Life as a Physicist

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!!

One one of my lasts posts about computers and HEP, Kevin left a comment.

It would appear to me that the LHC has been for many years “methods development,” yet I’m assuming a couple people already have tenure on it and more than a couple Ph Ds have been awarded for developing the technology.

As far as I know, in the USA, no institutions will give a Ph.D. for an experimentalist if they have not touched data. As far as I know, no one has managed to get an experimental LHC Ph.D. in the USA by just running Monte Carlo or working on a bit of the detector. Now, parts of the LHC have taken data — i.e. the test beam.

The point of the test beam is exactly as it sounds - we put portions of the detector in the test beam to test them out. We fire known particles at known energies into bits of the detector and make sure they react (and readout) as we expect them. If they don’t, we adjust the physics models we use to simulate them or perhaps find something wrong with the detectors and fix them. It is not common to get a Ph.D. in the USA on test beam data, but it has happened. For example, D0’s initial startup (Run I) was so delayed I think a few people did this and then remained on D0 as post-docs to get their hands on real data.

Europe is different - there you can get a Ph.D. on Monte Carlo studies or on building a detector. As far as I know, it isn’t viewed as any different than getting a Ph.D. on data.

But, if you are in the USA, what do you do? This is exactly why most HEP groups maintain a foot in more than one pie. For example, I do a lot of work on ATLAS now - but I also do a lot of work on D0. D0 is a running experiment and produces real results. My tenure decision was on D0. I could have started on ATLAS when I arrived at UW 8 years ago - there was plenty of work to do - but it was correctly seen as suicide. Instead I worked on D0. I only just now have graduate students working on the LHC. I bet if you looked at the number of US graduate students on the LHC it was rather small and is now rapidly increasing. And that is because we are finally in the time frame that these students can get a Ph.D. on LHC data.

Finally, I have heard of programs that offer Ph.D. in detector physics and accelerator physics - which is very different from the work I do. I know less about them than I should, however.

However, Kevin correctly points out, once you are past the tenure bar you can just do what you want. Want to put all your marbles in the LHC basket? Go for it - no problem! Directly addressing the implied question in Kevin’s comment - presumably the person on the LHC who is making these criticisms had to go through the tenure process. And hopefully they are applying the same standards that were applied to them. Sometimes it is hard - I went through the qualifying exam as a student. Hated it, and it wasn’t clear that it offered any net gain for me or my fellow students. I passed, and now, about 15 years later, I sometimes catch myself thinking “it wasn’t that bad…” Some people carry that to an extreme. In the tenure case this is exactly why it is necessary to consult with other people in the department to understand if this is something unique criticism held by one person or is generally shared criticism.

Final installment of this 3-part series next.

UPDATE: Changed the tone of MC physics paragraph above.

One one of my lasts posts about computers and HEP, Kevin left a comment.

After reading your blog (and enjoying it of course) for over two years now, I feel you have discussed a lot of issues in programming, ROOT, C++ vs other languages, computers and other things that are tools to do science but which are not themselves science (or at least not physics). I ask because a physics colleague of mine has recently been warned that he is doing too much methods development (and publishing on these developments).

This is a scary situation. My own tenure decision occurred while the Tevatron was struggling to get itself up off the ground. As a result the physics topics I’d been talking about when I got hired at UW were nowhere near being finished. It was a close scrape (at least, that was how I felt). I had physics in my pocket, but much of it was not yet published. UW, which has had some ridiculously good table-top experimenters - holds everyone to a rather high standard. And even under the best of circumstances a HEP person is already at a disadvantages when those standards are applied.

That said, here is my advice. You have to have the physics results. Most big research universities think developing a new method is cool — especially if it will let you do a whole new set of physics results in the future — but the method itself or the sake of the method isn’t all that interesting. The physics results and potential to do physics results is. I have seen people in HEP, for example, get overly involved in the methods development and lose track of the physics side of things. It does hurt them - and this chestnut is true outside of HEP as well.

Now, it would appear that your colleague is not in particle physics but is in table top physics (or similar). One thing that goes into a tenure judgement is expected performance in their field. For example, a theorist is expected to have n-papers per year (I’m not kidding; I’ve heard this said), a table top experimenter isn’t expected to do much their first two years as they build up their lab, but then a good paper every 6 months or so (depending on the challenge they’re facing, of course). In that sense, the tenure decision depends on what subfield you are working in.

Finally, if only one colleague has made this criticism well, it may be that it can be ignored. The first thing to do is ask others in the same sub-field (who have tenure, preferably) if enough work is being done. Often departments will have a formal review process - make sure to have frank discussions during that review process. Make sure to have tenured friends in the faculty that can report on discussions that happen in closed meetings. Finally, look one can look at other people at other institutions in the same field — especially the ones that are perceived as “hot shots.” What are they doing differently? Sometimes it is just a matter of a high wattage bulb burning brightly, other times you can see strategic decisions they made - copy them!! I guess most of this is common sense, but it never hurts to repeat it!

More tomorrow on Kevin’s comment.

In 2007 there were several tragic incidents on college campuses around the USA. Sadly, University of Washington was one of them. As a result of this many campuses have instituted early warning systems of one kind or another. At UW one of the forms this takes is the campus police now send Warning Notifications of anything involving a dangerous situation around campus.

