Blogs by physicists working in large scientific collaborations are looked with suspicion by the management, because they are considered -wrongly so- a potential source of leaks. Large experiments such as CDF at Fermilab or CMS at CERN have been careful to write specific guidelines, where they basically prevent bloggers to speak about anything that happens within the experiment, and to even restrain from discussing public material until the latter has been presented at an international conference.
Despite feeling that this is a profoundly flawed attitude -we work for the advancement of human knowledge, and a more open circulation of ideas is always to be preferred, and certainly not hindered- I have to comply to the requirements of the experiments I work for.
The fact that CDF and CMS have explicitly published blogging guidelines is, you guessed right, not totally unrelated to my participation in those experiments. But I always followed the rules! I never published internal material in this blog. Rather, I raised eyebrows in my colleagues a few times because science reporters started to contact me, rather than the experiment heads or the appropriate physics conveners, to discuss new results. Envy, ultimately, is the word. But that is another story.
Here I wish to point out that it is embarassingly simple to get access to internal, unscrutinized, restricted material from those very experiments that seem to be the most wary, those that have been proactive in preventing blogs from leaking information to the public. All it takes is google, and some fantasy.
For today I will just consider the site home.fnal.gov, which hosts the web pages of scientists working for experiments that have something to do with Fermilab. Note: physicists with public web pages in that site do not just work for CDF and D0, but also for the CERN experiments. And also note that similar sites exist for all other laboratories. Some fantasy is sufficient to locate them.
The search for "CMS site:home.fnal.gov" returns dozens -but I should say hundreds- of unpublished documents. Mind you: this is not old stuff that nobody cares any more -I found event displays not approved by the collaboration, physics distributions, slides with detailed comments on the experiment performance that would ban me from the experiment for years if I were to offer them in this blog. But you still have access to them. Try it, it's free.
Even more fun is to try something smarter, like "internal site:home.fnal.gov". This effectively sorts out stuff that is intended for internal consumption. In particular, you will find heaps of internal notes from a major physics experiment which is very careful with its publication rules. Quite smart to have put the word "internal" in the title, ain't it ?
More fantasy and some patience will bring a wealth of riches to your desktop. Just try it. But mind you: I would feel guilty if, having found out just how much restricted material is present in the site I mentioned, I did not report my finds to the experiments for which I work. So I expect that the material will only stay there for a few more days, before being taken off hurriedly. Eventually, though, more internal material will be stored there again, because we physicists have it in our genes: we distribute information!
