, after five years the FOSS tool has caught up in features and quality, or at least it is deemed “good enough”.\nLet us take stock of the situation at that point in time: the company has paid an extra 10% for office software each year, which means an additional cost of 500 k€. If, as a result of that, it can fully migrate to the FOSS suite in a smooth way, then it will start saving 1 M€/year right away, which means it will recoup its investment in six months.\nSo this seems to make sense to the company in this story. But it makes even more sense if you consider the EU as a whole, especially if the FOSS provider is European. After five years, the FOSS alternative has become the de facto standard, so newcomers do not need the extra initial investment incurred by the “pioneers”. This scheme also creates new jobs in the EU, and not just any job, but the kind that guarantees long-term sovereignty for our digital infrastructure. The order of magnitude is one new job for each medium-sized company using the suite.\nMy estimate of five years to catch up is more realistic if many companies take the same strategic decision to invest in FOSS. Since this plan, if executed correctly, clearly solves a problem for the EU, and since companies could have an incentive to just wait and let others do the initial investment, shouldn’t the member states contribute to it? They could do so by investing in FOSS themselves or through other methods. Investment could be direct (becoming users of the services of companies supporting FOSS) or indirect (e.g. allowing and encouraging the civil servants in administrations to spend part of their time contributing to FOSS).\nIn the scenario outlined here, you get more sovereignty and save money at the same time. This looks too good to be true until you realise that both aspects are tied together: you save money because you are sovereign, and you were spending more money before because you were not sovereign. Sovereignty becomes the cause and savings are just one among several positive consequences of that sovereignty. I mention this because we have seen in the past unsuccessful efforts to migrate to FOSS and my contention is that having a misguided objective (short-term savings) instead of the larger goal of achieving sovereignty played an important role in those failed attempts.\nLet me now circle back to the initial question. Betteridge’s law of headlines states that “any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” This article is no exception. Seeing the momentum already gathering in Europe and assuming the relevant bodies in the EU support it, I do not think we have a problem. What we have is a great opportunity.\n","permalink":"https://orellut.net/posts/do-we-really-have-a-problem/","summary":"Proprietary software works well enough for most of its users, so why worry about lock-in? A look at a risk nobody can quantify, and at what it would really cost to prepare an exit.","title":"Do we really have a problem?"},{"content":"This article was originally published on Medium on July 28, 2022. This version has minor edits, including a switch to British English.\nWhen you design hardware, it is very likely that you want to share your design files with others. At the very least, you may want to share them with your future self, i.e. you probably want to be able to open your files and edit them in the future. This article explains the advantages of using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) if you want to make sure you always have access to your files. In order to make things concrete, I will discuss the case of Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design, but all arguments translate easily to other domains.\nCommercial not the opposite of FOSS Let me start by dispelling a common myth. ‘Commercial software’ is not the opposite of ‘FOSS’. The opposite of ‘FOSS’ is ‘proprietary software’. A proprietary program is one for which you do not have access to the source code, or at least not in ways that would qualify it as FOSS. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) maintain definitions for open source and free software respectively. FOSS is a convenient umbrella term I will use because my focus here is not the difference between free-as-in-freedom and open, but the difference between either of them and proprietary. I will use ‘open source’ equivalently as well. ‘Commercial’ just means there is money involved. You can buy support for FOSS, and then it’s commercial FOSS. In fact, many people, myself included, argue that it’s a winning combination: you avoid lock-in situations because it’s open-source, but you contribute to the sustainability of the project and you don’t expect people to work for free, which unfortunately is often the case with open-source projects. KiCad is the most popular FOSS tool to design PCBs, and you can either use it for free or buy commercial support for it.\nBasics of PCB design tools and flow So what is the problem with proprietary tools? Before I go into that, let me explain a typical workflow for PCB design in a simplified way. This will help me illustrate the issues with using proprietary tools later on. In order to design a PCB, you start by drawing your circuit using a so-called schematic capture tool. This looks like a drawing program in which you place your symbols (representing electronic components such as resistors, capacitors and integrated circuits) and interconnect them using lines called wires. In order to place a symbol in your schematics, you typically search for the symbol in a symbol library. Libraries are stored in files, and when you place a symbol in your schematics, the information for that symbol is typically copied from the library to your schematic file.\nOnce you are happy with your schematics, you can start the layout phase. In layout, you draw the shape of your PCB, place your components inside and route all the copper connections between them. The schematics of your circuit usually follow some conventions: operational amplifiers are little triangles, resistors look like rectangles or zig-zags depending on whether you use the International or American style, and so on. In layout, on the other hand, your components are represented by the copper footprints they will have on your PCB. This defines the final product to be manufactured, a physical representation of your circuit. Footprint libraries play a similar role for layout to that of symbol libraries in schematics. Layout tools allow you to move footprints around and interconnect them using copper tracks of different widths. They also allow you to use intermediate copper PCB layers for your tracks, which in many cases is necessary for the routability of the circuit or other reasons, such as signal integrity.\nLayout of a PCB using KiCad\nWhen you are done with layout, you can generate manufacturing files (e.g. Gerber) which will allow a PCB manufacturing company to build the circuit and send it to you. Other important files include the Bill of Materials (BOM) and assembly files such as those used by pick-and-place machines to populate your PCB with components.\nThe problem with proprietary tools There is nothing special about PCB design, but it provides a good illustration of the most important issue with proprietary tools: the dependency on an external entity, typically a software company, to be able to open and edit the content you created to begin with. We are so used to accepting this that we no longer see how unnatural it is. Imagine you kept a handwritten diary. Some of these diaries come with a lock for privacy reasons. Now imagine that every time you wanted to open your diary you had to ask a company for the key to the lock. The company could ask you for regular payments to continue giving you the key every time you asked for it, and if you stopped paying you would no longer have access to the years of content you might have already written in those pages. Even if you were willing to pay, the company could go belly-up, or their priorities could change, and you might lose access to your diary. Sounds ludicrous, right? Yet, this is what we accept every time we generate content using a proprietary tool. The current trend for design software to be ‘in the cloud’ and for licensing to be subscription-based gives tool providers even more control over who can access files and when.\nThe importance of open formats The issues with proprietary tools are less serious if you use file formats based on open standards. One good example for text files is ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. If I write a text file using a proprietary text editor, it’s not a very big deal in terms of my ability to access my content in the future. This is because there are many open-source tools which have ASCII support, and I will be able to use any of them in the future to open my file, read it and modify it if need be. Software developers, who typically develop their software using a text editor, are blessed in that regard. They don’t even have to think about whether they will be able to edit their files in the future.\nHardware developers, on the other hand, evolve in an ecosystem dominated by proprietary tools which use non-open file formats to store their content. By non-open I mean that the file structure is not publicly documented. Sometimes these files even use obfuscation techniques meant to make them very hard to reverse-engineer, not to mention legal restrictions which may be enforced by the End User Licence Agreement (EULA) of the proprietary tool.\nYou may be used to exchanging MS Office files at work or elsewhere, and may be thinking that using proprietary file formats is not such a big deal after all. The difference between the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and office suite markets is that while the latter is clearly dominated by one vendor, the former is split among a number of options with comparable market shares. So there is a much greater chance of sharing problems triggered by file incompatibility. Also, the docx, xlsx and pptx file formats are at least partially documented in a way that has allowed some open-source tools to implement imperfect but sometimes good-enough read/write support. So while the Office situation is far from perfect, it is much better than the one in EDA.\nWhy open formats are sometimes not the (full) solution There is one prominent proprietary EDA vendor which uses a fully documented format for their files. This is clearly a step in the right direction. It allows you to implement software tools which could, if necessary, make it possible for you to still access your files in the future. Even if not many people are capable of doing this kind of software development, the mere fact that it’s possible is already reassuring to some extent.\nSo does that mean that vendor lock-in is absent when file formats are fully documented? Not completely. The information a designer wants to store for schematics is more than just the ‘netlist’, i.e. the list of symbols and their interconnections. Some of the information we may want to keep is linked to features in the software itself which may be proprietary and not documented (at least not to the extent that you can create an alternative), such as options for Electrical Rule Checks (ERC). The same is true for Design Rule Checks (DRC) in the layout tool. Other examples include shapes that may be generated at runtime, such as teardrops, meanders and solder masks, whose geometry may depend not only on what’s in the file but also on the algorithms implemented in the software. Any feature an EDA tool supports may find its way into a given syntax used in the file format to store its configuration. In a FOSS tool, the software implementation of those features is open for everybody to see, and therefore the absence of vendor lock-in is guaranteed.