Profile

Being a particle physicist does not mean that I spend my life scribbling complicated equations onto black- or whiteboards and don’t know how to tie my shoes. On the contrary, I am a very hands-on person, have done lots of major DIY projects involving timber, concrete, pipes and wires. I’ve probably had more first aid courses than you’ve had birthdays. I can drive articulated lorries. I can bake my cake and eat it too. Not everything goes well, though: I once needed emergency surgery after attempting to peel an orange.

It is very important to me to stay fit, so I do quite a bit of running, obstacle courses, circuit training, cold showers and martial arts. I make sure I get enough vitamins, especially the one that human bodies synthesize while lying in the sun.

My job has made me a very international person. I am German, have a job in the UK, an office in Switzerland, an experiment in France, a child with US citizenship, and friends and colleagues all over the world. I proudly display flags of the United Nations and of the International Committee of the Red Cross in my lounge. Borders are for wimps.

I care a lot about equality and justice, freedom and tolerance. You could say that I am a bit of a hippie, except with a haircut and some military background. I have no doubt that human society needs radical change in order to survive in the long run, but I see the way forward in technology rather
than frugalism.

In principle my job is quite dramatic. I am one of the scientists working with the largest machine that humankind has ever built, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland and France, and try to understand how the universe works.
This job is exciting because it is at the very frontier of science, the most fundamental quest for knowledge, “to boldy go where no man has gone before”.

In practice, the daily work is a bit less exciting, because knowledge comes very slowly, needs a lot (A LOT!) of work to be uncovered, and most of my work is dealing with the practicalities. This means, I don’t spend my day asking myself things such as “would the existence of a second Higgs boson tell us more about how the universe behaved in its first second of existence?”, but rather things like “why does this LED stop blinking if I press this button here?”.

But hey, you’ve got to look at the big picture, and doing that it’s quite a nice job to have. 🙂

I am an experimental high energy physicist, and that means I have to do my part in inventing new experiments, designing them down to very technical details, running the actual experiments, and, finally, analysing the data. Because in particle physics experiments are extremely big, extremely complicated, and run for an extremely long time (talking 20 years here!), you tend to do a specific thing for a year or so at a time, and then possibly do something completely different. So, here’s a few of my typical days at work:

2004: Wake up at 3am. Go to the loo. Check on laptop whether the detector is still running fine. All good. Go back to bed. Get phone call at 4am, detector not working, person on shift needs help. Push a few buttons on my laptop. Tell person on shift off for messing it up. Go back to bed. Wake up again at 7am. Get ready, jump into huge car, race to Fermilab, get coffee, go to control room of the experiment, check whether the detector is still running fine. Spend first half of the day discussing a few minor problems with an electronics engineer. Have lunch. Spend second half of the day lying next to the outdoor pool with my laptop, writing software to make monitoring our detector more automatic, so I get more sleep at night. Get coffee. Discuss with senior scientist what priorities we have in fixing minor problems with the detector. Write more software. Go home, get dinner, get back to laptop, write more software. Go to bed.

2007: Wake up at 7am. Get ready. Jump into tiny car, drive to Rutherford Lab. Get coffee. Sit in front of computer all day. Help student to simulate a possible future experiment, to see whether the quality of results with a particular type of detector would be good enough. Disagree. Have meeting with people in Germany, Switzerland, Russia and Japan via phone conference software on laptop. Resolve disagreement. Have coffee. Improve software that simulates possible future experiment. Go home, have dinner, bring children to bed, clean up after children, sleep, repeat.

2010: wake up at 6pm. Get ready. Jump into CERN van, drive to CMS experiment. Have coffee. Have more coffee. Talk to other people to learn how to operate the CMS experiment. Formally take over shift responsibility for the night. Surf the web while waiting for things to go wrong. Nothing going wrong. Sit there for 12 hours trying to kill time. Too tired to do some actual work on the side. Drive back to our work flat near Geneva, go to sleep.

2011: back to getting up at 7am, but now with seven seater car (more children…), but same coffee. Spend all day looking at graphical representations of data derived from Large Hadron Collider collisions. Some crazy (?) theorist had said that there might be a particularly exotic kind of particle might exist that we hadn’t noticed yet because behaves so unusual that our experiments may have simply not seen it because they were mostly tuned for more normal-looking particles. Check with simulation whether we would actually be able to see this. Compare simulation with real data to make sure simulation makes sense. Of course it doesn’t. Try to figure out why. If I look only at particles like this, does the difference go away? If I look at particles only in this part of the detector, does the difference go away? If I compare particles from cosmic rays that accidentally cross our detector with simulated particles, do they look the same? Lots of coffee in between, lots of meetings with status reports on video conference with people interested in similar kinds of things, and even more coffee.  Repeat for many weeks. Help graduate student do almost the same thing, but with slightly different particles, to cover more ground.

2013: Same time getting up, same car, same lab, different room. Now spending the day in the basement, in a huge lab filled with electronics. CMS experiment needs to be improved. Several universities develop new electronics to read data from new detectors. New electronics is very complicated. Need people to write firmware (which is something in the middle between writing software and developing electronics), and we formed a team of engineers and physicists to do that at Rutherford Lab. Spending the day sitting in front of a computer (again…), having lots of coffee (again…), and trying to produce firmware that makes our new electronics do what it is supposed to do. Liaise with physicists and engineers in other institutes all over the world, trying to negotiate how to share the work, who is responsible for what, exchanging results, helping each other when things don’t work. Kicking people’s behinds if they fall behind schedule. Being kicked by other people if I fall behind schedule. Wondering why science is so stressful – why can’t we all just sit below a tree and wait for an apple to fall onto our head? 🙂