Collaborate? Sure

As I am sure I’ve mentioned before, I do a lot of my physics collaboratively and a lot of this is remote collaborations. It’s critical to my being able to do research — otherwise I would feel very isolated here in Northfield. For those who don’t know, Carleton College has a very small number of people on the faculty, and only undergraduate students, which means that it is the antithesis of the big productive research factories where most faculty members got their Ph.D.

My colleagues not in the sciences find it fascinating that we have collaborative work at all. It’s easy to explain why experimentalists, particularly ‘big-science’ experimentalists, need collaborations. Certainly all of the very few single-author papers you still see in the literature are theoretical (I can’t remember the last time I saw a single-author experimental paper, unless it was a review of some sort). But why do theorists work in teams? And relevant to being at a small college (and hence making this an Anacapist post): How does one create and sustain collaborations (particularly remote ones), and what does one mean about the nature of my work?

So I’ve been musing about collaborations, and this is the first post that results

There’s an interesting tension in general between solo, focused, theoretical work (and boy can this be intense and focused, see Dave Bacon’s commentary on the comparison between theoretical scientists and Tiger Woods for example) and the wide-ranging, free-wheeling, and extended discussions that characterize a good Gordon conference or a KITP workshop (see the latest KITP newsletter for a discussion about how the KITP mode of doing science is beneficial).  Clearly some people prefer one mode and some the other.

In my case, as I find my time more sliced up by teaching, administrivia, life (especially post-parenthood), it has become harder impossible to sustain the kind of day-and-night-long sustained bits of effort that I used to periodically pull off in graduate school and as a post-doc. Not that this was always some remarkable push through new intellectual territory and not that all these pushes were useful — there were, and there remain, as many trips down intellectual blind alleys as needed to find the clear path. But still, I could do it: Survive on coffee and whatever snacks I had at hand until I was ready to get up from my desk, even if it was 12 hours after I sat down. But now responsibilities make sure that even if I do have that kind of time available, I don’t have it in one sustained chunk.

As I find myself bouncing from project to project, I wonder if I have changed irrevocably and can never do solo work again. My research is starting to look like my life, in short: Many things vying for my attention, and one has to parallel-process (or compartmentalize or whatever). To give you an idea, currently in rotation: (1) With Bala and Drew, on persistent patterns, (2) With Arik on quantum state diffusion and anomalous chaos, (3) With Nathan, continuing work on scaling in the quantum-classical transition for a decoherent chaotic system that I started with Arnaldo.

I also have two rising seniors working with me this summer, Bob and Chris, who are looking at sub-projects that relate to the project with Arik. I have on the back-burner my work with Anatole on ratchets, and hell, probably multiple postponed conversations with friends I need to pick up and keep moving.

The good part is, collaborative work can be innovative and definitely more than the sum of its parts (this is perhaps a good time to refer you back to a recent note on how humans problem-solve). The bad part is, I am not sure it is always good to have to keep re-orienting myself every time I dive back into a problem.

I could argue that given that I have only short chunks of time, it doesn’t matter what I work on in that time — I am always ‘restarting’ something when I return to it, and it might as well be something new. It certainly allows me to never feel completely stuck on a problem. When I get very frustrated with one of the projects, I dive into one of the others. But there is clearly some sort of cut-off point for having too many projects going, and I think I’ve hit that limit.

Sometime soon, musings on (1) What exactly is it that I *do* in one of these collaborative projects? And (2) How do different personalities affect the way a project works? And so on ….

Our life is not a movie or maybe

This is mostly to serve as a pointer to an essay by Philip Ball about an article in Nature about human mobility patterns. Ball quotes John Stuart Mill:

“Events which in their own nature appear most capricious and uncertain and which in any individual case no attainable degree of knowledge would enable us to foresee, occur, when considerable numbers are taken into account, with a degree of regularity approaching to mathematical.”

And takes it from there. It’s one of the consistent themes running through my intellectual life, and this blog, of course: That statistical thinking helps make sense of complicated confusing contingent phenomena. I’ve been fascinated by that idea since I was a kid. I remember heated discussions with my father after reading Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ trilogy about the possibility of ‘predicting’ human social futures (or psychohistory, a la Hari Seldon) — which he put down to my even-then-obvious bias towards ‘scientism‘. I get a great deal of satisfaction, even now, from seeing patterns at the macroscopic level arising from averaging over microscopic idiosyncrasies.

When we use the term ‘statistical’, we do not mean that everything is random or that it all relaxes to a Bell curve. The probability distributions that emerge when complicated nonlinear interactions and dynamics are at play in non-equilibrium phenomena can be heavily influenced by a few events and can lead to extremely counter-intuitive phenomena. Consider Levy flights, for example — these show up not only in particle dynamics in Harry Swinney’s lab, on Wall Street, but also form the basis of extremely effective atomic cooling techniques.

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” — Muriel Rukeyser. With all due respect to the spirit of that statement, the universe is made of stories, by atoms, about atoms. And atoms behave statistically.

The Anacapa Society website goes live

I’ve mentioned before my role in the Anacapa Society (for the promotion of theoretical physics at PUIs — primarily undergraduate institutions). Our website went live a couple of days ago, hosted by the good forward-thinking folks at Amherst College. Below is a note from Don Spector about it.

