First, hello to the MIT Tech Review who made me famous for about 15 seconds this month. That’s one of my Facebook comment replies Singhal is pointing at (below) – and hi there Facebook users! It struck me when I saw that how strange the spread of information is, and how much information we read in a heavily digested format in a typical day…

Meanwhile, the LHC is running as normal. No news is good news, for the moment. If you want to hear about some (possibly) exciting physics, I highly recommend the NYT article on a possible hint of new physics from the Tevatron. They do a pretty good job explaining things there, so I won’t confuse you any further. There does seem to be something to it – and now the race is on to find what’s out there at the LHC!! Physicists or the very brave can read the full article here. Notice that their result is “evidence,” not “discovery” (or “observation”). That means they’re 99.7% sure the result is new physics – to claim discovery, they’d have to be 99.9999% sure (ok, there needs to be a little more mathematical definition of “sure” to make that precise, but I hope it gives you some idea of what I mean).

Note: Fixed my evidence / observation mix up. Thanks for the careful reading…

–Zach

Any results or new physics hints?

We don’t yet have enough data to see much new physics. Unless it’s something really strange, we expect only one “interesting” event for every thousand million collisions we see. We’ve seen hundreds of millions of collisions now, but it’s unlikely that we’ll say anything definitive until we’ve seen quite a bit. You can see my previous posts about being careful and errors for some of the reasons why.

As for the results we have seen, we’re progressing well. I liked the way one of my collaborators put it: a march through the history of physics. We’ve gone through the ’50′s, ’60′s, and some of the 70′s. We’ve gotten some of the ’80′s done as well. We probably need ten or one hundred times more data to get through the ’90′s. After that, the sky is the limit…

Why is the machine going so slow?

Truth is, the LHC is doing great. It feels as though every week we collect as much data as we had collected up to that point. Of course, the exponential growth won’t go on forever. But there are quite a few things that we can still do to get a lot more data out of the machine. In numbers: we are around one half of one thousandth of one percent of the “maximum” collision rate in the LHC. We know very well how to get thousands of times more collisions per second – but we want to go slowly. This machine has to be around for 20 years – it won’t do to get hasty and have an accident at this point! We can’t just go buy another one!!!

If you watch the LHC Page 1 obsessively, then you’ll see a lot of down time. It turns out that, if you’re in Europe particularly, it’s self-selecting. That is, when the experts are there during the day, we’ll spend a lot of time doing tests. At night, they often have stable runs (by “night” I mean midnight to 8am). But it’s those tests (during which we don’t have “stable beam,” and sometimes we don’t even have beam) that give us the confidence to raise the collision rate by quite a bit. Tonight, more tests – so that we can get a higher collision rate!

So when will we know more??

The collision rate will continue to increase, and I hope we hit the “magic number” – 100 inverse picobarns of data – around the end of the year. I say “magic number” because that’s around the time when we’ll start to really beat previous machines like the Tevatron in Chicago. To some, that’s when the fun starts – when we start looking for new physics, and we have reach well beyond any other machine in history.

We release a lot of results at conferences. The summer has several key conferences, so I fully expect several results from each experiment at every conference. They probably won’t be “discovery” results, but they will be the first key physics results. They’re exciting to some physicists, but, frankly, many will consider most of these “ho-hum” results (unless one of us does find something new!). Everyone recognizes how important it is to get some results, and what attitude is being expressed. We’re releasing physics results less than six months after the machine started! There are experiments that have taken years with their data before releasing any results!!

And as the exciting results roll in, we’ll keep you up-to-date here, as much as we can!

–Zach

Well, what does it mean to be an “author” of a paper? In our case, it means that you made a contribution to the work described in the paper. Of course, if you built part of the detector, and that part of the detector is used in the analysis, then you should be a co-author on the paper! And if you were responsible for running that part of the detector during one of the critical times, or calibrating it so it would work, then you should be a co-author! And if you wrote some of the software (ATLAS software, at least) that was used during the analysis, then you should be a co-author on the paper! And if you derived some of the numbers that they used, even though you haven’t written a paper on your numbers yet, you should be a co-author on the paper! ….. The list grows pretty fast! In practice, it’d be almost impossible to try to select the correct several hundred people for an authors list. So instead, ATLAS keeps a running list of all the people who have contributed substantially to the experiment (roughly the list of people who have been members for more than one year) and uses that as our authors list. There are some stickier points to this – trying to draw a line between software we “develop” and software we “use,” for example.

