Part 5

As an undergraduate, I had worked with two professors and two graduate students on a fledging research direction motivated by the new realms that the LHC would probe and the exquisite precision of the data it would produce.  This was fall 2006, still a few years before the LHC would turn on in earnest, but unfortunately progress on the project suffered from several competing destructively-interfering effects.  The senior professor was highly-esteemed but had little time for day-to-day work, the junior professor was engaged, but was secretly hunting for jobs elsewhere, and us three students were very young, and lacked perspective or a broad picture of the project.  I did some simple calculations and others performed some computer simulations, but nothing materialized into something worthy of a paper by the time I graduated, and I moved on, distracted by all of the trappings of graduate school.  Then, early in 2008, a group of researchers from the UK and France published a short, simple paper presenting a novel technique for analyzing the data of the LHC, a method for discovering undiscovered particles.  This was it, this was the paper that we had been trying to write, but failed because we were out of sync or inexperienced.  This paper changed the playing field, re-imagining what could be possible at the LHC.  Searches for new particles that had been abandoned were now re-evaluated and an entirely original research direction was initiated that eventually infiltrated every aspect of the scientific program at CERN.  It was humbling to realize that in some sense I had been so close to being a key player in a major revolution, but at the same time acknowledging that there had still been so many pieces I had missed that there was no way I could have assembled the puzzle.

One of the senior authors of that paper, Gavin, was lecturing at this school.  I hadn’t thought much about the work from my undergraduate days since, and instead dived deep into a project presented to me by my advisor, and had even published a few papers on it, but felt neither ownership nor that it represented my research interests specifically.  With these lectures, the excitement and intrigue for that undergraduate research came flooding back.  That paper was just one of the three that Gavin and others posted in one month, February of 2008, that upended the game and now a couple of years later, had inspired a new international conference series, required the experiments on the LHC to write brand-new and greatly improved analysis software, and provided the skeleton for these lectures that had been filled out with pedagogical flesh.  This truly felt like a calling, I could sense my brain analyzing and anticipating where he was taking us in the lecture and mentally engaging in a way that I hadn’t noticed for other topics.  I internally criticized analogy or example choices, I quietly praised the lecture’s scope, vision, and goal, starting from simple assumptions and leading us to conversant fluency with the physics, and was determined to realign my research efforts with my research interests, and establish my own project in this field.  I made sure to sit next to Gavin at lunch that day.

I had prepared by wearing my swim trunks as shorts today and after finishing my meal, joined the dozen or so people already splashing about in the sea.  Like a hug from a warm blanket, the water was just above skin temperature, and I swam out to a sand bar about 100 yards from shore which others were using as a base camp for swimming further out into open water.  My experience with swimming in nature was limited to the lake near my parents’ house or just getting my feet wet on the beaches of the northern Pacific, and so the harsh taste of salt on my lips with each breath of air was surprising, but not entirely unwelcome.  My goal was modest, to just be able to say that I swam in the Mediterranean, so back toward shore I went with ample time before the afternoon lectures would begin.  This afternoon, I had no towel, but the sun and wind conspired into a rapid blow dryer while I was seated on the grassy bluff and gazed at the swimmers in the distance.  With a few minutes to spare, the exodus from the sea commenced, and lines formed about the bathrooms for changing back into street clothes.  Already dry, I went directly to the auditorium, to settle back into my seat.

As the lecture began, so did the itching.  The high salinity that makes the Mediterranean so pleasant to swim in was now crystallizing on my hirsute legs, tugging on the thousands of hairs in every which direction.  I would rub my calf on my shin or scratch my thigh for relief, and it seemed at the time like I could hear the slough and then sprinkle of the salt from my skin onto the floor.  Once one patch of hair was salt-free, another patch would be acutely painful and I kept itching and itching and the flurry of salt kept raining down.  Now, my arms itched, next the hair on my head froze in place by the sea’s natural product and worse was that a sneaky scratch deposited white flakes all over my shoulders, like I was the star in a bad shampoo commercial.  Only now did I understand the brilliance of bathing habits of Europeans, disciplined by decades of holidays in Cannes, Ibiza, or Marbella, and why there were so many showers in the bathrooms.  While I encouraged the sun to extract sea salt from my skin, they quickly rinsed off with freshwater, dried with a towel, dressed, and were back in the auditorium, reinvigorated for the lectures.  Once was enough swimming for me.

