Life as a Physicist

LHC has shown up on some blogs in the tech-sector recently. Gizmodo has some fantastic pictures of the ATLAS detector under construction.

Scoble also got a tour of the LHC, led around by Frank Taylor, a prof from MIT I know. Scoble has a huge readership in the world of tech-blogging (one of the “a-list” bloggers).

I like these efforts - inviting non-particle physicists into our field and everything we do takes continuous work. After all, most people don’t live this science day and day out - and when we suddenly show up with a new W mass measurement… well, hard to expect people to get excited out-of-the-box. The only way it works is continuous communication - and these sorts of things are just the ticket.

I visited Lausanne last night to have dinner with some friends. I don’t have a rental car on this trip to CERN. So I had to take public transportation. Round trip that was 6 CHF for the bus/tram and 41 CHF for the train. That comes to 47 CHF - which is about $47 bucks for about 1 hour of being on public transportation (and standing at bus/tram/train stops for about 40 minutes). That is some serious money!

On the way out I ran into a friend that happens to live at CERN. She makes that commute every day - so of course she gets passes to make things cheaper: 10 CHF round trip.

The 5 bottles of wine that were consumed over dinner took some of the edge off, but that was a crazy expensive! It is cheaper to rent a car for one day - about 35 euros!!

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!