Here I should add one category that is, perhaps, less obvious: graduate student advisors. As a graduate student, you don’t have a reputation in the field yet. Your advisor’s signature asserts that they vouch for the correctness and appeal of the work you’ve done. So I would say an advisor should always sign their students’ work – even if they have not been deeply involved in the paper.

This mess can lead to all kinds of confusing conversations. You keep a list of papers on which you were listed as an author and another list of papers to which you “significantly contributed.” And if you show those lists to anyone outside physics, they’ll say, “Wait, you didn’t contribute to these papers, but you’re an author????” I must admit that I have not read every word of all the papers that I’m a “co-author” of!

Because there are different practices in different fields (or even different experiments!), we can get into tough spots as well. Some fields list “major authors” first. Or they list graduate students first. Or they rotate the authors’ list alphabetically, so that one person is the “first author” on every paper. We don’t tend to do that in ATLAS, so it’s tough to tell who really wrote the paper.

It can be frustrating when you’re applying for a job – imagine having to explain which of the papers that you “co-authored” you actually wrote! – but I confess it’s kinda fun to have a list of publications as long as your arm…

One other note. Everyone has probably heard of the “six degrees of separation” game. You can play the same game with paper co-authors, and thanks to this notion of authorship the connections spread fast! In mathematics, it’s called the Erdos number after Paul Erdos. With physicists, there’s some debate over who should be the Erdos equivalent (my nominee is John Ellis). You can also play the game with academic genealogy. In fact, I can trace the Italian side of my academic genealogy further back (1860′s) than the Italian side of my family genealogy (1880′s), and they both go though Pisa! I leave you with the XKCD take:

–Zach

Almost no complete analysis is done perfectly on the first try. Physicists make mistakes just like anybody else, whether it’s simply a bug in our code or something more serious. The problems that we encounter are usually the most interesting part of the work, though! When I’m grappling with understanding some physics, I feel less like a code monkey.

We show each other results constantly. I probably show various people several dozen plots each week. Some of them make sense, and I’m showing the plots to share information. Others I show because I don’t understand what’s going on. Inevitably, one or two of them are because of my own mistake. Sometimes it’s something more than that.

If you’re lucky, you get to catch a problem that the entire collaboration has missed so far. That doesn’t mean people were lazy!! It means you looked in a particular spot that (perhaps) hadn’t been looked at before, or you looked more carefully, or another issue which had prevented others from looking until that point was solved. Great! You have earned the difficult task of convincing everyone that you found a real problem (it has to be confirmed by others), and once you’re done everybody will benefit from the solution.

Once a result is ready for publication, the real grilling begins. You get a lot more attention, and the smart folks in the collaboration may point out issues that you hadn’t thought of yet. It’s great as a student to find out what the more experienced members of the collaboration see, and what they consider serious. A large number of problems still get caught at this stage, when you look at things you hadn’t looked at before.

Next comes writing up the paper with your results. Often there isn’t much room in the paper for explaining problems that you might have had. I think it’s a shame, because the problems in the analysis are sometimes the most interesting part! And those are the things that people in the future can really learn from. Often, some of the problems will be explained in a talk about the analysis at a conference, or in a student’s thesis. But those are a bit harder to track down for the next person who comes along.

Once your paper is all set, it’s sent to a journal, and the journal asks a few people to review the paper. In the days when collaborations were much smaller, this was critical – it was the way to do quality control for all the physics results on earth. With 3000 member collaborations like those at the LHC, I’m not so sure that it’s as important. Still, sometimes there are real concrete questions raised during the review. Once that’s all done, there’s still a little time before the paper is really published.

Finally the thing goes out, and people start reading it. If one of the readers find a problem (which could happen), then there are a few approaches to fixing it. Most journals accept “errata.” Those are short notes saying, “this thing we wrote about wasn’t quite right.” One big problem with errata is that people search for, find, and cite the original articles – and they don’t always find the errata!! So they might be reading or citing the wrong version of your paper. Some electronic journals will accept a new revision, so that you can make the change in place (a bit safer). And for papers on the arXiv, you can upload a new revision.

