Physics can be busy, especially physics on a big collaboration at a very active national laboratory. This week has been a real highlight for me, mainly because for over half of it I have been in a meeting from first thing in the morning until the last hour of the day. Take yesterday, for example. The physics meeting, a weekly BaBar meeting, went from 8 am until 10 am. From 10:30 to 11:45, we had the second in a series of four statistics lectures from Louis Lyons (see http://www-group.slac.stanford.edu/sluo/Lectures/Stat2007_lectures.htm). At noon I attended the SLAC ATLAS forum, which is a weekly forum for the SLAC groups involved in the ATLAS experiment at CERN. That was a lot of fun – the speaker was a theorist who indulged us in a new pursuit of his, one which brought me back to the intensive days of learning QCD. By the time I got back to my office, I had just five minutes of sitting and sighing heavily when the phone rang, and I had a great conversation about some new experimental techniques that a student is working on.
Each of these meetings is rewarding. However, that makes them no less exhausting when you pile them on on top of the other. In the end, I found just an hour or so to get some of my own research done. Granted, I made progress – but sometimes I need more than just five minutes.
