Social events are an important part of about any scientific conference. Some argue they are even the most important part of the programme as they allow people to get together and discuss in a more relaxed atmosphere than the three minutes question time after the talks. Usually one half-day is reserved for some kind of excursion.
It was no different at the LHCb collaboration week in Saint Nectaire a month ago. On Wednesday afternoon we could choose between (a) a guided tour of six roman churches, (b) a guided visit of a volcano, or (c) climb the Puy-the-Dôme. From the 200 participants, 130 chose option (c), a 500 m climb of the landmark mountain next to Clermont-Ferrand. The organizers counted 3h30 for the hike and told us to hurry up if we didn't want to miss the bus. Actually everybody had reached the summit in much less than two hours. Some of us even made a detour to climb the Puy de Pariou, a small volcano with a nice crater (straight under the blue paraglider on the picture above). We were all quite impressed by how fit the collaboration is! Nobody expected that so many people would choose to climb a mountain between two meetings.
We also elected a new spokesman for the LHCb experiment. After more than 10 years in charge of the design and construction of the LHCb experiment, Tatsuya Nakada will step down as spokesman next year. The new spokesman-elect is Andrey Golutvin, director of ITEP Moscow and co-convener with Ulrik of the rare decays working group. A new era is starting, with a new spokesman and hopefully real data very soon.
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Undergraduate and Postgraduate students, Research Associates and Staff at the Imperial College London High Energy Physics Group. (everyone is invited to add comments!)
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5 comments:
> Social events are an important part of about any scientific conference. ....
> Usually one half-day is reserved for some kind of excursion.
Unfortunately, no one told us at T2K about having excursions during collaboration meetings!
We just got back from a meeting at KEK in Japan, where the entire T2K collaboration gets together a few times a year to coordinate all the work that is necessary to get the experiment up and running by April 2009.
These meetings are really intense, often starting at 7am or 8am, and finishing at 10pm, or past midnight depending on which sub-meeting you happen to be in. Lunch has been considered optional at times, so you have to sneak out and grab a sandwich when you can.
For the latest meeting, a last minute decision was made that we would have a party at the end of the four days, which the UK collaborators volunteered to organise. In spite of the fact that some people had other travel plans so couldn't attend, it went rather well. (No, please do not post any video evidence of this!)
Sorry that I did not help with the organisation at all, my only contribution being to help empty the nearby slot machine (with party funds) when we ran out of refreshments.
You are right though, it is important to get to know one's international collaborators through means other than work sessions in a seminar room.
Mount Tsukuba is just a few miles from KEK, and the view from the top is said to be fantastic -- perhaps some day we'll be able to organise an excursion up to the top as part of a collaboration meeting.
I somehow think that this will have to wait till we get our experiment running and taking data though....
This was my first T2K collaboration meeting and I really liked what I saw. I thought the discussions were lively and interesting, and amazingly they led to a number of important decisions. This is not always easy to do in an open forum with two or three hundred physicists in the room!
We have a SciBooNE collaboration meeting later this week, and luckily we are still small enough to finish the meeting in one day. Although that doesn't create a need for an excursion it is much easier on the psyche. But perhaps I'll organize a race up the stairs in Fermilab's Wilson Hall to determine how fit we are...
Yes, sorry, perhaps my post on the T2K meeting came across a little too negatively!
The meetings are intense and exhausting, but we do get real work done towards our common goal of extracting maximum physics from the experiment. The collaboration is full of people of all sorts of backgrounds (physics and otherwise), which makes it really interesting.
And I hasten to add that when I did race your 2nd year PhD student (who shall remain unnamed)
up the stairs in the Fermilab high-rise earlier this year, I came out the winner by several floors! And this was before he had learnt how to drive....
I want to step in at this point, before the whole world (or at least the subset who read this blog) get the wrong impression of T2K physicists.
The phrase slot machine has a number of meanings, depending on location, and I believe the predominant one these days is for a one armed bandit, a gambling machine where coins are fed in, a lever is pulled or buttons are pressed and money is won or lost on the spin of three drums.
This is not what Yoshi was referring to, but to the other (older and more British) meaning, of a vending machine or snack machine. In Japan, you can buy almost anything from these machines, which you will find all over the place. Some things are what you'd expect, soft drinks, coffee (although these come in a can) and chocolate. Others are not so common, beer, cooked 'squid nuggets' (I'm told the taste... okay), etc. An exhaustive list can be found on wikipedia.
So I'd like to confirm that when we ran out of alcohol, Yoshi, Melissa and I purchased more beer from a vending/slot machine in the dorm building, as good hosts would be expected to do. At no point, did we embezzle party funds to feed a gambling addiction, then run off with the winnings...
Just so you know.
Slot machines: This reminds me of another peculiarity of the Saint-Nectaire LHCb week. For all plenary meetings we used the theatre of the local casino. In the afternoon one could hear the sound of the nearby slot machines. And they were definitely not selling cold tea and warmish coffee cans. It was a little noisy at times but not as bad as in a pachinko.
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