Debbie Harris

Post-script to a Blog

December 31, 2005

I've been asked to pick my three favorite blogs from this year, and by looking over all the posts I wrote this year I'm realizing a few things:  the first is that I like my writing better when I'm angry or stressed out about something, and the second is that I must have been angrier and more stressed about things in the beginning of the year rather than the end of the year.  I think my favorite blog is Extraordinary Committements of Time and Energy, which is in response to Lawrence Summer's absurd remarks made at the beginning of the year about why there were so few women in the top positions in academia in the physical sciences. 

However, I would rather my year of blogging be summarized by telling the physics and juggling act that is my life.  So with that in mind, if somone were to only read three blogs of this entire year, they would be

1.  the very beginning of the run of the MINOS experiment, or the birth of a beamline.

2.  The transition from being on a running experiment to starting to plan a newer one to take the next step in the field of neutrino physics, Simulataneous Balancing Acts.

3.  My attempt to summarize Life at Fermilab in 15 Minutes (including the nifty video link from Fermilab's Visual Media Services).

I am grateful for the opportunity to use Quantum Diaries and a soapbox and at times a therapist, and I am especially grateful to all of you folks out there who are interested in learning more about physics and the lives of physicists.

Physicists in Mourning

December 30, 2005

Since I was forgiven for starting the year of physics by blogging about birth, I hope I will be forgiven for ending the year of physics by blogging about death.  On the eve of December 25 one of the spokespeople (tranlation: leaders) of MINOS, Doug Michael, died at forty-something after struggling with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, diagnosed in February of this year.  Doug was a outspoken personality in particle physics and worked hard to make the MINOS detector what it is today, and more recently was fighting to convince Fermilab how important it was to invest in getting as many protons to the beamline as possible so we could really get the most physics out of the enormous investment in the NuMI beamline.  There's no way I can do justice to Doug's personality or accomplishments here, although I can at least point folks to the famous "how to talk like Doug" web site from his old collaboration MACRO, and to my entry about the talk he wrote for the NuMI Beamline Dedication (and this just in:  a video from 1995 of Doug talking to Alan Alda about MACRO for the TV show Scientific American Frontiers). 

Cat James, a MINOS physicist whose physicist husband died a year and a half ago (also while in his forties) sent out email to the MINOS collaboration mailing list telling how when her husband died, people sent their rememberances of Harry to the spokespeople of his current experiment, and then they collected all the emails and put them together in a book for Cat and also for Harry's family.  She suggested we do the same, and the letters have been coming in even though so many people are away on vacation these days. 

I had the opportunity to read the book at Harry's memorial service, and I was amazed at the diversity in the book:  diversity in not only in nationality and in generation, but also in how many different sides of Harry were remembered there.  Although the book has yet to be synthesized for Doug, I can already predict that there will be letters from Greece, Japan, and lots from England and Italy, just for starters.  There are already letters in from physicists just starting their carreers who have benefited from Doug's ear and advice, and a physicist "pushing 80" who helped advise Doug as a graduate student. 

The rememberance of Doug I would write about (once I figured out how to say it the right way) is his "feeder" side.  We once had a very detailed conversation about his creme brulee technique (which involved using the blow torch he had around his house for plumbing), and the fact that when the MINOS collaboration meeting was held at Cal Tech (his home institution), he picked a fantastic Mexican restaurant for the collaboration dinner and then (very quietly!!!) footed the over 100-person margarita bill himself.  (Doug, if you're reading this, I apologize for yet again spilling the beans...)

As much as I've written about my own family and our adventures this past year, I realize that probably I have not done justice to the "families" that evolve every time a collaboration comes together to do physics.  After spending nine days "in the bosom" of my own family I am reminded of what family really means:  we don't necessarily all look the same or play the same instruments (see photo at left).  We also don't all deal with stress the same way, but we do all have a common goal:  the only difference is that with experiments the primary goal has to do with something you learn in the future, with a secondary goal of training studens so they can direct the next experiment and solve the new mysteries that most experiments end up uncovering.

