Slaying My Own Dragons

I haven't written in a while.  I've been working and traveling but that isn't why I haven't been writing.  I've stayed away because I have recently been dealing with my own personal demons (which surface for me at least on an annual basis)... 

When I first started this blog, I promised a look into my everyday life as a LIGO scientist.  Almost everything that I have shared has been positive and, truly, that is how the majority of my life passes - I am blessed beyond my dreams and I love my life and my work.  However, there are the other days where I feel like nothing I've done has amounted to anything other than keeping me busy.  Deep down, I know that isn't true but I have a horrible way of marginalizing everything I do.  Basically, if I did it then anyone could have or it wasn't meaningful.  This is a well known phenomenon called the Impostor Syndrome.  I've heard about this is various places; I think most recently it was in regard to women in physics but this is a widespread phenomenon in both genders. 

Honestly, I am hesitant to even write about this here.  Physics is a competitive profession.  I feel like a person's worth is usually judged on what you've done lately.  I am always afraid that I haven't accomplished enough to not be forgotten let alone respected.  And with my job being a temporary (I am a postdoctoral scholar - this is much like when a medical doctor goes through residencies after earning their medical degree) and on a yearly contract, not constantly earning respect means that I could lose my job all together.

It isn't something that I discuss with my co-workers; after all these are the people whose respect I am trying to earn and maintain.  I don't even bring it up to my friends because, since I really don't have much of a life outside of work, my friends are also physicists - sometimes even people I feel are my competition.  On my latest trip (to Santa Barbara, CA for the APS Executive Board retreat), I did bring this up in conversation over dinner (I felt more comfortable around these physicists since they are not in the same research circle as myself and I rarely see them).  As soon and I mentioned I'd been dealing with a bit of Impostor Syndrome the immediate response I got was, "We all feel that way."  At that, I didn't know how to respond since I was surprised at how open this person was with me.

So, how do I go about slaying this dragon?  Well, the first stage is messy and usually involves much anxiety and panic about the difference between what I feel I've accomplished and what I should have accomplished.  This then moves into a planning phase where I decide what I am going to do and is followed by a series of email feelers to people I need to collaborate with to perform the work.  By this time, I have usually exhausted myself (at least emotionally) and I wait for responses from collaborators.  If they are prompt, a new determined calm can begin to take root; otherwise, the anxiety increases again.  I start thinking, "Wow, I was right and everyone thinks so little of me that they don't want to work with me!"  (Note to self: next time check your spam filter before you flip out again.)  With a new plan of action intact, I get to start the cycle of the Impostor Syndrome again: "I have all this great work to do but I don't think that I am talented enough to complete it."  But, I plug away at it, complete tasks and rarely acknowledge what I've done.

The one good thing that comes from these episodes of mine is that it jump starts new projects for me.  It also reminds me of how lucky I am to have my husband since he is the only person with whom I share this insecurity.  The poor guy is my sounding board for all of the anxiety I've built up and there really isn't anything he can do for me.

A double rainbow taken from the LIGO Livingston Observatory parking lot on 30 June 2008.

This is a good article on the Impostor Syndrome: Laursen, Lucas, "No, You're Not an Impostor", Science Careers (15 February 2008).

***

Revised Erdös Number: 4

A friend of mine read my last blog post and showed that both of us (as members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration) have a lower Erdös Number (4) than I noted in that post.  Here are the references establishing this network:

1: Paul Erdős & Mark Kac
    Erdös, P.; Kac, M. "The Gaussian law of errors in the theory of additive number theoretic functions",  Amer. J. Math.  62,  (1940). 738–742.
2: Mark Kac & Theodore A. Jacobson
    Gaveau B.; Jacobson T. ; Kac M.; Schulman L. S. "Relativistic extension of the analogy between quantum mechanics and Brownian motion", Phys. Rev. Lett. 53 (1984), no. 5, 419–422.
3. Theodore A. Jacobson & Bruce Allen
    Allen, Bruce; Jacobson, Theodore "Vector two-point functions in maximally symmetric spaces", Comm. Math. Phys. 103 (1986), no. 4, 669–692. 
4. Bruce Allen & Amber Stuver
    Abbott, B.; et al. "Detector description and performance for the first coincidence observations between LIGO and GEO," Nucl. Instrum. Methods A 517 (2004), 154 – 179.