These are frustrating, though! The paper’s been reviewed so many times, catching a problem after all that is really disappointing.

Then there are the hard, philosophical ones, that I will leave you to think about. Let’s say you are relying on someone else’s number. Some group somewhere has calculated something useful to your work, and you used their calculation in the paper. And let’s say they find out their calculation was wrong. Now you know your results are wrong as well, but it’s not your fault!! Is it worth publishing an erratum? Putting a new version of the paper together? Holding the publication while you go back and fix things? Even if it was in its final stages? Tough choices, particularly when you want that paper out….

–Zach

Thought I’d put up today’s PhD comic, about research budgets in the US.

Often we’re asked to justify the cost of our research, but it really is a pretty small fraction of the Federal budget. Although we often hear things like “The LHC cost $5 billion US”, that cost is spread over many years and is split between many countries. Anyway, thanks Jorge for the nice demonstration!

–Zach

First candidate W boson decaying to a muon and neutrino

First W boson candidate decaying to an electron and neutrino

This is a pretty big deal for us. I think Flip will tell you more about the weak force in his next blog, but here’s the very quick version. A W boson can decay to an electron and a neutrino, or a muon and a neutrino, among other things (we have one of each!!). The electrons are those things that orbit a nucleus in an atom. A muon is, basically, a cosmic ray. They go through your body constantly (probably several thousand will have gone through you by the time you finish reading this sentence), and are one of the things that help evolution by kicking around your DNA. Neutrinos can’t be detected by ATLAS or CMS. They fly right out of the detector, completely unnoticed. Actually, they keep flying off into space. Neutrinos are produced by the billions in the sun, and several million will go through your body as you read this. They don’t do any harm – they basically do not interact with your body at all.

So what does a W boson look like?? We don’t see it directly – it decays too fast. We see the electron or muon in our detector, and we can measure that thing’s momentum. We see most of the other ‘stuff’ in the event, and add it all up. Once we’ve done that, the event doesn’t balance. The next trick comes from Newton: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The protons come into ATLAS going East-West. If something comes out going North, then there must be something that comes out going South as well! That’s how we can “see” the neutrino. We look for what’s missing when we add up the rest of the event.

In both of these events, there is some missing piece (the red dotted line) and an electron (in yellow) or muon (in red). We know that’s what the W boson looks like – they’ve been seen many times at LEP and the Tevatron. So if we guess that the missing piece is a neutrino, and that the neutrino and electron/muon came from the same particle, we can check what the mass of the particle was. And if that mass comes out close to the mass of the W boson, then we can say that this was probably an event with a W boson in it. It could have been something else – we can’t be positive – which is why we call it a “candidate.”

Why is this a big deal? Well, we only expect one W boson for every million events!! So that we managed to pick this up so quickly is a great sign for the way our detector is behaving!! At the very least, it’s a great first step!

The next thing on the list is the Z boson (I’ll leave that to Flip), and then the top quark after that. And probably in the meantime we’ll find some good high energy “jets” (quarks and gluons). Once we have all of those down (or maybe even a little before), you may start to see limits – or even discovery – of new physics!!!

–Zach

Here are a couple of nice pictures we can talk about. Both are taken from the Particle Data Group. First is the neutron lifetime – how long it takes a neutron (with protons, neutrons make up the nuclei in every atom in the universe) to decay. Second is the W-boson mass – a boson that is a part of the “weak force” that controls some decays of nuclei, for example. And both of these are measurements as they have evolved with time.

Lifetime of the neutron

The mass of the W boson

You can see why I picked these two. It looks like the first measurements of the neutron lifetime were way off! And, contrarily, it looks like the W-boson mass measurements might even be too good! Either way, it is satisfying to see error bars on all these measurements. That part is really important! It allows the possibility that you’re wrong.

