As the time approaches for the reinitiation of LHC operations, we are starting to feel the excitement  of this grandiose experiment again.

With the Tevatron’s first direct constraint on the mass of the Higgs boson beyond good-old LEP’s this past week, physicists in all LHC experiments are getting ready and more excited to re-start operations and finally gather some data that allow them to search for new physics and hopefully complement or surpass very quickly the astonishing Tevatron results.  Meanwhile, LHC physicists and engineers are finalizing the improvements in the quench protection systems that will allow us to run at the energy of 3.5 TeV/beam, starting middle February.

My two cents, as always, consists of collaborating in putting the CMS trigger system in the best condition possible to start taking good data.  This time though, we are using “real” data from last year’s operations as opposed to using “simulated” data.  No more relying entirely on Monte Carlo, no more tweaking and tuning and speculating about our computer simulations.  This is the real deal guys!!

What we do with the data is to skim it off-line into a collection of good and interesting events, then we feed them into our on-line system and run the trigger menu to check its performance.  These data has all the information, event by event, that the detector collected (in the form of electronic signals) from those proton-proton collisions we had last year.  For these past month or so, we have been capable of touching nature’s primary constituents over and over in order to adapt our detectors and tune them to be able to better sense the most fantastic petals of life: particles!

Edgar Carrera (Boston University)

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I recently found myself spending a lot of time thinking about science outreach and so was particularly tickled by an article in The Onion about the dumbing down of science. The Onion, of course, is “America’s finest [satirical] news source.” Included in the piece:

Sources pointed to a number of proposed shows they’ve abandoned in recent weeks, including [...] Atom Smashers, a series that was was roundly rejected by focus groups as being “too technical” and “not awesome enough.” “People liked that the particle accelerators were really huge, but apparently the show didn’t have enough smashing to hold their interest,” said a former employee.

I don’t own a television (is that weird?) so I don’t really know what programming is like on the Science Channel, but as a particle physicist I am often confronted with the question of how to explain my research to the public in a way that does not speak down to either the audience or the subject.

It is true that high energy physics isn’t a field which most people have everyday contact with, but this doesn’t mean that the material needs to be “dumbed down.” While the material might be unfamiliar to the audience, it is [very] wrong to assume that the audience is somehow incapable of understanding the material. In fact, it is the fault of the scientist if the audience unable to understand the material since it is part of the scientist’s responsibility to translate their technical work into something accessible to a broad audience without compromising scientific integrity.

This is not easy (though we here at US LHC are doing our best!) and there is a delicate balance between

1. Conveying a sense of scientifically-established ‘truth’ rather than facts that people should take on faith (very unscientific!)
2. Tailoring this argument to the interests, background, and patience of the audience
3. Simultaneously conveying one’s personal excitement for the field.

The joke that I always keep in the back of my mind before presenting ideas to a non-technical audience is the story of an old man talking to the engineer of a steam locomotive.

The engineer does a very good job of explaining how coal is burned to boil water into steam which is then used power a system of pistons that cause the wheels to turn and the train to move forward. He explains the conversion of chemical energy to kinetic energy and the mechanics of the various valves and rods.

Eventually, the old man interrupts him and says, “Yes, yes, I understand all that. What I want you to explain is where you hide the horses.”

-Flip, US LHC Blog

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Hey, Seth here.  When you last met my sister, she had just graduated from MIT.  Since then, she has moved to Berkeley, gone to (and worked for)  a cooking school, and started an internship at Tikkun magazine.  I don’t mention this to indulge my brotherly instinct to make fun of her for trying so many different things — which I am the first to admit is quite unfair anyway — but rather to point you to the first results of her latest project.  As part of her magazine internship, she’s writing a series of blog entries about science, and her first piece was on the Higgs boson and its unfortunate nickname, “the God particle.”  She’s done more background research than I’ve ever done, but I’m pleased to note that her conclusions are the same as mine: that term wasn’t physicists’ idea, we don’t like it, and it keeps getting used because it’s dramatic press.  You can read what she wrote here.

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It’s an exciting time for your humble LHC blogger. She may just have a thesis topic… So what does that mean? (I often times wonder that myself).