\nBut didn’t we say that the ASCII standard guarantees full interoperability of tools? Yes, text editing is one domain where the format tells the whole story. The Portable Document Format (PDF), standardised as ISO 32000, is a similarly successful case, with open-source and proprietary PDF readers coexisting in full harmony. In other domains, you really need the software implementation as well. You may have the full information about the docx format, but without access to the exact MS Word typesetting algorithm, you will not be able to guarantee that your tool displays the document in exactly the same way as Word. PCB design tools belong in this family. An open format is not enough. One could debate whether it would be possible to design a file format which captures all possible features in a PCB design leaving no room for interpretation, but the examples above illustrate that it would be a complex endeavour, and the fact that it has not happened yet also shows a lack of strategic priority for this in industry.\nBut my EDA vendor gives me this super-good deal! Some people invoke low prices of a given proprietary EDA tool as a reason not to worry too much. Versions of the tools with limited capabilities are sometimes even available for free! EDA vendors can give extreme discounts to users as part of their commercial strategy. For example, academic institutions often get very good deals because vendors know that these tools have a steep learning curve and once a user has developed the muscle memory to be super-efficient, they are very likely to ask for the same tool in their next job, which may be in a company paying the full standard licence fee.\nDoes that mean that you are safe provided you work in an academic institution? Ask people working there, and you will find out that changes in the strategy of EDA providers (for example as a result of new management) can easily result in abrupt licence fee increases. The feeling of helplessness in those cases is hard to describe, especially if you already have a huge number of designs done with that tool.\nZero or very low licence fees create the illusion that you will not lose much if you have to change tools as a result of a price increase, because you never paid them much to begin with. This may be true unless you and your colleagues have invested a lot of effort in learning the tool and creating content you may not be able to access again. For example, a single PCB design might have taken hundreds of hours and multiple iterations to be completed; you might still have the Gerber files for production, but if you need to make a small modification, there is a significant cost to starting the whole layout project again.\nIf, on the other hand, you think that you may be willing to accept a steep increase in fees to be able to keep access to your files, I have bad news for you: your EDA vendor may be doing that very calculation for you as you read this. One cannot blame a commercial company for wanting to make more money. That’s what companies do. Whether your interests and theirs are aligned enough for you to purchase a proprietary licence to their software is for you to judge. At this point it is worth noting that many users absolutely want to pay in exchange for the assurance that they will get technical support if they need it. This is a reasonable expectation when one uses a tool for important design work. As I mentioned earlier, it is entirely possible to buy that kind of support for an open-source tool. It is also an excellent way to help the project, funding software development work while maintaining the benefits of FOSS. Proprietary licences typically conflate two aspects which are largely independent: the ability to open and edit your files on the one hand, and the support if anything goes wrong on the other. You can certainly get the latter without compromising on the former.\nCall to action Every designer wants to be able to share designs with their future self. If, in addition, you are designing Open Source Hardware (OSHW), your motivation to use FOSS should be even stronger. Open-source tools are sometimes lacking in features and quality. This may be partially explained by the fact that developers are often volunteers who join a project to ‘scratch their own itch’. As a result, conceptual integrity and user experience may get less priority than they should. You can help develop a good open-source tool in your domain (mechanics, electronics or other) in many ways. Contributing code, helping fund development or steering these projects to make them more organised and scalable are just some of the ways people are already doing this. In software development, many of the best tools are open-source. Awareness of the importance of FOSS in guaranteeing easy sharing and absence of lock-in is a first step. This article, necessarily limited in scope and depth, is meant to raise this awareness. Let’s make FOSS the standard way of sharing OSHW designs!\n","permalink":"https://orellut.net/posts/foss-for-hardware-design/","summary":"Using Free and Open Source Software is the best way to make sure you can always open and edit your own hardware design files. Printed Circuit Board design serves as an example.","title":"Why you should use Free and Open Source Software to design your hardware"},{"content":"This article was originally published on Medium on June 1, 2020. This version has minor edits.\nPreliminary note: this article is co-authored with Carlos Serrano. Javier is with CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland. Carlos is with LBNL, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA, USA. Both CERN and LBNL have public statements on their mission, which includes the maximisation of positive impact of their developments on society. The means employed for reaching those goals differ, of course, as a function of the circumstances of each development and, to a lesser extent, are also subject to opinion. This article presents the personal opinions of the authors, hoping to foster productive discussion, and is in no way intended to represent an official communication from either LBNL or CERN. A pdf version is available in the Open Hardware Repository, with a few extra footnotes in places where more detail might be welcome by some but could otherwise interfere with the reading flow in Medium.\nEvery year, universities, laboratories and government agencies spend public money designing hardware: instruments, electronics, machines. Much of that work stays in a drawer, gets reinvented by another publicly funded group, whether down the corridor or in a different institution altogether, or is tied up in licensing deals that limit who can use it. It does not have to be this way. Shared as Open Source Hardware, these designs could form a common pool of technology that anyone is free to use, on which companies build products and generate revenue, and to which part of that value flows back. In this opinion piece, we argue that, with the right coordination and support, this could give innovation and welfare an enormous boost, and we propose concrete steps to get there.\nIntroduction Software is omnipresent in today’s modern societies. Wherever we look during a normal day, software is at work, helping us brew coffee in the morning, take our kids to school, work, meet friends and choose a good movie to watch in the evening. Software is everywhere, from schools to airports, from hospitals to stadiums. Everywhere.\nThe pervasiveness of software is a manifestation of the many people developing it. Software development was democratised in the 1980s and 1990s. In the space of a few years, it became much easier to write useful code. Computers also became cheaper, and these two causes allowed many people to become software developers, for work, fun or both.\nThere is a special quality to things which are both useful and easy to do. One example is crossing the border between France and Switzerland; it is easy to do, and it is very useful for many people who do it every day to go to work, visit or for any other purpose. Because it is both easy and useful, society as a whole benefits greatly if it can be done, i.e., if appropriate measures such as law and infrastructure are put in place so people can easily cross the border. An example of not-easy-and-useful is travel to Jupiter; although it would stand as arbitrary and somewhat awkward, relatively few people would complain if it were forbidden.\nSharing software source code was not widely useful in the 1950s. Few people had computers, and software was typically very specific to a given computer type, so the chances were slim for the recipient to be able to run the software (s)he would have received. It was also not easy, typically involving costly copies and physical transport to the destination. With the democratisation of software development and the growth of the Web in the 1990s, sharing software became increasingly easy and useful, so the case for putting appropriate measures in place to facilitate it became all the more compelling. The start of the GNU project, whose aim was to develop a free-as-in-freedom operating system, and the publication of the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) are commonly considered the foundations of the Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) paradigm. They established best practices for sharing source code and binaries effectively, and the adoption of these practices by projects such as the Linux kernel resulted in a revolution. Today, GNU/Linux and other FOSS projects power most of the infrastructure we use every day as we interact with friends, colleagues, vendors and other actors on the Internet.\nIt is our contention in this article that hardware development is currently undergoing a similar democratisation process. Design tools exist, themselves FOSS, which allow non-experts to design hardware of a complexity which would have needed a small company a few decades ago. Manufacturing of products based on those designs has also become substantially easier and cheaper. While the production of a physical good will always be more costly than producing a binary file from a set of sources, the exchange of hardware design files themselves is just as easy as it is for software source files. Even if the easy-and-useful condition is fulfilled to a lesser extent than in software, the case for investing in appropriate ways to share hardware designs is still compelling.\nWe also want to make a special point about public institutions. A private company represents the interests of a subset of society, namely those of its owners or stockholders. As such, it should not be surprising that its rational economic behaviour differs in some cases from that of a public institution, which represents the interests of a much bigger group of people: the complete population of a city, region, country or set of countries. In particular, in some circumstances, a private corporation might decide it is in the interest of its stockholders to not publish the source code of a program, or the design files for a hardware development, so as to exclude their potential competitors from this knowledge. In a similar situation, a public institution could judge that it is in the interest of society as a whole to publish these developments, so that free access to this knowledge can be used by companies and individuals alike to build upon as they see fit.\nSo, if the case is so compelling, why aren’t most public institutions publishing the majority of their software and hardware developments as open source? There are, in our opinion, a number of factors, including inertia and negative external incentives. In the following sections, we detail them and we propose a road map to overcome these obstacles and unleash the huge potential contributions to society. If you are a practitioner of another discipline, e.g., software development or mechanical engineering, feel free to draw your own conclusions as to how much of the following applies to your case.