https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassb...
There are continuous technical workforce challenges in science because the methods keep advancing. If only there were money it. Instead we have engineers, scientists, and physicians driving Uber and we outsource and offshore the entire scientific supply chain.
We lose techniques all the time but gain new ones. I designed a scientific instrument once that had a long precision bore through it. I designed it with the belief that I needed clearances for a large stiff boring bar to make the feature.
I showed the prints to my machinist, and he told me they were just gonna put it on the five axis and hit the bore on both sides with an end mill. That it was as accurate as how the old guys did it.
It was.
Every day at 3pm was "coffee and cookies", and my colleagues and I would join the line filled with physicists of all ages and from across the lab, to grab a cookie or maybe two. On Fridays the coffee turned into wine and the cookies into cheese.
The second floor, where the coffee was, had a rotating art installation, which at some point included an acrylic box filled with water. One day this box went from being empty to containing a live goldfish.
I hope Fermilab retains this sense of magic that I have found in so few other places.
People who say "I don't have friends at work" with pride are completely foreign to me. I don't understand how people are supposed to have any joy at work, or get over comms barriers, when there is no opportunity to get to know coworkers as people.
You can be friendly, but when something happens at work and one of you no longer works there...things get weird. Those weekend bbqs that you had with work friends no longer happen, or they keep going for a bit, but conversations are awkward since the still employed are no longer free to discuss or the no-longer employed harbors resentment that isn't exactly hidden. What kind of "friend" was that after all?
> a few members of my team would get up at 2pm to get coffee and chat about work and life
If I stopped programming arbitrarily at 2:00pm when my hours are 9:00am-5:00pm I expect to be let go (unless I'm taking this as my lunch period). Especially to socialize over coffee. As a production-level IC I just can't do that ethically, and perhaps this is a personal fault... but I'm paid to keep my nose down and develop software solutions, not to socialize with colleagues. If we need to meet over work it's best to get that on the calendar so there's some expectation of formality - not in some adhoc social hour/afternoon.
> People who say "I don't have friends at work" with pride are completely foreign to me.
I don't say it with "pride," but I have 100% learned to put distance between my personal and professional lives. Example: every time I have had to deal with suicide scares it's always been a professional relationship/colleague of sorts. It's been three times now, and for some reason I seem like a trustable enough person that people put this on me. I hate it.
Then, there's people who I have thought were close friends who completely ghosted me after moving to a different company - who knows, maybe it's me. But I've heard lots of people express similar frustrations and it's just pushed me to consider every work friendship a "work friendship." I have more equitable and consistent relationships when I make friends outside of my profession, I invest my time and energy there.
Finally there's the emotional investment. When it comes to employment I am not part of a "family," and I'd really appreciate that sort of language to stop. Right now. I am selling my time and labor to a business to solve problems and fulfill operational duties that they require of me. At any point, employer or employee can terminate that relationship because "at will." This is surely not a "family," and I personally believe it is not an ideal spot to sink your social energy. I've seen people have their careers pulled from underneath them after over-investing socially into the company - they do not do well. I'm not here to emotionally invest during my 9-5, I'm here for business. Unless it's a requirement of the job (sales, vendors, talent aq, etc.) I am not putting myself out there socially/emotionally.
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Sorry to share some anecdotes but I think there are very valid reasons to put distance between your work relationships and your personal ones, purposefully erecting a buffer. I think it's very valid if someone wants to keep their work relationships just that: work relationships.
Just an aside, but at a senior level walking around and bullshitting with people is where a lot of the work gets done. At some point you'll get involved with a project that's so interesting you'll never really stop thinking about it, and then your idea of what someone looks like when they're "working" will change.
I see a lot of the points though.
The room had been overlooked in the usual surplus process for years. My friend was related to someone working for the janitorial services company, and they'd been told to clean that room out and throw the stuff away. So what we got to do was help with that, and put anything we liked in my car instead of the dumpster.
We were stripping stuff there in the parking lot to save space. Crammed that car full of junk. It was a truly wonderful day.
I wonder if they still do that summer program.
The building was empty but open, there's a museum upstairs but when we got lost between floors we would just walk between cubicles that were clearly in use during the week, it was super wierd and cool at the same time. We didn't see the accelerator of course but still, we saw some control rooms etc..., to this day I'm not sure if we broke in or what
My leadership chain was…interesting but it was incredibly cool in my mid 20s to lunch with high energy physicists and others in this space.
https://cms.fnal.gov/remote-operations-center/
(worked on CMS data taking for a year in the mid 00s)
Similar to your story, I got to take high school physics extra classes there, and it was awesome, like being in a Star Wars set with entirely normal parents who worked there and who could teach us really interesting physics (classical mostly, and relativity).
