Life as a Physicist

I am exhausted. I was probably blue. And I certainly felt like I was seeing that light at the end of the tunnel sometimes. But I stayed away!

When we take Julia out for dinner I always talk about a blast radius. Anything and everything within that radius will get destroyed. Thrown to the floor. Baby food will be dribbled on it. You name it, it will happen. Well, gentle reader, I’m happy to report that my blast radius is much much much larger than hers! It is good to be king.

It started last night. I was happily typing up emails and sorting out everything I needed to do before this morning. Suddenly I noticed my head hurt a little bit. Not much, just a little. The sort of hurt you can ignore and continue working. I did. Suddenly I noticed that it really hurt. I don’t get headaches often, but this was brewing up to be a real one. While rolling the feeling around in my head trying to judge how bad it was going to get, I noticed that my stomach was getting into the add. 10 minutes later there was no question, I stumbled into bed, and fell over. I didn’t even get undressed. And in about 20 minutes the first “blast” hit. Ick. Then, all of a sudden, it was as if I’d drunk unfiltered tap water in Mumbai (I did, accidentally. Not happy.).

I think around 2am I’d finally gone one hour without a trip to the bathroom. I had some ginger ale. By that time my body was quite dehydrated. I can’t tell you how good that tasted! I refused myself any more for about an hour to make sure my system was on the mend. But for that full hour all I did was dream about ginger ale. There is a marketing campaign in there somewhere.

I’d not been this sick in at least 10 years (cross fingers!).

It must have been something I ate. No idea what, as Paula and I were hanging out together all day Sunday. Perhaps blue cheese? The sandwich? At any rate, this morning I’m fine, but I’m so exhausted I can barely stay awake for an hour! I have a phone meeting in an hour… see you!

Yes — this post is back dated. But I remembered the time.

This trip home to Seattle is going to take forever…

Whew. I’ve been on the road now for almost 2.5 weeks. I return to Seattle this Weds — I’m really looking forward to it. Skype video just does not do Julia justice (though it is better than nothing at all!). I’ve given seminars, conference talks, and workshop talks on this trip. It has been a lot of fun, but I’m ready to get back to producing things rather than talking about work I’ve done in the past!

The “kids” are walking around here doing something crazy with their cell phones: they play music. The blast it out as loud as the cell phone will do it (i.e. not very loud!). It sounds horrible: very tinny. But anytime you find a group of girls or boys someone has their cell phone providing music. Crazy!

The New Yorker has a nice (long - duh!) bit on the LHC. It includes this classic line near the start:

The place was so crowded that it took me five minutes to pay for a cup of coffee, proving the elemental truth that man can build a superconducting collider but not a functional cafeteria.

The spend a bit too much time addressing how the LHC might (or might not) destroy the earth as we know it, but at least bring it to a slightly humorous conclusion.

There is also this quote from Arkani-Hamed (a theorist at Harvard), which I do not think I need to comment on.

It’s a general fact about physics that the people you tend to remember are the theorists,” he went on. “At least in the mythology, experiment plays a less central role. And there’s a natural reason for that, because the ultimate goal isn’t to observe things about nature; the ultimate goal is to understand and explain things about nature. So, for that reason, it’s a chicken-and-egg problem. But definitely you want to be the chicken.”

(the previous paragraph is worth reading too). All-in-all, a good read.

I’m in Marseille for the ATLAS b-tagging workshop. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Marseille is in the south of France. It is 81 degrees outside as I type this, and brilliantly sunny. Always warm down here, life moves at a slower pace.

To get myself in the mood for this trip I’ve setup my desktop picture program to grab pictures from Flickr that have the Marseille tag. There is a problem here which I only caught when I was sanding several feet away from my portable looking down towards it in a crowded conference auditorium… Some of the pictures that people have taken and posted on Flickr are not safe for work! I don’t think anyone saw me make the dash for my computer to close the lid.

Further ignoring what I should be doing, I stumbled across this article describing the re-start of the RHIC collider. In it, a professor from UW describes what the control room is like:

Thomas A. Trainor, 62, a physics professor from the University of Washington, who was at the control panel, invoked another metaphor, likening the control room to the bridge of the Enterprise in “Star Trek.”

“That’s Captain Kirk over there,” said Dr. Trainor, pointing to the shift leader, a spry 81-year-old physics professor from U.C.L.A., George Igo. He was accumulating collision data from the experimental run and amassing an impressive pile of pistachio shells on his desk. “I’m just the bookkeeper,” Dr. Igo said.

Dr. Trainor continued, “You could say I’m Sulu, at the controls, but when the captain tells me, ‘I want things run this way,’ I do it.”

“He’s Chekov,” Dr. Trainor said, pointing to Jan Kapitan, 26, a doctoral student in nuclear physics from the Czech Republic. Then he turned to a tall man monitoring the alarm systems, Peter Filip, who works for a research group from Moscow.

“He’s Scotty,” Dr. Trainor said, “because if something goes wrong, he has to respond.”

Say. That sounds just like the DZERO control room, which is where I’m sitting right now.

In an attempt to procrastinate, I was reading the Science Blog. I looked at this article on an alternate use for string theory. Almost more interesting than the article, however, were the adds that Google pulled up:

What is Gravity?

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TheFinalTheory.com

New Theory of Everything

Explains all new physics phenomena. Also incorporates the mind.

NewPhysicsAndTheMind.net

One-on-One Tutoring

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www.clubztutoring.com

Study the Universe at MIT

5-day short course on relativity, gravity, and cosmology at MIT.

professionalinstitute.mit.edu

“Also incorporates the mind.” Just a small added effect!

This is from an article in the New York Times describing the Republican presidential primary debase:

There were revealing moments that went past the well-rehearsed lines by all the candidates. Three of the candidates — Mr. Huckabee, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado — raised their hands to signal that they did not believe in evolution.

These three are not qualified to lead the United States. I hope they will be quickly defeated in the primaries.

Running this country — or almost any country — requires the leader to have a basic understanding of science and “how things work.” Statements like this show an utter lack of basic understanding in the world that we live in today. We already know that things are not run well when our leader is disconnected from reality. Get rid of them now.