If you are a potential Anacapist and haven’t signed up for our society yet, please do. It’s free, and has already proved to be a really good resource network. More information at the website, of course.

—
Anacapa members,

Much has been going on recently, and we have two important new developments to share with you.

First, and most important: We have a brand new web site, located at
http://anacapasociety.org
. The very first thing to do — maybe even before you finish reading this email! — is to go to the new web site and register.

The web site will be the new home base for announcements, discussions, and all other Anacapa activities.

Three important reasons to sign up are:

(1) Only members can access the forums, and there will be additional content only available to members

(2) The membership list will eventually become part of the searchable database to find collaborators, outside reviewers, etc.

(3) As everything gets consolidated into the new web site, the googlegroups mailing list will be phased out, and the Anacapa website registry will replace it as the tool for staying in touch.

And big, big thanks to Courtney Lannert for spearheading the new web site; to David Craig and Will Loinaz for their important assistance in helping get this completed; and to Howard Hanna and others from the Amherst IT department who helped design and implement the new site.

Second, and quite exciting: The Anacapa Society’s first grant proposal, submitted last September, has been funded by the NSF. Want more information on this? Go the web site (
http://anacapasociety.org
) and follow the links for news!

But now, if you haven’t done so already, go register at
http://anacapasociety.org
. Also, a tip: we suggest that you use your actual first and last names as your username (e.g., “Anna Kappa”), because that is how you will be identified in any forum posts or article comments you make. (The forums and comments will only be viewable by logged-in members.)

We look forward to more developments in the coming months.

–Don Spector, for the Anacapa Society Board

***************************************************************
Donald Spector, Moorad Professor of Science
Chair, Department of Physics
Coordinator, Engineering Program
Hobart & William Smith Colleges

What say we ask PRL or AJP for a music review section for real?

Selections from the forthcoming Quantum Aesthetics: The Best of the American Journal of Physics’ Music Review Section. (h/t Gaetan Damberg-Ott)

And don’t forget the letters in response (look for the ones by Adam Jensen and Mike Hicks).

How do I spend my time?

School’s out. That is, classes are done, grades are due shortly, commencement is this Saturday, and we’re chilling out on vacation. Right? Hah.

There is a discernible difference in how term time goes compared to how the summer or breaks go, but work continues. Mostly for my own edification (one reason I started this blog was to keep track of where I was spending my energies so I could manage things better), here’s my estimate of where time went this particular term:

When I was teaching 3 courses (and the senior integrative exercise or ‘comps‘): 33 — 36 hours a week on teaching (contact, prep, and grading) — but only on average. Grading makes that fluctuate tremendously. This dropped hugely when I went down to 1 course for the second half of the term (we teach 6 courses a year, 2 during every 10-week term at Carleton; my schedule split Spring Term into an insane half and a relaxed half by virtue of our 5-week courses).

College-and-department-related administration and engagement (this includes advising, college-wide committees, departmental responsibilities including searches for visiting faculty, etc, signing off on various expense reports and logs that I have to verify, lunch meetings devoted to pedagogy or presentations by colleagues on their scholarship, for example, semi-formal socializing with visitors, with students, staff, and colleagues): 4 -8 hours a week.

CISMI-related administration issues: 2 – 10 hours a week. This fluctuates hugely, again, depending on whether a proposal or reporting deadline is headed down the pipeline or not, for example.

Research:

The very least I do every week, no matter how badly I am drowning: scan the daily abstracts from arxiv.org (restricting myself to quant-ph and nlin, though I do subscribe to cond-mat as well, but that last is a true high-level scan more at the level of paper titles than abstracts, honestly). I also get the Table of Contents emailed to me from PRL (weekly), PRA, and PRE (monthly), Physica A and D, and a bunch of IOP journals (J. Phys. A., J. Phys. B, Nonlinearity) as well as Nature and Science. I would say I look at the text of 10 papers a week beyond the abstracts, and download and print a smaller subset. So let’s say that’s another 3-5 hours or so weekly just staying abreast/staying afloat of what’s current. Oh, and reading some physics blogs (I do it through Jacques Distler’s Planet Musings, mostly). Another hour or two meeting with research students. An average of an hour a week on being a Referee (big fluctuations on that, of course).

You can do the addition as well as I do. ‘Research’ the way I understood it as a graduate student and post-doc: Discussions with collaborators, or an analytical calculation, or coding something for the computer, or running simulations, or analyzing the runs, or writing (I once heard Sir Michael Berry of ‘Berry’s phase’ fame give a talk at UT-Austin, dressed in one of his trademark tie-dye shirts, looking for all the world like a Deadhead, and someone asked him if he’d written up the result he was talking about, and he said, ‘Well, I’ve written it down, but I haven’t written it up’. I liked that quick way of summarizing the difference between knowing something well enough for yourself versus the attempt to frame it more formally for an audience), or rebutting a referee, or whatever, came above and beyond the standard 40 hours a week during those insane first five weeks of Spring Term. And honestly, during a typical 2-course term as well.

It’s a good thing I love my job so much.

(And yeah, some time spent on this blog as well. That there are periods of dead silence here may not be that surprising, then, eh?)