DSD

collidingparticles.com has a series of (beautifully produced) episodes about “Hunting the Higgs” at the LHC.

The episode about theorists is unsurprisingly entitled Problems, and features a number of good moments, from signs at the LHC that read “Risk of Liquid Air,” to enormous chalkboards covered with Feynman diagrams, to the hilarious expressions of all-too-familiar grad student angst (“sometimes I almost want to give up everything”).

‘Problems’ travels to Paris for a look at some of the theoretical work behind the ‘Eurostar’ paper. Gavin and his PhD student Mathieu explore the mathematics behind the behaviour of fundamental particles, and we have an update on the ‘incident’ which is holding up work at the LHC.

One of my favorite quotes is an observation that I didn’t fully understand until well into graduate school:

I think one of the hardest parts of research is not so much trying to solve a problem, as figuring out which problem you’re going to solve.

It’s absolutely true. The most exciting problems are simultaneously easy enough to be solvable, and hard enough to teach you something deep while you’re solving them. So far, for me, these have been hard to come by. My impression, based on the work that’s been done by my professors, is that a sense for the right problems is something you develop slowly over time, no matter how clever you are.

And as ridiculous and depressed as the poor Ph.D. student sounds in places, I completely understand what he’s feeling. The realization that theoretical physics is hard (and I mean real physics, not classwork), is something that comes in waves, and really only starts to hit in graduate school. It’s a little scary — you’ve got to grow up fast, or go do something else.