It’s a little easier to talk about this in terms of politics, since we’re all pretty familiar with “polls.” Take the latest Zogby poll that reported that “48.8% +/- 1.7%” (read 48.8 plus or minus 1.7 percent) of likely voters approve of the job President Obama is doing. In polls, that 1.7% error usually only reflects statistics (polling 10 people is less accurate than polling 1000). There are also systematic errors, like the differences in population between those responding to your poll and those voting, possibilities that people misunderstand the question or even lie when polled, and so on. Those are really important to include, although they’re really hard to justify sometimes – how much do you trust your work? But that “48.8 +/- 1.7%” really means one of two things, depending on your philosophy:

• If you repeated this poll 100 times, 65 times you would get a number between 47.1% and 50.2%.
• We are 65% confident that the “real” answer is between 47.1% and 50.2%.

When ever we physicists claim to discover a new particle, for example, we require that it be outside the expected error bar by at least five times the error bar’s width (called five standard deviations or five “sigma” – one “sigma” is 1.7% in this case). In other words, we would only have “discovered” something with this poll if we had predicted approval above 57.3% or below 40.3%. Three sigma is often called “observation,” two sigma is often called “evidence.” And we usually choose to consider something new “excluded” if it is ruled out by three sigma. In the case of finding a new particle, for example, we might expect to see 6 events that look such-and-such a way, and we could claim “discovery” only if we find more than 36+/-6.

This sounds complicated, but it’s all to ensure that we are very confident about what we’ve seen before announcing to the world that we have discovered a new particle! If you trust your error bars completely, five sigma means the chance we’re wrong is 0.00006%!! And this is also what we spend a huge amount of our time on: making sure those error bars are honest!

Next time I’ll talk a bit about what happens if we’re wrong!

A lot of people ask me when we’ll start announcing discoveries of new physics (or exclusions of new physics). It could take a while. Even I don’t like the idea of waiting long before the really interesting new physics at the LHC gets published. So why does it take so long?? Well, for fun, let’s say ATLAS has found a new particle. And let’s say that you are the one who gets to say when the result is made public (in reality, that responsibility is shared among several people).

It's not quite that fast...

We have to write a paper about the discovery!! This is our chance to explain, clearly and carefully, what makes us think we have found something new. When the entire collaboration is happy with the paper, we send it off to a journal. The article we’ve written is then reviewed and, we hope, accepted in the journal. Finally, if all went well, the journal publishes the paper. If everything went perfectly, the review would all take a couple of months. No problem!

But it rarely goes perfectly. Usually, we find problems along the way, and those problems have to be corrected. And because it takes so long, the results are often presented in some “preliminary” form at a conference before they have been published. That’s one of the reasons we like going to conferences so much (and we get to go to some pretty sweet places). All those results get marked “PRELIMINARY” in big bold capital letters, because they aren’t published yet. There might still be some problems that shake out in the review of the work.

So now comes your job…

• How long before work is ready to be published do you allow it to be seen outside the collaboration? If you wait too long, someone else might announce the discovery before you do! But if you move to quickly, then you might announce the discovery of a particle that doesn’t exist!! Both have happened a few times. It’s also hard to keep secrets (physicists like to gossip!!), so you may tip off someone else on where to look before you’re ready to announce your findings!
• Who makes the announcement? Is it the person who did the analysis, and so knows the details best? Often that’s a graduate student or post-doc, and we like to protect them from the fallout if it turns out the announcement is wrong. Does the spokesperson make the announcement? Does the “physics coordinator”? The coordinator of the physics group that included the work?
• In what journal do you publish the work? One of the most famous in physics is Physical Review Letters, but articles are not allowed to be more than four pages long. You could publish in a less well-known journal so that the page limit goes away – but do you need to publish a long article first?
• The result might be more interesting if you can present it in terms of some particular theory. But do you want to share the information with a person outside of the collaboration? The information might get out – and long before you are ready for it to! (Of course, in ATLAS, we have quite a few experts in various theories, so this may not be an issue…).

In the past, there was some added pressure to publish first so that you could be recognized with a Nobel Prize. In many previous experiments, there was some person taking the lead who could be recognized (though in some cases that is debatable – or even resulted in picking the wrong person). Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t know of any obvious experimentalist to get it for a discovery at the LHC. How can you leave out the people who designed and built the machine? Or the people who designed and built the detector? Or the people who did the analysis? And no more than three people may receive the prize!! So the Nobel Committee will have its work cut out for them…

Good luck!!

