Life as a Physicist

Hey — Lisa Randall made it into Vogue! Lisa is famous for her work on Extra Dimensions (there is a whole class of models named after her collaborator Raman Sundrum – Randall-Sundrum models). Now, if only it wasn’t so unique that she was a woman in physics!!

Both my wife and I have searched for an online link to the article, but we can’t find it. But are sure that she appears in the US edition of Vogue! Amazing that not everything (or at least a reference) is online these days!

Marseille is famous for its wind. Today I couldn’t open the door to leave my apartment! The reason was the wind: it was blowing so hard that the pressure difference between my 13′th floor apartment and the 12th floor elevator lobby was enough I couldn’t get it open. I pulled as hard as I could — I thought I was going to break the door handle. Once I managed to move the door a small amount and the howling wind through the crack was amazing. I had a brief moment of panic before I realized I could close the windows to relieve the pressure.

Finally it occurred to me to close the windows so the wind couldn’t get in: it is so hot right now that one doesn’t think, normally, of closing the windows. It is sort of like: I don’t think I would have noticed if the apartment had come without windows. I offer this as an excuse as to why it took me a while to remember that I could close the windows to enable me to open the door.

It felt like I should have been an unemployed writer. Sitting in some cafe in Paris. With wine. A lot of wine. But, no, it took place here in the south of France, on a day much too hot to have an intense discussion. It was so hot we all had to get an ice cream after it was over.

I knew it was only a matter of time before this would happen. I made it about 3 weeks. Topic: Iraq. For this first time it was a Frenchman, an Italian, and me (an American). We all basically agreed that the US was going to have to withdraw. I think the other two wanted to make sure that I thought going into Iraq was a mistake (I did, but I never thought it was going to be as big a mistake as it turned out to be, but I didn’t tell them that… hmmm, hopefully they won’t read this!). But the real discussion was over what will happen next. And what shape will Iraq be in when we leave (will it improve or crash? I think it will crash and then slowly start to improve).

Another sticking point was the arrogance of the US to think that it can change a government without consulting the people first. What started this was me saying that if one were all-powerful, Hussien (sp?) might be someone you’d want to fix, though there are other higher priority things that a being of limited power might want to take care of first - by diplomacy.

At any rate, what was planned to be a 1 hour lunch was 2.5 hours by the time we left. We were talking in English and we were talking quite intensely, but no one seemed to mind (it was a crowded outdoor seating area at a small restaurant). There was, thank goodness, beer. I was exhausted by the time we got back.

Everyone have a good weekend. I’ll be back on Monday when I have Internet again!

The Tour de France went through Marseille the other day (that is the stage winner cycling down the road my bus to work runs along). At the time the doping rumors were already starting to swirl around the Tour. But now… wow — it is going to take years for the organization to recover.

And it is so sad! In my past, when I was in much better shape, I was able to cycle 100 miles in a day. I was even pretty fast. I got there by riding 30 or 40 miles every day and then perhaps 50 or 60 on the two weekends. 100 miles at a good clip is hard. And I was doing this in Chicago — which is flat flat flat.

The Tour is amazing. In 22 days (it is over this Sunday) it will cover 3,550 kilometers (2200 miles). Of the 20 days of cycling, 6 are in the mountains. They rate the mountains they climb (Category 1, etc.). The finish line for yesterday’s stage was so steep it wasn’t even rated. Humans do this. And they don’t need doping to complete it either. But these guys push themselves to the limit. It is just amazing that we can do this.

Which is why the doping is so sad. How much performance does the doping add, in absolute terms? 10%? I can’t believe it was much more than that. And read any paper (at least in the US) about Le Tour and what do you read about? The doping and the scandals. What a sad mess. Yes, I realize 10% can make a big difference when you are trying to win the race — I understand, individually, why they have done it. But globally what a disaster!

I wonder if people will learn? Will next year’s be any better? How many sponsors will have been lost? I hope most of the sponsors that have withdrawn had something written into their contracts about no pay if doping is going on. The Tour is such a feat of human insurance — it is such a waste to be distracted by this doping!

P.S. How much more complex is this going to be as we started to get good at altering the genes of a person?

I was searching for something I posted a while back in Google Groups and I stumbled on a very very old April Fools joke I posted when I was one of the info-mac moderators. I’d not gotten much feedback when that happened (was anyone fooled??) — but:

Just read this, it can’t be true can it??????????

Date: Mon, 01 Apr 1996 08:18:38 -0500
From: Gordon Watts — Brown University <gwa…@FNAL.GOV>
Subject: [!] Microsoft to buy Apple!?

[Ouch.  What will the anti-trust folks have to say about this? -Gordon]

Heh. Kind-a fun to see that an April fools joke I helped with more than 10 years ago actually did fool someone. Of course, in this day an age, I bet it would have bounced around from blog-to-blog… like some rumors…

There may be a few new readers heading to this blog, I suspect. So, a few introductions. Feel free to leave comments or ask questions. I’ll do my best to answer them (but I don’t have Internet at home right now, so I might be a little slow!).

