Morteza Marzjarani

The Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award (ESRA) Committee selected Natalie Wolchover as the honoree of its 2016 award. Wolchover is a senior writer at Quanta Magazine, covering the physical sciences. Previously, she wrote for LiveScience, Popular Science, Seed, and Make magazines. She has a bachelor’s in physics from Tufts University, studied graduate-level physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and co-authored several academic papers in nonlinear optics. The ESRA committee was especially impressed with the number and breadth of Wolchover’s articles related to the discipline of statistics.

Natalie Wolchover won the 2016 ESRA award for an article concerning the Tracy-Widom distribution.

Tell us about yourself and what professional experience you have had so far.

As a writer for Quanta, I cover research at the bleeding edge of physics and occasionally dip my toes in mathematics, computer science, and other fields. (Statistics plays into all of these, of course.) I love my job because it allows me to spend my days learning. I was born in London, England, and grew up going back and forth between there and the podunk town of Blanco, Texas. From a young age, I was shaped by those opposites, while also balancing seemingly opposing loves of science and literature. I planned to be a physicist; I studied physics at Tufts and started in on a PhD at Berkeley. But, eventually my writerly side protested and I left the program to pursue science writing. I started up a blog and began freelancing while also tutoring college physics students [so I could] earn extra cash. My clips helped me land an internship in New York, which led to my first staff job, which led to my second. I now live with my wife and two cats in Brooklyn. I’m enjoying city life, but—always seeking a balance of opposites—also longing for that big Texas sky.

Do statistics enter into your physics reporting?

Yes, all the time. Beyond just explaining sigma values and that kind of thing, I try to get across that the laws of physics are, fundamentally, an attempt to describe statistics. Both at the quantum scale of particles and the cosmic scale of the universe, everything we know about nature is in the form of statistics. On the one hand, there are the statistics of how particles morph and scatter in collisions, and on the other hand, [there are] the statistical distribution of galaxies and other cosmic structures. These are sets of data points in no particular order.

The Standard Model of particle physics doesn’t have an explanation for why, when two protons collide at the Large Hadron Collider, the scattering process produces two photons one time and a Higgs boson the next. The order of these scattering processes doesn’t matter—and in fact quantum mechanics says the order is impossible to know or predict. All you can do is collide particles over and over again and tally up the number of times you get photons versus the number of times you get Higgs bosons. The Standard Model is essentially a theory of these statistical likelihoods.

Similarly, cosmologists can’t tell you why two superclusters are found a certain distance apart while two others are some other distance apart. They just gather statistics on the correlations between structures and then develop a theory of the universe’s birth that accounts for these statistics. So it’s really interesting that our fundamental theories are that way. And there’s a deep issue where, in order to have a complete theory of particle physics and cosmology (and ultimately these have to converge), we would actually need infinite statistics. This might suggest we need a new approach.

Your award-winning article concerned the Tracy-Widom distribution. Can you give a teaser?

Tracy-Widom is a statistical distribution that crops up frequently throughout math and physics—as the distribution of largest eigenvalues of random matrices and variations along the interface of a liquid crystal, for instance. It looks like a lopsided, left-leaning Gaussian distribution. Like the bell curve, the Tracy-Widom distribution also exhibits “universality,” emerging as the common macroscopic behavior of diverse microscopic systems, but in its case, researchers are only beginning to understand why it is so universal and what the underlying cause is.

My article focused on some fascinating work in that direction by the statistical physicist Satya Majumdar and colleagues. By studying the extreme tails of the distribution, they found it bears striking similarities to a third-order phase transition—and as readers will learn, that’s a major clue as to why it arises.
One wonderful thing about reporting the article was that I had the opportunity to speak to Leo Kadanoff, the great statistical physicist who, decades ago, coined the term “universality” in his study of phase transitions and who sadly died in October. He told me he had always suspected there was a connection between the universality of phase transitions and universality in random matrix theory, and this seems to be bearing out. The puzzle isn’t solved yet, but I definitely plan to stay on top of the story.

Do you plan to write more about statistics?

I’m writing a statistics-related article right now, in fact! I keep coming back to this theme of emergent universality in many-body systems. It’s a fascinating and mysterious topic, one that transcends boundaries between disciplines. I, like everybody, love becoming aware of connections between seemingly disparate phenomena, and that’s what universality is all about. It is a hard topic to write about, though, because when a certain pattern or law is universal, meaning it manifests itself in the behavior of many disparate systems, it can be a struggle to give a sense of that breadth while also tying all the threads together and telling a cohesive story. I’m in the thick of that struggle at the moment.

What do you think about ESRA?

I’m thrilled to have won this award and very grateful to the American Statistical Association for their recognition. The prospect of winning awards is, of course, not what motivates me to write—I write because I love to learn and think about the world, and to articulate what I’m learning and thinking about—but it’s nonetheless incredibly gratifying to receive such positive feedback. I love that the award comes with a traveling cup. All my friends are insisting we have to do crazy things with it, Stanley Cup-style, but don’t worry—I plan to keep it on my desk at work and look to it for inspiration in times of writer’s block!

What are your interests other than writing?

Above all, reading—I love nothing better than a good book or New Yorker article. My partner is an art historian and we see a lot of art together. I love hanging out with family, friends, my beloved cats, animals in general. Also, playing squash, cooking, traveling. Taking walks in [the] woods and swimming in rivers. It would be disingenuous not to also mention Netflix.