With the recent success and in anticipation of high energy collisions (and therefore data), it’s time to figure out what can be found and what can’t given the projected amount of data. (We’re going to be running at ~7 TeV for the first part of the year, then ~10 TeV the latter half). Now lots of people are doing cross sections measurements – which is a different beast than searches (see below).  Cross section measurements take a particle that we know – Zs and Ws for example – and check to see if we measure what we predict. This is very important to do and I’m over simplifying but that’s the basic idea. Despite it’s importance, I personally feel like if I’m working on the highest energy accelerator in the world, I’d at least like to try to do a particle search.

The Cross Section Beast

This isn’t a completely trivial question because ever since the Tevatron turned on, theorists have been making predictions as to what was out of reach to our current experiments.  So what makes for a good early search? Lots of things, I’ll list some here:

• Of interest…

Maybe this goes without saying, but I’m going to go ahead and say it anyway. A search has to be well defined and predicted. One doesn’t just look for the Higgs, or SUSY or Z’, they look for specific decay products that could come from the predicted particle and can not be explained by sometime else. Although we’re going to be 3.5x and 5x higher energy than the Tevatron, there has been years of data collected at the Fermilab experiments. Now there are some particles that are simply outside of their reach. For example just due to conservation of energy, nothing can be created >2TeV, but due to statistics (need that high fluctuation over the background again…) some limits are in the 100-200 GeV range. Increasing the energy will allow us, even with less data to raise limits.

• High Signal:Background ratio

Since there is going to be a smaller data set (only 1 year of running), we simply won’t have enough statistics to say with confidence that we discovered certain particles. We need to say that the signal is an actual signal – not just a fluctuation of the background. I elaborate this in my Higgs post. This also means that there would be a distinct signature for example: something that would decay to 2 very high energy electrons and 2 very high energy jets. It could be di-boson production or W/Z+jets, but the electrons would come from a W/Z which was very far off mass shell – which is not impossible, but maybe not as probable.

• Missing Energy (MET to be more specific)

This is a bit contentious, and maybe more a personal taste than anything. We won’t have a completely calibrated detector initially. The detector is calibrated by taking standard particles (Ws and Zs for example) and reconstructing them. We then convert the electrical signal out of the machine to energy and momentum. To do this, the more Z and W events the better – which like everything takes time. So the energy of the signal can be off. This isn’t a bad thing, but the way we calculate missing energy (say in the form of neutrinos) is by balancing the energy in the detector. For example if there is 40 GeV deposited in 1 part of the xy plane, then there has to be another 40 GeV in another part of the xy plane to balance it out. If we don’t really know if it’s 40 GeV or 45 GeV, then it’s hard to calculate missing energy. (I should also point out, it’s transverse energy, not just energy – which I can elaborate on if anyone is interested).

So these requirements gives us a whole range of particles to search for. I’m involved in a physics group called exotics. Exotics are a generic term for anything beyond the standard model and isn’t the Higgs or SUSY. This isn’t to say that Higgs/SUSY searches aren’t beyond the standard model… I guess they get their own groups since so many people are interested in them. It makes the exotics working group more intimate . My interests (and potential thesis) are in particles that would unite quarks and leptons (like how a W unites the family of quarks and the family of leptons). These generically are called leptoquarks.

So what’s wrong with the Higgs? It like the captain of the high school football team and head cheerleader all rolled into one particle to the high energy physics community. I don’t know… I’m just not that into it.

-Regina

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The color scheme I enjoy coding in (and my favorite programming language).

What is the main thing that a graduate students in particle physics spends most of their time doing?

Here are the most common activities:

A) Working with pen & paper, staring at equations, using computers to help solve/simplify those equations

B) Building/fixing hardware, Running wires, Connecting cables, Soldering connections

C) Writing computer code, Debugging code written by others, Documenting code

D) Reading/writing papers, Attending meetings, Preparing/giving presentations

This list probably generic enough that it could apply to a grad student in any science field.  (I hope for sanity’s sake that nobody spends most of their time attending meetings.) Continue Reading »

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K_short meson

One of the most amazing characteristics of science is reproducibility, i.e., experimental results can be reproduced by independent tests.  So, the first thing to check in any physics experiment is to see if you can reproduce what older, well tested, experiments have found running in similar conditions.  CMS did this very quickly last November when it presented its beautiful di-photon resonance peak, but the story does not end there.

