{"id":4785,"date":"2010-06-21T09:26:19","date_gmt":"2010-06-21T09:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/06\/21\/the-glamorous-life-of-an-exper\/"},"modified":"2010-06-21T09:26:19","modified_gmt":"2010-06-21T09:26:19","slug":"the-glamorous-life-of-an-exper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/06\/21\/the-glamorous-life-of-an-exper\/","title":{"rendered":"The Glamorous Life of an Experimental Physicist"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/thevirtuosi.blogspot.com\/\">The Virtuosi<\/a> has quickly become a staple of the daily Links Dumps here, but the recent series of posts on experimental physics deserve greater prominence, so here they are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/thevirtuosi.blogspot.com\/2010\/06\/life-as-experimenter-day-one.html\">Life as an Experimenter- Day One<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/thevirtuosi.blogspot.com\/2010\/06\/life-as-experimenter-day-two.html\">Life as an Experimenter- Day Two<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/thevirtuosi.blogspot.com\/2010\/06\/life-as-experimenter-day-three.html\">Life as an Experimenter- Day Three<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/thevirtuosi.blogspot.com\/2010\/06\/life-as-experimenter-reflections.html\">Life as an Experimenter- Reflections<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The individual day posts provide an inside look at what it&#8217;s like to do experimental condensed matter physics, specifically using beam time on an accelerator to do diffraction studies of materials. It&#8217;s got everything you would like to see in such a story&#8211; equipment failures, sleep deprivation, bad data, good data, and promising results for future experiments.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;Reflections&#8221; post contains general comments on what it takes to be an experimental physicist:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>It&#8217;s An Emotional Roller Coaster<\/strong><br \/>\nSometimes nothing works.  At all.  You try and try and you just can&#8217;t make it work.  Then sometimes everything is going well.  You&#8217;re getting data, and not just that, but the data looks good.  Whether it&#8217;s confirming or destroying your expectations, you&#8217;re finding out something new about the world.  It&#8217;s exciting.  You find something interesting and start chasing it.  However, you have to be careful.  Often the result is not what you think you&#8217;re seeing.  It&#8217;s a false signal from your equipment, or attributable to the background material doing something strange.  Or you&#8217;ve destroyed the sample, and that&#8217;s why it&#8217;s  not doing what you expect.  You go up and down quite a bit.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s great stuff. While the experimental details are specific to their field of physics, the general material is accurate even for those of us whose experiments fit in a single room that we control 24\/7. Experimental physics at any scale is both exhausting and exhilarating, sometimes simultaneously.<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t just take my word for it, though&#8211; go over there and check it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Virtuosi has quickly become a staple of the daily Links Dumps here, but the recent series of posts on experimental physics deserve greater prominence, so here they are: Life as an Experimenter- Day One Life as an Experimenter- Day Two Life as an Experimenter- Day Three Life as an Experimenter- Reflections The individual day&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/06\/21\/the-glamorous-life-of-an-exper\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Glamorous Life of an Experimental Physicist<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,19,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-experiment","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4785\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}