In families (or at least mine, I think) I would say one goal is to get as much out of the past (and present) as possible to teach the next generation.  On the other hand, after nine days of four generations of my family in Florida, I am realizing that in the case of both "blood" families and physics families, not only the youngest generation learns, and not only the oldest generation teaches.  Doug was definitely still learning and teaching in his impossible to duplicate way, and there are many branches in his physics family not only who are mourning, but who will carry on his legacy.

Happy Birthday Sonia

December 20, 2005

Yesterday was the first of several birthday parties that Sonia will have--on Sunday I made a monster batches of brownies, dutifully put nuts in only half the batter, and brought the whole thing to the Fermilab Children's Center in time for the afternoon snack on Monday where Sonia was serenaded by about 12 kids, her parents, and Teacher Jennifer (pictured at the left).  Her two other birthday parties will be tomorrow (which is her real birthday) with my parents and grandparents in Florida, and then a joint birthday party in two weeks with one of Sonia's classmates who is about 4 weeks younger than Sonia. 

This week most schools near Fermilab are not open, so lots of folks have already started taking vacation, and the parts of the lab have been blissfully quiet:  there is much better parking, which means a shorter walk in single-digit temperatures to get into the high rise (pictured at left). 

However, the twelth floor of the high rise, which houses both the MINOS control room and many MINOS offices (both visitors from Universities and lab employees) is a very busy place.  There is a collaboration meeting in Oxford at the end of the first week of January, and the collaboration is busy writing "position papers" which describe the tests we want to perform to prove we know the data well enough to "open the box". 

A relatively recent phenomenon in (particle) physics has been the idea that you want to blind yourself to the data at some level, so that you do not bias your measurement by just working until the number you measure agrees with the number you expected to measure.  So MINOS wants to figure out as much as possible about the way our detector works, and how our neutrino beam works, and has been figuring out ways to do lots of checks on our understanding without actually making the measurement we're trying to make.  The term people use for this is called "blinding" the analysis, and somehow the act of taking the blindfolds off is called "opening the box". 

Different parts of Fermilab prepare for the holidays in different ways:  many folks put up some kind of festive decorations, some are much more festive than others.  For the first time in the 5 years I've been on the 12th floor, there is a tiny Christmas tree right next to my office, put up by several of the post-docs on MINOS.  I am all for more greenery in offices in the first place, but I actually laughed out loud when I saw the present at the bottom of the tree:  it's a plain box that says "Do not open until January 9" (or was it January 8) which is the day of the collaboration meeting where if we can convince ourselves that we know what we're doing then the blinders will come off.  Unfortunately since the end of the year will be the end of this blog, interested readers will simply have to find out some other way whether we opened the box in the first place, and what we saw if we did open the box. 

The time difference between opening the box and getting the result out to the public is an unknown.  However, I would be willing to bet that before Sonia's next birthday (not to be confused with her next birthday party) we'll all know a whole lot better than we know today just how often neutrinos change flavors between here and Minnesota! 

Life After the Review

December 17, 2005

I am finding out that there is in fact life after the MINERvA Director's Review.  I have been preparing for/worrying about this for easily a month or more, and now that it's over (and I've been told it was reasonably successful) I can't quite figure out why I don't feel more relieved. 

The review started on Tuesday morning with Jorge and Kevin, the MINERvA spokespeople, giving talks about the physics motivation for the experiment and the detector description and performance.  Then I gave a talk about how the detector is being built:  who is going to be responsible for building what, and what the cost and schedule are.  Then there were 10 more talks, each about a different piece of the experiment, each given by one of the "Level 2 managers" in charge of that subsystem.  If that's not a long enough day, then we all (reviewers and reviewees) had drinks at the User's Center (see photo at left) and then dinner at Chez Leon on the evening of the first day. 