Since December, CMS has taken advantage of the technical stop scheduled for the LHC in order to improve the reliability for the cooling system in the end-caps of the detector and, meanwhile, physicists have put a lot of effort in analyzing the data gathered during those few weeks of operation, mostly at 900 GeV of energy.

The results are quite fantastic.  I mean, ok, we know these particles (resonances) for quite some time now (most of them have been known for more than 40 years) and we can easily “google” them and obtain all their information, but to see them coming alive in our detector is probably only second to experiencing the actual discovery.  To make this succint, we know now that our detector is capable of reconstructing, with an astonishing precision,  the invariant mass of many mesons and baryons ["vintage" Kaon (short) resonance is shown in the plot as an example!!], such as pions, eta mesons, kaons, lambda baryons, etc, that were seen and studied many years ago by different experiments around the world.  Seeing these beloved resonances is not only cool, but they are necessary to calibrate the detector and to be in a much better shape for the next round of operations of the LHC, which will happen most likely in middle February.  Stay tuned, the next big thing will be seeing  Z/W bosons, for example, and from then a plethora (hopefully) of new and exciting physics (particles).

Edgar Carrera (Boston University)

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My foray into particle physics began with a summer at the linear accelerator at Stanford in California. It’s the longest accelerator in the world, which makes it easy to find on google maps.  (I also must say that during my time there, the weather there was consistently perfect.)

A welcome sign at the Stanford Linear Accelerator.

One of the first signs you see when you enter the site has a somewhat disconcerting message about chemicals and cancer.

I don’t know what chemicals they were referring to exactly, but one safety topic I learned about when I began taking SLAC’s mandatory safety training courses was related to radiation exposure.

In these safety courses I quickly learned that frequent fliers and airline employees are exposed to far more radiation than any employee at SLAC.

I hadn’t thought about it before then, but it turns out that being at high altitude exposes one to high energy particles produced when even higher-energy particles from sources elsewhere in the universe collide with particles in Earth’s atmosphere.  Being lower to the ground provides more protection than being high up where there is less atmosphere to absorb the radiation.

“A single, long international flight will expose you to a week’s worth of natural background radiation.” (Air & Space Magazine).  But that’s still well below recommended yearly exposure limits.

So in the end, I learned that particle physicists should be more concerned about the radiation they’re exposed to while traveling to their experiment!

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Hello, this is the first blog I am putting here.. Hope you enjoy…

In these first working weeks at CERN, as is a bit traditional, not many things happen. People are usually coming back to work, filling up the line in the bank and post office at the Meyrin site and checking the new coffee machines that, recently, are being exchanged a lot. This year, things got especially slower, as a huge amount of snow is falling in a good fraction of Europe. Even in Arles, in the south of France, many centimeters of snow fell. The coldest temperatures reached (around -5°C) are, anyway, much above the -271°C kept in the LHC magnets. To warm up and cool it down again, the LHC would need months, so, the cooling system of the collider was kept working during this whole time.

Most CERN services are kept at a very minimal level during the end of year break. A few winters ago, actually, I remember having to work in the library, one of the few places where heating was still available. Warm coffee was only available in the gas station beside the Globe. This year, at ATLAS, the detector I work on, most of the subsystems were also shut down. The detector cooling system which circulates cold water in the front-end electronics suffered a few interventions in the beginning of the week and the electronics finally started to be turned on by Wednesday. I was supposed to be on shift and take calibration data (important, specially after a long shutdown), but some systems are still not available, and this was not possible. The detector seems like a gigantic animal, waking up after a little nap. A bit lazy to start what will be probably its longest operating period as we will start data taking earlier than ever (in February) and finish much later.

