It’s been a busy month, and the only reason I am pausing to jot all this down is because I have a cold, and I don’t feel like doing much of anything else. So, let’s do it! The month of May brought with it the end of teaching, graduation, family travel, terrible rains that ended the drought and drowned Texas, and travel to Israel and France that extended into June. Oh, and I was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure!
The end of the school year is always a train wreck. You’re finishing up your course, preparing for your final exam, and getting ready for a summer of research. In some semblance of order, here are some snapshots from the past 5 weeks.
My introductory course in electricity and magnetism ended on a general high note. Students put in a lot of effort to prep for the last (non-comprehensive) exam and to finalize their “Grand Challenge Problem” write-ups. I was overall quite happy with those write-ups, and for a first time through this process I learned a lot about how I want to assess the projects in the future. In addition, working with a professor and a graduate student in our department and building on this year’s “Honors Physics” section, I’ve sketched out what the 2015-2016 Honors Physics Section will look like, incorporating active learning, classroom demonstrations, and team projects that span the semester. Honors Students looking to go above and beyond and distinguish themselves at SMU will definitely get a chance to do that in 2015-2016.-
Out for dinner with some of our family in Wisconsin. Looks like Aunt Jodi said something unbelievably silly. In between the end of classes and graduation, Jodi and I took a few days to visit family in Wisconsin – specifically, our nieces, one of whose birthdays we had to miss earlier in the year due to work-related travel. After the crush of final exams and before the press of graduation-related events, this was a welcome respite. We rested one night and morning in Milwaukee before heading to see our nieces for the next couple of days. We had a great time going to parks and the zoo with them, and we even went for a morning jog with Jodi’s brother with the girls along on a bike and a scooter.
- The week of graduation, I received my formal letter from the Provost informing me that I had been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. After a 1-year review by the department, then the Dean, then the Provost, and a vote by the Board of Trustees of SMU, I was promoted. I want to thank all of my colleagues, family, and friends who supported me through this process . . . and now that this part of my career is closed I can finally just focus on research and teaching without the looming threat of being booted out of the university after 6 years.
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Our graduating seniors, Matthew (left) and Mayisha (middle) with Jodi (right). Our department saw the graduation of two outstanding students, whose contributions to the department were significant and who will truly be missed as they move forward into their lives. It’s always hard to watch students graduate – you’ve gotten to know them a little over four years and watched them turn into these incredible learning and creating engines, but then you have to let them go so they can go run the world and fix all the mistakes you’ve already made. It’s tough. Mayisha’s and Matthew’s senior theses can be found on the SMU Physics Pre-Print website: http://www.physics.smu.edu/web/research/preprints/.
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Water drips from the seam in the drywall of the alcove ceiling in our bedroom during a very bad rain storm. This picture was taken at 3am. Texas was battered with rainstorms throughout May. This ended the long-standing drought conditions in the state, but also did significant damage to the state. It’s not good to go without heavy rains for years and then suddenly get heavy rains. Our house was not spared from this, although the extent of the damage may be minor. We awoke at 3am the day we were to begin travel abroad to the sound of dripping on the carpet in our bedroom. A thunderstorm was raging outside. Power was out in the house. Jodi got one of our emergency flashlights and we looked for the sound of the dripping. We found water falling from the drywall in the ceiling of the alcove in our bedroom. This alcove has its own roof, which we’re now having a roofer inspect. Eventually, we’ll have to rip out the drywall, dry the interior, and replace the drywall. Then we have to repaint. Since I am at CERN until mid-July, Jodi is dealing with all of this on her own. Summer travel is never kind to either of us.
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The Sea of Galilee, where we lunched and then went swimming. Jodi and I departed that same day for Israel. We spent a few days at the Weizmann Institute of Science so that I could work with my colleague, Eilam Gross, on some ATLAS Higgs physics-related issues. Then we were off to a Kibbutz called “Ha Goshrim” for a workshop on low-mass dark matter entitled “Beyond WIMPS” (WIMPS are “Weakly Interacting Massive Particles,” a favorite class of particle for explaining dark matter). The workshop was a really nice opportunity to understand the inner workings of an opportunities in a very exciting but distinct community from my own: the dark matter search community. On the way to the Kibbutz, in the very north of Israel (wedged between Lebanon on the west and Syria on the east) we stopped at various spots, including a national park, a symbolic spot on the Jordan River for baptisms (representing the baptism of Jesus Christ by John the Baptist), the Sea of Galilee (for lunch and swimming), and finally the Golan Heights (which offer a clear and sobering view of the demilitarized zone between Syria and Israel, in force since the “six days war” in the very early 1970s).
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Blois, viewed from the south side of the Loire River. The Chateau sits atop the hill, behind the cluster of buildings in the foreground. After a couple of days at the workshop, we drove back to Tel Aviv and caught a morning flight to Paris. We spent the afternoon on trains getting to Blois, a city southwest of Paris and the location of the annual “Rencontres de Blois” (“The Blois Conferences”). This conference brings together the particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology communities to share the latest news and seek common ground on difficult problems like dark matter, dark energy, inflation in the early cosmos, and the structure of matter and energy. It was a fantastic conference in a fantastic setting (the Chateau de Blois, once the seat of the French Monarchy during parts of French history). The dark matter and cosmology talks were, by far, my favorite at the conference. It’s my experience at this conference that the astro/cosmo community does a great job of speaking to a more broad audience than do the particle physicists. This is often because particle physicists from big collaborations have their plenary talks micromanaged and dictated by the collaboration, so they come off as a bland litany of 100 new results with little context or explanation of their meaning or value. In contrast, the astro/cosmo speakers tend to focus on core physics issues and then highlight progress in those issues with recent experimental results or theoretical insights. I prefer this latter approach.
- Jodi and I had a few days of rest and relaxation in Paris after the conference . . . something we both desperately needed after a long semester and two weeks of workshops, conferences, and travel. We stayed in the Latin Quarter, near Luxembourg Garden, one of our favorite spots in Paris. We spent our days wandering about Paris, stumbling on the Jardin des Plantes while touring an old Roman Amphitheater. We visited Versailles for the second time, spending the entire time in the Petit Trianon and the gardens, especially the gardens of the Queen. We also explored from of the pieces on display from the artist in residence at Versaille, Anish Kapoor. Here is one of the pieces, a thundering whirlpool named “Descension.” It shakes the ground as you stand by it.
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- I am now at CERN for a month, and Jodi is back in the US. It’s tough to be apart after finally getting to spend some unbroken time with one another, but this is also a good chance for me to focus on research for 30 days before returning to normal life at home.