Brief Aside:  There is no way I could write for a year about the life of a physicist at Fermilab and not talk about Chez Leon.  This is a gourmet restaurant on the laboratory site for Fermilab users and visitors, that has been around for decades:  my earliest memory of going there is as a "starving graduate student" and having fantastic fresh-baked bread right before going on owl shift, and of chef Tita taking pity on me and giving me extra bread to give to my buddies on shift later that night. 

Chez Leon is open for lunch on Wednesdays and dinner on Thursdays (assuming you're organized enough to get a reservation in advance before the seats fill up), but Tita and her crew also provide meals for most (maybe all) of the "official dinners" at the Laboratory.  It is a true reward to be given such good food after all the preparations and stress of a review.

However, when I got home Tuesday evening I found out that my grandfather had suffered a "minor heart attack" (which sounds like an oxymoron if I ever heard one) and was in the hospital.  I have spoken with him several times since then, and he sounds like his same witty self, but nevertheless I feel pretty shaken up, and I can only imagine how much more shaken he feels. 

So the review continued on the next day, further punctuated by my daugher's coming down with a 24-hour stomach virus, and long "breakout sessions" where only a few of the reviewers ask you lots of detailed questions on the thing you're specifically leading.  Although I am told things went well overall, I still feel like I have a ton to learn as far as management goes. 

Now that the review is over I want to breathe this huge sigh of relief, but I am finding that really hard to do:  the best part of this review was the fact that the reviewers were really good at constructive criticism, and now I really feel like I have my work cut out for me. 

Luckily my long sigh of relief is not too far off:  I will be flying to see my grandparents in Florida on Wednesday for 9 days...but until then it's high gear...

Celebrity for a Morning

December 10, 2005

Finally, a relatively quiet weekend!  Last weekend was filled with a NOvA meeting, and the Einstein Conference at Francis Parker school in Lincoln Park, then the week was filled with preparations for the big MINERvA "Director's Review" which is finally about to arrive. 

If these diaries are supposed to be records of "a year in the life" of a physicist, it seems unfair to write about things that are happening this year as a result of being one of the diarists.  So far I've avoided that but I can't resist describing my morning (a week ago today) as a celebrity.  I was asked to be on a panel to discuss or react to a talk that was to have been given by Mike Turner, famous cosmologist working at NSF these days who is also a very popular public speaker.  He also happens to have taught a cosmology class I took a million years ago in graduate school, so I know him from there.  Anyway, Mike's talk was supposed to be about "What would Einstein think was cool now in phsyics" and I originally was concerned about being on the panel because really I am no expert on Einstein so I figured I would be out of place.  Also, when I looked at the list of the other folks on the panel with me, I realized I was by far the least famous of all of them. 

After talking about my assignment with my friend Kevin, (who was also in that cosmology course) we realized that all I had to figure out was what Mike Turner would think was cool now in physics, and I could go from there.  As Kevin predicted, Mike gave a great talk that morning about how physicists today are using measurements of outer space (Hubble Space Telescope, or the WMAP survey of the galaxies) to understand what happened in the very first moments after the Big Bang.

So in my five minutes of commentary/rebuttal I got to say that Mike only told part of the story--Einstein would also think it's amazing that we are also looking inward, using neutrinos to study the first moments of the universe after the Big Bang.  Einstein certainly would not have guessed that there are three flavors of neutrinos, or that they can change from one flavor to another.  The funny thing about how they change is that it is simply a macrosopic application of Quantum Mechanics--people usually think of Quantum devices as microscopic entities, yet here is a particle which based on its flavor will react with a neutron to make a particle that can cross meters of steel (a muon) or a particle that goes only a few centimeters in steel (an electron) or microns (a tau).  Start with one kind, you end up with a mixture of all three. 

By studying the way neutrinos (and antineutrinos) change flavors, we may one day find out that neutrinos are the reason that matter didn't just annihilate with the antimatter that was created in equal number at the Big Bang.  We know that something had to favor matter over antimatter since there's no antimatter left, yet when we look at the particles that make up protons and neutrons (quarks) we see that most everything looks the same when you switch all the quarks to anti-quarks.  Something had to tip the scales in favor of matter over antimatter, and we may find out yet that neutrinos were that something! 