Note: I’ll try to follow this with a blog about what happens when we’re wrong…

The LHC is about to start colliding protons at 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) or with about three times more energy than has ever been achieved by man. This is really exciting stuff! We’ll have a big media day on Tuesday to make sure everyone has a front row seat to the event!

Last night I was asked an interesting question – interesting enough that I thought I’d share the answer.

Will we collide the beams at many energies, or only at 7 TeV?

The LHC is really a discovery machine. Imagine that you’re back in 1490, and we’ve built a new ship that is capable of going seven times further than any previous ship in history before it needs to land (to refresh its stores, etc). The first thing we want to do with this is take it as far as it will go to see what’s out there! It could be that we’ll find a whole mess of new particles – that would be wonderful! It could be that we find nothing at all. That really would be like Columbus sailing for the new world and coming to the edge of the earth! It seems impossible and would fly in the face of everything we know – for physicists, it would be almost as interesting as finding a load of new particles! And, of course, when you’re sailing that far, you might pass some interesting things along the way…

Once you’ve searched for new high energy physics, you might want to try collisions at a few different energies. That would be something like looking for islands in the Atlantic. They might not be as exciting as a new continent, but they’re worth searching for all the same. Technically, just like if we were to sail out, we have no choice but to pass all the energies in between. But we do so for only a moment, and don’t really pause there to do any significant search in the middle. Side note: the middle energies aren’t quite as exciting at the LHC as they would be at, say LEP, because protons are “composite”, rather than single objects (as one professor put it, it’s like colliding two garbage cans). You can get some sense of what’s going on at lower energies from the higher energy collisions.

So on Tuesday, you should expect to see the beams go up from 450 GeV each (when they go into the machine) to 3500 GeV each (when they are colliding) without stopping in the middle – unless they plan something I don’t know about, of course!

One fun (very) technical note. Computers have a clock that keeps them in time (your computer is probably 2 GHz, for example). The whole LHC acts like a giant set of computers, all of which are timed together. It’s as though the entire thing has a single heart beat, around 40 MHz. We actually keep the heartbeat going at just the right pace to always have collisions “on time.” But the protons are changing energy from when they are injected at 450 GeV to when they collide at 3.5 TeV!! That means the entire heartbeat of the machine speeds up just a little bit to keep up (because of relativity, it’s only a fraction of a percent, but it is noticeable!!). To make sure things are safe, ATLAS usually stops collecting data while the heartbeat is actually changing – it’s a delicate operation, and we don’t want to have to stop to fix something right before the data arrives! So we may or may not actually see any of the collisions at energies between 900 GeV and 7 TeV!

EXCITED!!

–Zach

This morning there’s been a press release from CERN announcing March 30th as the first attempt for collisions at 7 TeV! You can still follow CERN or ATLAS on Twitter for all the action…

A little reminder – these collisions will be 3.5 times higher energy than our competitors at the Tevatron, and 3 times higher than we reached at the end of last year (when the last record was set). Because of the higher energy, we should be able to quickly match the Tevatron’s sensitivity to “new physics” – what ever that might turn out to mean…

If all goes well, this will mark the start of a very exciting year in physics!!

Will things ever be the same again?? It’s the Final Countdown!!

–Zach

ATLAS just put out its first paper, much like CMS did a few weeks ago. Ours is called Charged-particle multiplicities in pp interactions at sqrt(s)=900 GeV measured with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. It’s a light 19-page read with an extra page of acknowledgements, 3 pages of references, and a 17 page authors list at the end!! (Look for your favorite bloggers hidden in there somewhere!)

Here’s a very quick run down of what on earth that title means. First, the LHC collides protons, so these were proton-proton collisions (pp interactions). Each of the incoming protons had 450 GeV of energy (about half of the current energy of the Tevatron, and about 1/3 of the highest energy we’ve reached at the LHC). Instead of writing “450 GeV each”, we write down one of the Mandelstam variables describing the collision. It’s a better measure because it includes both particles’ energies in a “natural” way. For example, if you had a car accident, it matters whether you were going 30 and the other car was stopped, or you were both going 30 and collided head on, or you both were going 30 in the same direction and bumped each other. Each of those would have a different “Mandelstam s”.

We use a detector called the “tracker” in ATLAS to measure charged particles bending in a magnetic field. By just counting how many we see coming out of a collision we can say some interesting things about what physics we see. We can count the number in terms of momentum, or in terms of numbers per event (roughly equivalent to “how fast are the cars going on each road,” and “how many cars are there on each road”).

