Comments on: A Day in the Life

By: Another day in the life | Cosmic Variance

Another day in the life | Cosmic Variance — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 23:48:47 +0000

[...] Here at Cosmic Variance we occasionally grant the gawking masses a brief glimpse into the glamorous and sexy world of the professional physicist. So, for those of you keeping score at home, I just did a quick count: in the last 24 hours I have sent 35 emails. Sadly, I have received 54 emails, so it looks like I’m still falling behind. (No, this doesn’t include spam — I usually get between 100 and 150 of those per day, but I do have a very good spam filter.) [...]

By: JoAnne

JoAnne — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 05:41:53 +0000

Aaron F: Indeed new ideas just tend to sprout, as Clifford spelled out. I never have the time to work on all of them and have to pick and choose.

Citrine: Indeed the caffiene factor is most joked about. However, at least at SLAC, many of us are caffiene-free (for medical reasons due to previous mistreatments of the powerful drug). So coffee is not a factor.

By: Clifford

Clifford — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 01:12:25 +0000

Aaron F.

If you can’t think of something, you find out what others are thinking. In other words, you read a paper, read a book, go to a seminar, (check a blog), ichat or call a colleague and ask a question, etc. Pretty soon, you’ve got new stuff to chew on and useful thoughts spurt out all over the place.

Cheers,

-cvj

By: citrine

citrine — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 01:01:46 +0000

Aaron,

According to the mathematician Erdos, a mathematician is a machine that turns coffee into equations. I’d say that this is true of many theoretical physicists as well.

By: Aaron F.

Aaron F. — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 01:58:03 +0000

Great post!!! I’ve always wondered what theoretical physicists and mathematicians do all day. I mean, if you’re an experimentalist or an engineer, you can fiddle with machinery and analyze data and such… but I can’t imagine getting paid to sit around and think. What if you couldn’t think of anything? I’d feel so guilty…

By: What are the odds? | Cosmic Variance

What are the odds? | Cosmic Variance — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 06:28:22 +0000

[...] Today, I continued on the deck staining project (as mentioned in a post yesterday). I needed a newspaper to put under the brushes and can of stain. Yesterday was recycle day, so I threw out all my old newsprint. Scouring the garage, I came across an old newspaper, still covered in plastic. I took it out of the plastic, picked a few pages at random from the middle and placed it under my can of stain. About an hour later, dipping my brush into the can, I saw a headline staring out at me: Bloggers Learn the Peril of Posting Too Much Information [...]

By: Tom Renbarger

Tom Renbarger — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 00:18:27 +0000

I’ll be interested to see what you’ll have after you’ve written a few of these “day in the life” posts, JoAnne. One of the things that tends to get lost in the shuffle is the nature of science as a process, as opposed to a collection of results (the way it is almost exclusively reported), and your project is exactly the sort of thing that can remedy this misperception.

By: Arun

Arun — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 21:08:24 +0000

You’re lucky – you get paid to think. In the Dilbertesque world of the large American corporation, one is often paid to suspend one’s ability to think.

Examples available on request.

By: JoAnne

JoAnne — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 16:40:13 +0000

Jay, for me the sexual harassment course was a bit of a distraction (especially at 2 hours long!). I’m fairly well attuned to such things. However, I can personally vouch that there are some people who need the training – badly.

Citrine, SLAC has a funny status. It is both a school within Stanford University (same as, say, the school of engineering), and a national laboratory. We have a faculty (of which I’m a member) that are professors at Stanford Unversity. However, in practice we are really a lab, so we are research oriented and generally don’t teach. Once in awhile we’ll teach a special topics course on some aspect of high energy physics. I did so last Winter quarter. That was the third quarter I’ve taught in the 12 years I’ve been here.

The fact that we don’t teach makes what we do even more mysterious to people. Everybody can understand teaching, and assumes that either we teach or we sit around twiddling our thumbs.

By: citrine

citrine — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 15:24:02 +0000

Are you teaching any classes? If so, how come you didn’t spend any time grading? (Or do T.A.s do it for you?)

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 14:08:52 +0000

I’m curious if you find the time spent to learning to “detect sexual harassment” worthwhile? Or, is it a distraction?

By: Torbjorn Larsson

Torbjorn Larsson — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 11:51:01 +0000

I think you succeeded in making your work day sound ordinary enough. Except that you do some work _before_ making coffee!

By: JoAnne

JoAnne — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 08:43:59 +0000

Plato, yep, I find the possibility of blackholes at the LHC very interesting. Check out my paper from last Spring:

BLACK HOLES IN MANY DIMENSIONS AT THE LHC: TESTING CRITICAL STRING THEORY.
By JoAnne L. Hewett, Ben Lillie, Thomas G. Rizzo (SLAC),. SLAC-PUB-11024, Mar 2005. 5pp.
e-Print Archive: hep-ph/0503178

By: Plato

Plato — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 08:05:48 +0000

Have you ever talk to Giddings?

If this possibility is true, the most remarkable prediction of this scenario is that black holes could be created at high-energy accelerators, perhaps as early as with the LHC. We studied this problem of black hole creation and decay carefully, and came to the conclusion that there could be a lot of black holes made (up to around one per second) and that they could apparently produce very outstanding effects in the detectors at the LHC. This possibility has obviously aroused a lot of interest.

http://www.esi-topics.com/blackholes/interviews/SteveGiddings.html

Yep, it does mine.