Life as a Physicist

I’m on shift again. Which means I am catching up on old emails. I stumbled on a very cool looking bit of tech (my first question was: can I get the D0 online event display to run on that!?). One person has already written a framework that allows plug-ins to drive the keyboard images. The plug-ins are written in .NET — that is, an interpreted language. He got a comment back that sounded familiar to me complaining that C++ was much better — and wrote back a great response. He makes the point that a programming language can’t be judged on speed alone, but also on how quickly you can write a bug-free program (if it was speed alone we’d never have gotten python or java).

In constructing this argument he quotes from a fellow named William Caputo (his whole post is worth reading on this topic):

In the real world, its not “write once, run forever”, its “write a bit, run a bit, change a bit, run a bit”, and so on.

And that, my friends, is why HEP will be stuck with C++ for years and years to come.

My sister pointed out a cool blog a while back. I had to make sure it wasn’t dead (it doesn’t get many posts). It is in french. And it is mostly comics of one sort or the other. Fortunately for me, the French is simple enough that I can understand it. I liked his set on the addiction to his computer…

I arrived at CERN yesterday. Did some work, went out to dinner, got back home and did a little more work. I put my portable to sleep. I put myself to sleep.

This morning I turned my portable back on and was greeted with the dreaded “IDE #0 Error”… no hard disk! No OS! I was suddenly faced with the prospect of actually listening to all the talks this week rather than getting work done!

A Phillips head screwdriver later, however, I found out what had really happened. The new hard disk we installed in this machine several months ago is too short! All the turbulence on the flight over must have worked it loose so it no longer was connected to the portable.

Whew. I can’t tell you how relieved I was when I opened the portable up to look… Disaster averted!

I’m fascinated by clocks. I think they were the only things I built in my high school wood shop class. I periodically check out the ebay clock listings (though I’ve never purchased anything there). Nick pointed out a very cool clock. This thing moves water around to tell the time — it has 12 tubes, one of reach hour. Would that be neat or what? I need a clock for my office… Of course, this baby will set you back CHF 15,000 (12,263 US bucks).

I’ve been pretty busy lately and so totally missed that a friend of mine, John Conway (dude — fix that picture!!), has joined Cosmic Variance. First of all — Congratulations John! I’m, all at the same time, happy, envious, and a bit nervous. The first is pretty obvious: I’ve known John a long time and like him and Robin a lot. The second is because CV is one of the largest blogs out there — and who doesn’t want a large audience!?

The third is a bit more complex. Check out his posts. One post (I think that is where it started!??) generated a news article. Conway is, of course, a member of the CDF collaboration and one of ~600 people that keep that experiment running and analyze its data. The article is pretty bad in the sense that CDF appears as a helper to John’s team, and it appears first quite a way into the article. It is pretty good in telling a story about what is going on (I think John’s posts are better, actually). Goodness knows that HEP needs more press like this, and more blogs or people like John and CV. But the thing that gets me is the press connection. CV has a large readership. I’ve seen science writers in the New York Times respond in the comments section of that blog — so it has a very direct access to the press — something that very few of us or our experiments have. Is that appropriate? I can’t tell. I’m really torn. We need to be out there and in the public: heck, the public funds the science we do. On the other hand, we are large experiments and it isn’t the individual: all of us contribute to these results.

Also, reading this, I wonder if I should alter the content of my blog. Because I started with the Quantum Dairies, I tended not to talk about the physics — at least, not in detail. A lot of this blog tends to be dirty details of my life (sorry). Also, frankly, it takes  a lot more time to write those types of posts (I don’t know how Tommaso does it and still maintains an active research career!). What do you guys think?

I visited Wicker park this evening. Mike & Grace, who Paula and I met up in Vancouver, and live two blocks from us in Seattle, and who used to live in Chicago are visiting Chicago last week. Are you impressed with my sentence making ability yet? They went to the Green Mill this evening and I hung out with them. I’d post some pictures, but I forgot my camera in the hotel room (gasp!).

At any rate, I visited my favorite cheap Chicago Thai place, Penny’s, first and then went over to Filter to read a bit of Thomas’ thesis before joining Mike & Grace up at the Green Mill. Filter is one of those great coffee shops - the sort I wish Seattle had. Stays open late. Has a huge room full of couches and chairs and tables (all of it pretty ratty). Food, drinks, and really good baked goods. The crowd there is mostly “creative” types (whatever the heck that means). Of the 50 people in there, about 30 had a computer, and I’d say about 25 of them were Apple’s. Ripped jeans galore. Funky hair cuts. But this is what surprised me: A good number of them were pecking away on smart phones (mostly the blackberry to my eye). I wasn’t expecting that!