For the moment, I remember the end of Die Hard II : let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

By Denis Oliveira Damazio (BNL), 2010/01/13

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It’s the first week of spring classes at UNL, even if it doesn’t look much like spring. (Temperatures will break the freezing mark tomorrow for the first time in about three weeks.) Today was the first day of the course I’m teaching this semester — introduction to particle physics at the graduate level. Actually, this “introduction” to the field is the only graduate-level course that we offer in the subject (we’re a small program), so I consider it a great privilege to be teaching it, and it is certainly a great responsibility, as for many of the students this will be the last course they ever take on this topic.

This is my second time teaching the class, and I must admit that I learned a lot of physics on my first time around, two years ago. Yes, I took a course like this as a graduate student, but the way to really learn something is to be prepared to teach it. I have a much greater appreciation for the successes of our models, and the constraints that all the existing data place on the possible extensions to those models.

It’s a lot easier to teach a course for the second time than for the first time, since you’ve done the work to re-learn all the material relatively recently, and you have a good idea about how you want to structure the course, etc. But I actually wish it weren’t so easy this time! When I last taught the class, in Spring 2008, the LHC was scheduled to start up that fall, and we would have had a year’s worth of data under our belts at this point. Perhaps it would have been naive to expect that we could have made any significant discoveries by now, but at the very least we would have started mapping out the physics of the next energy scale. I was hoping that I might have to significantly change the course for 2010 in light of what we were learning from the LHC!

But it wasn’t to be. However, by the end of the semester in early May, we will have collected a good amount of collision data at 7 TeV, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to share some of that experience with the students in the class. And I am expecting that I’ll be teaching this course again in Spring 2012 — let’s hope that I have a lot of prep work to do then!

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Happy new year LHC Blog enthusiasts! I hope everyone had a happy and safe holiday season.  I was lucky enough to get to go back home to Colorado this year, but unlucky enough to not have enough snow/nice weather to go skiing. Oh well, we all know the best time to ski is late winter/early spring. It’s been a while since I’ve contributed anything, so it seems only fitting to give a recap of what’s been happening in terms of the LHC, particle physics, and life as a graduate student in general.

I’m sure most people who read this blog are up-to-date as far as the LHC status. We had a very successful end of 2009 run and were able to get collisions at a record breaking energies. (Sorry for the cheesy title… It’s hard to get back into work after a break, anywho…). We’re all excited for things to start back up in February. (And by excited I mean frantically trying to write code so when the data starts rolling in, we’ll have a way to analyze it).

In other exciting particle physics news, CDMS (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search) in mid-December reported two candidate WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) events. This experiment is near and dear to my heart because as an undergraduate, I worked as a Summer Intern for CDMS at Fermilab. It’s important to say that not all particle physics is done at large colliders with gigantic collaborations. It’s a really exciting experiment and I encourage anyone interested to check it out or ask questions!

On the subject of graduate student life… The holidays are always a difficult time. Despite grad school being “free”, (It’s not really free, the grants or the graduate school pays our tuition, and usually not our school fees), our stipend isn’t that much especially when you compare it to others who went into the private sector. (I went to an engineering undergrad so all my friends – with the same degree as I have – now making 70,000+/year). Even my younger sister who works as an office manager of a business makes almost double – a fact she loves to bring up over the holidays… At least I get 2 weeks off  . This means that my family usually gets macaroni necklaces and hand drawn cards as presents.  But even worse is the dreaded question that everyone seems to ask:  When are you going to graduate?

For those of you reading who went to graduate school – you know – you might as well ask my age, weight, and why there are holes in my shirt. And I don’t just get it from parents… it comes from friends, in-laws, former teachers, Marge Simpson, etc… It’s getting to the point where I’m afraid to go back to my home town because I’m now in 20th grade. Not that this is atypical. I can expect another 1.5+ years if I hope to hit the average. But it’s not about fulfilling a class requirement any more. I’m done with classes. It’s about doing a unique (or somewhat unique) bit of research and writing it up and that takes time – or so I’m told.  >sigh<

So if you’re one of those people who asks their grad student friends/colleagues/children when they’re going to graduate. Please stop and just smile when they give you a present that they made all by themselves – remember it comes from the heart.

Happy New Year!

