How to become a GOOD experimental physicist — part 0

• Post by: admin
• November 4, 2015
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Nobel laureate and super-determinism conspiracist Gerard ’t Hooft has an online guide on how to become a GOOD theoretical physicist. He lists required subjects and key concepts in each subject and links to mostly online resources for self-study of those concepts.

I’ve always considered it a shame that there isn’t anything similar for experimental physicists. Indeed, experimental physics is a bit of an afterthought in most university physics courses. A syllabus usually lists all kinds of theory skills that graduated physicists should have, but practical skills such as “knows how to use an oscilloscope” is usually not part of it. Sure, that’s too specific and instead there are those conceptual problem-solving related items that supposedly cover the practical aspects of being a physicist, but those are usually assumed to either happen on their own, or at most through the unstructured undergraduate labs that are sprinkled throughout a degree. Those labs usually represent a rather random collection of skills covered for historical reasons rather than a comprehensive framework, but more on that elsewhere.

So back to the topic, which is recommended resources on how to become a good experimentalist. I’ll start this out as a series of posts until I either get bored, or until I have enough material to collate it into a separate website. I will not presume to have anything of remotely the quality that G’tH offers, I simply haven’t put enough work into this. But hopefully it evolves and we will see what happens. Also, there is not yet any emphasis on free or online resources, I’ll write this off the cuff and refine it later.

G’tH starts out with languages, and similarly I will start Part 0 with a soft skill.

Project Management

Project management (PM) is crucial for any experimentalist and I swear that many a tragically failed PhD attempt could have been turned into a successful career had there been a modicum of project management knowledge. You don’t need full PM certification, even just the rudimentary basics will make a big difference. Set an achievable and measurable goal with a reasonable timeline, break it down into work packages, define milestones and deliverable for these work packages, and then define tasks and related activities to achieve those. And then learn how to time manage those tasks, how to assess the risks, and how to review and re-evaluate the work breakdown structure later when something goes wrong—as it inevitably will. On a higher up level, learn how projects form a program, and how a program can further a vision. For reading, any basic literature on the topic should do, so why not start with Project Management for Dummies.

I didn’t need to read that, luckily, because I attended professional development seminar on the topic in the first year of my PhD. Shortly after that I offered to impart my newfound wisdom on the rest of the group. I still remember quite well that Anton Zeilinger, who taught me a lot about having the right kind of vision, scoffed at the idea of having well defined, measurable goals. He insisted that that was for business people, that the mere idea would restrict us in our creativity to pursue whatever was the really important goal. I agree that we shouldn’t bow to some arbitrary goal (unless your stakeholders demand it, which is yet another thing PM helps you assess), but that’s for a group leader to keep in mind and a PhD student should instead still stick to goals that can be achieved.

And there are other aspects of project management that need adaptation in experimental physics. Rigid time planning for example is a challenge, due to the unpredictable nature of experimental work. However, that is part of proper risk management, and being aware of it helps decide when a project might need to be scrapped in order for deadlines to be achieved. But I digress, this really should be turned into a separate post on PM in the lab. TLDR: learn project management, it’s good for you!

Which concludes the warm-up to this series. The next part will deal with another bunch of not-yet-physics related subjects such as electronics and programming.