Late spring/ early summer is Conference Season in academic science, with lots of meetings scheduled during the academic break, so that everybody can attend without cutting into their teaching responsibilities (of course, our trimester calendar means we’re still in session for most of these, but whatever…). The peak time for conferences in my subfield is late May and early June– the main meeting I go to, the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics is actually later than usual this year, presumably because it’s in Calgary, and they need an extra week or two to thaw out.
Of course, scheduling the talks for these meetings is a major undertaking. Hundreds of physicists will submit abstracts to present, and these need to be reviewed and arranged into sessions. The sessioning is done on a semi-volunteer basis, as I understand it, so they need to provide ample time for getting everything sorted out, which means that the abstract deadline for talks to be presented at a meeting that starts June 5 is, well, today.
that’s a lot of lead time, and here are two main ways of dealing with it:
The first option is to submit a solid abstract based on work that is already complete, or very close to completion. The problem with this is that by the time the meeting rolls around, the work in question is boring old news. Everybody who cares has already heard about it, and moved on to something else. I’ve given talks at conferences on work that I was already bored with, because the experiment was already done when the abstract was submitted.
The other strategy is to submit the “hopeful abstract”– look six months ahead, and guess what you’ll have done by the time the meeting starts, and promise to talk about that. There are some code phrases that identify hopeful abstracts– “progress toward” (as in, “we report progress toward the development of faster-than-light interstellar travel”) is a dead giveaway– but at a given meeting, probably a third of the talks are hopeful abstracts.
Hopeful abstracts often lead to better talks– the science is fresher, and everybody likes fresh, hot science– but they can be risky. One tiny little lab flood that sets things back, and your talk ends up being pure vapor: “We would’ve had a working star drive by now, but the equipment was damaged in a flood, so, um, here are some computer animations…”
Anyway, unlike last year, I won’t be wrestling with the APS’s abstract submission system today to get a paper in before the deadline. One of my thesis students had his submission accepted for the Special Undergraduate Session at this year’s meeting. This is a big deal– only five or six students are selected for the session, and they get to give half-hour talks rather than a poster or a ten-minute contributed presentation. And, as a bonus, the APS pays for his registration and travel to the meeting.
Of course, what he submitted was very much a hopeful abstract, which means we’ve got a lot of work to do in the next few months… The Special Session should serve as ample extra motvation, though. For me, as well as him…