Doing my work I sit in my office, or in a cubical at Fermilab. I interact with those around me -- at Fermilab that is almost 100% other experimentalists. Back at my office I sometimes make it up to the 4th floor to talk to theorists, but not all that often.
In order to make progress in this field theorists and experimentalists must work together closely. High Energy Physics is in a rather unique situation: we have lots of hints something odd is going on -- but nothing strong enough to call a smoking gun. Neither the theorists or the experimentalists can find that smoking gun alone.
A year or two ago a conference series was started here at Fermilab to try to increase the interaction between theorists and experimentalists. It is called TeV Connections. It is organized into section, and in each section there is a talk by a theorists, someone from the DZERO experiment, and someone from the CDF experiment. It has a second purpose -- it is always scheduled right before the really big Lepton/Photon conference (I'm not going, but check out the location!!), and the CDF and DZERO experiments are encouraged to release their results at Fermilab first, before traveling to Lepton/Photon.
It just finished up yesterday; I managed to attend most of the talks. All the talks were good, but I really liked Tim Tait's talk on the state of top quark theory. I've already forwarded it to one of my students to look at. BUT -- darn it -- so much of what made that talk good was the extra information that Tim said. And there was no video recording (or streaming). Which was too bad.
Overall, however, I don't think the conference this year was as good as it was in the past. First, the attendance was rather low. This is in part DZERO's fault: we just had our big vancouver retreat and many people were on vacation up in Canada. But that doesn't fully explain the lack of people. The second problem was that, at least in DZERO, getting the results blessed is running late and as a result there were a number of results that weren't released in time for this, but should be for Lepton/Photon. You could hear some of the theorists' frustration at this. I'm not really in a position to appologize for the experiment, obviously, but I sympathize.
I really like the idea behind this conference. I hope it is done again next year and I hope the organizers and experiments are able to improve it for next year. :-)
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