Shaking off the remaining salt during the afternoon break, I was able to relax and focus for the final session of the day.  No students were talking today; instead, a lecturer, Tim, was presenting a tutorial introducing how to use a piece of software that he had developed several years earlier, but had since become a standard tool in the field.  A rather unique and special feature of particle physics, unlike nearly every other realm of science even among other subfields of physics, is that there are extremely precise simulations that accurately describe the minutiae of collider experiment, despite the amazingly complicated nature of the events with thousands of detected particles of dozens of different types.  Additionally, particle physics experimental collaborations hold the data they acquired in confidence, only presenting their results in a published paper, and only after significant analysis.  As common practice, raw data was never shared, an unfortunate cultural phenomenon born out of jealously, arrogance, and pride amongst the famous personalities of the field who fought for Nobel Prizes to be the first to find that new particle buried in their data.  The next best thing, and the only thing at the time that the hoi polloi who were not on an experiment could use, was to generate your own artificial data using one of the many offerings of simulation software that had been developed.  The tutorial on this early evening was designed to orient and familiarize students with a particle event generator, and we could work along with Tim on our laptops.

Tim’s introduction, before computers were pulled out, was informal and funny, and he emphasized that we were ambassadors for the field and should talk physics with everyone we meet.  He had a wonderful way of talking laterally to us, as colleagues, putting smiles on faces while we watched him on screen do perhaps the most boring thing possible of just opening up his laptop and navigate around the desktop.  There was a website interface to use the software, which would actually run on a dedicated computing cluster at Tim’s institution.  Of course, it is not a good idea to just have access to a computing cluster out there on the internet, so a general user would have to first register and validate that they were from a legitimate institution of higher learning and needed to perform particle physics calculations.  I and a few others in the audience had used this software previously, so had usernames, but most did not and with finite lecture time, Tim had created a general username and password that could be used by everyone at the school.  So, 90 people logged in simultaneously and immediately the site crashes, and only the first and quickest few successfully begin the simulation generation.  With a generous estimate of a couple thousand people in the world needing this program, there was effectively 0 probability that several percent of them had accessed the site at precisely the same time, so the system had never been tested in this way.  We could read on Tim’s face that while this was a minor setback it was discouraging for the active participation he had envisioned.

With time limited and vanishing faster than anticipated, examples from the end of the tutorial were eliminated, and we were pivoted to form small groups with only one computer per every few students logged in, sufficient to reduce the load on the server and ensure everyone had a screen to stare at.  Carefully balancing student engagement in the seats with the presentation at the front, Tim cautiously continued, and demonstrated the syntax for entering a desired process to simulate through the online form.  Tap, tap, tap went fingers on keyboards, and a few dozen thumbs hovered over their “return” keys when the banshee peal of the fire alarm filled the auditorium and pushed all of us outside, suspending our event simulation.  It was immediately apparent that there was no smoke, no fire, just a rogue electronic alarm that scattered students to the far ends of the institute to avoid the noise, that required the organizers to run from building to building to find any site staff that remained into the early evening.  Efforts to turn off the alarms were unsuccessful and eventually, randomly, silence clawed its way back into the auditorium after a 20 minute absence.  However, an alarm that randomly stops ringing is not an alarm that has been extinguished, and with just enough time to get seated again, open computers again, and start the simulation again, that rascal alarm shrieked again.  The time flew by with all of the distractions, and 6 pm had already arrived so we all gathered our things, holding our ears as we were able.  Defeated, Tim joined the train hiking back up and out of the Institute, his tutorial postponed until the following week.

While Tim had made his name through development of these simulation tools and the subsequent predictions they enabled, recently his interests had shifted to physics education research, and in between servers failing and alarms blaring he hinted at it, giving us little slices of pedagogical insight while computers were loading.  Physics education research was beginning to grow in acceptance as a legitimate discipline and necessary for reaching students who were otherwise frightened of the subject, while at the same time introducing techniques that provided all students of all interests and abilities a richer and more profound personal connection with physics.  More and more universities were offering Ph.D. tracts in education research, and big names in science were moving that direction late in their careers, with no bigger name than Carl Wieman, Nobel Prize winner for creating a novel super-cooled state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate, who had founded an open, online education resource for virtual physics demonstrations through the University of Colorado Boulder, but had since been adopted by institutions throughout the world.  I had some familiarity with physics education research, as I worked as a teaching assistant as an undergraduate in a department with a long and storied history of education research, and was deeply entrenched in the philosophy, techniques, and inquiry-based approach pioneered there.  As the din receded in the distance behind the trees, I introduced myself to Tim and mentioned my work in physics education and his smile returned, knowing that, despite the interruptions, he had connected with the audience.