\nCurrent state of affairs Our experience is in the community of developers of controls and data acquisition hardware for large experimental physics facilities, so this article is to be interpreted as applying broadly in that context. Discussions with members of other communities of publicly funded hardware designers have convinced us that these issues are quite general.\nA quick clarification is in order here regarding the type of hardware we are talking about: we do mostly Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) design using Hardware Description Languages (HDL). In this realm, the easy-and-useful-to-share hypothesis applies fully. It applies less in the case of Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) design, but it is likely only a matter of time before the democratisation we describe above reaches this domain as well.\nProliferation of similar developments Controls and data acquisition are often generic tasks. For example, digitising an analogue waveform at a sampling rate of 100 million samples per second is something that many projects need. Equipment designed to cater for that requirement does not need to know if the analogue signal comes from a telescope or a particle detector. Yet there is a bewildering variety of designs out there doing effectively the same thing. The same happens for synchronisation systems, analogue waveform generators, high-speed communication links and many other basic building blocks of a control system. It is sometimes argued that independent development is necessary for scientific discoveries to be reproduced by at least two groups in a completely uncorrelated manner, discarding any possible systematic effects due to design errors in shared devices. We concur that some variety is good, and leaves room for innovation and progress. Beyond a certain degree of variety, the extra cost for society is difficult to justify.\nUnnecessary multiplication of efforts has other less visible costs beyond the obvious one, namely that society gets less and less for its money. The second Analogue-to-Digital Converter (ADC) board with almost identical specifications adds little value to the first one, and so the trend continues until the 100th one and beyond. Other costs include missed opportunities for sharing maintenance, economies of scale, and improvements coming from communication among design groups. The software world is plagued by the same problem. On the one hand, developing software is accessible to more people, and that results in a tendency for more proliferation of redundant solutions. On the other hand, sharing developments is more established than in the hardware world, which compensates to a certain degree for this unnecessary multiplication of efforts.\nWhy does this happen? These are the main reasons we have identified:\nLack of information. Some people just don’t know that a similar development is ongoing in another institution or (for big places) even in the same one. Risk management and/or lack of trust. Some groups may decide to go solo instead of embarking on a collaborative effort where they don’t have a direct hierarchical line which would enable them to tell each designer what to do, easily change plans, etc. Low priority on Knowledge and Technology Transfer (KTT). In many cases, financing is tight and so are deadlines. Designers produce something, but there is a perception that preparing it for transfer to the outside world would incur extra costs, both in money and time. This includes things like proper documentation, design reviews and licensing, but would also typically involve a more-or-less sizeable rescoping of a project, because making something really useful for others often needs to tackle the solution to a more general problem than that at hand. If the management chain does not give enough importance to this step, designers may naturally choose not to publish. KTT offices have as their main goal to maximise the impact of technological developments on society. Over the last 20 years, organisations around the world have agreed that this is a desirable objective, and established KTT groups to assist the process. In many cases though, the budgets to support these activities do not match the ambitions set out in the mandates of these offices. Pernicious incentives. Research groups are made to compete. Some of them naturally develop a tendency to not share their developments, either until very late, or at all. They do this out of fear of helping their competitors catch up with them and outperform them. This is a serious issue. Sometimes the very existence of a research group could be compromised by this sharing. Of course, the problem arises when one looks at the situation from the vantage point of a taxpayer financing all these parallel efforts. Another pernicious incentive does not directly apply to designers but rather to the KTT groups in their institutions. These groups are being increasingly asked to self-finance, or otherwise generate revenue for a number of purposes. Monetisation of proprietary developments is often perceived as more direct than its open source counterpart, so this can push these groups to prefer proprietary licensing arrangements whereby they can generate revenue out of royalties. Whether the list above is complete or even correct, the fact is that there is a tremendous amount of publicly funded development out there with little (if any) impact outside the walls of the respective institutions. Developments often solve the limited problem they were assigned, and nothing else, forgoing opportunities to contribute more to economic activity and global welfare.\nThe funding agencies conundrum One other reason why groups in public institutions do not share much publicly is the perception among certain managers that the results of their research should benefit exclusively the subset of people who have financed it. In the case of a city, it would be its citizens. For a regional institution it would be the individuals and companies from that region, and so on. For national and international laboratories, one often hears the objection in terms of the unsuitability of offering all our knowledge and technology for free to a specific large country in Asia. One possible line of reasoning is that this knowledge can then be used by these external actors to harm our economy, by letting ‘them’ cheaply manufacture what companies in the financing states could have offered for sale, using profit margins to properly pay their employees and reinvest in innovation. We explain later why we think this reasoning is incomplete and can lead to decisions which forgo important opportunities to benefit our societies.\nPatents The patent system was created to provide incentives for creators to disclose the details of their inventions. In exchange for a temporary monopoly on the economic exploitation of an invention, the patent holder is expected to publish its details. Clearly, the patent system was initially designed to encourage sharing.\nThe current trend to patent inventions in public institutions arose from a combination of two factors, which we have already mentioned: the expectation that KTT offices self-finance (totally or partially), and the wish to be able to favour a subset of companies (typically in the funding states/regions) by giving them exclusive or non-exclusive access to a technology. Regarding the former, its origin probably dates from the 1980s, when public opinion in the western world became increasingly convinced that the private sector was necessarily more efficient at assigning resources than its public counterpart. It therefore followed that the public sector should be made thinner, and adopt competitive practices wherever possible. Academic competition had already been a basic tenet of public research for ages, but it was felt that adding economic competition to the mix would make labs ever more productive.\nSeen from that perspective, patents should be a basic component in the toolbox of any KTT office. Their use makes it possible to control very finely the dissemination of a given technology, favouring only those actors we deem fit. It also allows the generation of revenue through royalties, which are then reinvested to create more innovation. From a conceptual point of view, patents make public institutions resemble their private counterparts. These newly acquired assets are as exclusive as a good can get, and are therefore ideal for a public institution wishing to enter the markets and play the game of supply and demand.\nThe analysis above is an attempt to explain why so many laboratories and universities engage in the filing of patent applications. We will explain later why we think this chain of reasoning is fallacious, but we would like to be clear about one thing: it is our conviction that the people who push for such practices in public institutions do it because they think that is the best possible use for public money, and they may be right, i.e., it is possible that privatising knowledge generated with public money is a winning strategy for society in many cases. We respectfully disagree, but we may be wrong.\nWhy sharing is (almost always) better Let’s get something out of the way first: sharing is the natural state for an individual and for an organisation. When you discover something, your first instinct is to share the news, and to explain to others what you found. The current widespread practice of non-sharing is a constraint, artificially imposed, sometimes for good reason. One should therefore not have to justify sharing, but rather non-sharing. What’s more, many of our public institutions have sharing enshrined in their mandates. In the case of scientific labs, reproducibility of discoveries, a basic tenet of science, is directly harmed by opaqueness and proprietary developments. Because people like to share in general, you will have an easier time hiring brilliant developers if you do not constrain their ability to exchange information with others, inside and outside your organisation. Besides, these developers have a better chance of being familiar with your technologies if they are open source, and they will continuously learn on the job as they interact with other brilliant people around the world. From that perspective, investing in open source is investing in the people you work with. This is not a theory. It is something we have seen repeatedly in our practice.\nA quick disclaimer before we get into a systematic discussion: in the interest of conciseness, and considering that this document is already quite long, we do not fully develop some of the arguments that follow. We hope the explanations we give are enough and we remain available for further discussion if needed. We may complement this document in the future with a more academic one, heavier to read but with an effort to support all our claims with references from the extensive literature on the subject.\nOK, so let’s look at situations in which an institution might decide that not sharing is the best option. For example, the funding agencies conundrum we mentioned earlier. Let’s suppose we really want to favour local industry and therefore decide to patent a given technology, or otherwise make it available only to a set of selected actors in the hope that it will become very popular and these companies will be able to generate great revenue and contribute to employment and welfare in the process. This is all great, except experience shows that it very rarely works. Most of the developments published as open source have openness as one of their key (often the main) selling points. Openness makes a product more appealing to the end user because of the almost-zero risk of vendor lock-in in that case. This in turn makes the market bigger, sometimes beyond the critical mass at which a product can become profitable. Conversely, many private deals fail because the market for those products never gets off the ground. They are “one more signal acquisition system” or “one more signal analysis software suite”. Nothing really sets them apart from many other competing developments. Openness is that key differentiator which can make publicly funded developments attractive for the end users.