Life as a Physicist

Noticing something very bad is about to happen when your child sits down on a raised plaque at the base of a tree, and you only have a split second to give warning, your brain comes up with the following sentence: “Honey - Julia shouldn’t sit on that inclined plane because it is covered in poop!”

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.

Graduate student and advisor bonding over Joss Whedon and Buffy.

Having to go from 8pm to the next morning at 9:30am without a portable. Didn’t get to write a talk I was asked at the last minute to talk about and also got a full 8 hours of sleep. Not done that in months.

A less scary moment was getting lost on the streets of Genova, Italy. This city is packed to the gills with buildings - it is impossible to get a lay-of-the-land unless you are on the side of a hill.

I have pictures, as usual. Along with some from a pretty stunning hike.

I noticed in a Fermilab Today issue (the May 3rd issue) that Fred Ullrich retired. He ran Visual Media Services forever (well, as long as I can remember). I’ve interacted with him on and off for years. Sometimes begging him to prepare a poster for a conference that I’d waited until the last minute to finish off. I wanted to send him a congrats email. But I can’t find his email address!

So, as usual, I’m going to take this one little anecdote and extrapolate it way beyond reasonable limits (this is a blog, after all). The normal place to look for this sort of thing is the Fermilab white pages - an online directory. But the problem is Fermilab has taken computer and employee security to the level that pretty much the day you leave Fermilab all trace of you ever existing is removed from their databases. I realize this is how all of corporate America (and perhaps the rest of the world) works, but the problem is Fermilab feels like a “home” to me - and so this seems like fairly harsh treatment. Not something you’d do to your friend - especially as they are leaving on good terms. Queue the refrain “Ah, it was better in the old days…”

Bummer. At any rate - Fred - thanks for all your help over the years, and have fun starting the second half of your life!

Visual Media Service has a great collection of pictures taken over the years at Fermilab (ha! the page still says to contact Fred — he isn’t gone yet!!). Well worth looking through!

Being an American, I’m a capitalist. Thus, I’m greatly in favor of competition. And there is a big competition coming down the pike: ATLAS vs. CMS. Both are going to be racing to find the not only the big discoveries but also to be the first to see a Z boson, or the first to see a top pair production. In the long run I think this competition will be healthy - it will make sure results come out in a timely fashion and keep the two experiments on their toes. It is most embarrassing, after all, when your competitor points out a big mistake you’ve made!!

A bunch of us were discussing this over lunch the other day at the ATLAS Genova b-tagging workshop. One person was very against the idea of the competition, pointing to the damage it had done at CDF and D0. This surprised me; I’d always thought the competition there was pretty healthy. No, he said, from the outside he sees lots of name-calling and trashing of each other’s results.

Yuck. I hope there are very few people doing that. I can understand where the feeling comes from- you work for months or years only to be beat in the last few weeks. The science is intensity personal. Still…

This lead to us trying to sort out what was good and what was bad about competition. The title of this post was the tag line we came up with.

N.B. Not all American’s are capitalists!

Or at least your career?

I stumbled on this article while trolling the net. It is a bit sensationalist, but the message is that people who work from home always don’t advance as quickly as people who come into the office.

This is relevant to me and experimental particle physics because we are a truley global “company” - with small groups littered around the world. Most groups are probably less than 20 people in size - many are less than 10. We are effectively all telecommuting on this large LHC experiment. Many of us, including myself, have always thought that we need to maintain a presence at CERN (this is based on my experience at Fermilab).

Clearly not everyone can live there full time. I have to teach back in Seattle, for example. I use the standard tools to keep in touch: video conferencing, instant messaging, email, Skype, etc. I’ve never felt it was as effective as being there, however. Indeed, this is one of the reasons behind the sabbatical - go somewhere else, learn something new, and bring it back to the university - thereby enriching the local research program. Besides, who wouldn’t want to go to a lab where the world’s experts all congregate to work on a particular set of problems? What better place to learn and to push research forward?!

I have no idea how much these two are connected - telecommuters not being as successful and remote HEP research — but I suspect there are parallels.

By the way - I find it very hard to interpret the cause and effect relationship in cases like this — there is so much sociology involved. For example, the boss doesn’t see you so doesn’t think you are getting as much work done - which may or may not be true. Or perhaps people who work from home tend in the first place not to be as ambitious as those that don’t (I have no idea). I know that I like coming into the office - being able to walk down the hall and ask questions makes me feel, if not be, must more effective. Not sure how the others that I’m asking the question feel!

Note: Written while waiting for ATLAS code to compile. Yawn!!

An email just went by on a public mailing list that contained the following gem:

I have many users who have no compiler, as they are physicists and have no use for C++.

I forget that in HEP we could not do physics without C++!

This month’s Symmetry Magazine has a feature on physics rock and blues bands. Ironically, I was at CERN last week for the ATLAS week and the Canettes played (check out their home page, as of this posting they are using one of my pictures there). I’ve seen them twice now, and they are a lot of fun. And they can pack a pretty large bar too!

P.S. One of their members runs the whole CERN computing department. Another member runs the ATLAS secretariat - which basically means the whole experiment.

I have complained about the Margin Lady before:

The Margin Lady occupies a special place in the physics-thesis-writing ethos. … You knew the Margin Lady was on the horizon so you used a document template that was sure to satisfy her: figures just so, page number is the right spot, margins just perfect. It just doesn’t matter. No matter how perfect you will have to make corrections.

I am currently helping to edit some 200 pages of some 2000 or so pages that ATLAS will release at some point in the near (I hope) future. One of the things I’m responsible? Make sure the figures are done right. Make sure everyone uses the same units. Make sure everyone is printing on A4 paper. Make sure the margins are right!

I am the margin lady! Shoot me now!

Boy — you could do a lot on that kind of a vacation. You could have a nice house sitting out on the edge of an island… The penthouse for a night in downtown New York (I jest! I jest).

Well. I spent 20,000 on a vacation! Sadly, I just gave the money to Uncle Sam. Yep - Taxes! Isn’t that grand!?

The rules for working out of country are fairly complex. In general, however, our government takes a rather enlightened view towards working abroad: if you get paid out of country they are willing to give you a rather hefty tax break on that money. Which makes sense, really - if you are out of country you aren’t using as many of the services you would normally be if you were working in country. And besides, the more Americans working abroad, the better for our country’s image and also better because they will learn new things and bring them back!

However, while enlightened, they have some rather strict rules about what “out of country” means. And we violated them. If the rules had been for “out of seattle” instead of “out of the USA” then that cool $20,000 would have been sitting in my bank account! It was the Christmas trip back to the USA that did it. We were back in the USA for one full month. Some vacation and a bunch of work for both of us. What is really bad is that most of this is going to hit us on next year’s taxes. That combined with the weak dollar is going to make this year suck!

Actually, given the type of career that Paula and I have I don’t think we could work out of the country and also satisfy these rules - we have to travel back to the USA too frequently. Which is really unfortunate!