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This Week Archive
The art of not getting scooped
Quantum Diaries' physicists may want to share all with their readers, but sometimes they have to hold back -- or risk everything. Stephon Alexander teases readers about a new theory of Dark Matter that he's working on, but can't give details: "I can't talk too much about it, because the idea is so simple, once I say it, it's easy to implement (meaning, I risk getting scooped)," he writes. "That could be quite something if it was real," responds Gordon Watts.
Peter Steinberg elaborates on the need to simultaneously publicize and hide physics "trade secrets." "There's a real art to letting on that you're doing something great while keeping it just secret enough that someone else won't get to it first -- and it's a great way to build up a solid resume," he writes.
Tommaso Dorigo complains that the publication process in his collaboration can sometimes be so slow that other experiments could beat them to a result. "You are competing against other experiments who can publish before you and later get more money than you from the funding agencies," he explains. |
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Life, the Universe, and Everything
In response to a reader's query, Caolionn O'Connell takes on the question, Why physics? "I always like the idea that basic research physicists, especially high-energy physicists, are like philosophers with better data," she writes.
John Ellis has a more practical approach to a similar question: What can physics do for society? "Perhaps only physics and astrophysics could provide the tools to avert an asteroid strike or mitigate the effects of a nearby supernova explosion or a gamma-ray burst," he writes. "Perhaps physics could provide better tools for warning or reducing the impacts of earthquakes and tsunamis."
On the other hand, Peter Steinberg writes that physics risks having what he calls "negative relevance". "This is the perception that our 'irrelevant' scientific goals may inadvertently become a threat to all or part the human race, and thus unfortunately exceedingly relevant, but in a bad way, to the life of the uninvolved human being," he writes. |
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Are physicists bad programmers?
Absolutely, says Gordon Watts. And he has the story to prove it. When he was a graduate student, a program he
wrote accidentally deleted two years' worth of his colleague's data
analysis. "I try to tell all my students about this sort of thing so they
don't have to live through 3 horribly sucky days," he writes. Luckily,
his colleague was able to recover his data, and Gordon got his PhD after
all.
Jochen Weller might disagree with Gordon's analysis. He reports that he
and his colleagues got a new algorithm to work this week. Its goal is to
find clusters of stars where galaxies form. "Hooray for that," he writes. |
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Coming Soon
Rosa Alba
INFN
language: Italian |
Richard Jacobsson
CERN
language: English |
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