\nWe all know of examples that succeeded using the proprietary paradigm, some spectacularly so. For example the MP3 coding format for digital audio, largely developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, which brought it millions of euros in royalties. It is clear that looking at this from the perspective of the institute, and imagining for a second that the institute were private and had it as its main mission to generate revenue, this is a great success. One could adopt a different perspective and examine what the impact on society was and whether that impact would have been lower or higher in case Fraunhofer researchers had decided to open-source the development. Of course, the Fraunhofer partial self-financing model skews the choice towards the proprietary end, but that model could be challenged as well to begin with. Even this poster-child of proprietary dissemination is subject to controversial opinions. We should stop now and remind the reader that the case we just mentioned is extremely rare, even in institutions like Fraunhofer, which have the explicit goal of generating this kind of technology. Furthermore, note that Fraunhofer’s non-discriminatory licensing policy was key to the success of MP3, so this is not a case which would illustrate a means to favour this or that country or set of countries. Let us emphasise again that MP3 was a great success, both technically and in terms of impact. Its open-source alternatives at the time were much less successful on both counts. Being open does not automatically make a project great.\nThe question is: if a project is great, what is the best way to optimise its impact on society? We are taking the case of MP3 as one of the most successful public-institution-originated proprietary developments we can think of, and we still think that the impact would have been even higher had it been open-sourced. At the very least, it would have preempted many alternative open-source developments, such as the Ogg format, which also took a considerable amount of public and private resources and were ultimately less successful.\nOne example of the process of open-sourcing a technology which was great to begin with is BSD. The clean design and technical superiority of Unix were already acknowledged in technical circles from early on. In its BSD open-source incarnation, it arguably played a key role in the development of the Internet as we know it, and became the basis for Mac OS X and its successors. And then GNU/Linux took the impact to another level, largely thanks, some people argue, to the adoption of the GPL.\nLuckily, the vast majority of developments in public institutions which ultimately had a big impact on society were free to use by everyone. From the discovery of the structure of DNA to the invention of the Web, we even have a hard time imagining what would have happened if they had been licensed under a proprietary paradigm. Jonas Salk’s answer to a journalist, when questioned about who owned the patent for the polio vaccine, vividly illustrates this state of mind: “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”.\nLet’s now look at a recent example which we could more easily contrast with the MP3 case: the development of the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA), started in 2010 at the University of California in Berkeley. RISC-V allows designers to come up with new processors, all sharing the same ISA, without constraints. RISC-V was designed from the ground up with the explicit goal of having an ISA completely unencumbered by patents. The main ingredient of its success is openness. This is universally agreed. Had the original developers decided to release it under a proprietary licence, this would have been “one more ISA”. Instead, RISC-V has gone on to become a revolution in computing and embedded systems, even playing a big role in the digital sovereignty debates in Europe and elsewhere. But wait a second, so does that mean that this development paid with American taxpayer money is actually helping Europe? Yes. Is that bad? Will Europe now use the technology to harm US economic interests? Absolutely not. The positive impact on the US economy arising from the RISC-V revolution is already evident. That benefit would not be there if RISC-V had become a proprietary niche. Chances are that Europe would have come up with its own patent-free ISA if RISC-V had not appeared. So yes, RISC-V is helping Europe, and yes, it is great for the US economy. Go figure!\nIn practice, we see that when public institutions attempt to exclude our friends in the Far East from knowledge, they also end up excluding lots of the taxpayers who paid for their work, including many small and medium enterprises, in a tragic outcome arising from using inappropriate tools to solve a problem which may not even exist. Here it is probably worth mentioning that big players have the means to reverse-engineer most developments, or even restart them from scratch once they are given an idea. Keeping design information secret is typically not an effective strategy against this type of actor. On the other hand, we have found that public institutions can still favour local companies after having open-sourced a design. Not everything is in the source: design intention, ideas that didn’t work, plans for the future are all examples of bits of information which can easily give a head start to one or a set of chosen partners. Again, we have seen this at work, and the fact that the biggest RISC-V company is in the Berkeley area is no accident.\nOpen-sourcing provides, as a side effect, a benefit to third parties. Keeping things secret from third parties means, as a side effect, excluding many of our taxpayers from this knowledge. Between these two side effects, the former is clearly to be preferred.\nTo summarise, it is our contention that many (most?) hardware developments are of a type where the goal of generating revenue for the public institution through proprietary deals will compete with the goal of having a positive impact on society. This is all the more unfortunate considering that the number of patents or the amount of royalties received often feature prominently in official metrics used as indicators of impact, which is what most public institutions are ultimately mandated to prioritise.\nOK, so we have already dealt with the material related to the use of proprietary licensing to avoid helping people who did not pay for our developments. Let’s now focus on the other items in the list of reasons not to share. This is basically a list of disincentives created by the fact that, somewhere along the way, the local interests of managers and developers have become misaligned with those of the taxpayers who pay for their work. Seen from the perspective of the latter, all this unnecessary duplication of work is a waste. It is also a pity that the work of so many bright people has so little impact beyond solving their immediate problems at hand. Regarding the objection that open-sourcing requires extra effort, it is often the case that those things required for effective open-sourcing are good engineering practice in themselves. So the argument can be turned around, arguing that open source forces us to add quality to our developments, through careful design, documentation, testing plans, etc. This is especially important in institutions where developments have support lifetimes which often exceed the typical duration of an employment contract, leading to problems in keeping the knowledge needed to guarantee trouble-free operation and evolution of the designs. If the goal of this section is to convince the reader that it is better to open-source, there should be little else to add, provided we agree that “better” is taken to mean whatever maximises positive impact on society. We will see in the next section what can be done about this.\nAnd finally, a few words on patents. Some open source advocates take a maximalist position, arguing that the very notion of owning an idea is preposterous. Let’s for a moment accept that the patent system grew out of a societal need and plays a positive role in some cases, even if it is evident that parts of it are severely broken and probably do more harm than good. The main argument one hears from people defending the current system is that it would be “impossible to change”, which reveals how much intrinsic value they assign to the basic principle of patents. If this is the case, i.e., if this is a bad system which is a necessary evil, then surely those who can should avoid using it, right? This is the case of public institutions. There is in principle no need for them to use patents, and the only reason they would is if their funding agencies left that as the only option, i.e., if governments decided that public institutions should increasingly resemble their private counterparts. In practice what we see is that private companies are great at what they do, and public labs are typically bad at trying to behave as a private company, not to mention the potential issues with competition law one could bring up. So you have lots of efforts at privatising knowledge, including patenting, which ultimately result in lots of wasted time and money. More resources assigned to lawyering and less to engineering and science. Some KTT offices have a “patents as a last resort” policy: they will file them if a development cannot be completed without external private investment and the investors require some kind of exclusive right. This is justified insofar as the alternative is that the development never sees the light of day, but should be exceptional and usually just means that the public institution in question should be better funded.\nSo hopefully we all agree by now that having public institutions release more of their work as open source is good. Does that mean that they will not create economic activity, that commercial companies will not be able to capitalise on these developments and generate revenue, contributing to global welfare? No, of course not. Please read on, we’re almost there!\nThe way forward: a call to action It is quite clear that there is room for improvement in how public institutions develop and disseminate hardware designs. What can we do to make things better? One specificity of hardware is that commercial companies are not optional, i.e., you need at the very least somebody who will manufacture the hardware and sell it to you and others. This is fortunate, because companies are natural actors when it comes to generating economic activity around a development. On the other hand, companies cannot monetise open source. This statement may sound a bit controversial, but it isn’t: it is clear that one cannot sell what everybody can get for free. You cannot sell air, and you cannot sell open-source code. Even companies whose main object is FOSS, such as Red Hat, make money off something different from the source, namely the guarantee that “things will work”. This, in turn, is supported by the experience and skills stored in the brains of their developers, which are as proprietary as it gets. There are many other business models in FOSS; all of them consist of selling something which is not the source. They all rely on the availability of a solid FOSS foundation which adds value to whatever service you want to implement on top. The incentive to contribute to this commons is strong, especially if rebuilding it from zero is deemed risky and costly. Public institutions, on the other hand, can have this open-source foundation as their ultimate object, because they do not need to monetise developments as commercial companies do, at least in principle.