Piled Higher and Deepr nails it this week:
A Pofessor's Negation Field is the unexplained phenomenon whereby mere spatial proximity to an experimental set-up causes all working demonstrations to fail, despite the apparent laws of Physics or how many times it worked right before he/she walked in the room.
I haven't been on the faculty long enough to develop a really effective Negation Field, but my boss when I was a post-doc was the absolute king of this. I eventually stopped telling him when things were working well, because he'd invariably want to come see it, and then something would go spectacularly and bizarrely wrong. I would just take data as fast as I could, and show it to him after the fact.
Is there a theoretical equivalent of this effect? Do computers crash whenever theoretical faculty walk into their students' offices? Does code mysteriously fail to compile? Do random number generators spit out "4" over and over and over?
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As a computer support tech, we have an opposite effect on our customer's systems. We get a call saying this thing is broken, they tried everything 3 times and still it doesn't work. So we make the trip to their office, and they're sitting there telling us how it just started working when we walked in. We call it the Technician Switch, which we flip before we leave our desk.
On that subject, I was wondering if there is any physics lore of proximity to a famous experimentalist making theorists do / say / write incorrect things. I'm thinking of a sort of anti-Pauli...
I had developed something like this for organic chemistry experiments - they called me the Arsonist or Disaster-Master in Prague. I did very many horrible things there, (many of which I managed to cover up - but those that I didn't cover up got me repeatedly fired from research labs). Funny thing, it kind of escalated and from some point on, I even did not have to do anything - I just walked into a lab and people were shouting: "Go away, please don't get close me" because they knew that somebody is about to spill something valuable or set himself on fire by the sheer force of my personality.
I'm with Relic - Things break until I look at them, unless I'm the primary user, in which case they work just fine until I absolutely need them.
A similar phenomenon is well known in software; from the FOLDOC:
demo...1. A demonstration of a product, often of an early version or prototype. A demo is a far more effective way of inducing bugs to manifest themselves than any number of test runs, especially when important people are watching.
The generally understood explanation is that important people ("suits") are bogon emitters.
See also.
From your report, Chad, apparently bogosity increases with time on the faculty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_effect
No theorist should be allowed near working apparatus.
Just to make you all jealous, I was personally the inspiration for this strip. Seriously. See on the PhD site that the strip idea was contributed by "Jeff from Rice University"? That's my grad student, Jeff Worne, who has been getting annoyed with me walking into the lab and, by the Negation Field mechanism, apparently killing his devices.
Another case that's sort of the opposite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug#Heisenbugs
And I see someone beat me to mentioning demos.
One of my post-docs has his electrophysiology rigs just outside my office door, but the data coming out of it continue to look beautiful. Since I am an untenured junior faculty, maybe my negation field doesn't reach that far.
Yeah, the "theorist" version is totally what #1 said: you just can't get the code to compile until someone smarter/older/better-paid glances in its general direction, and then it miraculously works. Until they walk out of the room again, of course.
In math your proof works until you try to show it to your advisor, at which point the argument comes out garbled and false. Then you look at it afterwards and it's right again. But I guess it makes more sense to have nerves and confused thinking in front of an audience than to have equipment spontaneously fail.
Integrated circuits are cheap because they are very sloppily built. For example, the time delay for a signal to go through a chip will differ by a factor of two
http://www.fairchildsemi.com/ds/DM/DM74ALS03B.pdf
over changes in temperature, power supply voltage, and how lucky the process was. To get a design that can be manufactured in volume requires that its function not depend on these things. Because of all this, it happens quite often that a prototype will work perfectly but when put into production a substantial percentage of the product will be defective.
Having someone around who makes iffy hardware break is a great thing because it shows the problems up before it gets expensive. But lab techs are selected from the population that tends to make things work. To properly test things, you have to bring in people who are more difficult.
My experience has also revealed the corollary to this phenomenon, where any non-functional experiements/demos/displays begin working when the professor/TA comes to help you figure out why it isn't working. I've seen this many times from both sides. (Well, not as a professor, but as a TA.) Thus, the Professor's Negation Field not only negates the properly functioning equipment, but also the improperly functioning stuff, too.
Do random number generators spit out "4" over and over and over?
Hey! I use that random number generator in my code. That way I don't need to worry about seeding it.