Since there hasn't been much activity on the blog for a while, I have decided to blog about my week. I hope this will serve as a warning to my colleagues that they should update the blog reasonably frequently!
Anyway, for a detailed account of a "typical" week for a lecturer at Imperial HEP, watch this space (or avoid it, as the case may be...).
One of the founding principles of this blog was not to fill it with self-indulgent spewings, but my hand has been forced -- beware:
Sunday
Start the week in a good mood, a big chorizo omelette breakfast in the Portuguese area up the road from me.
I come in after lunchtime, a bit later than I wanted. It seems about a third of the offices down my corridor are occupied. Weekends are good because there is no teaching and fewer people come knocking on my door, although today a certain DZero physicist did come in asking to be rescued because he had locked himself out of his office....
The central event this coming week is a face-to-face meeting (as opposed to the usual teleconferences) that I have convened for the T2K experiment near detector physics software group. Today I am sending out a draft agenda for the meeting. We only have two days but a lot of work to get done, and because some people are dialling who can't travel this week from a variety of time zones, it is going to be quite difficult to arrange the sessions to suit everyone.
I also send out a reminder for some people to submit their sections of a report we are writing. Then I make a mental note to myself that I'd better get on with writing the bit that I am supposed to be responsible for.
I look through the laboratory notebooks of a dozen or so first year undergraduate students. Keeping a decent logbook of everything you do is an important part of a physicist's training, and while some are already amazingly good -- legible and detailed with lots of interesting jottings -- there are one or two where I can't figure what they were thinking. Some harsh words are in order, but then I remind myself about what I was like as a first year student, and hold back a bit....
Before catching the bus home, I continue drafting some recommendation letters that I am writing for a student. There are about 10 undergraduates that I have been tutoring who are graduating this year, so I know I'll be doing a lot of letter writing over the next several months! As far as so-called administrative tasks go, letter writing is something that I feel a sense of responsibility over -- if my wording is somehow off and the letter conveys the wrong impression, it could have a lasting effect on a person's life. One of my students graduated last year and is now studying at one of the very top Institutes in the US, diametrically opposite the one I went to (geographically), which isn't bad, although whether he actually needed any help from me to get in is another matter....
Monday
Get up early, work a bit on the report over a nice cup of tea.
Second year undergraduate tutorials at 11am, mostly about quantum mechanics. Today I am going through the postulates of QM with them, and how the physics concepts like states and measurements are linked to the mathematics, letting you calculate and predict things. In just a few months' time, they'll be able to calculate the behaviour of hydrogen atoms in laser beams and the like. In a couple of years, the lucky ones will have moved on to calculating what happens in particle interactions at a collider, or neutrino interactions with matter!
At Imperial Physics, we do tutorials in groups of about four students. I think this is about right, because for most issues that the students have, they can bounce ideas off each other and work things out on the board and come to the right conclusion, with just a bit of guidance. Any more and I think some students would find it more difficult to participate fully, any fewer and there wouldn't be the student interactions which can work so well.
Have lunch with Dave Wark at the Senior Common Room, where we are joined by a physicist from a different group. The conversation centres on the world economy, the price of CD players, and how much the space station costs.
1st year lab at 2pm. They are measuring the speed of light using a tabletop setup. My job is to wander about, saying "think about the errors, think about the errors...."
Later in the day, I receive some emails from a couple of personal tutees, asking to have chats with me. I sense some more letter writing coming my way. This week is full so I schedule sessions for next week.
In the evening, Dave, the students Ian and Francois and I attend a lecture from the IgNobel people, where some "improbable" research at Imperial are presented. It is good fun, and you can see how introducing the "quirkiest" science is a great way of showing how the scientific method works and why we all do it. The research on camel hydration and brain temperatures left a lasting impression on me.
Afterwards we end up having an extended chat with a certain prominent science journalist. Good science journalism is of course crucial for the public to understand the importance of basic research. We agree that having a good "rubbish-o-meter" is the most important thing for a journalist (although "rubbish" may not have been the exact word that was used). She also writes a lot of obituaries for scientists, and that seems to be bothering Dave somehow....
