The Glamorous Life of an Experimental Physicist

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 posts provide an inside look at what it's like to do experimental condensed matter physics, specifically using beam time on an accelerator to do diffraction studies of materials. It's got everything you would like to see in such a story-- equipment failures, sleep deprivation, bad data, good data, and promising results for future experiments.

The "Reflections" post contains general comments on what it takes to be an experimental physicist:

It's An Emotional Roller Coaster

Sometimes nothing works. At all. You try and try and you just can't make it work. Then sometimes everything is going well. You're getting data, and not just that, but the data looks good. Whether it's confirming or destroying your expectations, you're finding out something new about the world. It'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're seeing. It's a false signal from your equipment, or attributable to the background material doing something strange. Or you've destroyed the sample, and that's why it's not doing what you expect. You go up and down quite a bit.

It'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.

Don't just take my word for it, though-- go over there and check it out.