\nMany things can be done to improve on the current state of affairs. In the following sections, we describe some of them, going from what individuals can do without any external help, to more ambitious actions only reachable at the government level. In the middle, inspired by the case of FOSS, we identify what we call the foundation/consortium level, which would only need moderate effort and a bit of collaboration to put in place and can bring about great benefits.\nHelping at the individual level OK, so you are an individual developer, or a small team in a public institution, and you are convinced by the arguments in this document. You want to open-source your designs. Great! Well, just go and ask your supervisor, talk to your KTT office, trigger debate if needed, put the subject on the table. You may be surprised to see that their views are more aligned with yours than you thought. If they aren’t, you may want to organise a discussion on the subject, and bring in colleagues from other institutions, including KTT officers, so they can help illustrate the positive impact on society with real examples.\nAnother way to bring about change is to publicise your open-sourcing efforts at conferences and other gatherings. We all have our reference meetings, where we share our latest findings and plans with people doing similar things in other places. These are ideal occasions to promote collaboration through open source. Projects which publish all their details, with appropriate licensing for those who want to see, modify and republish under an open-source paradigm, have a competitive advantage, in an almost Darwinian sense, over projects which are more proprietary in nature. Sometimes it takes a relatively modest initial effort to get the ball rolling, and open-source projects can develop into expansive endeavours with huge positive impacts. Conferences and other meetings, along with online communities, are also ideal places to launch new collaborative efforts, for example on basic infrastructure blocks which benefit many groups.\nFinally, there is one more way in which you can bring about more openness, which is to favour open source when you purchase hardware (and software). We discuss this at a higher level later, but there are many institutions which will happily delegate this decision to the individuals purchasing equipment.\nActivity at the foundation/consortium level It is in the ethos of open source, and we can see it at work in many examples, to capitalise on past developments, to improve designs and add value to them incrementally. Many people have worked on many technologies in the past, and published them as open source. It is therefore often the case that projects do not start from scratch. Similarly, when one looks for a solution which will allow us to marry the interests of society with those of private companies, and to find ways of generating positive incentives for both public and private actors, one can build on top of many existing efforts. In particular, the FOSS world has seen the emergence of foundations and other bodies which act as hubs to house projects, and provide a solid legal basis and guidelines for governance. They also provide a basic economic model, which each project is free to complement in order to come up with a sustainable environment. Two salient examples of such institutions are the Linux Foundation and the Apache Software Foundation. There are other, more grassroots-like actors, such as the Software Freedom Conservancy and Software in the Public Interest.\nWe need a similar kind of institution for hardware. We can create it from scratch or ask one of the existing bodies in the Open-Source Hardware (OSHW) world. Good candidates could be the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) and the community organising the Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH). This is a non-exhaustive list of services this institution could offer to our community:\nProvide a template for the governance of projects, as well as their legal foundations (including licensing of designs) and basic business model. Provide a meeting ground for public institutions, private companies and individual developers, with compelling incentives for each of them to contribute to projects in a sustainable way. Fund research on unsolved problems, such as the tracking of impact on society without compromising openness. Provide information to decision-makers in funding agencies and public institutions so they can see the benefits of contributing to the financing of OSHW projects and they can in turn come up with appropriate incentives for the employees in public institutions, fighting the disincentives we discussed earlier. Provide education, including best practices for sharing designs, both on the technical and legal fronts. Foster developments which will allow easier and more efficient sharing, such as common formats for design files. Give visibility to good open-source projects to reduce the chance of people inadvertently re-inventing the wheel. Provide a platform for gathering societal needs and matching them with existing OSHW technological developments, facilitating the organisation of collaborations to customise solutions or launch new projects as required. There is also a more controversial subject that this institution could help with, namely that of the generation of revenue by public institutions to fund their KTT offices and reinvest in more innovation. One could discuss whether asking KTT groups to self-finance, totally or partially, is justified or productive. But if it is deemed appropriate, then research should be conducted to find the best ways of generating revenue without giving up on any of the basic tenets of open source. Consortia typically provide good examples of how to do this. Membership fees can be stored in a common account and distributed following a set of rules, and then the main problem to solve is how to make membership attractive. There are many things one could offer to members without touching openness, such as the ability to use a given trademark, benefiting from the marketing efforts of the consortium in general, early access to design documents, or the possibility of steering the direction of development to a greater or lesser degree. Access to developers for training or consultancy could be another incentive for membership.\nSo let’s start the discussion in OSHWA, GOSH and any other community out there which could be a good candidate to launch this effort.\nThe government level Public institutions also have another important role. They often act not as developers/creators but as users/customers looking to purchase a solution. We have discussed extensively the OSHW supply side, but there is a demand side which could easily be stimulated by giving preference to OSHW in purchasing departments of public bodies. The benefits of open source when it comes to purchasing have been extensively documented in the literature and are well known: lack of vendor lock-in, far fewer problems with obsolescence (programmed or otherwise), fewer concerns about security (e.g., back doors) and the ability to easily collaborate with companies in design tasks, to name a few. This information, which is common knowledge in designer circles, needs to make it to the management and purchasing spheres in organisations. Developers can help, and so can the foundations and consortia we described above. A complementary push from the funding agencies would also be very useful. It is becoming abundantly clear in recent years to governments in the EU and the US that open source should play a preferential role in public procurement. Public institutions can also be beta-testers or initial users/customers for projects which need a certain critical mass to get off the ground and self-sustain. This role as a “tractor” institution is not new. We just mention it here for completeness.\nFrom the supply side of things, funding agencies could request that publicly funded projects release their designs as OSHW. In some cases, this could be tricky, either because secrecy is a design requirement (e.g., in military applications) or because a large part of the investment comes from private funding with an associated requirement for exclusive rights. But OSHW-by-default, with the requirement to justify any departure from that base policy, looks like a very realistic measure to put in place.\nThe combination of both supply and demand policies described above would have a huge positive impact on society, first and foremost as direct economic activity, but also as a strong message that public institutions (e.g., labs and universities) would then interpret as an incentive to carry these policies over to their own realm.\nConclusion This brings us to the end of this document, whose main purpose is to put some ideas on the table and trigger debate. It is our conviction that hardware development in public institutions could be done more efficiently and have more impact on society. We try to go beyond a mere assessment of the situation and suggest a way forward, in the hope that at least some of you will find it interesting enough to help us improve our proposal and trigger concrete actions for real change.\nAcknowledgements Thanks to all reviewers of the initial drafts, who supplied interesting complementary points of view and suggestions, in particular David Cobas, Larry Doolittle, Andrew Katz, Dimitris Lampridis, Luis Felipe Murillo and Daniel Tavares. They helped us clarify and improve the text. Any remaining mistakes, conceptual or otherwise, are exclusively our own.\n","permalink":"https://orellut.net/posts/oshw-in-public-institutions/","summary":"Public institutions could have far more impact on society by sharing their hardware designs as Open Source Hardware. Why this rarely happens today, and what individuals, foundations and governments can do about it.","title":"Why (and how) public institutions should release more of their hardware designs as Open-Source Hardware"},{"content":"Rescato aquí un artículo que escribí en 2004, inicialmente para una revista especializada en literatura, pero que finalmente no se publicó. Felizmente, el Higgs se descubrió en el LHC en 2012.\nHablar de Ciencia hoy en día es una ocupación bastante respetable, pero uno corre el riesgo de aburrir soberanamente al personal. Todo el mundo tiene mal recuerdo del instituto. La ciencia no se enseña bien en casi ningún sitio, pero hay que ser realistas: pedir a un profesor quemado que contagie un entusiasmo inexistente es un plan con muy pocos visos de éxito. Incluso un coloso como el físico Leon Lederman, judío neoyorquino a medio camino entre Einstein y Woody Allen, muestra respeto ante tamaña tarea: “Me siento como el séptimo marido de Zsa Zsa Gabor. Sé lo que hay que hacer, pero ¿cómo hacerlo interesante?”. Lederman, que recibió el premio Nobel de Física en 1988, es el prototipo de showman que se necesita en un aula para acompañar a los amedrentados alumnos en sus primeros pasitos por el fascinante mundo de la ciencia. Después de todo, cualquier joven tiene una curiosidad latente por comprender el mundo que le rodea. ¿Por qué hace más calor en verano que en invierno? ¿Cómo funciona la tele? ¿Por qué me quedo calvo a los 25 como mi padre y mi abuelo? (suspiro ribonucleico).