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!!

This town takes May1’s seriously. It is dead. Really dead. Everything is shuttered up. I hope we have enough food for dinner this evening because it is looking like none of the usual grocery stores are even open. This is the sort of holiday that when you ask, say a bus driver, “Is the bus schedule the same everyday?” They respond “Every single day - even May 1st!”. In North America you’d say “Every single day - even Christmas!”

This is a picture of a Lilly of the Valley. People give this to each other for May 1st.

Whatever the reason, this break is definitely nicer then working on ATLAS’s transient/persistent class separation (I’ll try to say something about that later, after I’ve actually accomplished something)!

Update: Pictures from the big parade today. This parade was really about unions and workers. They take this way more serious then we do in the USA. Some of the literature handed out was quite something - this is one example of an anti-capitalist party flyer. The hammer and sickle on a red background were common themes in the flags in the parade as well.

A few weeks ago my Dad visited me here in Marseille and we took a trip along the coast to Nice. We went the slow road - a long the coast - right a long the coast. At one point we got caught in the traffic jam that is St. Tropez. St. Tropez is a playground - made famous by Brigitte Bardot.

The harbor was packed with boats that were… well excessive. Most of them were large motor boats, but there were plenty of sailboats.

However — it was cool to see that it was a sailboat that took the “excess” grand slam gold metal title. That is the picture you see here. The thing is completely computer controlled too. In fair weather I wonder if you could sail it with one person? We also joked that it probably made sail “snapping” and luffing sounds so the captain could hear what was going on — being so far away from the actual sail!

And how deep does the keel go!?!?

I’ve got a few other excessive pictures, including a panorama that shows exactly how out of hand it was in that small port.

This weekend, walking down the main drag in Marseille to the old port, I was surprised multiple times to hear conversations in English going on around me.

Summer is coming, and along with it tourists. When I was here first in 2005 it wasn’t so back. Just a few sitting in the bars along the old port. But now lots of people show up - both French and non-French. The town is really changing.

Summer is wonderful in Marseille. Warm, with enough wind to keep you from suffocating, and always sunny. Only one problem. At the end of summer it will be time for Paula, Julia, and I to return to Seattle. And teaching.

UW is a big place. And the computing folks there manage a lot of systems. Mail, of course. Our group’s computer guy knows a person involved in C&C’s mail operations and discovered that:

• 95% of all mail that arrives at UW is spam
• The record of the “sender not found” bounce messages into one account (like the ones that were causing me problems the other day) is 40,000!!! So, my problems are minor.

40,000!!! It is no wonder everyone is switching over to instant messaging.

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++!

I was reading an internal note today and stumbled on this great quote:

The success of the standard model (SM) has been quite unexpected, given its shortcomings. The number of free parameters ranging many orders of magnitude, absence of Dark Matter candidates, the hierarchy problem, lack of gauge coupling unification, and no path to incorporate gravity naturally lead to the belief that the SM is but a low-energy approximation of some more general and aesthetically pleasing theory. Yet despite all e orts no significant deviations from the SM predictions have been found to date.

The way that starts is priceless!

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.

The LHC hasn’t delivered its first collisions yet. ATLAS and CMS haven’t taken collider data yet. But we already have to plan for the next steps. There was a recent kickoff event at CERN for people working on the upgrade to the LHC - the so-called SLHC (Super Large Hadron Collider).

That picture above is a simulation of what the CMS tracker would look like at a luminosity of 10^35 - that is 4 orders of magnitude greater than what we expect to be running at by the middle of 2009. Being able to reconstruct that many particles is going to require both experiments to replace their tracking detectors with more robust and more accurate detectors. This takes years and years to prepare for - the R&D for much of the replacement is already well underway. They are talking about installing these new detectors in 2013 - 5 years from now.

The accelerator talk is also fascinating — but my favorite talk was from MLM who was summarizing some of the physics possibilities of the SLHC:

While there is no guarantee that any deviation from the Standard Model will be found, the existence of physics beyond the Standard Model will demand and fully justify these studies: we’ll be measuring the properties, however trivial, of something which we know exists, as opposed to blindly looking for “we don’t know what” as we are unfortunately doing today!

Worth a look if you are curious about the next step!

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!