The Rumor

Looking for more info? I’m afraid there isn’t much new out there. If you want to follow the trace of posts the best way is to follow the blog articles as they are all interconnected — which is why we call blogs echo-cambers. Here are my posts:

• Stop Already (posting referenced in the article)
• Lessons Learned (or not)
• Rumor News (Wired Article)
• Combining Results (CDF and D0)
• ATLAS Experiment and blogs

The Article

It was pretty good - I thought it was balanced. It is a bit odd because all of the people mentioned or quoted — we all know each other pretty well. I’ve been out for a beer with almost all of them. Well, there is Dr. Weinberg. I have seen Dr. Weinberg eat lunch at the University of Texas Faculty club (where I did my undergraduate work). I think I once carried a paper from a string theorist at Rutgers down to him for review. But no beer with him.

On a more personal note, I never use the word “Dude” in conversation. It was a little awkward reading that. But, that is blogging for you. How often does someone get the word “Dude!” into the NY Times? I think my family will have some fun with that…

I’m curious to see what effects it causes in the experiments. Considering that Dennis, the author, carefully talked with the spokes-people of both experiments I suspect there will be very little fallout from this article.

Who am I?

I’m a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle in the Physics department. I got my Ph.D. in 1995 from the University of Rochester. I then did 5 years of post-doctoral work at Brown University before finally ending up at UW. I’ve been there almost 7 years now. I have just started my first sabbatical — I’ve just moved to Marseille in the south of France. I’m working with some collaborators at a lab called CPPM (Centre de Physique des Particles de Marseille), and I’m here for one year.

I’ve worked on only four experiments in my lifetime. This is not very many! I started at AMY in Japan (so old it doesn’t seem to have an official web site!!), and then moved to CDF at Fermilab, I then walked around the Tevatron accelerator ring a short distance and went to work on D0. I’ve spent most of my professional life there, and I am now really delving into the next experiment, ATLAS at the LHC.

On a more personal note, I’m married to another physics professor at UW and have a 1 year old child (who I miss, darn it, because we are separated until mid-August when she will join me here in Marseille). Probably the best way to find out more about me is pick random posts on this blog and read them or look at my flickr picture feed.

My Job

I love particle physics because it seemed to me to be the perfect intersection of physics and computers and hardware. I’m not sure I could any one of those three full time. My job as an experimentalists lets me, on one hand, explore the secrets of the universe, talk  intelligently about dark matter, and on the other hand argue some obscure point about parallel computing, and perhaps also fiddle at the boundary between hardware and software (micro controllers and the like). That was why I got into this field. I’ve since discovered other things — the students and others I work with, for example. I even like teaching (seriously — people seem to think most professors at large research universities don’t like teaching — I’m sorry they had bad experiences; but it isn’t the norm among my friends).

Particle Physics

The NY Times article does a good job at describing the current hot topics. There have also been some great long articles recently in the NY Times and also the New Yorker. 

Where do I start? I have no idea. We are trying to unlock the secrets of how things work at the smallest scales (quarks and gluons) and then use that to try to understand how things works at the largest scales (the universe). We have had this beautiful model of now nature works since the late 1960’s/early 1970’s. We call it the Standard Model (yeah, I know, pretty boring). It is almost complete in the sense that we’ve seen every single particle but one that it predicts: the Higgs. The Higgs discovery will be a big deal when we finally find it (if we find it at all - but more in a second). I would not be surprised if its discovery made the front page of the New York Times. Depending on what else is going on, it may even be above the fold. Finding the Higgs is definitely winning the lottery, but not the jackpot. See, we know the Standard Model is broken — it doesn’t work at higher scales. The problem is all the measurements we’ve made have been at a lower scale that the Standard Model works too well! So we know that nature doesn’t have an infinity in it — so the Standard Model is broken — but we don’t know how to fix it yet. And there are a lot of proposals out there. Figuring out how nature solved this mathematical problem we have with our Standard Model is the big Jackpot.

The beauty of the Standard Model is that it describes all interactions of matter. In particular, it is fairly easy to use its rules to understand how the universe first evolved. And here is the key: if you can predict that, you should be able to predict a universe that looks a lot like the one we are in now. Only we can’t. Some key ingredients are missing — dark matter and dark energy. “dark” because we have no clue.

The LHC was built exactly to answer some of these questions. Ironically, the LHC was started before we realized the dark matter/dark energy problem existed. It would be a neat twist of fate if a machine not designed to solve the dark matter problem ended up solving it. But our luck is not that good.

