Being a particle physicist requires a lot of travel. In general, being a scientist means going to conferences, visiting other institutions, and collaborating with a global network of colleagues. The tools of particle physics tend to be consolidated at single locations, rather than at one’s home institution. As a result, particle physicists do a lot of commuting and telecommuting. Since the latter is still catching up with the quality of the former, we drive and fly all over the place.
For a long time, I’ve wanted to put a big Mercator projection of the globe on a wall and stick pins in it. Each pin would indicate a place I have been in my life (for more than just 1 day – I’ve been to plenty of airports just to connect). It would give me a sense of just how much running around I’ve been doing, largely in the name of science. The only reason I saw Wisconsin was because I wanted to pursue a Ph.D. in physics. I went to California not for the dot-com explosion but for the mini big bang being created at the PEP-II collider at SLAC. I went to Texas to be an instructor and a researcher. I went to Montreal to give a seminar. I went to Uppsala in Sweden to participate in a workshop on an electrically charged Higgs boson.
What brought me to Missoula, or Grand Island, or Ely? Each pin is a story, if not a collection of them. Think of the tales you can tell the person who looks at your map.
I owe a lot of my exposure to the world to physics. I expect a great deal more I as continue to grow in this field. Meanwhile, I’ll share with you my little life map – my digital Mercator projection with push-pins.
Everyone keeps asking me how I am “settling in.” My quick answer has been to say, “Very well,” and then make a remark about how grant-writing is my major stresser right now because the deadling is looming so close [1]. I’ve been thinking a little more about this question, realizing it has many layers to it.
The first layer, one I’ve started to neglect, is the promotion angle. July was such a strange month, with all the packing and driving, the breaking down [2], that it’s hard to realize that between July and August I made this strange transition from a post-doc to a faculty member. In a sense, the distraction of benefits seminars, paperwork, setting up an office, meeting people, and the hundred other things that have been going on has made me forget that I am fundamentally doing a different job in physics right now. I suspect this will really sink in during second semester, when I will teach my first class.
The second layer is more about university life. I’ve been at a national laboratory for a long time. Yes, I’ve worked for schools, but I’ve been immersed in laboratory culture. Never in my time at a lab did I forget how much I enjoyed university life; never did lab life wipe away my enjoyment of a diverse university campus, the presence of thousands of students a constant reminder that you have a job, you have a responsibility, to educate and to innovate. My greatest moments at SLAC, the ones I will always remember, involved working with students. You can imagine my joy at being a faculty member now! My most intense memories are moments of both teaching and discovery, not just solitary discovery.
A view from the doorway of my office at SMU.
Being a new faculty member has also tapped a little into my creative side. There is a freedom that is reawakened when you realize you can have whatever furniture or adornments you like in your office. The cubicle culture at a lab is stifling, but much like being in a car you forget how stuffy it really is until you get out and breathe the free air. Okay, okay, I am embellishing a little here; lab culture is certainly far from the regime of Pol Pot. But with all of its attention on a top-down chain-of-command structure, with uniformity of look imposed on office space and especially in new buildings forged from government money, you take for granted the ability to hang a poster outside your door and the ability to put a table fewer than 18-inches from any neighboring furniture.
Shameless advertising - a benefit of blank wall space outside your office.
I also decided that a new faculty member needs something bright and shiny outside the front door, something to catch the eye of interested physics majors or new graduate students. I’m not above shameless PR; sometimes, I get a little caught up in the sloganeering and the excitement of what ought to be serious work. But, come on, if physics weren’t a little fun, why would I be doing it? I made a pair of posters that now hang outside my office door, one about opportunities for discovering dark matter at BaBar and the other about discovering dark matter using ATLAS.
And then there are just things that catch your eye on a university campus. Take Dallas Hall, for instance. When you stand inside the rotunda of this oldest building on the campus, you look straight up into a beautiful stained-glass window atop the dome. How can the eye not look at this and imagine a beautiful particle collision leaping forth from the center of its colored symmetry? Mine did. Enjoy.
An LHC proton-proton collision superimposed on the Dallas Hall stained-glass window.
