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As a follow-up on this recent entry, I wanted to say a little bit more about what it means to be an experimental particle physicist. To be fair, what I am about to write is probably easily generalised to anybody doing basic scientific research in an academic environment.
My thesis is quite simple: Being an experimental particle physicist is not a job. It is not even a career. It is a calling, a way of life.
To do what we do, we must spend a ridiculous number of years in school beyond the undergraduate level. I believe that five to seven is the norm in the United States. During this time, we assemble the diverse array of skills that I talked about in my recent entry. After graduating, we compete for an ever-scarcer number of jobs as post-docs and, later, faculty. These jobs pay roughly half of what our credentials could earn us if we chose to leave academia and work in private industry. These jobs pay roughly one third of what we could earn if we left research physics and entered the financial sector... because, yes, Wall Street and their ilk love to hire Ph.Ds in maths and physics and other intensively quantitative subjects to do financial analysis. Assuming that we successfully procure a job in academia -- with the lower salary that it offers -- we then proceed to work all sorts of ridiculously long hours, including weekends and holidays. The labour unionist in me sometimes cringes at the things that the physicist in me does!
So why do we do it? Because it is more than a job or a career. We do this because of a fundamental need to know -- and be a part of the process of uncovering -- the fundamentals of how the Universe works.
Wednesday night is a good example of this. I left Italy, after working ten days straight -- including a four day holiday weekend -- and returned to Skullcrusher Mountain. When I got off the bus near the flat, I started running inside.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cheshcat had warmed up some food for me, but the first thing I did when I got home was to pull open the laptop. Why? Was it some perverse need to read LiveJournal after a twelve hour hiatus? No, of course not! The Mini-BooNE experiment had -- at long last -- presented their first results while I had been in transit... and I desperately needed to know what those results were. Mini-BooNE is a neutrino oscillation experiment at Fermilab and, since I had been a neutrino oscillation guy during my days on Super-Kamiokande, I was particularly interested to know what they had uncovered. It was possible that they could have discovered evidence for the existence of a fourth type of neutrino (known as a "sterile" neutrino)... and that would have rocked my Universe! As it turns out, their paper seems to find against the existence of a sterile neutrino -- as was much more likely and far less interesting -- though, sadly, not conclusively so.
The moral of this story? After ten consecutive days of work, you don't come home at 10:30pm and immediately go to check on the latest news in your field -- with nobody pressuring you to do so -- unless you consider what you are doing as having a greater end than simply a paycheck or a way to advance your career.
In a way, experimental particle physicists have a lot in common with monks, I think. But perhaps that is best left as the subject for some future musings...
My thesis is quite simple: Being an experimental particle physicist is not a job. It is not even a career. It is a calling, a way of life.
To do what we do, we must spend a ridiculous number of years in school beyond the undergraduate level. I believe that five to seven is the norm in the United States. During this time, we assemble the diverse array of skills that I talked about in my recent entry. After graduating, we compete for an ever-scarcer number of jobs as post-docs and, later, faculty. These jobs pay roughly half of what our credentials could earn us if we chose to leave academia and work in private industry. These jobs pay roughly one third of what we could earn if we left research physics and entered the financial sector... because, yes, Wall Street and their ilk love to hire Ph.Ds in maths and physics and other intensively quantitative subjects to do financial analysis. Assuming that we successfully procure a job in academia -- with the lower salary that it offers -- we then proceed to work all sorts of ridiculously long hours, including weekends and holidays. The labour unionist in me sometimes cringes at the things that the physicist in me does!
So why do we do it? Because it is more than a job or a career. We do this because of a fundamental need to know -- and be a part of the process of uncovering -- the fundamentals of how the Universe works.