After figuring out a way to say all this in public and feeling like a celebrity in the process (with my very own reserved parking spot in Lincoln Park), I was much more inspired to drive back out to the Western suburbs of Chicago and attend the rest of the NOvA meeting and get ready for the big MINERvA review.  The reality is that we need both MINERvA and NOvA if we're ever going to get to seeing neutrinos and antineutrinos changing flavors differently. 

Isaac's Blog

December 2, 2005

One of the questions women in physics get more often than men is "Oh, I'll bet your father is a physicist, right?".  While I know women who are the first scientists in their families, I have to reply that yes my dad is a physicist (shown here with his political scientist daughter).  But in fact, as a family we really didn't talk about physics when I was a kid, we talked much more about language and music and just about anything else.  I obviously have no clue as to what my kids will do when they grow up, but I do wonder how having two physicists as parents is affecting them.   

Rob and I do end up talking about science to my kids, and Isaac (my 8-year-old) is fascinated by the fact that I'm on an experiment with a detector deep underground.  He also is in awe of my having a blog, and the fact that so many pictures of him are on the web. 

One direct consequence of having two physicists as parents is that my kids to go science-dominated Children's Museums a lot.  Since I only have a month of blogging left and I took my kids and nephew to the Dupage Children's Museum last Sunday, I figure this would be a good time to give Isaac the floor since only the really devoted blog readers are still on board here anyway...so the rest of this blog was dictated by Isaac and only minimally edited by me. 

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Isaac's Blog

On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, I went to the Children's Museum with my mom, sister, and cousin, Nicholas.  There is a lot of stuff at the Children's museum.  There are things like building waterways, crafts, and rooms where young children play.  In the building section, we build things with wood.  There are hammers, nails, screwdrivers, and other stuff like that.  I made a little person in the building area.  I also played with Nicholas at an air thing where you could put light balls through tunnels and they go up and down the tunnels, and out to a place where you could get them.  There is also a fan where you put goggles on to put things that air could easily move, like a pinwheel.  I made a track where you put down a golf ball and it rolls on the track. 

     I also made an airplane with flappy (or floppy) wings out of paper towel rolls and colored paper.  Downstairs used to be a place with a lot of exhibits, but they moved it all upstairs.  Instead there was a snack room, where there were vending machines.  We had popcorn and cheddar cheese dolphin crackers. Nicholas took off his shoes and it was hard to get them back on again, and we failed trying to get them on. 

There is a mirrored maze where you can see infinity on each mirror.  Infinity means numbers going on and never ending.   If something goes on a mirror which has a mirror facing it on the other side, it will show what the mirror shows, and that mirror will show what the other mirror shows.  That is infinity.      

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For those of you still reading, thank you for being here! 

Macedonian Sheep Dogs

November 30, 2005

A month ago there was yet another article in the New York times that got me really angry, but because I"ve been so busy with getting ready for the MINERvA Director's Review (which isn't even until December 13!) I haven't had the energy to write about it.  A wise friend told me this afternoon that these blogs don't have to be life-shattering, perfect, or planned out, so here goes...

The article I would have written about, had I the energy, was by Maureen Dowd (whose OP-Ed columns I usually enjoy), and was called What's a Modern Girl to Do? .  It was a long article which mostly describes trends which to me would signal the death of feminism.  Although many parts of the article made me cringe, the part that somehow stayed with me for the past month was the statement that intelligence in women is a turnoff to men, and that women should really "dumb down" if they want to catch a man.  I remember feeling this vibe when I was in high school, but then finding it blissfully absent when I got to college.  I read this article and thought that either I am really divorced from reality these days, or Maureen Dowd is, and since she's the journalist then maybe I"m the one who is without a clue. 