\nDe entre todos los estudiantes, habrá algunos con algo más que esa genuina curiosidad. Jóvenes con talento y pasión por la ciencia. En España, muchos de ellos elegirán el sucedáneo de la ingeniería para poder vivir. Los más brillantes se harán presentadores de tele-realidad o polemistas. La miopía de los sucesivos gobiernos sobre este tema demuestra que ninguno de estos brillantes estudiantes acaba de ministro de Educación. España, único miembro de la OCDE que gasta más en lotería que en I+D, sigue siendo en muchos aspectos el país de la castañuela y la pandereta. Sin embargo, los precedentes que demuestran lo acertado de fomentar la investigación básica abundan. Tomemos el ejemplo de la Hungría de principios del siglo XX. Allí vivía el barón Loránd Eötvös, un noble que decidió emplear su tiempo en verificar la hipótesis newtoniana de la igualdad entre masa inercial y masa gravitacional. La masa inercial de un objeto, llamémosla m, es la masa en virtud de la cual el objeto es difícil de mover. Si ejercemos una fuerza F sobre él, la aceleración adquirida por el objeto será inversamente proporcional a su masa inercial. Por otra parte, la masa gravitacional es la que interviene en esa ley que dice que la atracción gravitacional entre dos cuerpos es proporcional a sus masas (gravitacionales) e inversamente proporcional al cuadrado de la distancia que los separa. Llamemos a esta masa M. Cuando un padre tiene que levantar a su rollizo niño dormido del sofá y llevarlo a la cama, está secretamente deseando que su masa gravitacional fuera menor (no olvidemos que el peso de una persona no es otra cosa que la atracción de la masa terráquea sobre su masa gravitacional). Sin embargo, si el niño despierta y, ya de pie, se resiste a entrar en la habitación, el padre —atónito frente a esta rebelión de la masa— empezará a pensar que ojalá su hijo tuviera menos masa inercial, mientras le empuja hacia adentro. Pues bien, no hay ninguna razón a priori para suponer que M y m tengan que tener el mismo valor numérico. Es evidente —por sus definiciones— que no son la misma cosa, pero unas consideraciones bastante toscas habían inducido a Newton a postular su igualdad numérica. Nuestro barón realizó en su laboratorio una serie de experimentos inteligentísimos que le permitieron concluir que el cociente entre M y m no es mayor que 1,000000005 ni menor que 0,999999995. O sea que hay muchas probabilidades de que en efecto sea 1. Esta incertidumbre se debe a la precisión de los aparatos de medida, siempre imperfectos, y no tiene nada que ver con la imposibilidad teórica que predice la mecánica cuántica para medir algo con absoluta exactitud, como veremos más adelante. Pero a lo que íbamos: Eötvös también se preocupó por la enseñanza científica, y organizó clases para profesores de instituto que tuvieron mucho éxito y popularizaron su disciplina entre los jóvenes. El resultado fue una explosión de genio como nunca se había visto. Gigantes como los físicos Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard y matemáticos como el prodigio John von Neumann, padre entre muchas cosas de la arquitectura de ordenadores, salieron todos del Budapest de la época de Eötvös. Las ventajas económicas derivadas de todos sus descubrimientos beneficiaron en principio al país que los acogió durante la locura nazi, Estados Unidos, que puede tener muchos defectos pero conoce perfectamente el valor de la ciencia. Por supuesto, Teller y compañía no tuvieron nunca el tema económico muy presente. Eran, como todos los grandes científicos, estetas de la razón. Lo cual nos lleva, tras una introducción un poco verbosa, a nuestro tema principal.\nLa belleza La Estética es, según la arbitraria pero necesaria clasificación de las ramas del saber, la parte de la Filosofía que se ocupa de la belleza y, accesoriamente, del gusto. A lo largo de la Historia, una cantidad de energía inimaginable se ha invertido en intentar dilucidar lo que es bello y lo que no lo es. Los más grandes filósofos han buscado en la naturaleza humana pautas innatas que permitan definir el buen gusto. El estado de cosas actual parece dar la razón al “sobre gustos no hay nada escrito” que cualquier ciudadano romano tenía más que asumido hace 2000 años, demostrando que la Historia no es un discurrir lineal de progreso ni siquiera en el saber.\nLa Estética de Platón, en concordancia con el resto de sus teorías, habla de una belleza pura que no existe más que en el mundo de las ideas. De esa belleza participan en mayor o menor medida los diferentes objetos. Hume y Kant, que en algunas cosas estuvieron razonablemente de acuerdo, definen por primera vez la belleza como un proceso interno del ser humano y ya no como una propiedad del objeto bello. Pero Kant va más allá, argumentando que las personas tienen un sentido innato de la Estética. Esta es la salida que Kant encontró para salvar la idea de belleza como concepto objetivo. Según él, las divergencias de opinión sobre, por ejemplo, las obras de arte son meros accidentes, y la norma es que todo el mundo está más o menos de acuerdo a la hora de valorar la belleza de un objeto. Es una pena que Kant no saliera en toda su vida de Königsberg, su ciudad natal en la Prusia oriental. Si le hubiera gustado viajar, podría haber visitado por ejemplo el territorio de la actual Tanzania, donde entre los Masai empezaba a pegar fuerte la moda de ensancharse el orificio del lóbulo de la oreja. Al primer contacto con un lóbulo de dos palmos habría huido despavorido hacia Europa para cambiar ésta y otras chapuzas antes de que llegaran a la imprenta.\nYa en el siglo XX, se pueden distinguir dos corrientes que llegan hasta nuestros días. La primera es un cacareo múltiple salpicado de rebuznos. Es el siglo de la libertad de expresión. Todo el mundo tiene derecho a opinar y, como en el presente artículo, lo ejerce con la mayor desfachatez. En el caso de la Estética, los artistas no son completamente inocentes del desaguisado. Ortega y Gasset se queja amargamente, ya antes de su best-seller sobre las masas: “En nuestro país los artistas —yo no sé por qué extraña ignorancia de hechos elementales— suelen suponer que la estética es cosa de ellos cuando, en realidad, se trata de una de las ciencias que requieren más difícil técnica estrictamente filosófica, psicológica y hasta fisiológica. De ordinario el artista no sabe nada de estética ni le hace falta ninguna, como la camelia ignora por fortuna la botánica”. Leyendo a Ortega, uno se maravilla sin cesar de su intuición histórica. La vertiente fisiológica que él menciona se convirtió en el segundo gran eje de debate estético del siglo, heredero legítimo de la rama “intelectual” de Kant, Schopenhauer y Nietzsche.\nHoy creemos saber que todas las impresiones y sensaciones son producto de reacciones químicas en el cerebro. El centro de las emociones, el hipotálamo, está lleno de neuronas conectadas entre ellas y con otras zonas sensitivas como el sistema receptor óptico de nuestros órganos de visión. Muy crudamente, se supone que cada vez que vemos algo bello se desencadena una serie de pulsos eléctricos desde los ojos, a través del sistema nervioso hasta llegar a esta zona del cerebro. Por supuesto, la experiencia estética así vista no tiene ninguna necesidad de la visión. Uno puede llegar al éxtasis estético pensando en el gol de Maradona contra Inglaterra o mediante la ingestión de substancias psicotrópicas, pero en todos los casos el placer vendrá de un fogonazo neuronal en las inmediaciones del hipotálamo. Qué cosas le producen esta chispa a cada uno no puede ser, como decía Kant, una característica común a toda la Humanidad por una simple razón. Dado el ingente número de neuronas que contiene un cerebro normal, los procesos de su creación, conexión y destrucción no pueden estar dictados por el programa genético porque no hay suficientes genes para codificar tanta información. Para explicar estos procesos, hay que recurrir, además de a la información genética, a factores externos como el entorno físico y el ambiente sociocultural. Y como estos factores varían mucho entre Königsberg y Tanzania, nos damos de bruces con el “de gustibus non disputandum est” de salida (ahora se oye a lo lejos una carcajada burlona de Cicerón). Del argumento kantiano, sin embargo, se salva de la quema todo lo que entre en juego en la experiencia estética y tenga que ver con la estructura cerebral que compartimos todos.\nAntes de adentrarnos en la Física y sus conexiones con la Estética, necesitamos una definición operacional de la belleza. Hemos estado hablando mucho de placer estético, pero la belleza sigue siendo un concepto escurridizo. La definición que mejor se adapta a las anteriores consideraciones es probablemente la que da George Santayana en The Sense of Beauty (1896). Según él, el placer es la categoría estética central y la belleza no es más que “el placer mirado como cualidad de una cosa”. Esta definición, con todos sus defectos, nos permite acomodar a diferentes grupos sociales y sus gustos. Puesto que, como hemos dicho, gentes diferentes experimentarán el placer en situaciones diferentes, el concepto de belleza es relativo. Una de esas tribus la componen gentes que se extasían con la idea de poder describir y predecir el comportamiento de la Naturaleza usando ecuaciones matemáticas. Que una manzana caiga del árbol en virtud de la misma ley que hace girar a la Luna alrededor de la Tierra les produce una avalancha de fogonazos emocionales: son los físicos.\nFísica-Estética La Metafísica de los presocráticos es la precursora de la ciencia actual. En sus intentos por encontrar el principio último de la materia se reconocen fácilmente las motivaciones de orden estético. De entre éstas destaca una que ha llegado indemne hasta nuestros días: la Naturaleza debe funcionar conforme a unas leyes elegantes que requieran el menor número posible de variables. Por ejemplo, un mundo en el que todo es aire, que forme los objetos visibles adoptando diferentes densidades, es más elegante que un mundo en el que cada objeto tenga una esencia distinta. Como es bien sabido, hubo varios intentos con diferentes sustancias, hasta llegar a Demócrito de Abdera, contemporáneo ya de Sócrates. Demócrito, que a diferencia de Kant viajó mucho, es el filósofo de la antigüedad que más se acercó a la idea que hoy tenemos del mundo físico. Por alguna extraña razón, en el currículo escolar se le ha condenado a unas pocas líneas que especifican que todo lo que acertó fue de chiripa, puesto que en aquella época no existían los medios necesarios para verificar sus hipótesis. Veamos cuáles eran. Demócrito dice que todo en el mundo es átomos y vacío, el alma también está hecha de átomos y el pensamiento es un proceso físico. No hay propósito en el Universo, sólo átomos gobernados por leyes físicas. Privarnos de tal genio y endosarnos en su lugar los mundos imaginarios de Platón y la lata de Aristóteles fueron los grandes logros del aparato propagandístico de la Iglesia Católica. Después de Demócrito los grandes filósofos, con su mejor intención, ponen al hombre en un lugar preferencial del Cosmos, llevando a la ciencia a un callejón sin salida hasta el Renacimiento.\nAristóteles creía en el propósito como el concepto fundamental de la ciencia. Veamos qué quiere decir esto. A la pregunta “¿por qué gira la Tierra en torno al Sol?” se le pueden dar dos tipos de respuesta. Una mecanicista, que es la que interesa a la ciencia: “por la atracción gravitacional”. Otra teleológica, à la Aristóteles: “para que haya día y noche” o algo por el estilo. Ni qué decir tiene que la oposición a este tipo de respuesta les costó la hoguera purificadora a muchos desviacionistas. Ya lo dijo Leonardo: “Dove si grida non è vera scienza”, y la Europa del medioevo estaba llena de gritones. Es muy posible que Aristóteles hubiera terminado hasta los Nicómacos de sus “defensores” de haber vivido para verlo, porque, a diferencia de ellos, poseía la primera cualidad de todo científico: cambiar de opinión si confrontado a la evidencia.\nPero no todos los mártires de la ciencia fueron víctimas de la Iglesia. Sir Francis Bacon murió de un resfriado que atrapó tras rellenar una gallina de nieve para comprobar si ello retrasaba su putrefacción. Bacon, que se pasó la vida intentando caer bien a los sucesivos monarcas británicos para obtener protección y títulos, metía a veces la pata por su impetuoso carácter. Su ingente obra se la debemos sobre todo a los encierros de castigo que sufrió en la Torre de Londres donde, alejado del mundanal ruido, tuvo tiempo de transcribir una parte de su enciclopédico saber. Bacon es el padre reconocido del Empiricismo, pero dio muestras de tal talento que incluso algunas locas teorías, que consideran que la obra shakespeariana no pudo ser fruto de un simple comediante del que no se sabe casi nada, postulan al coetáneo Bacon como el mejor candidato para haber sido el Shakespeare en la sombra.