I toured Fermilab later in college while we where near there for an ACM programming competition. The one thing I remember from the tour was a big red button labeled "Start" next to some huge experiment. The tour guide saw us looking at it and said something like "You don't want to touch that". I've often wondered if that was real or just a prop they used for tours.
Btw, I'll never forget what Leon said when asked by a physics student about what the most important thing to learn or study as an undergrad. He said, "learn to write".
If you need anonymity to talk to a reporter, you already know that DOE has a problem.
I know nothing of the issues going on but this just isn't a universal truth. Most people would speak anonymously when talking about their employer and that doesn't mean there is anything wrong with their employer.
Which employers allow their employees to speak poorly of them in public without permission to speak about the company?
I am all for radical transparency in the public sector, but part of that transparency requires that the individuals communicating have a precise understanding of technical communication. I’ve seen inaccurate communication cause very similar issues to those caused by a lack of communication.
AFAIK the rule for federal employees is they’re allowed to speak publicly and opine on political matters, but not to identify themselves as government employees while doing so.
> “We did not write a very good contract for the excavation,” ... “There were all kinds of loopholes in it, and the excavation company made an awful lot of money off of us.”
Another thing that strikes me is, why is construction in the U.S. so corrupt and such a money pit? I don't think I have ever heard of a large construction project being delivered on time and on budget. I understand construction is very difficult, but it just seems out of control.
I have also read anecdotes about that project. For example, stories of contractors tricking out their personal trucks and tools and booking it to the protect.
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and got accepted into the Saturday Morning Physics Program (https://saturdaymorningphysics.fnal.gov/) at Fermilab. Many of the lectures went completely over my head at the time but I was still in awe of the particle accelerator on campus. I actually got lost driving to a different building one Saturday and accidentally drove around the ring (with several people blindly following me). Their neutrino experiment, which was planned to shoot neutrinos to Minnesota (MINOS program), was on the imminent horizon and the staff were excited... apparently that was ended in 2016.
I guess it's a hard life being known for a particle accelerator when you get dethroned by CERN and then shut down your ring.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivVzGpznw1U&list=PLAB-wWbHL7...
We stopped wanting to do that, or at the very least outlay the capital to do that. We likewise don’t want people at fermilab doing other things with their time. Meaning that they don’t have much to do but go through the motions.
We have a few of these in science, it would arguably be better in the long run to refocus our science budget on problems we’re interested in solving and some “risk” budget for different ideas.
In my view, the entire field is on pause awaiting the development of truly transformative accelerator technology, then it's off to the races again.
"In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending." -- Wilson.
Nobody would argue that a business unit that has outlived its usefulness should be funded in perpetuity, yet there seems to be this "strictly increasing" mindset around organizations funded by the taxpayer.
The video of the project is pretty cool https://youtu.be/nv13DswIKr8
Shooting neutrinos through the earth 1300km in 4ms
tl;dr: CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) is one of two major detectors of the Large Hadron collider. Fermilab was intimately involved in designing CMS. Fermilab is also a "tier 1" computation center for processing LHC data (possibly restricted to CMS data?). Per this factsheet[1], there is one other "tier 1" compute farm in the US, though it isn't named in particular. I'd guess Lawrence Livermore, but I have nothing more than a hunch.
[1] https://www.fnal.gov/gridfest/pdfs/uscomputing_factsheet.pdf
The Standard Model has some issues but it's, in principle, a valid effective description of all the fundamental forces minus gravity. The issue is that quantum effects of gravity are negligible until the Planck scale, we have no technological means to get even close to those levels. That is, physicists have been able to provide an understanding of the universe that for all we know for certain might be valid up to the Planck scale, which is where we know for sure new physics must appear. And because our technological ability is lagging much farther behind they must probe that new physics blindly, without any experimental evidence. This is an incredibly difficult thing to do.
Imagine that the ancient greeks managed to discover Quantum Mechanics. They lay down the correct Schrodinger equation, and understand the superposition principle, Heisenberg uncertainty principle, etc. They know it can potentially explain the atom but lacking sufficient engineering prowess they cannot really test the theory and verify its validity. This is the situation physics is in, we have mathematically consistent theories of quantum gravity but we cannot know if it's the correct description of the universe because experimental evidence is inaccessible and might be inaccessible for centuries to come.
That used to be my view, but it turns I was wrong. The standard model was complete in the 1970's, and everything beyond it since then has been fruitless. Axions excluded, the other kind of axion excluded, sterile neutrinos excluded to make just a few.
Even Roger Penrose thinks we're on the wrong track with quantum gravity.
Check out Sabine Hofstetter's voluminous output on this issue for a better breakdown than I can give.
