My flight activities (long distance) of the recent years ... It looks similar or with more flights for most of my colleagues.
…. ok, it took me a few days more to get around the world, but in principle this is possible as a particle physicist. If you followed this blog, you will have realized by now, that traveling is one major activity of this community. Working in worldwide collaborations means, that we need to travel to meet our collaborators. Of course, also mentioned in other entries in this blog, we use phone meetings, video meetings, and other means to avoid traveling. But in the end we travel around the world quite a bit. Whenever a bunch of particle physicists is hanging around together, like in the evenings during a conference, sooner or later they start to talk about airlines, airports and travel adventures. Each of us has a repertoire of stories about getting stuck at the remotest places on the earth, missed planes, the most bumpiest flight etc.
As the community is not so large, people meet not only ones in the life. We actually bump into each other at different places in the world. I have actually a number of friends I meet only ones per year during one specific conference. We always have a nice time, having fun during coffee breaks or meeting in the evening for a beer. At the end of the week we say goodbye and say something like “See you next year in Orlando”.
Even so the community is small and after some years you know a lot of the people, we don’t know everybody. So usually name batches are given to the attendees of larger meetings. I started to collect this name batches when I started my first post-doc position. In the picture you can see the mountain of name batches I collected in the last 7 years… I wonder how big this will be at the end of my working life.
Probably by then we will have some implanted mini LCD name batch…
My name batch collection of the last 7 years.
