Life as a Physicist

When the NYTimes published its recent article about the Higgs hunt, the author, Dennis Overbye, used “The God Particle” — its nick name. This nick name comes from a book by Leon Lederman about the hunt for the Higgs, and is titled… yes you guessed it, The God Particle.

I saw statements like the following on the blogs:

Apparently, Overbye also got a lot of email complaining that the use of “The God Particle” ruined an otherwise perfectly good article. In fact, he got so much feed back that he felt compelled to write an essay talking about it:

But physicists groan when they hear it referred to as the “God particle” in newspapers and elsewhere (and the temptation to repeat it, given science reporters’ desperate need for colorful phrases in an abstract and daunting field, is irresistible). Even when these physicists approve of what you have written about their craft, they grumble that the media are engaging in sensationalism, or worse.

I have to say — I don’t get it. Sure, I’m not a fan many things that have happened to the USA in recent times that can be traced to organized religion — or at least people wrapping themselves in the religious flag. But to deny myself the ability to use those word that are connected with religion because I might be seen as giving support to that??

I have the same problem with the words pro-choice, pro-life, abortion, etc. If you are pro-choice you should not call yourself anti-abortion — because that gets the abortion word there and that scares people. Are people really that dumb? Does America just have these knee-jerk reactions based on the words and not what we mean? As if to support someone that disagrees with me, you’ll note I’ve taken perhaps one the most hot-button issues out there as an example. I suppose in a country where the presidential election will be fought based on 30 second advertisements where every word mentioned goes through poling and a focus group…

I think Overbye’s conclusion – get used to it, we’ll be calling it the God Particle for a long time — is correct. Lets work on finding it. Whoever finds it can then help write the press release as a reward. I’m willing to bet a good deal of beer that it will be very hard for even the scientists who help shape that press release to avoid the words “God Particle”.

Many people ask if you can do ATLAS physics at UW and never travel to CERN. The answer is no. You can do a lot of physics at UW — in fact, I suspect you could do all the physics you wanted — but it would take a lot longer — and you’d never be able to keep up with the people that did travel to CERN.

Coming back from dinner this evening is a case-in-point. The #9 bus, which goes from downtown Geneva to CERN, was packed at 10:30. By the time it thinned out I found myself standing next to a group that sounded like they were from CERN. One thing lead to another and I discovered they were working on GRID software, and, in particular, condor.

This has been one of my pet things — using VM’s (Virtual Machines) to run GRID jobs so you can avoid all the setup issues that generally one has to deal with (i.e. did you get the version of python right? etc.). And it turned out they were experts in using VM’s for doing GRID jobs. I got lots of good ideas out of that — we stood at the bus stop for perhaps another 20 minutes after the bus left exchanging email addresses and names.

All from a chance meeting. It is like the coffee house cooler, but on a bus. Travel will always be a necessary part of all types of physics. Too bad, on one hand!

 Mark Emmert, the president of the University of Washington, just sent around an internal email: last year the university received more than $1 billion dollars in funding from federal and other sources (about 80% of it was federal).

That is a lot of grant funding! I’d heard that UW had the largest grant funding of all public universities in the USA. What I didn’t realize was, first, we’ve done that since 1974. And in since 1969 we’ve been top 5 for all universities — and recently only Johns Hopkins beats us. Ok — now this seems like a truly phenomenal amount of money! It is kind-a fun realizing that the grant money our group brings in goes towards that. Of course, it is a piddly amount. I think the way you get to $1 billion is by having lots of centers funded to the tune of 50 million a year each or similar sized projects.

Last I heard (and this was before the NIH changed its funding profile) this was something like 70% medical grants and 30% natural sciences. I doubt it will have changed much given that federal funding has been flat since those days. We sciences have some catching up to do!

This also explains why we get audited so much!

Now, if only the university had money to hire more professors!