The Unbearable Sameness of Physics Talks

Gordon Watts has deja vu:

[Leaving a colloquium], I got stopped by another member of our department, who is a good friend of particle physics, and she said basically the same thing: all particle physics talks look the same. Some of the comments: Two slides on the detector. Some pictures of quarks, and then some hard-to-understand plots. Where is the story? I only know how hard it is to do this sort of thing because I know you guys: I'd never guess how hard it is from your talks. It is the same plots over and over!

To a certain extent, he's being too hard on himself-- after a while, all sorts of talks start to look pretty similar. As far as I can tell, synthetic chemistry talks are mostly indistinguishable, and even in low-energy physics, there's a lot of repetition. Wolfgang Ketterle (who, I should note, is a terrific speaker) used the same "what is a Bose-Einstein Condensate" slide in every talk I saw him give over about a five-year period-- I know this, because it had the same hand-corrected typo on it every time.

I do think the problem is somewhat worse for the high-energy people, though, and I can offer a couple of speculations as to why:

The big culprit, I suspect, is the large collaboration structure that dominates high energy particle and nuclear physics. You have literally hundreds of people working on the exact same experiment, and there are only so many ways to describe it. After a while, they're going to fall into a common pattern.

This isn't unique to high energy physics-- the areas of atomic physics in which you experience this kind of sameness are areas that are dominated by a small number of large groups. Cavity QED talks have a certain sameness to them because they tend to be given either by people who are part of Jeff Kimble's group, or people who were trained in Jeff Kimble's group. Ion trap quantum computing talks look pretty similar because they're mostly coming from the Wineland group.

You don't get quite the same degree of sameness, though, because in atomic physics, the apparatus is a lot less expensive. Big research groups in atomic physics will have three or four different experiments going, and the apparatus can be very different from one to the next. And even people working on the same apparatus can be using completely different detectors, because they're not the size of buildings.

The size and complexity of the detectors is the other major factor that leads to the sameness of high energy talks. Our department chair works at Jefferson Lab, and has had a bunch of research students over the last few years, and they all use the same two or three slides to describe the experiment. There's an aerial photo of the facility, a schematic of the accelerator, and a cutaway drawing of the CLAS detector. The framing text changes a little from one student to the next, but you can count on seeing at least two of those three graphics in any talk by a J-Lab person.

The problem is, the accelerator and detector are so complicated that you can't really expect people to re-do those images for every individual talk. Somebody put hours into that spectrometer schematic, and it's too much work to make a new one, so everybody uses that one diagram, and ends up explaining it in almost the same words.

You don't get that as much in lower energy physics. Most atomic physics experiments are "table-top" physics, so it's a little easier for students and post-docs to do their own graphics. Which leads to a little more variety in the talks, even from people who are working on the same projects.

In the end, though, the tenth time you hear a talk about a particular research field, it starts to sound a lot like the previous nine. A really good speaker (such as the speaker whose colloquium prompted Gordon's post) will be able to cut through that, but in this case, familiarity does breed... Well, not contempt, but at least deja vu.