Luckily there are folks out there who can pull apart Maureen Dowd's work much more effecitvely (and in a much more public forum) than I can, and when I got the Nation a week after the original article by Dowd came out, I felt much better.  True to form, Katha Pollitt offered a scathing rebuttal in The World According to Dowd.  She claims that although things are certainly far from the way they should be in the arena of gender equality, we've come a long way and that Dowd's article tends to reinforce and legitimize the inequities rather than describe the flaws that bring them about.  Furthermore, she points out that women have made great advances and that we are not in fact going backwards.   

"How many young women flash their breasts for the camera or flog themselves academically all the way to the Ivy League merely to snag a rich husband?  More than minor in women's studies, volunteer for rape-crisis hotlines, have black-belts in karate or PhDs in physics or raise Macedonian sheep-dogs?....By many measures young women today are far more independent than we were..."

I'll admit it here: I was proud to be in such fine company, although somehow I'm guessing there are more women getting PhD's in physics than there are raising Macedonian sheepdogs.   

This One's for Sue

November 12, 2005

A year ago today my mother's best friend, Sue Mendelsohn, died at the tender age of 62.  This week there was a memorial tribute at Fermilab in front of the Lederman Center at Fermilab, the science education center where Sue worked for the last several years of her life.  There's no way I could do Sue's spirit, convictions, or energy justice here, but words spoken at this service (by my mom, actually, pictured at left) made me do something small that I hope will end up in big changes in the long run.  My mom said that while most of us sit around and complain about what's wrong with the world, Sue actually got up and did something about it. 

The day before Sue's memorial I received a link to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, because I was quoted in the article.  The story is about the precarious nature of the post-doc position in science, and the specific case of one post-doc who is suing her ex-boss and his university because she was denied maternity leave and had her pay docked after the birth of her second child.  I mentioned this very case "anonymously" in an earlier entry this year, but this article is much more detailed and depressing, and explicit.  Once I read the article I felt terrible all over again about what happened to Sherry, but didn't actually forward it to anyone besides a friend who has sent me Chronicle articles in the past.

However, at Sue's memorial service I realized that it's not enough to read this article and be depressed about it.  We have to get the word out that this is NOT acceptable behavior, and that sooner or later someone as brave as Sherry will come along and blow the whistle on you.

So when I returned to my office after the service I sent the link out to a mailing list that is supposed to target women scientists at Fermilab, and sure enough the discussion started.  Some replied and said I didn't know the whole story...others replied and said that they could relate to much of what Sherry went through but never had the guts to even complain, never mind take legal action.  Still others replied that this article is a terrible thing because it will deter women from physics because it makes us look like we're still in the dark ages on issues of maternity leave. 

The simple fact is that there is a Family Medical Leave Act, which has nothing to do with your analysis style, your physics abilities, or your personality:  it has to do with your employment status and your status as a primary care-giver. 

The Chronicle article itself, while clear and moving, does neglect to make the point that there are faculty in physics departments (and national labs) who grant their post-docs the maternity (or paternity) leave they request, and support them through their next appointment--I worked for one myself at the University of Rochester, and I sent in a comment to the Chronicle telling them that.  (see my response here)

But I think we need to use this article (along with all the positive role models out there) to point out that there is an attitude problem in this field, one that hurts the field as a whole, not just the women in it.  That attitude problem is the assumption that every minute of research counts, and that if you lose 3 months of your post-doc to infant care then your physics (and funding for your physics) grinds to a screeching halt forever.  Every great physicist had outside interests, from Newton to Einstein to Feynman, and people love to point that out yet never make the connection that perhaps what made them great was that they were NOT doing physics every waking moment of their lives. 

So the first thing that I hope happens, perhaps because this article is getting wide circulation, and perhaps because it's just long overdue, is that the Fermilab scientific appointment policy changes.  They are now discussing a written policy that gives people the option of an additional year on the tenure clock if they were the primary care-giver for an infant, as well as an idea that a post-doc's appointment get extended for extra time for the same reason. 

So I'm still learning from Sue:  It's just not enough to complain about these injustices, and set up some pregnancy leave rumor mill where we warn people about bosses who are unsympathetic to maternity/parternity leaves.  We have to change the assumption that a boss can deny someone the right to take off to care for their newborn child in the first place! 