-Regina

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If you know any particle theory graduate students who have applied for postdoctoral positions this year, today might be an especially stressful time for them. While this is still a couple of years away for me, I’ve been watching with fascination as many of my friends and colleagues go through this process. [Note that while this holds primarily for the particle theory community, I imagine a similar process occurs for other fields.]

A post-doc is a 2 to 3 year academic position in between graduate school and an assistant professorship. It’s a time to develop one’s independent research without the teaching requirements of a faculty position. Postdoc applications are typically sent out in fall and offers start trickling back in December.

In a month or so things will be all sorted out, but early January is when applicants get to see how the sausage is made, so to speak. The process can be a bit rough primarily because of the small size of specialized research communities like particle theory. Unlike undergrad admissions where there are thousands of accepted applicants for a flexible number of positions, most research groups can only hire a few postdocs (often just one) and have no wiggle room. This means that if there’s only funding for one job, a group cannot afford to make multiple offers at a time because it would be a disaster if more than one person accepted. Making postdoc offers becomes a non-trivial multiple-stage process that requires some strategy.

To keep make the playing field fair to the applicants, just about all departments have agreed to the particle theory postdoc deadline agreement, which states that no offer can be made that requires a response before January 7th. (That’s tomorrow!) This is effectively a deadline for the first round of offers and protects applicants from offers that try to force a commitment before other universities can make offers.

But now there’s still a lot of ‘game theory’ involved in the process. As is often the case in theoretical physics, a simple “toy model” is sufficient to demonstrate the phenomenon. Suppose you have postdoc applicants Alice, Ben, and Chris,  and departments at X, Y, Z. For simplicity let’s assume that these lists are ordered by status: A > B > C and X > Y > Z. Thus universities want to hire A while applicants want to go to University X. Let me pause and say that this is a gross simplification: usually rankings depend on particular research interests and can be confounded by all sorts of external factors (e.g. spouses).

So here are some examples of what could happen:

• Scenario 1: Every department makes an offer to Alice, so Ben and Chris have to wait until after the first round deadline to get offers. They’re sweating bullets because they don’t know if they’ll have a job next year. Alice ends up going to X, and then by a similar process, Ben ends up at University Y in the second round, and finally Chris ends up at University Z in the third round.

• Scenario 2a: Now consider the case where University Z wises up a little. They know that applicant Alice is out of their range, so instead of making a first round offer to her, they go straight to Ben. Now in the first round Alice can choose between Universities X and Y, but Ben has an offer from University Z and no longer has to worry about getting a job. Now Ben has until the first round deadline to accept Z’s offer. He thinks that maybe he’s good enough for University Y, but he can’t be sure and he doesn’t want to gamble with his career so he accepts Z. In this scenario, then, the third-ranked university was able to snag the second-best applicant. We’ll say that University Y “fell through the cracks.”

• Scenario 2b: could have turned out differently: Maybe Alice decides immediately that she wants to go to X. Then she can inform Y ahead of time (though she’s not obligated to do so) that she’s taking another offer, and Y can move on to make an offer (essentially a second-round offer) to Ben before the first-round deadline. In this case we end up with the same matching as Scenario 1. Note that it is often the case that it’s very difficult to choose between X and Y, so Alice ends up using the entire first-round period to mull over her choices and this secnario has to happen at the last minute (e.g. the day before the deadline — today!), or might not happen at all.

• Scenario 3: another twist: This time, maybe University Y decides that it wants Chris (for one of multiple valid reasons) and University Z has  ‘resigned’ itself to being the third-best choice, so it cuts straight to the chase and also makes an offer to Chris. (e.g. so that the fourth university, W, doesn’t steal him like scenario 2a.) Now Alice goes to X, and Chris can choose between Y and Z, but Ben has no first round offer, even though Z would have been happy to have him. In this case the second-best applicant has fallen through the cracks. [e.g. maybe he is forced to accept a first round offer from the fourth best university.]

Now you can see how this can get a lot more complicated. There are maybe a hundred or so applicants and maybe a few dozen universities. You can expect that top-tier universities will target top-tier applicants and so forth, but it’s not clear where the boundaries are and it’s not clear who falls through a crack (as Ben did in scenario 2a). Maybe Alice does string theory while Ben does LHC physics and the top universities are currently looking for LHC physicists. Or maybe Alice has a spouse who refuses to live in X, so she won’t consider their offer. Maybe a university has multiple postdoc positions so they can afford to be more ambitious. At the end of the day, it gets really complicated.

