121–130 of 153 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of this story: https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassb... There are continuous technical workforce challenges in science because the methods keep advancing. If only there were money it. Instead we have engineers, scientists, and physicians driving Uber and we outsource and offshore the entire scientific supply chain.
> we have engineers, scientists, and physicians driving Uber Why do you believe this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of this story: https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassb... There are continuous technical workforce challenges in science because the methods keep advancing. If only there were money it. Instead we have engineers, scientists, and physicians driving Uber and we outsource and offshore the entire scientific supply chain.
> we have engineers, scientists, and physicians driving Uber Why do you believe this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of this story: https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassb... There are continuous technical workforce challenges in science because the methods keep advancing. If only there were money it. Instead we have engineers, scientists, and physicians driving Uber and we outsource and offshore the entire scientific supply chain.
> we have engineers, scientists, and physicians driving Uber Why do you believe this?
My Fermilab story: when I was designing my dissertation experiment it became clear that i would need ~$100k in silicon strip charged particle detectors, and that no company would ever microbond the thousands of connections for me due to the low volume. Fermilab gave me detectors that had been QC rejects from the outer barrel of the CMS detector at CERN for free, and bonded them to my boards for essentially materials…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Roger Penrose is a remarkable mathematician and has made profound contributions to mathematics and its application to General Relativity. But his opinions on Quantum Mechanics, (e.g., its relationship with conscience) are very fringe, when not outright quack-material. Nobody takes him seriously on this topic and he has made no recognizable contribution or proved anything that would grant any credibility to the idea.…
This implies, I believe, that further progress refining physics will result in similar great societal advances. This can only be based on belief. Maybe. And perhaps a spectacular future awaits us, due to some present-day discovery that now seems insignificant. Yes, one can point to many such instances in the past; but what gives us confidence this will continue into the future?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of this story: https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassb... There are continuous technical workforce challenges in science because the methods keep advancing. If only there were money it. Instead we have engineers, scientists, and physicians driving Uber and we outsource and offshore the entire scientific supply chain.
I don't know if that is true. Stuff just changes. To solve similar problems to this, my lab developed sapphire metal bonding techniques that could be run with CNC machined parts. Everything became nice and reliable and repeatable. We lose techniques all the time but gain new ones. I designed a scientific instrument once that had a long precision bore through it. I designed it with the belief that I needed clearances…
Back in 2015 when I still thought I'd be a physicist, I was a summer intern at Fermilab on the MicroBooNE experiment. The sense of excitement and teamwork on the 10th floor was something I dearly missed when I went to CERN the year after. Every day at 3pm was "coffee and cookies", and my colleagues and I would join the line filled with physicists of all ages and from across the lab, to grab a cookie or maybe two. On…
When I last worked in person in IT, a few members of my team would get up at 2pm to get coffee and chat about work and life. Different people went in the mornings. It was really useful to team-build and feel decent about work. People who say "I don't have friends at work" with pride are completely foreign to me. I don't understand how people are supposed to have any joy at work, or get over comms barriers, when there…
> However, Fermilab may not deserve all the blame, says a theoretical physicist who requested anonymity to protect relations with DOE. For example, he says, after the lab finally hammered out an excavation contract with Thyssen Mining, months passed before DOE approved it. “I’m not sure whether it’s really the lab that has a problem, or if it’s DOE that has a problem and is blaming the lab.” If you need anonymity to…
No civil service government employee should openly talk to the media, ever.
I think it is a poor idea for the Department of Energy to being hiring businesses or organizations to be managing the National Laboratories. This means there are three levels of management: the DOE, the managing organization/business (such as the University of Chicago) and the lab itself. Eliminate this middle layer--so that management is either done by the DOE or the laboratory.