Travel

I promised Yoshi in front of the entire group that I would make a post to the Blog, so true to my word, here is a first effort.
As you are no doubt aware, the possibilities to conduct a HEP experiment in the UK are nowadays rather limited. Much of the group is involved in experiments which take place overseas. Ideally we send people overseas for an extended period of time, a Long Term Attachment (LTA), which allows them to minimize the effects of travel, and maximize their ability to participate in the experiment they are working on. This arrangment works well, but for some of us it is necessary to be both here and at the experiment at the same time. In some ways this gives us the best of both worlds, but it has the nasty side effect of requiring a lot of travel.
A typical morning for me at Imperial might actually begin at 5am in Geneva. There is flight that leaves before 7am and arrives in London so that I can be at Imperial by 9am. I can say with confidence that there is absolutely no glamour in the "jet-set" lifestyle. But honestly this is a pretty easy commute. 10 years ago when we were setting up the BaBar experiment at SLAC (near San Francisco) I regularly flew between California and London, a commute which can test your endurance, and involved regular resetting of my internal time-zone.
Members of the group are currently working overseas on experiments at Fermilab (near Chicago), SLAC (near San Francisco), CERN (near Geneva), and in Japan. There are some ways in which technology has made it possible to avoid some of the travel. Participating in meetings via telephone/video/internet conference is now much more practical. There are several systems where presentations are posted to a web site, and so particpants can see all the material on their local machines, and then follow and participate in the discussions via the conference call. This works reasonably well for many working meetings, and is used by most members of the group. There are difficulties with this as well due to the spherical nature of the earth, meetings which take place in the evening in Japan are in the morning here, meetings in the evening here are in the morning in California, and so there is actually a rather small window of "working hours" where these conferences can take place without causing one side or another to come in very early, or stay very late. Some times, however, it is just necessary to travel. It isn't yet possible to plug in cables on the telephone, and sometimes you just need to be in the same room as your colleagues or your detector to work through a problem.
I've picked out some of the difficulties of the travel, but it also comes with a lot of benefits. As well as getting to work in some very nice places, one gets the opportunity to work with colleagues from around the world. These interactions are extremely valuable in broadening our work methods and our ways of approaching various problems.
That's it for now, I've got a plane to catch...