Life as a Physicist

Now. I might be more willing to spend time on a science social networking site. I can’t tell you exactly what it would offer to get me there because I’m not 100% sure what I want (see this comment on previous past). But…

At any rate, I stumbled on this post on Ars the other day:

When it comes to thinking and working internationally, scientists don’t always do as well as other professions. Scientists trained in the developing world often relocate to the US, Europe or other industrialized nations, taking with them their expertise.  The New York Academy of Sciences is determined to do something to help less-well-off nations strengthen their scientific institutions and development, and it’s harnessing the internet to make it happen, through a site called Scientists without Borders.

Clearly not aimed at particle physics (hey, I think we do OK on international collaborations!), still, it sounds interesting. At first, it looks like a contact site - you say what you are good at and then when someone comes along searching for a collaborator they might find you. There is an interesting second half to this site:

This tool will eventually create a record of accomplishments that also identifies the next steps for solving specific problems.

That got me to thinking. We already have such a tool in particle physics - the paper archive (arXiv). I think if you built a physics social networking site you’d have to drive it with data from that site. Already, if you have a new idea, you might troll that site looking for others that have done similar things. Then you might read their papers, perhaps follow up with email or a phone call. Then you’d write your own paper. You’d send them an email about the paper (like a social networking notification) and then they would read it and, of course be impressed. After that perhaps the two of you would co-write the next paper and you’d gain entry into this other person’s network of collaborators. Or something. At the moment all that happens by email. Would it be better if it was somehow automated?!? I don’t quite see it. And how should the model be adjusted for experimentalists?

Maybe friendfeed needs to gets links when one of its members posts a paper.

One of the nice things about being on a new experiment is that I’m not key to its operation. If I don’t do something, or if I sleep late then the experiment won’t be impacted. Not having that responsibility is nice - relaxing. I’ve been operating like this for almost a year now. I and a student and a bunch of others have been working hard to release a note on bottom quark tagging calibration. Fun, and will become key when data arrives. But real data will arrive only if we are lucky later this year. So, not so much pressure.

But, frankly, I’m getting tired of no pressure! There is definitely a part of my personality that likes being in the thick of it.

About 3 weeks ago I started working on a high priority software task - modifying how we write out some of our b-tagging data. The reason this is high priority is we are preparing our software for the first data - so all major changes like this need to go in so we aren’t stuck with the data in an old format. A little bit scary - all of a sudden I’m giving updates in several meetings, I get asked about how things are going in random emails. And I’m deep in the middle of the code muck - something I really don’t understand at a fundamental level.

Have to say, it is fun!! Hopefully I won’t tire of the fun until after I’ve finished the task!

On the drive from Marseille to Genova I asked the 3 others in the car if they used Instant Messaging (IM). I was the oldest in the car (getting close to 42!) and the rest ranged from mid thirties to late thirties. All are like me in that they have permanent positions. All have students, though I was the only professor - the rest were at labs around France.

How many people used IM for work? None other than me. Who used IM at all? None, other than me. On the way back I was in a car with graduate students - so mid to early twenties - but I totally forgot to ask them. However, since I rode with their advisors on the way out there I can be pretty safe in guessing they don’t use IM for conversations about physics with their advisors.

So, I have a bunch of questions. Do people use it mainly for social interactions? Or am I just in a bubble and it turns out that lots and lots of people use it for work and I just move in the wrong circles?

It was the day, not much more than two decades ago, that HEP lead the world in computing hardware and (to a lesser extent) software. We had to push it forward - the power and flexibility was just not there. I think if you look at the way we operate now - it looks very similar to how it looked back in the ’60’s. Command line. Simple text editors (vi and emacs are BIG). Batch jobs. The older set are only just getting off pine - a text/terminal mail program (moving mostly to the FireFox mail mail reader, and some to web clients).

Is there something holding us back? Or are we as a field voting with our feet: these things don’t help us get new physics results out? Perhaps we usually are in labs where you can run from one office to another and so email is good enough? IM interrupts our workflow and so we don’t want to let it in? What about all those Web 2.0 tools out there? Much of that is based on social networks and so if a lot of physicists don’t get on there, then it doesn’t really help. Are we slowly building critical mass? Or does it just not excite us yet?

Comments?

Just to make sure I stay ahead of the curve, I’m trying out friend feed - think of it as a way to aggregate all of your online activities… Of course, I don’t have many online activities.