Check out this from the Economist, science section, 3/10 Issue:

In recent weeks a number of physicists have gotten excited about bumps in the data taken at two experiments at the Tevatron. A bump is usually a sign the something has gone awry, but if all possible sources of error have been eliminated, it can indicate the presence of a particle. That both experiments on the Tevatron ring have their new bumps at precisely the same energy is particularly intriguing.

Wow. That is really cool! I’d like to offer my congratulations to the Tevatron experiments! That would be, of course,  CDF and DZERO!

Wait. I’m on DZERO. Why don’t I know about this discovery!?

All sarcasm aside, I’ve seen the DZERO results and, yeah, there is a bump. But there is a reason we aren’t really talking about it: we don’t trust it yet. We see lots of these bumps. Most of them don’t stick around very long: we can easily identify their (non-new-physics) sources and remove them. Some stick around longer than others.

Further, I’m not sure I’d use the word “precisely”. Second thing I’d ask about CDF’s bump: if it was the Higgs shouldn’t it be wider!?

Finally, there is a long history of bumps that appear and then go away — especially in something that involves jets (ala the ALEPH 4-jet bump). Both of these analyses are 4-jet bumps.

Still. I was certainly guilty of showing the slides around from one of the internal talks to other members of DZERO at UW! We have x2 more data. Trust me when I say we are killing our batch systems trying to analyze it!

BTW, where does the economist get its sources!? Wow!!!

Well, our search for a particle physics faculty position is starting to close in on the end. The first batch of rejection letters goes out tomorrow or the day after. These are rough — especially in particle physics. Everyone knows everyone and it is hard not to take these things personally (I know I did when I got them). The reality is that it is a very complex decision that goes into these things, but… Well. It is impossible to write these letters and not feel bad. Partly because we had so many great people apply — many of them I would really have enjoyed working with. So, my apologies, and best of luck.

Seen in the hallway in our physics department… That would be PI. I didn’t count the digits…

The March 3rd edition of the Economist had a good article on the state of corporate R&D. You know — the people the brought us the transistor? This survey points out how the boom of technology has really changed how research is done. In the old days places like AT&T had Bell laboratories — places where research was done that didn’t focus on an immediate product. Sure — the research was more applied than what goes on in some university lab where there is absolutely no pressure to produce a product — but still the product horizon was pretty far off. No so much any longer, however. According to this survey research departments in companies (if they still have them) are much more focused on solving the problems of product teams — indeed, research groups are often paired with product teams which was rarely the case previously. It was a science advisor for Franklin Roosevelt that setup this system: universities would do only pure research and companies would do applied. This model with separation of scientists and engineers was duplicated in companies. Obviously, it worked quite well. But it has changed. The Economist’s argument for this change (now)?

The approach to R&D is changing because long-term research was a luxury only a monopoly could afford.

…

“The fusion of research and development is meant to solve the central shortcoming of [Roosevelt's science advisor's] plan: how to turn ideas into commercial innovations.

…

… the nature of IT has changed so much. … the science that went into computing was itself closer to basic research. By contrast, many of the big scientific questions in computing have been answered — at least well enough for companies to find that innovation emerges from new ways of arranging today’s technologies rather than inventing new ones.

What is the new model?

Companies tinker with today’s products rather than pay researchers to think big thoughts. More often than not, firms hungry for innovation look to mergers and acquisitions with their peers, partnerships with universities and takeovers of venture-capital-backed start-ups.

There is (at least one) one ironic passage in the article:

But making this vision work technically is hard. Academics, he says, cannot do this, since they continually struggle for funds. This forces them into projects of just one or two years — even shorter than industry horizons. “It’s insane,” says Mr. Drucker [a Microsoft media applications researcher]. He reckons it means corporate research can look farther ahead, do bigger things and risk more money for a big payout.

You can’t have it both ways, right? You can’t depend on universities for start ups and long term research and also talk about really short event horizons. Sadly, there is truth to this split. Perhaps they are right. All the important big questions that require years of work have been answered in computing (where have we heard that before!?), and it is fitting that companies, most motivated to put out a working product, are the right place for further research.

But this product driven model won’t work for the next big thing. If transistors powered this revolution — what will power the next? You’ll need something hidden away, insulated from the corporate winds, to do that research. Currently only the government has a “business model” that can fund that sort of research.

Now, if only they had enough cash to carry out that mission…