Life as a Physicist

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!

Ok, this wasn’t April 1st, rather April 4th. What is worse is CMS saw him first. Darn!

That picture is of the ATLAS detector and Peter Higgs, the fellow whose last name is attached to the Higgs particle - the particle that all of us are after.

See? ATLAS saw him!

Coincidentally an email conversation broke out on a D0 mailing list around the time of this picture discussing the origins of the Higgs mechanism. It was sparked by this yahoo news article. The title is “‘God particle’ expected to be found soon.” Hmmm. Expected to be found? Not sure we are that sure… At any rate.

The email conversation was interesting because because it pointed out that in science often more than one person has the same idea at the same time. Discovery is partly having all the bits in place to build the discovery on. Once all the bits are in place then several people can make the leap.

I’m not familiar with this bit of history, besides Peter Higgs, there was also Robert Brout, Francois Englert, and Tom Kibble in Europe. There are two in America too - Gerald Guralnik and C.R. Hagen. I note that on the Englert page what we normally call the Higgs mechanism is called the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism. On the Kibble page it notes that he is credited with the co-discovery of the Higgs with Guralnik and Hagen, the beauty of wikipedia! [they are all basically right, I believe]. Oh — hey — and the UR home page has something up about Hagen as well.

I went to the University of Rochester for my graduate work and my quantum mechanics class was taught by Hagen. At the time I didn’t fully appreciate the work he had done.

BaBar closed down the other day. Well, the long running PEP-II collider shut down, and BaBar depended on it for its collisions. The shutdown came a bit earlier than planed due to the science budget cuts.

BaBar has had a long career. If you are curious about its legacy just check out the 528 or so published papers that can be found on SPIRES. It will be missed!

I really didn’t want to say something about this article. Actually, at first I wondered if it was just an excuse to show a truly awesome picture I wasn’t going to write anything. But then it started showing up on tech blogs, it rose to near the top of the New York Time’s most emailed articles. And non-physics friends of mine started asking what I thought about it. And then I saw some of the comments left on the article at the Herald Tribune’s version of the article (read them - it is worth it). I agree with Peter Woit: “it’s unclear why the story deserves any attention” However, I can hold out only so long.

Here is what I think: this article has the legs for reasons similar to why ID and Creationists are able to push the “evolution is only a theory” so effectively.

If you don’t have time to read the article: Wagner (ex physics researcher, lives in Hawaii) and Sancho (author, researcher on time theory (!?), lives somewhere in Spain) are suing Fermilab, the Department of Energy, and CERN to prevent the LHC from being turned on. Their’s is a doomsday worry: a small black hole or something similar will be created in the center of one of the detectors and will quickly expand to eat up the whole universe. Including us. I actually think that I’ve seen Wagner. One day, when I was a graduate student at Fermilab, I remember seeing a collection of people protesting outside the Batavia gate. I didn’t stop, but some friends did. It was someone from Hawaii who was worried we were going to end the universe. I don’t remember the name, but I suspect it was Wagner.

Now, in the evolution and creationism debate we scientist types call evolution a theory. In science it doesn’t get much more iron clad than that - pretty much the top of the heap. Note that we very carefully do not call it a fact. The reason is that science is always looking to improve the answers. We may have a model that fits all of our observations - but that isn’t to say that we’ve not missed something thus will need to extend the model or theory at a later time to account for new observations. Scientists are very careful about declaring the limits of their knowledge, and are very reluctant to go out on a limb and make a statement for which they do not have supporting evidence. That is part of the reason why we don’t call evolution a fact.

Now, lets go back to the article. There are lots of papers talking about mini-black holes and their possible production at the LHC. So far no one has seen any evidence of a black hole generated at any of the operating accelerators. But can you get any scientist to declare: “Absolutely, under no circumstances, ever will there be a black hold like this produced.”? I doubt it. If you asked a particle physicsts if they were worried about it - I don’t know of any that would be. Most would love to be at CERN, in fact, when the LHC starts up. I’d love to be there, but I may be teaching instead.

There is another aspect in this - risk evaluation. For example, it is much more dangerous to drive in your car than fly in an airplane. That is the raw science (statistics, whatever) of it. Yet we fear flying. When it comes to something like this how do you evaluate the risk? There is no way a non-scientist can do it themselves. The more science literacy there is the better people will understand the language that scientists use, but… And there is no way you would want to limit scientific endeavors and research to the list of topics that the non-scientist can easily understand! Ahhh… outreach!

Obligatory joke: fear not; us particle physicists will be first to pay if we’re wrong.

But you have to admit — that is one amazing picture of CMS! These large detectors are stunning. I think someone should gather up the copyrights for some of these pictures and make a lulu.com book or something like that.

Sean Caroll, one of the famous bloggers behind the Cosmic Variance blog, is giving the colloquia in my department today at the University of Washington. Unfortunately, I’m over here in Marseille, so I’ll miss the talk. Too bad, because he always gives a great talk! Good luck, Sean!

I missed another great talk by the deputy spokes person of ATLAS on Monday, Fabiola Gianotti, which from reports sounds like it was fantastic. I’ll have to get those slides.