All of us, in this field, are products of the people around us as well as ourselves. I say this especially in reference to the rumor: if you piss off your colleagues then they will not work with you in the future. Collaboration is the life blood of particle physics in a way that it isn’t in many other science disciplines. The lone scientist slaving away at his table in the basement for years and then winning the Nobel prize? Nope, it won’t happen here!

Here are a few links to explore further. They are of varying quality as I just picked them out this morning and have not had a chance to carefully review them. Let me know what you think!

• Inquiring Minds - Fermilab outreach and particle physics tutorial
• Particle Physics - Wikipedia, A bit of history and perspective.
• Teaching Resources - from CERN

What is this blog?

 I started blogging as part of an outreach program called Quantum Diaries (check them out, there are some much better bloggers than I). The constant fear is not enough people are going into science (women in particular). So, how to make it more accessible? Someone in the PR department at Fermilab came up with the idea of a group of us writing blogs for the 100’s anniversary of Einstein’s most productive year. And I found I liked it.

So what does this blog have? It has less science than most science blogs. There are some excellent science blogs out there (my favorite) – defiantly read them. If you want to find more, just follow one link or anther and you’ll find us all linking to each other. I am very impressed with how they are kept up — it takes me hours to write posts of that quality and depth (this one is over an hour in the making). This blog is much more informal. If there is something bothering me, or some trip I’ve taken, etc., I’ll post about it here.

You can click on some of the blogs I’ve listed in my blog roll if you want. You’ll quickly find they link to higher quality blogs than I do. My problem: I only read blogs sporadically. Never feel like I have enough time…

Thanks for stopping by!

In France. I should add. It is because everyone around here says numbers to quick. A garlic clove, a tomato, and some zucchini? What was that? 72 Euros? That can’t be right! Ok, here is a 5 euro note. Oh! You said 1.72 Euros! Crap, now I have another 3 1 Euro coins in my pocket!

As I mentioned, it has been almost 10 years since I’ve gone this long without Internet. I’m still alive.

I really miss being able to talk to my wife or see our kid via Skype. Sadly, Skype is outlawed in the laboratory I work.

The other thing is I now usually waste the first 45 minutes when I get to work doing dumb things that I’d normally do at home. This includes catching up on newspapers.

And I’ve started reading a book, something I’ve not done in a long long time!

Another 2-3 weeks to go!

The central question about air travel boils down to: Do commercial airline mechanics ever fly in commercial jets?

This question occurred to me while waiting for a plane to be repaired in O’Hare a few months ago. The flight from France was a bit early, and so I rushed to get an early plane to Seattle. It was delayed by 10 minutes when I got through immigration, so I sprinted. This was a real score because it was scheduled to leave a full 3 hours before the flight I had a booking on. Had it left on time I wouldn’t have made it.

Only once I’d moved my reservation over did I realized the departure time had been moved from “10 minute delay” to “no estimate.” Hmm… That is never a good sign! In response to “What’s wrong?” I got back “The pilot noticed a bent turbine blade. They are just making sure that it is bent, not broken.” That didn’t sound too bad.

I walked around to the windows and I could see the engine being worked on. There was a guy, perhaps in his 50’s, standing inside the engine. He would brace the turbine with by jamming his foot between the blades. This kept it from turning. He would then saw away at one of the blades with what looked like a regular metal file. Every now and then he would pull out some sand paper and give it a rapid sand. All the while people - managers?? - kept wandering up to him and asking him questions. All, I imagine, that boiled down to “How much longer?” They would do this every 5 minutes. Eventually he turned around and gave some sort of long lecture to one guy — no idea, but I’d like to think it went something like “I’d have already been done if you guys didn’t keep interrupting me!” He looked like that kind of guy.

Eventually one of the managers came in to update the ground crew on what was going on. As he was walking away from the desk I asked him what was up. “Well, on the pilot’s walk around inspection he discovered one of the turbine blades was bent. The engine had probably sucked something in, like a big rock. The worry is that there is now a fracture in the blade, and through the course of running the vibrations will grow the fracture until it hits the hub of the engine. Then foom! the engine will come apart.” He paused. “And that is why a pilot has so much training. For those 10 seconds.” And then he walked away.

I looked back at the engine and the fellow now sanding away at the blade. He was soon finished and we boarded and I arrived two hours earlier than my original schedule.

It is nice to know that a machine as large and complex as a Boeing 757 can still be fixed by one guy with a file. On the other hand, I’m not sure they should have let that mechanic talk to me. I was sitting right next to that engine.

Update: Check out this comment left by a retired 757/767 pilot on another post. Especially the pictures of the Chinese jet engine and youtube video of a bird strike (i wish I could have seen what that engine looked like afterwards).

I don’t have Internet — so this is a forward post. But I just realized that today is my Birthday (Sunday)! 41 years old. Actually, I have to do this to remind myself: Julia’s birthday is the 18th and so she totally eclipses my birthday now. And rightly so — she is a lot cuter than I am!