Sabine Hossenfelder is a peculiar character. She raises some good points regarding the futility of a lot of the phenomenological models that are published, in my mind they are little more than busy-work to have something to publish and survive the publish or perish attrition that researchers must endue. And she is right that is not the way to do science. It's a form of overfitting and throwing things to the wall in the hope something sticks. But this is mostly due to publish or perish. Discovering something deep is very difficult and if you have to have several publications per year to renew your contract you have strong incentives to build a silly toy model with little chances of being right. But the problem lies in the incentives that have been set up in academia. Remove them and most of those silly publications will disappear. But then it's hard to establish a different set of incentives that ensure those that most deserve funding get it. Beyond that fair criticism it's hard to understand what she proposes as an alternative. She doesn't bring anything constructive to the table. Pack it up and de-fund physics until our technical means allows us to probe the Planck scale?
There is certainly an argument to be made on how much funding different sciences should receive given their potential contribution to society. And I see a lot of low hanging fruits in other sciences that would grant most funding going there. But theoretical physicists cost pennies to our society; they are few, poorly paid, and require little more than pen and paper. At the same time, theoretical physicists have contributed to this date immensely valuable contributions that make our developed world possible. It's my perhaps biased opinion that they have had the most outsized impact into our progress. It's sensible capital allocation to keep some funding in the chance they keep changing our lives for the better as profoundly as they have done in the past.
There is this apocryphal quote that summarizes it quite well, it is said that William Gladston (british minister of finance) asked Michael Faraday what was the usefulness of this electromagnetic field he was researching. To which Faraday purportedly answered, "I don't know, sir, but one day you may be able to tax it". Even if this particular exchange didn't happen, it contains a very valuable truth, when you are researching the frontiers of science the practical application is not always obvious but that shouldn't deter us from doing it.
Yes. Theoretical particle physics has done a wonderfully good job in explaining everything it can. But now the job is done. Should move on and do something else. But because the institutions are too established, and past glory is too good, they don't know how.
I'd say physics without the related "technological/engineering prowess" (i.e. the experiments to back said physics up) is just wishy-washy fancy-sounding maths.
Neutrinos are pretty fascinating, it's true, but the price tag's pretty high. DOE could instead be financing solar PV research, battery research, etc... although then the politicians would likely cut their budget under pressure from the investor-owned utilities and fossil fuel exporters.
1: It kept a workforce advancing, both at the labs themselves, and at all the suppliers and manufacturers who fed into them. Those mega-budgets weren't buying mega-yachts for the lab directors; they flowed into mega-upgrades for industry, who could score "juicy government lab contracts" and advance their capabilities, which then paid dividends for the rest of the sector.
2: It supplied national prestige. The best and brightest from all over the world would fall over themselves to work in labs here. The moon landing shattered records for the most-watched TV broadcast ever, and a billion people knew America was on top of the world.
Both of these had significant trickle-down effects, which I don't think were fully appreciated until we let them rot on the vine.
I think "science" in the sense that GP uses it, should refer to any research that ticks both of the above boxes.
In general however, there's too much opportunity for corruption if contracts are just blindly given to private interests by politicians. Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction contracts were a good example of how bad that can get.
I'd rather risk that every tenth contract is fraudulent than have every contract cost twice as much with the government doing it themselves. There's just zero incentive for government employees to work quickly and efficiently.
Check private contractor's work to make sure they're not cutting any corners, make corruption harder and incentivize whistle-blowers, but letting the government do things is not something I want as a taxpayer.
And toll turnpikes.
"Public-Private Partnerships" are neoliberal fantasies of privatized, for-profit monopolies performing government functions while taxing working people. Most often, there is some sort of corrupt and unethical favoritism and revolving door between government official(s) and the vendor corporation.
It's easy to criticize Fermilab for cost overruns and delays, but we must remember that they are pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge and technology. The nature of cutting-edge research means that there will always be unknowns and challenges that cannot be anticipated.
>>Spending for the Superconducting Super Collider had become a target for a new class of congressmen elected in 1992. They were eager to show that they could cut what they saw as Texas pork, and they didn’t feel that much was at stake. The cold war was over, and discoveries at the SSC were not going to produce anything of immediate practical importance.
https://redsails.org/concessions/#education-and-research-its...
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the hacker mentality extends far beyond software. The hacker mentality is a way of life.
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UOpsfRLRr_I/VbhWuR4OeBI/AAAAAAAAB...
https://live.staticflickr.com/3800/33033871090_f658526696_b....
The art and architecture around the lab has a surprisingly rich history dating back to its first director who was also a sculptor/artist: https://history.fnal.gov/historical/art_arch/art_architectur...