In my opinion, the hardest part of the measurement is putting good errors on everything. We have to be very quantitative – we can’t just say “it’s probably right.” And each piece has to be quantified. The easiest analogy I know of is polling. When someone takes a poll, they usually say, for example, 45% “+/- 3%”. That 3% is the “error” on the poll – though it’s usually only statistical, or telling you something about how many people they sampled. If they wanted to add systematic errors, they would have to include other effects that can be very hard to quantify like: how did the sample they polled differ from the general population? How likely are certain populations to answer the phone or respond to a survey? How likely are people to give honest answers on a survey? Those can vary from hard to almost impossible to quantify, but we have to be honest about how they might affect our results before we can publish with any confidence!

–Zach

The LHC has been running quite happily over the last few days, even ramping up the energy to 1.18 TeV – that’s 1200 times the mass of a proton, and 20% more energy than the Tevatron. ATLAS has been running and collecting data the whole time, even for the few exiting periods when there have been two beams in the machine.

At the beginning of this week we’ll have a short “technical stop.” There are a few things that the LHC guys want to try to fix. There are rules that say we may not run the machine while there are people working on it, so we’ll stop the machine for a few days. In fact, they want to open up a few areas that may be “activated” (read: a very, very, very little bit of radiation could be there). So we’ll stop, and the work on those areas will only start after about a day of waiting (when the areas have “cooled down” enough).

Because of the radiation, all the experiments have very complicated documents describing what we’ll do when the beam turns off at the end of each year. There are rules about which pieces of the detector you can work on right away, which bits you have to wait a day to work on, which bits you have to wait a week for, and so on. And all the different areas have to be marked off carefully so that no one wanders into the wrong spot!! Actually, the rules make it really safe – if you hang out in your basement a lot, you will likely get more radiation than any of the people working on the LHC.

So don’t worry too much if you don’t hear exciting news about collisions this week – we’re still working hard, and the machine will be back soon (could even be by Wednesday)! And in the meantime, enjoy some pie!!!!

Update: You can read about the weekend’s fun here…

–Zach

Mike wrote about this page a few days ago. I’m in the control room again, and there are about 15 pretty tired physicists here with me (it’s 5:30am on Sunday morning, and we’ve been here for at least 6 or 7 hours by now). But you can see everyone start to perk up when the beam comes back.

The most entertaining part of the return is the return of the sound effects. When the LHC main control room says they are ‘ready’, an alarm goes off in here that sounds like we’re on the bridge of the Enterprise and we’re under attack. I keep expecting read lights to start flashing and for someone to tell us to stumble to our left!

Every once in a while, the beam gets steered off course and is “dumped” out of the machine (actually, a kinda cool process where it’s “painted” across a block of graphite down a side tunnel so the energy can be safely absorbed). If they intended to dump the beam, then all’s quiet here. If something went wrong, a loud FLUSH (toilet flush) plays in the control room. Right now I’m watching the pixel detector, and I’m also responsible for checking (when there is a toilet flush) if there might have been damage to ATLAS after the beam was dumped.

Now back to listening for the toilet flush!!

I’m on shift tonight watching part of ATLAS, but the beam is having some teething troubles right now. Nothing to worry about, but we won’t be running for the next 11 hours or so. So instead, I thought I’d pile on the talk about graduate school with my own addition. I hope you’ll forgive me if this is long – shifts are eight hours…

I admit it’s not new news, but this is my reply to a New York Times op-ed piece by Mark Taylor of Columbia University. He really put a hit on graduate and general higher education and “specialization.” Read it all at the NYT online.

First, I believe we are leaving out medical school, law school, business school, pharmacy school, trade schools, teaching certificate programs, and many other kinds of “higher education,” instead focusing on academic PhDs. I’ll try to restrict myself similarly.

Two claims in the first paragraph I find to be worth examining closely:

-) “There is no market” for graduate students. Our obvious example is that the professors at any large university are all PhD’s. One doesn’t get a PhD in art history so that one may become a plumber. If we want to argue that there are too many graduate students in fields that are too small to support the students, then we need to better educate students about their job prospects prior to graduate school. Graduate school isn’t a default position – there should be a reason that you want that degree.