Wednesday night is a good example of this. I left Italy, after working ten days straight -- including a four day holiday weekend -- and returned to Skullcrusher Mountain. When I got off the bus near the flat, I started running inside.
cheshcat had warmed up some food for me, but the first thing I did when I got home was to pull open the laptop. Why? Was it some perverse need to read LiveJournal after a twelve hour hiatus? No, of course not! The Mini-BooNE experiment had -- at long last -- presented their first results while I had been in transit... and I desperately needed to know what those results were. Mini-BooNE is a neutrino oscillation experiment at Fermilab and, since I had been a neutrino oscillation guy during my days on Super-Kamiokande, I was particularly interested to know what they had uncovered. It was possible that they could have discovered evidence for the existence of a fourth type of neutrino (known as a "sterile" neutrino)... and that would have rocked my Universe! As it turns out, their paper seems to find against the existence of a sterile neutrino -- as was much more likely and far less interesting -- though, sadly, not conclusively so.The moral of this story? After ten consecutive days of work, you don't come home at 10:30pm and immediately go to check on the latest news in your field -- with nobody pressuring you to do so -- unless you consider what you are doing as having a greater end than simply a paycheck or a way to advance your career.
In a way, experimental particle physicists have a lot in common with monks, I think. But perhaps that is best left as the subject for some future musings...
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From:
no subject
My mother was a Ph.D. in Statistics from Columbia. Worked for NHTSA doing safety regulatory stuff. Loved her job. Loved her field. To wit:
My earliest childhood memories are of yellow pads of paper my sister and I referred to as being full of "greek heiroglyphics". These were problems she was solving from the Mathematical Monthly. She subscribed to the thing from before I was born until she died.
When she went to publish her doctoral thesis she her advisor gave her a piece of bad news. 1) This big high muckity muck math guy from the USSR just published a paper where he says "There is no A that is B" and her paper said "Choose and A that is also B". and 2) The advisor was going on sabbatical monday.
She had to pull two all nighters and found an example that was A and B. Gave it in her paper.
Fast forward 6 mos later or so: A guy named Petrov, another big math guy from the USSR was in NYC for a UN function and stopped by her City College office to say he really enjoyed her paper. Turns out he didn't like the first guy, and had written to the journal that pubished his paper questioning the assumption Mom had to blow away. Mom was 5'2" tall, 31, part-time, and very pregnant with me. I'm sure Petrov never let the first guy (whose name I CANNOT remember) forget he was contradicted successfully by an American Housewife.
What amazed me was Mom never told me the story until I was in my 20's. She didn't think it was that big of a deal. That's like David not mentioning Goliath to his kids...
From:
no subject
I think I'm going to "follow my bliss" and go make some popcorn...
From:
The Boonies
But as we all know, if anyone confirms LSND, the terrorists win.
From:
Re: The Boonies
However, the results themselves are, in my opinion, an enormous let-down. I had hoped that LSND would have been confirmed -- providing evidence for either a sterile neutrino or strong CP violation. I had expected that LSND would have been finally laid in its grave. I had feared that the results would be inconclusive. Damn shame to find that the third is true.
So I can understand why people were all psyched up for this talk. And I can even understand -- with disappointment -- their results being inconclusive. There are smart people working in Mini-BooNE and the data just happens to be what it is. Not their fault. What I cannot understand -- and what irks me -- is just what a big deal they have made over their inconclusive result. Did you know that there is a New York Times article today on the Mini-BooNE [lack of a] result? Read it here (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/science/12neutrino.html?_r=1&oref=slogin). What the...?!? I mean, there was a big New York Times article (front page of the print edition) on June 5th 1998, when Super-Kamiokande discovered neutrino oscillation. That makes sense. But having a big media release to herald inconclusive results? What's the sense in that? I wonder if I -- still in my first decade as a physics researcher -- am becoming a cynic already. But it just seems plain stupid to whip up such a big fuss about such an insignificant result.
In reply to a post I made last week about particle physicists, you pointed out (correctly) that, at the end of the day, our goal is to better understand the universe that we live in. And, as we have all been taught, even a null result -- while disappointing -- teaches us something about the universe. But Mini-BooNE's first release is not even a null result! I do not feel like I understand the universe any better today than I did two days ago, before they made their release. Hence, all their fanfare amounts to much ado about nothing in my eyes. Knock off the celebrations, Booners, and get back to work!
P.S. At last, the goal of the terrorists have been revealed! They are secretly in the employ of sterile neutrinos...