A big issue at these labs is that there's this idea that people with PhDs think only others with technical PhDs can manage things. Management takes a certain set of skills, and quite a lot of PhDs have zero experience outside of academic environments with managing things. > “We did not write a very good contract for the excavation,” ... “There were all kinds of loopholes in it, and the excavation company made an awfu…
Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
91–100 of 153 posts
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#92The real problem is that theoretical particle physics had hit a local optimum that they can't break out of. String theory hasn't panned out, quantum gravity hasn't panned out, and no one really knows where to go next.
This is a complete misunderstanding of the state of physics. The problem is not theoretical physics, if anything, the problem lies in our technological/engineering prowess that has not been able to follow our advances in physics. The Standard Model has some issues but it's, in principle, a valid effective description of all the fundamental forces minus gravity. The issue is that quantum effects of gravity are negligi…
Beautifully put together conception of the current state of technology and science.
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#93A big issue at these labs is that there's this idea that people with PhDs think only others with technical PhDs can manage things. Management takes a certain set of skills, and quite a lot of PhDs have zero experience outside of academic environments with managing things. > “We did not write a very good contract for the excavation,” ... “There were all kinds of loopholes in it, and the excavation company made an awfu…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dOe_6vuaR_s
Thanks for the video. I'll watch in full later. But it is interesting that he opens with The Big Dig in Boston. There have been several counts, including prosecutions, of fraud in that project. It wasn't just because it was complex. There was rampant fraud and corruption. After some skimming, it didn't appear that that video covers that.
I have also read anecdotes about that project. For example, stories of contractors tricking out their personal trucks and tools and booking it to the protect.
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#94Fermilab has been in trouble for a while. They did not diversify enough at the tail end of Tevatron and (I think) are mostly working on DUNE, which isn’t going great. You can’t have a lab that big with mostly a singular focus which is being executed poorly.
They're also the CMS tier 1 site for US and possibly north america
I found this webpage[0] (and those it links to) to be a good bit of context on what this all means. (And then ran off to do a bunch more searching!)
tl;dr: CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) is one of two major detectors of the Large Hadron collider. Fermilab was intimately involved in designing CMS. Fermilab is also a "tier 1" computation center for processing LHC data (possibly restricted to CMS data?). Per this factsheet[1], there is one other "tier 1" compute farm in the US, though it isn't named in particular. I'd guess Lawrence Livermore, but I have nothing more than a hunch.
[1] https://www.fnal.gov/gridfest/pdfs/uscomputing_factsheet.pdf
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is tangential at best but I was in Chicago,US once for a business trip and we had weekends off so we did some sight-seeing and one Sunday late afternoon we were close to Fermilab so we decided to take a look. The building was empty but open, there's a museum upstairs but when we got lost between floors we would just walk between cubicles that were clearly in use during the week, it was super wierd and cool at th…
I’m not sure if it’s still there, but if you walked into the cafeteria the remote ops center for the CMS detector and the LHC was on your left hand side through a glass wall and door. My leadership chain was…interesting but it was incredibly cool in my mid 20s to lunch with high energy physicists and others in this space. https://cms.fnal.gov/remote-operations-center/ (worked on CMS data taking for a year in the mid…
I recall back in the 90s that Fermilab had a public telnet page one could connect at to get current beam line stats/info.
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dOe_6vuaR_s
Thanks for the video. I'll watch in full later. But it is interesting that he opens with The Big Dig in Boston. There have been several counts, including prosecutions, of fraud in that project. It wasn't just because it was complex. There was rampant fraud and corruption. After some skimming, it didn't appear that that video covers that. I have also read anecdotes about that project. For example, stories of contracto…
He does talk about corruption a bit but he focuses on other factors more.
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#97Back 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 is no opportunity to get to know coworkers as people.
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
This may be an interesting example of a “zombie” organization. Fermilab exists to push the boundaries of particle physics. We stopped wanting to do that, or at the very least outlay the capital to do that. We likewise don’t want people at fermilab doing other things with their time. Meaning that they don’t have much to do but go through the motions. We have a few of these in science, it would arguably be better in th…
Government organizations should be wound down more regularly. Nobody would argue that a business unit that has outlived its usefulness should be funded in perpetuity, yet there seems to be this "strictly increasing" mindset around organizations funded by the taxpayer.
Fundamental research into particle physics: no longer necessary?
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure blame the experimentalists. If the theorists are so smart maybe they can use their immense brilliance to draw on their chalkboards with femtoscale precision. All joking aside, while you are correct that we don't really have the technological ability to advance on a better theory of Quantum Gravity. But theorists need a rich experimental backdrop for their work to be meaningful. Since this is lacking, theoretical…
I wouldn't even go so far as to say it's either the theorists or experimentalists fault. The problem might just be that it becomes physically impractical to the point of practical impossibility to observe the nature of things beyond a certain scale to us. And that's just, you know, the nature of things.
At what point do you separate that which is only of imagination and that which exists bridging the physical and imagination?
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#100Back 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…
I can have lunch and water cooler chat friends at work, but rarely do they turn into invite over to bbq on the weekend friends. There's a big difference.
You can be friendly, but when something happens at work and one of you no longer works there...things get weird. Those weekend bbqs that you had with work friends no longer happen, or they keep going for a bit, but conversations are awkward since the still employed are no longer free to discuss or the no-longer employed harbors resentment that isn't exactly hidden. What kind of "friend" was that after all?