Graduate school has another stated purpose: at the end of it, you should know a single subject better than any other person on earth (okay, as close as possible, we can’t all be geniuses!!). If you learn how to write the perfect comma over four years, then you’ve set your self up for a career as a professor – or as a typographer, publisher, editor, printer (yep, they’re still around), graphic artist…

-) “All at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100k in student loans).” Personally, I don’t know anyone in academic graduate school who is paying for his or her education (remember, we left out medical school, law school, business school, etc). The point of those teaching positions is so that graduate students can support themselves. I make a very comfortable living – and I’m living in Geneva! Still, graduate school is an investment, just like buying a house. You pay for it over the years, and at the end you have something of value. If you play your cards right, you can easily make money on the deal – if that is what you are after. And if you don’t care so much about money, you can live very comfortably.

Finally, I’ll try to go through his proposal point-by-point (my paraphrasing in parentheses).

(1 – Restructure the curriculum to avoid departmental specialization) This seems to be a misunderstanding of what “specialization” means in the modern world. I am a student in high energy particle physics, and my thesis will be on hadronic jet shapes using the calorimetry of the ATLAS detector at the LHC (sounds specialized). That means that I am a combination of student, physicist, mathematician, computer scientist, electrical engineer, author, editor, presenter, graphic artist, webmaster, teacher, manager, and politician – and that’s on a slow day. I don’t want to learn how to be a better computer scientist from someone like me. I want to learn how to be a better computer scientist from someone who knows a lot about computer science! At some point I may “raise” my own graduate students – and at that point, I will be able to teach them about those areas that I know best. And I hope I have the wit to send them to the appropriate place or person to be trained in the other specialties they will need to know in order to better do their job!

I claim that to really specialize, one also needs to know things about all the other fields that in any way overlap with ones own. Richard Feynman wasn’t a great physicist just because he knew a lot of physics. He knew enough about physics to be able to look at a problem a chemist was having and propose a solution.

(2 – “Abolish permanent departments” in favor of “problem-focused programs”) Essentially, this is a repeat of claim #1. I don’t want a “water” teacher. I want a political science teacher to teach me about the aspects of political science pertaining to water distribution across nations. I want a geophysicist or atmospheric chemist or oceanographer teaching me about where the drinkable water will be 100 years from now. I want a chemical engineer or chemist teaching me about new desalinization techniques.

If we are talking about a major in “water”, then I think that’s a good idea. In fact, most universities already support “create your own major” programs for students interested in an interdisciplinary major (which, incidentally, does not mean it is more or less specialized than any other major). Many PhDs are interdisciplinary in some sense. In fact, I know of one person with two PhDs in water-related fields (water distribution, and… don’t remember). I don’t want a department of “time.” If someone wants to study the philosophy of time, they should join the philosophy department. And that person would be nuts to not talk to a physicist about relativity at least once during their graduate career.

(3 – “Increase collaboration among institutes.”) This is already done in many other countries. I see no reason that state universities in the US should not do the same. I see many reasons why private universities in the US should under no circumstances attempt to spread themselves out like that (Ok – Harvard, you guys get math. Yale gets classics. Stanford – you get Physical Education. Everybody okay with that?)

(4 – “Transform the traditional dissertation”) Let me just change this point for him a bit: “Reformat” the traditional dissertation. In the modern era, there is no reason that a dissertation should be published as a paper book. Publish all theses electronically, in a publicly accessible catalog. Rather than simply citing a text, one could electronically link the texts. Links could be included to permanent web addresses. Humanities departments should try to catch up with the sciences (and I mean sciences broadly, to include most research fields) in their use of electronic formats. That’s not a “transformation” of the dissertation any more than binding was a “transformation” of the Iliad – it’s the same story. It’s just easier to carry around.