What practically happens is that there are a lot of telephone calls in December as faculty members in charge of their local postdoc search call up their colleagues to ask about their students who are applying. (Like I said, it’s a small community.) These are usually to further assess how well that student would fit as a postdoc and how likely it is that the student would accept an offer were it made. Then by late December the first round offers are made and the lucky students have until January 7th to accept an offer. Often departments will inform students if they’re short-listed, which partially means that they’re waiting to see how the market turns out before committing to making an offer. When a department hears from an applicant that they’ll politely turn down an offer, they can immediately go to the next person on their list, hoping that this person hasn’t already accepted elsewhere. As you can imagine, January 6th can be a bit of scramble as departments try to make offers before applicants are forced to commit to an existing offer. It’s been suggested that proper etiquette requires one to inform institutions as soon as possible about one’s decisions, or even that it is only reasonable to hold on to no more than two offers, but currently such things are completely voluntary and nobody wants to decline an offer unless they’re 200% sure that something won’t change their mind down the road.

Since a solid postdoc is one of the keys to proceeding onward to a faculty job, this can be an extremely tense time for young scientists. (It’s actually a very good thing that they have the winter break to be with friends and family during this period.)

There have been two recent developments in the postdoc market that have changed the game a little bit. The first one is the existence of an unofficial postdoc “gossip” page where postdoc offers can be self-reported. It is the only way to get a semblance of the status of the postdoc market. I have to admit that I keep up with this the same way that basketball fans keep up with the NBA draft.

The second development was just rolled out this year, a centralized system called AcademicJobsOnline to organize postdoc applications (“officially” endorsed by the HEP community). Like the Common Application for undergrad admissions, this makes it much easier for recommenders to upload one letter (instead of many dozens) and for an applicant to avoid filling out the same data on different forms. I’ve heard unofficially that this has led to a big increase in the number of applications to some institutions, which is something of a minor annoyance to prestigious institution but can be a big boon for ‘diamond in the rough’ departments in lesser-known universities.

As many of my colleagues bemoan the uncertainty of January 6th, there is another conversation which keeps popping up every year: why can’t we do things the way the medical doctors do? The National Resident Matching Program is a ‘magical computer program’ that matches med students to 25,000 residency positions. The system is a bit mysterious, but it pairs up students with a residency in a way that somehow maximizes the desires of the medical program and the applicant (after interviews). The general statement from the people who wrote the common deadline agreement is that the NRMP’s large administrative overhead makes it difficult to implement in academia.

While it’s always true that it’s hard to shift to a new system, there is certainly some merit to having some kind of matching algorithm where ranked preferences from institutions and applicants can be taken into account to make postdoc pairings. Because the theoretical physics postdoc community is so much smaller than the medical resident community (by factors of tens of thousands), I suspect the overhead can be significantly trimmed. The program could be written to simulate the process as it exists today, with institutions making offers and applicants choosing between them based on the preference lists. Multiple rounds of matching can be done automatically without the threat of “falling through the cracks.” This way applicants don’t have to feel like they’re having their choice taken away from them. Unlike the NRMP, preference lists and the computer code can be made to be completely transparent to ensure that there are no secret back-room deals. In fact, now that applications are beginning to be centralized through AcademicJobsOnline, there already exists a natural framework to implement such an automated system.

I’m a bit naive about these things, but the actual implementation seems simple: Applicant submit an ordered list of jobs and, afterward, institutions submit an ordered list of people they’d like to hire. Then what follows is an optimization algorithm that can be tuned depending how one wants to break “ties.” This requires some choices that the community has to agree upon, but it is still more reliable than of whether or not someone officially declines an offer before the Jan 7 deadline.

Every year this discussion must pop up at informal lunchtime at different universities, and every year people start out being very skeptical about radical changes… until January 6th, when the stress of the current postdoc market catches up to applicants and they worry that they might fall through the cracks (e.g. University Y in scenario 2a or Ben in scenario 3 above) and they wish that a more certain system were in place. Then a few months later everything works out, people are excited about their new jobs, and everybody forgets about the postdoc market again. Hopefully the community can work something out that avoids the shortcomings of the current system.

