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.