So, if someone is mugged late at night, or held up at gun point, or a person is attacked — anything that put a person in danger — these warnings are sent out. They contain a fairly complete description of the incident along with its status (caught the perpetrator or not), and then a helpful list of things to do to avoid getting yourself into a similar situation.

I appreciate these emails, and I don’t want them to stop. But I find them a bit spooky. I’ve been at the UW for over 7 years now. I’ve never thought of it as having crime. It must have, obviously - 35,000 students, and a large campus in an urban area. And these emails are thankfully rare. But it does make me realize my idilyic representation of the campus isn’t quite right.

 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!

I’m filling out a grant application. There are a series of questions that the University asks before it will allow you to submit the grant. Things like “Will human subjects be used in the course of this grant?” or “Will you or anyone else be exposed to radiation as a consequence of this grant?”.

There is a new one, however, that I don’t remember from before: “Does this research involve the use and/or creation of human embryonic stem cells?” Unfortunately, this question is new enough that the help blurb doesn’t say anything about it yet.

Wonder why it is there?

Sad to say, but the Society of Physics students BBQ was better than the department awards BBQ (holy cow — I didn’t take one picture of that!!). Why? Two reasons. First, instead of having University Catering services do the BBQ, Jermey’s parents dropped by and did it. Home made tabouli. Hard to beat that. Second — we had a egg drop.

The egg contraptions were dropped off the top of our 5 story physics building onto the stone patio out front. Thanks to the building manager for helping us get away with this. I got some video of it. My video camera has this very cool slow-motion feature. Unfortunately, I hadn’t quite gotten the hang of it, so I only caught a few of the drops.

This is a picture of a a very very large and very very flat granite table in the basement of the UW physics building. It is about to be split into bits and carted out and thrown in the trash.

It was used as the construction platform for UW’s ATLAS forward muon chamber construction. In order to correctly reconstruct muons this granite table had to be ultra flat — the specs say to 0.000125 at 71 degrees F (measured May 17, 1999). For almost three years a glue robot traveled its surface putting together the muon chambers. That task finished more than a year ago, and the physics building needs the space back for some astrophysics experiments.

That granite table doesn’t fit through any doors. In fact, we had to knock out part of the wall of the room and the hallway in order to move it in (I wish I had some pictures from then). Sadly, since no one else is interested in it, we will be splitting it into bits instead of the wall. The week of June 11th a group will use a diamond saw to cit it into bits. Sadly, because of dust and mess, the whole section will be sealed off: it isn’t likely I’ll be able to get in to see the work in progress.

More recent pictures of the table, if you are interested, can be found here.

The end of the year is always busy at a university. Other than all the committees that suddenly realize the year is almost over and they had better get together and do something, many students and advisors pack in their defenses in the last several weeks.

I’ve been to several over the past month — all quite good. But three stick out in my mind. First was a physics one. Michael Endres was working with David Kaplan and gave a great defense. Usually, when the advisor introduces the student giving the talk, they will give one or two anecdotes about the student. David was no different. He started out with “And, Michael has been exceptionally good at killing all of my good ideas…” The problem was the way he said it: it took a while to figure out that he wasn’t holding a grudge.

Later the same day I saw the general exam for Can Kozcaz (Can is pronounced John). On topological string theory. Ouch. His advisor is Amer Iqbal, from the math department. A colleague of Amer’s from the math department came along as well - Charles Doran. After Can would answer a question (usually quite well), Amer would add some detail. Then Charles would kick in something. Quickly the two of them would be lost in a detailed discussion of some fact of string theory. Can and the rest of us would sit quietly and listen.

Finally, I was the external representative for Ryan Torn in Atmospheric Sciences, who was advised by Gregory Hakim. Hakim and I met on some random university committee and both of us were looking for external representatives for students of ours. Every Ph.D. committee requires an external representative - this is to make sure there is nothing untoward going on and to give the student someone outside the department to talk to if need be (of the 5 or so I’ve been on, this has never been an issue). This defense was cool because of the topic. I know very little about climate modeling - and Ryan’s whole topic was on modeling various weather events and the stability of the modeling. It was very cool to see techniques we use in physics being used in other sciences as well — like ensemble testing. Ryan was also a great speaker — so it made it possible for me to understand most of what he was talking about. One thing I found out, btw, is that a great deal of the most accurate weather information that is input to these models comes from balloons. They are released, travel up until they pop — transmitting information all the way. Seems so old school… BTW, the anecdote that Greg told… straight from a Sinfeld episode — the doctors at a rental car agency — Ryan was the ass man, apparently. Ryan’s expression was priceless when he realized what anecdote Greg was going to tell to the room full of 50 of his colleagues and (if I remember correctly) mother.

Remember I posted about all those textbooks I head to read? I just looked at that picture in that post. If only the stack of textbooks had remained that small! Well, we have finally figured out what textbook to use for our next year’s introductory course. That was a lot of work. The committee was 9 people (imagine having to coordinate that!). It came down to Young vs Tipler. Tipler had a slight edge in the end.

This is big money for the publishers. I think we run about 1000 students a quarter through the course. My guess is between 1000 and 2000 of those textbooks are purchased every year. I’ve been on this committee before - but some things happened this year that I’d not seen before. For example - I got gifts. A starbucks card and some weird-o little wire sculpture. A friend of mine, who was the chair of another textbook selection committee was offered a nice lunch (he declined). I’m not sure of the ethics involved here — but it feels like it is getting close to the line!

Now, the only thing left is to get rid of all these textbooks!