Night and Day, Robert Weigand
My first note’s byline is UC Davis:
Good evening from California!
Well, it’s evening here (10:30 pm), but it’s already tomorrow on the east coast of the U.S., and in fact already time to wake up at CERN. Here is where I usually face my conundrum: Do I stay awake and watch for the first email reports on the activities at the LHC? Should I wait for our postdocs and students who live at CERN to respond to my emails? If I go to sleep, what will I miss?
Unfortunately, I have an 8:00 am video meeting tomorrow, in which our postdocs on the CDF experiment at Fermilab are presenting an introduction to our new analysis, searching for signs of light dark matter in the CDF data. (CDF has been in the news recently for an interesting result that has previously been discussed by Flip Tanedo and Michael Schmitt.)
The CDF meeting is followed by a 9:30 am video meeting with fellow CMS colleagues who are working on searches for fourth generation quarks, and it looks like one of our CMS postdocs may have something short to present there. But this isn’t so bad: on Fridays my first meeting is at 6:30 am, which is 3:30 pm in Geneva, and many meetings are earlier than that, so I usually have to miss them. I am grateful that at least for tomorrow’s CMS meeting at 9:30, those at CERN are willing to have it at 6:30 pm, their time, which for me means I can at least get the kid to daycare and get to work formally before it begins.
Of course, even after these early meetings, the California workday still lies ahead for me, and it sometimes turns in to a very long day. But the time is worth it— as you have gathered in these blogs, there are lots of exciting things going on in the world of particle physics these days, and I wouldn’t want to miss it!
With that, I’d better say “good night” (*yawn*) and get some sleep… the sun is fast approaching.
Day and Night, Google Earth