Flying Solo

October 30-November 5, 2005

This past week has been my turn to take care of the kids and the house single-handedly, since Rob (my husband) was out of town (at CERN, no less) for work.  Although Rob and I are both in particle physics, Rob likes travelling much less than I do, so as a result he ends up travelling for work only two or three times a year--and this is someone whose day job is on an experiment that will take place Geneva Switzerland!

Since I am much more involved with the day to day necessities of the kids than Rob is, when Rob goes away the biggest difference in my schedule is that I just end up doing a more clearning and straightening up the house, and overall the house is much less clean.  Conversely, when I go away Rob's whole daily routine changes, from getting breakfast ready to putting the kids to bed at night.  Either way, whomever is taking care of the kids solo ends up going to sleep right after the kids do...the only difference is that I have dishpan hands (which makes me wonder if Rob's been wearing gloves all this time).   

Somehow having to fly solo once in awhile feels like good exercise for me:  I end up prioritizing a lot more than I usually do, and somehow when Rob comes back to town I all of a sudden feel like I have all this freedom and extra time on my hands, even though that can hardly be true.  I used to call this "single Mommin' it", but in fact I imagine that it's really nothing like actually being a single parent.  There is still so much I don't bother with in the house...

The funny thing about this week feeling like taking a dose of my own medicine is that I got the tables turned on me at work too.  I've been doing lots of "taking stock of things" and preparing for a big review of the MINERvA Experiment that will take place on December 13-15 at Fermilab.  We're holding all these internal reviews, and trying to get a bunch of documentation together that says exactly what we're planning to build and how and why we're building it (and how long the whole thing will take!).  One of the things I did this very week was come up with a list of outside experts whom I'd want to invite to review the project.  The funny thing is that the very same week I submitted that list to the organizers, I also received an invitation asking me to serve as an "outisde expert" on a very similar kind of review, only it'll be a review that takes place at a laboratory I've never worked at.  I guess what goes around comes around...

Happy Halloween

October 31, 2005

So I guess another Halloween has come and gone--this year Isaac was a scary ghost with stitches and chains, and Sonia was no less than four different things:  at yesterday's Halloween party she was a princess, and today at her "old school"  (Fermilab Children's Center) she wavered between being a lion and a dinosaur (both of which were once Isaac's costumes), and at her public pre-school Halloween party last Thursday she was a butterfly. 

Halloween presents yet another opportunity to feel guilty about how much time and effort I can manage to spend on various aspects of my children's lives--some parents really go all out and make gorgeous creative costumes (there are a few examples in the photo at the left), and some (like me) head over to Costume City and buy something and feel like we're organized if we actually buy costumes more than a few days in advance.  Luckily my kids don't seem to mind the Costume City routine, and I just have to bite my lip to keep my mind off the inane stereotypical options the kids have to chose from.  (Why are the police, fire fighters, and doctors costumes only listed with the "boy costumes"? I was so proud of a friend of mine whose 5-year-old daughter was a football player this year. ) 

But as skimpy as I might be about the costume part of Halloween, at least I always spend a few hours each year carving pumpkins with my kids.  Sonia is learning sign language in the Fermilab Children's Center, and she showed me that the sign for jack-o-lantern looks like someone scooping the guts out of the pumpkin.  Unfortunately she's more interested in making the sign for jack-o-lantern than actually helping with the gut removal, but as usual Isaac took the task very seriously. 

After writing this I realize I am in the same pattern with regard to work over the past two weeks:  there were so many things that I would have liked to accomplish! However, I could only pick some of those things.  Luckily I did have time to do the things I really wanted to do (like reviewing MINERvA detector designs and going to Southern Methodist University to give a talk).  Nevertheless I feel guilty for the things that got neglected (like finishing a few plots for an overdue report, and like writing entries here about my trip or about the relocation of my grandmother's piano to my house...). 

When they come up with a drug with no side effects that eradicates the need for sleep, I'll the the first one to sign up for a prescription (assuming I can get around to it!).