(5 – “Expand the range of professional options for graduate students”) Graduate students are trained in a huge expanse of fields. See my point above. That I might not be employed next year in a job that uses the exact same combination of skills I have now developed is no surprise. Would anyone suggest the skill set developed during high school is identical to the one used by a carpenter? Or that an undergraduate economics major uses the same skills an economist? Or that a journalism major uses the same skills as a journalist? And yet, that is a part of their training. On the job training is just as important for academia as for any other job – it’s just different. To be an academic, one must learn how to advise students, interact with a department, balance a budget…

I find it deeply unnerving that he suggests that all a PhD is “trained for” is to become a professor. Of my current advisor’s six previous students and three most recent former post-docs, zero are professors. All of them left academia. Two of my closest non-physicist friends are preparing themselves for a career in industry – which they will begin after receiving their PhDs.

If a graduate degree in religion is only sufficient preparation for a professorship, so be it. But then it should be made clear to the entering graduate students that they are preparing for a life as an academic. One does not enter the seminary and complain that the only career path open to him is the priesthood!

(6 – “Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure”) Mandatory retirement is a bad idea in any field. Some people need to retire when they are 55. Some people should keep working until they are 75. Some people should keep working until they die. I’ve met – and taken classes from – all of those in academia. Abolishing tenure is something that I am not fundamentally opposed to, and I know that puts me in the minority. Suggesting that every professor should come up for job renewal every seven years is pretty excessive, though. Having “performance evaluations” regularly is not a bad idea – and already takes place in many universities, irrespective of the possibility of firing someone.

Academia is not quite like blue collar work, nor is it like most corporations. In blue collar work – for the most part – once a worker gets old enough, they cease to be as productive as a young guy. Not, mind you, a new guy – the new guy still has to learn the job. The alternative is to move into “management” – essentially, into the corporate side of the work. In a corporation – for the most part – one moves up the ladder, and by the end of a career one might be near the top. In academia, quite frequently the best professors have no interest in “moving up the ladder” to become deans or presidents of universities. In this sense, academia is most like construction work – one begins as a graduate student, doing the grunt work, writing as much as possible. Eventually, one becomes a full professor, managing graduate students and undergraduates of ones own.

Knowledge is a funny thing. It’s not always well-transferred by a book, article, or talk. Sometimes the only way to keep the knowledge around is by keeping the person around. Over a lifetime as a professor, one develops a certain set of skills – one “specializes” in being a professor, which requires understanding many different fields. Universities hire professors to teach and do research. Perhaps it’s entirely appropriate that in their final years, even those professors who can no longer contribute to the knowledge in what used to be their field can continue to teach students what they know better than anyone else. They could even try to teach the young guys how to be a better professor.

Of course, being an American here at CERN, we have to find some way to keep up with American sports! Tonight was the US vs. Canada Olympic Hockey final, and I went to the nearest pub to take in the action. That was an incredible game, for anyone who missed it, and we watched in a crowd of Canadians and Americans (with a Swede and a few others in the mix):

A crowd of Canadians and Americans focused on a great hockey match

It seems there are British Pubs no matter where in the world one goes. So we headed down to our regular pub in Geneva to enjoy the game. The last few weeks we’ve had to compete for viewing space with the Carling Cup and a few Champions’ League matches (that’s European football for the baffled Americans…), but we’ve been able to find enough space. And watching the US beat the Swiss team twice in 10 days was quite a treat! In fact, one of the best Swiss teams is the Geneva-Servette Hockey Club, and they (and the league, I assume) took three weeks off to let some of their players head for the Games (Servette is the neighborhood of Geneva just west of the main train station, where I happen to live).

Next week baseball’s spring training games will start, which can be even harder to find on the television over here. I’m lucky that the Cubs have a long history of playing many day games, which are night games over here (the Superbowl started at 2am over here…). But we find a way to watch when the big games come around – frequently via internet, or even via videochat with a friend who’s willing to point there computer at the television!

During the summer, I play on one of the CERN softball teams, called the “Quarks,” in the Geneva Softball League. It serves as a little trip back to American every Sunday. The games are hosted, very kindly, at the US Marine Corps House just north of Geneva, and the league includes a team of Marines (jocks vs nerds anyone?), a team of Cubans (Buena Vista Softball Club), and two CERN teams (the Quarks and the Leptons). Our team is usually about half homesick Americans wanting to swing a bat, and half Europeans wondering why the bat isn’t flat and there are four bases instead of two. But we have a lot of fun, and we even occasionally win a game.

The 2009 Quarks Softball Team!

But I’m a Cubs fan, so I know it’s not all about winning….

–Zach