As Jodi and I discussed on our podcast this Sunday [1], deadlines and time pressures make people nuts. In physics, this is the kooky season, as the big conferences – EPS (European Physical Society), SUSY07, and Lepton-Photon ’07 approach. Over the next 1.5 months, thousands of physicists from across the globe will converge in Europe and South Korea to hear the news from experiments far and wide. No doubt, BaBar and Belle (my experiment and our friendly competitor experiment) will make the usual strong showing. Also, no doubt, will come new results from the Tevatron experiments at Fermilab. With the slip of the LHC schedule until next year, we won’t even get a hint of news from that experiment. Its accelerator on ice until several delays can be made up for, the LHC won’t be a big player in the field for at least one more year.
Meanwhile, we physicists sweating it out with real data will continue to go crazy with the heat and the deadlines. Meetings, sign offs, reviews, paper edits, more meetings, phone calls, e-mails . . . it’s a wonder any of us have any time to actually do all the work that all that stuff is designed to oversee!
Wanna hear why else this might be the “Summer of Nuts”? Check out the latest podcast.
[1] “Summer of Nuts”