\nEl influjo estético en la ciencia, particularmente en la Física, se hace más patente en el siglo XX, siglo de los grandes avances teóricos. A finales del XIX, Maxwell había demostrado que electricidad y magnetismo son dos manifestaciones del mismo fenómeno subyacente. Los físicos persiguen el sueño presocrático de un solo principio que explique el Universo, y la unificación de Maxwell fue un paso bienvenido en esa dirección. Entre 1900 y 1930 se produjeron una serie de resultados experimentales que no se podían explicar con la Física existente y que provocaron el advenimiento de dos grandes teorías: la Relatividad y la Mecánica Cuántica.\nLa primera sorpresa experimental fue el descubrimiento de que la luz se propaga a la misma velocidad c con respecto a dos observadores A y B que se estén separando uno del otro a una velocidad fija v. Veamos lo poco intuitivo de tal afirmación. Supongamos que A y B van en dos coches. A avanza a 60 km/h y B, en el mismo sentido, a 100 km/h. Supongamos que un tercer coche C los alcanza y los supera a 120 km/h. Si pedimos a A y a B que midan la velocidad de C, cada uno se considerará a sí mismo en reposo y responderá con una velocidad relativa. A medirá 60 km/h y B 20 km/h. Pues bien, si reemplazamos a C por un rayo de luz y damos a A y B los medios para medir su velocidad, ambos darán la misma respuesta, independientemente de la velocidad de sus coches: 300 000 kilómetros por segundo si el experimento se conduce en el vacío. En el desarrollo de la teoría de la Relatividad, Einstein partió de dos postulados. El primero, la impepinable —y ciertamente poco intuitiva— constancia de la velocidad de la luz, dada por los experimentos. El segundo, la suposición de que las leyes de la física, expresadas en ecuaciones, tienen que tener la misma forma para los observadores A y B. No hay razón para que uno de los dos tenga por ejemplo el privilegio de obtener leyes más simples. Imposible buscar una justificación formal para este segundo postulado: estamos en terreno puramente estético.\nSi uno parte de estos postulados y posee la materia gris de un Einstein cualquiera, concluye fácilmente que el tiempo no es un concepto universal, sino que A y B tienen sus propios tiempos, que discurren a ritmos diferentes dependiendo de su velocidad. También concluye que la masa inercial de los cuerpos crece con su velocidad. Las ecuaciones de Einstein predicen que estos cambios de tiempo y masa son casi indetectables en nuestra vida diaria, donde las velocidades de los objetos son minúsculas comparadas con la de la luz. Sin embargo, en experimentos donde las partículas se mueven a gran velocidad, los efectos predichos por Einstein son detectables y se han verificado íntegramente hasta hoy. Otro de los descubrimientos de Einstein es que los cuerpos poseen una energía por el simple hecho de existir. Energía es simplemente aquello que nos permite realizar un trabajo. Por ejemplo, se necesita energía para fregar los platos, para calentar el agua o para correr un maratón. Si una partícula de masa dejara de existir, cosa permitida en la teoría de la Relatividad, encontraríamos en su lugar una energía disponible para realizar un trabajo. La relación entre la masa desaparecida y la energía recuperada es la famosa E=mc², donde c es la velocidad de la luz en el vacío cuyo valor dimos antes. Como c tiene un valor tan alto, basta con una ínfima cantidad de materia para producir energías colosales, como descubrieron para su pesar, y el de todo el mundo, los habitantes de Hiroshima y Nagasaki en 1945. Por razones, otra vez, estéticas no se ve por qué estaría prohibido el proceso inverso: crear materia a partir de un aporte de energía. Como veremos, los experimentos demuestran que es ciertamente posible. Antes de continuar, una aclaración se impone sobre esta famosa ecuación. La energía E=mc² es la energía que posee una partícula en virtud de su existencia. Si se quiere recuperar para hacer algo útil, la partícula tiene que desaparecer. Si tuviéramos un estómago nuclear, por llamarlo de alguna manera, que hiciera desaparecer el bocadillo ingerido y nos proporcionara la energía liberada, Iberia se iría definitivamente a pique porque podríamos viajar de continente a continente dando saltos. Además, el proceso no tendría ningún desecho, ahorrándonos una fortuna en retretes. Con nuestro humilde sistema digestivo, un bocadillo nos da para un paseo por la playa y poco más. Si alguien nos ha diseñado, era como mucho un ingeniero mediocre.\nLa Relatividad fue por tanto la respuesta de los físicos a las incongruencias que resultaban de aplicar la física clásica a situaciones donde entraban en juego velocidades no despreciables frente a la de la luz. Otro terreno donde la física newtoniana mostró pronto sus límites fue el ámbito de lo infinitamente pequeño. Las partículas elementales no se comportan como cabría esperar, y esta vez los científicos tuvieron que dejar en el camino incluso más conceptos intuitivos que en el caso de la Relatividad. Los resultados experimentales dejaban atónitos a los físicos de la época, y cundió el desconcierto general. De haber existido en aquella época, Buffalo Springfield habría sido el grupo fetiche de los laboratorios: “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear”. Todo se aclaró, como de costumbre, con el consiguiente grupo de genios que definieron un conjunto nuevo de reglas llamado mecánica cuántica. El nombre nos indica ya uno de los cambios conceptuales más importantes: las partículas no pueden tener cualquier valor de energía, sino que se les limita el menú a un conjunto discreto de posibilidades. Las energías entre dos niveles permitidos consecutivos les están prohibidas: bienvenidos a la era de la cuantificación. Otra gran diferencia es que ya no tiene sentido hablar de una propiedad dada de una partícula, por ejemplo su velocidad, si no se considera el proceso de medida al mismo tiempo. En mecánica cuántica, la velocidad y cualquier otra cantidad asociada con una partícula están indeterminadas hasta el momento de la medición. Es la medida de la velocidad la que decide en cierta forma la velocidad misma. Antes de ella, de un electrón por ejemplo sólo se puede saber la probabilidad de que al medir vayamos a encontrar una velocidad dada. La medida de las propiedades juega, como se ve, un papel fundamental en mecánica cuántica, y aún nos reserva una sorpresa. Hay parejas de propiedades, como la velocidad de una partícula y su posición, que es imposible medir simultáneamente con una precisión arbitraria. El producto de las dos incertidumbres de medida tiene que ser siempre superior a una cantidad llamada la constante de Planck, que siendo ínfimamente pequeña no es cero. Esto quiere decir que si medimos la posición con una incertidumbre mínima, la incertidumbre sobre la velocidad crecerá para satisfacer dicha relación. El principio de incertidumbre de Heisenberg, que así se llama la criatura, describe una propiedad fundamental de la naturaleza y no depende de la precisión de los aparatos de medida. Nuestra visión macroscópica del mundo se salva porque al hacer medias de todas las predicciones probabilísticas sobre una cantidad ingente de partículas, las predicciones de la mecánica cuántica coinciden con las leyes de Newton. Desde el punto de vista estético, la teoría no tiene tanto sex-appeal como la Relatividad. Ya nada es cierto, todo es probabilidad. Los físicos pronto se dividieron en dos grupos, con Einstein —y su famoso “Dios no juega a los dados”— a la cabeza de los hostiles y Bohr defendiendo, con muy buen criterio, que esto era lo que la madre naturaleza les estaba diciendo a través de los experimentos.\nEn 1928, D.H. Lawrence buscaba una segunda mecanógrafa para el manuscrito de El amante de Lady Chatterley tras la dimisión de la primera, aquejada de estreñimiento moral puritano. Mientras esperaba, se dio a la lectura cuántica y nos dejó un testimonio con el que muy pocos físicos estarían de acuerdo, y que muestra una vez más cuán personal es la experiencia estética: “Me gustan la relatividad y las teorías cuánticas porque no las entiendo, y me hacen sentir como si el espacio se agitara como un cisne que no puede quedar quieto, rechazando pararse y ser medido; y como si el átomo fuera una cosa impulsiva, siempre cambiando de opinión”. Muy bien Lawrence, pero hay que saber que esas dos teorías no son el capricho de un físico loco sino el resultado de un penoso zigzagueo hasta llegar a explicar resultados experimentales reales, reproducibles y nada caprichosos. Que la realidad no corresponda a nuestras intuiciones no tiene nada de extraño. Después de todo, nosotros sólo estamos equipados para ver con los ojos, que son unos aparatos bastante imperfectos que nos permiten apreciar objetos de tres dimensiones siempre y cuando algún haz de luz rebote en ellos y llegue hasta nuestra retina. Si el haz de luz, antes de llegar a nuestra retina deambulara por otras diez dimensiones, por ejemplo, nuestro ojo seguiría viendo lo mismo. Sin embargo, la existencia de otras dimensiones tendría implicaciones “extrañas” en otras circunstancias. Algo muy parecido le pasó en 1929 al astrónomo Edwin Hubble mientras estudiaba el cielo desde el telescopio del observatorio del Monte Wilson. Entonces ya se conocía el efecto Doppler, que hace que la longitud de onda de la luz emitida por un objeto varíe en función de la velocidad a la que el objeto se acerca o aleja de nosotros. La luz emitida por las galaxias se utiliza para averiguar sus velocidades con respecto a la Tierra. Hubble descubrió atónito que todas las galaxias parecían alejarse de él, y que la velocidad de alejamiento era mayor cuanto mayor fuera la distancia entre la galaxia en cuestión y la Tierra. Hubble, que tenía unos hábitos higiénicos irreprochables, concluyó que no había nada de personal en ello, y que las galaxias se alejaban también de cualquier otro observador en cualquier punto del universo. Pero ¿cómo explicar semejante estado de cosas? La respuesta es, otra vez, un atentado contra la intuición. De la misma forma que seres bidimensionales que vivieran fijos en la superficie de un globo se verían alejarse si el globo empezara a hincharse, y que sus velocidades de alejamiento dependerían de la distancia entre ellos, se puede concluir que nuestro espacio tridimensional se está hinchando y que nosotros no somos capaces de ver más que las consecuencias indirectas de dicha hinchazón. En las teorías correspondientes, hay un parámetro que juega un papel crucial: la densidad de masa total contenida en el Universo. Si esa cantidad es superior a una densidad crítica, los modelos predicen que el ritmo de expansión decrecerá hasta un momento en el que el Universo, por atracción gravitacional entre sus partes, empezará a contraerse. El fin de la historia será un Big Bang al revés, una implosión morrocotuda donde todo colapsará hacia un punto sin dimensiones. Si la densidad real es menor que la densidad crítica, la predicción es que el Universo se expandirá indefinidamente, volviéndose un lugar frío e inhóspito donde la vida será imposible. La tercera posibilidad es que la densidad sea exactamente la densidad crítica. En tal caso, el Universo crecerá asintóticamente hasta un tamaño límite, que nunca alcanzará pero al que se acercará arbitrariamente. Este tercer caso es el favorecido por los físicos, en primer lugar porque en los otros dos supuestos tendríamos pocas posibilidades de estar aquí hoy, pero sobre todo, una vez más, por estética. La teoría de la hinchazón del espacio demuestra en cualquier caso lo que cualquier espectador del Telediario sabe desde hace tiempo: lo que se ve y la realidad no son necesariamente la misma cosa.