This post is dedicated to all of my friends who are holding their breaths for postdoc offers on this “day-before-Jan 7.” Good luck, everyone!

-Flip, US/LHC

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While visiting friends and family over the holidays, I was surprised by the number of people asking how I am paying for graduate school.

Lots of loans?

Not a lot of people know, so I thought I’d share: attending graduate school in a hard science is typically free.

You see, generally, when someone attends graduate school in a field such as Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Math, Physics…, their tuition is paid for in full and they get a salary on top of that.

This is the case as long as you do work for the department by being a Teaching Assistant, Research Assistant, Grader…or some job. Typical grad student salary is roughly between $15,000 and $25,000 a year, plus health benefits. (Pay, of course, depends on the institution, department, job, and the % of time committed.)

One difference between graduate students in physics doing research in “theory” vs “experiment” is that, generally, there are more positions and more money available for students to do experimental research. Students who work on theory research typically teach some or most of their years in graduate school, while students who work on experimental research typically do not teach past their 2nd year of graduate school (and are paid entirely as a research assistant). That’s only in general.

So, different strokes for different folks (see others’ posts about doing research in theory: 1, 2, 3), but in the end, either way, grad school tuition is free, and students get paid on top of that.

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Dennis Overbye, the New York Times reporter with a physics degree from MIT and the newspaper’s local LHC expert, wrote a nice essay about the joy of doing physics. In it, he goes through the usual question of why anybody but physicists should care about the LHC. He goes through all the usual arguments that fundamental research in high energy physics has led to all sorts off spin-off technologies, including MRIs and PET scans that now play prominent roles in medical science. He goes on, however, to write

But better medical devices are not why we build these machines that eat a small city’s worth of electricity to bang together protons and recreate the fires of the Big Bang. Better diagnoses are not why young scientists spend the best years of their lives welding and soldering and pulling cable through underground caverns inside detectors the size of New York apartment buildings to capture and record those holy fires. They want to know where we all came from, and so do I.

And I think this is the point that people don’t seem to understand when talking to physicists. People don’t don’t devote their lives to fundamental research for possible spin-off technologies or fame or money. The reason that people do science is the unbridled curiosity to understand what makes the universe tick.

This doesn’t get said enough, probably because it sounds so corny, but there’s something very wonderful about being able to ask nature how it works. Physicists feel like there’s nothing more noble than this pursuit of scientific truth, and it says something bright about our society that it values these pursuits enough to support them.

Along with other bastions of culture such as the arts or history, our scientific progress — how we understand the universe — is an indelible part of who we are. In college I took a course on Meso-American Archaeology, and I would wonder, why would anybody today care about Mayan cosmology? (Other than desperate movie producers.) The answer is that it tells us more about the Mayans as a people and how they understood their place within existence. What will our science tell future societies about us?

For every day people, this is the beauty of understanding that protons are made of quarks or that a fantastic phenomenon called the “electroweak phase transition” occurred early in the universe: it enriches our lives by putting it in the ultimate context.

Unlike our grandparents (or even parents, for those a bit older), we can definitively say based on the scientific method that we are made up of mostly empty space, but the stuff that isn’t empty is a wonderfully complex scaffolding of atoms, which in turn are made up of a lattice of nuclei surrounded by a gas of electrons. These nuclei are held together by a force so strong that separating the components of a nucleon produces a shower of additional particles that weren’t actually “inside” the original object but are only created from the exchange of virtual (not quite physical) particles. These subatomic, despite being very small, played key roles in the development of the billions of galaxies in the universe when it inflated early in its lifetime: the little quantum fluctuations in the primordial plasma gave rise to the large scale structure we see in the sky. Further, the universe is still expanding today. So here we are: little carbon-based life forms on a chunk of rock that developed sentience only few million years ago, and we are able to know these magnificent things.

If that’s not simultaneously humbling and self-congratulatory, I don’t know what is.

Happy New Year everyone,
Flip, US/LHC blog

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