It has been a VERY long time since my last entry. I have a lot to catch up on, so this will have to be brief.
First, I went to Washington D.C. two weeks ago to lobby for increased funding for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the National Science Foundation. While my field, High-Energy Physics (HEP), and biology found themselves fully funded in the short-term, mid-term investments in all fields are being sacrificed for the needs of existing, as well as far-distant and yet unrealized, facilities and programs.
Our goal – that is, the goal of the SLAC and Fermilab User’s communities – was to discuss with legislators what we do, describe the strong outcry from academia and industry (“http://futureofinnovation.org/”:http://futureofinnovation.org/), and ask for their support to fund the DOE Office of Science at a “constant levek of effort”. This phrase means adjusting the budget to accomodate the consumer price index (~1.7%) and salary increases (~2%). This should be compared to the President’s request for a 3.8% **cut** to the Office of Science in the coming fiscal year.
I scheduled 6 appointments, one each with the offices of Senators Kohl, Lieberman, Sununu, and Kennedy and Representatives Obey and Capuano. I also joined my Fermilab and SLAC colleagues on some of their visits. I think that the majority of these visits were an overwhelming success; most of my appointments were positive, expressing support for the mission of federally funded science as well as an understanding of the trouble to the economy. They also expressed interest in dear colleague letters that were starting to circulate in the House and Senate calling for an increase for the Office of Science.
I spent a wonderful weekend with my Nana (grandmother), right after returning from D.C. I rarely get a chance to see her, so this was a real treat to be able to spend four days with her in Maryland. We went to church together, had a wonderful lunch at a crabcake place near her home, and spent the weekend cheering and jeering the college basketball teams heading into the “sweet sixteen”.
The week after D.C. was a chance top renew my research efforts. The first half of the week was a no-go, mostly due to catching up on my responsibilities to my working group and MIT colleagues. At the end of the week, my colleague Robert McElrath came down from Davis to attend a conference at SLAC. He stayed at my place, and we burned a lot of midnight oil discussing QED and two-photon backgrounds to this invisible bottomonium decays analysis. We also discussed new strategies for attacking the signal and the background; we discussed the need to generate a generic QED background simulation to develop suppression strategies; we setup a list of goals for the next few weeks, him on the theory and me on the analysis. So far, this is an extremely fruitful collaboration.
So as of tomorrow, I get to have a fresh look at my own analysis again.