\nLa Relatividad y la Mecánica Cuántica son también dos ejemplos de teorías modernas en el sentido definido por Karl Popper a mediados del siglo XX. Popper arremetió contra el método de investigación llamado “inducción”, según el cual uno puede pasar de un número suficiente de observaciones a una conclusión general sobre el comportamiento de la naturaleza. Bacon, padre de la inducción, veía cómo le retiraban su carné de físico después de haber dado su vida por la ciencia. Otro requisito popperiano es que cualquier teoría digna de ese nombre tiene que ser susceptible de ser desmentida por un experimento: es la famosa falsificabilidad. Es más, según Popper, el creador de una nueva teoría debería someterla a despiadados ataques y cerciorarse de que sale indemne antes de publicarla. En el caso de la Mecánica Cuántica y la Relatividad, sus creadores no tuvieron que preocuparse mucho del tema: ambas tuvieron adversarios de calibre desde el principio, y sobrevivieron en los campos de batalla para los que fueron ideadas: el ámbito de lo pequeño y el de lo veloz. Pero ¿qué reglas se le aplican a una partícula que sea a la vez diminuta y endiabladamente rápida?\nEl Higgs Hemos visto que los físicos siguen su intuición estética cada vez que se encuentran en un cruce de caminos y no saben por dónde tirar. En ese contexto, la creencia en un principio único del Universo ha gozado y sigue gozando de muy buena salud en el ranking de las motivaciones últimas. El siglo XX, vertiginoso en todos sus aspectos, nos ha llevado más cerca de ese ideal que nunca antes en la Historia. Los científicos comprendieron pronto que para investigar este ámbito infranuclear había que bombardear unas partículas contra otras. En las colisiones hay cierta probabilidad de que las dos partículas se aniquilen y dejen en su lugar un cogollo de energía. De ese manojo energético brotarán espontáneamente nuevas partículas, que los detectores identificarán y catalogarán. El ingenio que nos permite tales intrusiones en el universo subatómico es el acelerador de partículas. Éstas ya no tienen vida privada. Los aceleradores son paparazzi microscópicos.\nPero vayamos por partes. Habíamos dejado a los físicos con el dilema de las partículas pequeñas y veloces. La mezcla de Relatividad con Mecánica Cuántica resultó ser un callo teórico duro de roer. Por suerte para la humanidad, tampoco en los años 50 faltaban físicos sagaces para sacar la castaña cuántica del fuego. ¡Y qué castaña! Nuestra visión del mundo subatómico cambió tanto que todavía nos estamos frotando los ojos. Este es, telegráficamente, el legado que nos dejaron tras mucho sudor y lágrimas. El Universo contiene dos tipos de partículas: las que forman la materia (fermiones) y las que tienen como función vehicular las interacciones o fuerzas (bosones). Se conocen cuatro tipos de interacciones: gravitacional —que todos conocemos desde el manzanazo de Newton—, electromagnética —y ya no eléctrica y magnética, gracias a Maxwell—, fuerte y débil. Por poner un ejemplo, la repulsión electromagnética entre dos partículas con carga del mismo signo se interpreta hoy como un intercambio de fotones entre ellas. Los fotones son los bosones que vehiculan la interacción electromagnética. La luz, que no es otra cosa que una onda electromagnética, está hecha de fotones. La interacción fuerte, por otra parte, es la responsable de mantener a los protones juntos en el núcleo de los átomos, a pesar de la repulsión electromagnética que estas partículas positivamente cargadas se infligen entre ellas. Finalmente, la interacción débil explica muchos procesos de desintegración, como los que permiten al Sol transmutar el hidrógeno en helio, creando en el proceso la energía que nos permite vivir.\nEstéticamente, la situación es más bien deprimente: queríamos un tipo de partícula fundamental y tenemos 48. Queríamos un tipo de interacción y hay 4. Pero también hay buenas noticias. Materia y fuerza ya no son conceptos distintos: sólo hay partículas. Además, un desarrollo teórico de los años 70 nos permite vislumbrar por dónde se puede progresar. Weinberg, Salam y Glashow demostraron que la interacción débil y la electromagnética se parecen formalmente como dos gotas de agua, salvo por un detalle: la masa de los fotones es nula, mientras que los bosones W⁺, W⁻ y Z⁰, vehículos de la interacción débil, están más bien en el club de las partículas entraditas en peso dentro del zoo subatómico. Esto tiene como consecuencia, entre otras cosas, que el alcance de la interacción débil no sea infinito como el de la electromagnética. Pero ¿qué pasaría si los bosones débiles no tuvieran masa? Esencialmente, estaríamos hablando de un tipo de interacción y ya no de dos: ¡Demócritoooooo!\nAl Universo primigenio se le supone, en nuestros sueños de físico, la simplicidad de los ideales presocráticos. Pero entonces, ¿cómo hemos pasado de ese paraíso al infierno cuántico actual? ¿En qué momento se desbarató el tinglado y empezaron a medrar partículas de todo pelaje? El caso de la diferencia entre la interacción débil y la electromagnética nos proporciona una pista: ¿en qué momento adquirieron masa los bosones de la débil para diferenciarse de los fotones? O, y esta sí que es la pregunta del millón, ¿por qué mecanismo puede una partícula adquirir masa? El físico británico Peter Higgs propone una solución. Según él, el Universo entero está bañado por una cantidad ingente de unas partículas muy especiales. Estas partículas, apropiadamente llamadas bosones de Higgs, interactúan con el resto de partículas más o menos intensamente. El resultado de esta interacción es que la partícula adquiere una masa que no tenía. Las diferentes masas que observamos no son más que diferentes intensidades de interacción con los bosones de Higgs. Hay que admitir que últimamente el concepto de interacción se ha estirado considerablemente. Si Newton levantara la cabeza le daría un patatús.\nComo ya hemos dicho, hoy en día nadie se extraña ante el hecho de que la realidad sea poco intuitiva, pero en el caso del Higgs estamos forzando un poco la benevolencia del público. En 1993, el ministro británico de Ciencia retó a las grandes cabezas pensantes del reino a que describieran en una página, y de la manera más clara posible, qué es el bosón de Higgs y cómo funciona. He aquí una variante de la explicación de David Miller, uno de los ganadores del concurso. Imaginemos una de esas recepciones que la nobleza británica ofrece en sus castillos. Los invitados entran por una puerta y se abren paso a través de una nube de nobles encorbatados hasta la mesa de los canapés, al fondo de la sala. Supongamos que ahora la sala está llena de lords y empiezan a llegar jugadores del Manchester United en su uniforme. Supongamos también que un físico marciano está observando el espectáculo por una de las ventanas. Como todo el mundo sabe, los marcianos tienen una debilidad por el color rojo y son incapaces de ver nada que no sea de ese color, así que el físico ve a los jugadores, pero a ninguno de los nobles que pululan por la sala. Primero entra Silvestre y, como no le conoce mucha gente, llega relativamente rápido a los canapés. Después entra Van Nistelrooy, y con éste todo el mundo quiere hablar. Los nobles bosónicos se arremolinan a su alrededor, deseosos de trabar conversación con el jugador. Éste avanza penosamente hacia los canapés, pero cada paso le cuesta una energía indecible. El físico marciano no tiene duda: la partícula Van Nistelrooy es mucho más pesada que la partícula Silvestre, pero ¿por qué? Tras mucho discurrir, postula la existencia de unos nobles invisibles que interaccionan más intensamente con un jugador que con el otro. Ahora sólo falta verificar la hipótesis con un experimento…\nPues en ese momento histórico estamos hoy. Queremos verificar la existencia del Higgs mediante un experimento. Lo más obvio, puesto que se supone que están por todas partes, sería diseñar un aparato que hiciera tic cada vez que detectara un Higgs en sus inmediaciones. Desafortunadamente, el medio ambiente contiene también un sinfín de otras partículas que dejarían la misma señal en un detector. Para evitar la indeterminación, la única solución es producir los Higgs artificialmente en una factoría de partículas que garantice un entorno controlado: un acelerador. Hemos visto que, al hacer colisionar dos partículas entre ellas, a veces éstas desaparecen y dejan su lugar a una energía latente que se convierte en otras partículas inmediatamente después. La masa de esas partículas que se crean no puede “costar” más energía de la que las partículas originales aportan, según la relación de Einstein E=mc². Si queremos poder crear partículas muy masivas, hay que acelerar las partículas iniciales correspondientemente para que al desaparecer dejen suficiente energía.\nLa historia de los aceleradores es otro de los grandes éxitos de la ciencia del siglo XX. Baste decir aquí que estas máquinas mastodónticas han crecido en potencia y tamaño constantemente, permitiéndonos descubrir o desmentir las diferentes partículas que los teóricos habían postulado. El Higgs, sin embargo, parece tener una masa tal que ninguno de los aceleradores actuales llegaría a proporcionar la energía requerida para su creación en un entorno de fácil análisis. Ni siquiera el Large Electron-Positron Collider, LEP, que ocupaba un túnel circular de 27 kilómetros en las afueras de Ginebra, pudo con el dichoso Higgs, lo cual enrabietó a los físicos sobremanera. En el mismo túnel que el LEP, el Laboratorio Europeo de Física de Partículas (CERN) propuso instalar un nuevo acelerador para llegar a las energías necesarias para aceptar o desterrar la hipótesis del Higgs. El Large Hadron Collider, LHC, empezará en 2007 a operar dos haces de protones a energías jamás alcanzadas en ningún otro acelerador. En sus entrañas, las partículas colisionarán con violencias que no se recuerdan en el Universo desde una ínfima parte de segundo después del Big Bang. De esos castañazos entre protones, la comunidad física espera que salgan Higgs a discreción. En caso de que no salgan, el bombazo informativo sería aún mayor: las teorías más populares actualmente dependen en mayor o menor medida de la existencia del Higgs para su coherencia interna. El LHC costará unos 2000 millones de euros, menos que el portaviones Charles de Gaulle, último juguete bélico de la marina francesa. Aun así, convencer a los políticos de su necesidad ha sido y es un proceso laborioso. Pero, después de todo, ¿hay algo más digno del hombre que ocupar su mente en comprender el Universo? En el túnel del LHC suena ya la llamada de Demócrito: “Nada existe excepto los átomos y el vacío. Todo lo demás es opinión”.\n","permalink":"https://orellut.net/posts/ciencia-y-estetica/","summary":"Los físicos persiguen la belleza tanto como los artistas. Un paseo por la Estética, de los presocráticos a la Relatividad y la Mecánica Cuántica, que termina en la caza del bosón de Higgs.","title":"Ciencia y Estética: la caza del Higgs"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m an engineer and a physicist working at CERN, and a member of the European Open Source Academy.\nHusband, father of two. Citizen.\nDisclaimer The opinions expressed on this website are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.\n","permalink":"https://orellut.net/about/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eI\u0026rsquo;m an engineer and a physicist working at\n\u003ca href=\"https://home.cern\"\u003eCERN\u003c/a\u003e, and a member of the\n\u003ca href=\"https://europeanopensource.academy/\"\u003eEuropean Open Source Academy\u003c/a\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHusband, father of two. Citizen.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"disclaimer\"\u003eDisclaimer\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe opinions expressed on this website are my own and do not necessarily\nreflect the views of my employer.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"About"}]