My Erdös Number

Many people have heard of the "6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game, introduced in 1994, where you try to connect a famous person to the actor Kevin Bacon within 6 connections, e.g. X acted in a movie with Y who acted in a move with Kevin Bacon gives a Bacon Number of 2 for actor X and 1 for actor Y.  The idea of six degrees of separation originated in the early 20th century (of course, not with Kevin Bacon) when Frigyes Karinthy conjectured that any 2 people could be connected through at most 5 people.  This was the basis of the Small World Experiment in 1967 by social psychologist Stanley Milgram.

Long before the Bacon Number in the entertainment industry was the Erdös Number (you can also view the Erdös Number Project page) in mathematics.  Paul Erdös was a prolific mathematician authoring the most academic papers in history, many of those in collaboration with others (at least 1,525).  It became a anecdotal measure of prominence in the field to have a low Erdös Number.  So much so, that the American Mathematical Society has a tool to calculate your Erdös Number based on their database of mathematical papers (click here to go to the tool and select the "Use Erdös" button, try "Einstein, A" and you should see his Erdös Number is 2).  Studies seem to show that, if a person has a finite Erdös Number (meaning, have you published a paper with another author that you can use to start your connection), that number is at most 15 with a median number of 5.  It turns out that my number is 5:

1: Paul Erdős & Mark Kac
    Erdös, P.; Kac, M. "The Gaussian law of errors in the theory of additive number theoretic functions",  Amer. J. Math.  62,  (1940). 738–742.
2: Mark Kac & Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
    Chandrasekhar, S., Kac, M., Smoluchowski, R., "Marian Smoluchowski: his life and scientific work. Chronological table and bibliography compiled by Alojzy Burnicki. Edited and with a preface by Roman Stanisław Ingarden", PWN---Polish Scientific Publishers, Warsaw, 2000. 141 pp. ISBN: 83-01-00671-4.
3: Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar & James B. Hartle
    Chandrasekhar, S., Hartle, J. B., "On crossing the Cauchy horizon of a Reissner-Nordström black-hole",  Proc. Roy. Soc. London Ser. A  384  (1982), no. 1787, 301–315.
4: James B. Hartle & Kip S. Thorne
    Thorne, Kip S., Hartle, James B., "Laws of motion and precession for black holes and other bodies",  Phys. Rev. D (3) 31 (1985), no. 8, 1815–1837.
5: Kip S. Thorne & Amber L. Stuver
    B. Abbott, et al., "Detector description and performance for the first coincidence observations between LIGO and GEO," Nucl. Instrum. Methods A 517 (2004), 154 – 179. 

Special thanks to Nathan Urban for finding this low Erdös Number for me (using the tool listed above) - the best I was able to come up with was 8 with a manual search.

NOTE:  I have a revised Erdös Number of 4 - see my next blog post.

Do you have an Erdös Number?  Post it and your connections as a comment below!



Random picture for today's blog: an honest to goodness black widow spider I found dead behind the LIGO Science Education Center today (in Louisiana):

How I Came Into Blogging

I never thought that anyone would be interested in what I had to say, especially in an ongoing basis.  I go to work (albeit to a pretty cool job), go home and do normal things that everyone else does.  Who'd be interested in that?

But then I thought about how scientists are usually perceived.  I've noticed that people who were having a normal conversation with me will talk to me differently when they find out I'm a physicist.  I've had adult visitors to LIGO be in awe and mention that they have never met a physicist before.  My response to that is that they don't really know that - the person in line behind them in Walmart could have been a physicist and they would never know it.  When scientists are portrayed in media, there is usually something about them that puts them apart from the "everyday" person.  I admit that the characters on CBS's "The Big Bang Theory" have gotten a lot of the quirks right (I can label the characters with my friends) but the show only shows the interesting parts of their lives where their quirkiness comes to the fore - I can guarantee you that if these were real people, their 'boring' times are just like everyone else's.

Still, I didn't think that this was enough to base a blog on.  Last February "Astro Guyz" David Dickinson requested a tour of the LIGO Livingston facility so that he could blog about it.  I was more than happy to take him around (regular readers of this blog know that I LOVE to talk about LIGO to anyone who will listen).  After showing David and his wife around we talked about their experiences blogging (they are both experienced bloggers).  They were very encouraging and I was intrigued.  Read Astro Guyz blog post from his visit to LIGO here.  Below is a picture of William Katzman (LIGO Livingston Science Education Center lead), me, and David Dickinson from this post:

Astro Guyz also gave me my YouTube debut:

Months later, on my birthday, I decided that there is no better time than the present to start my blog and see if anyone was interested in following what being a scientist is really like (not just the stereotypes).  Now I had to find a way to let others know that the blog exists.  For that I turned to Astro Guyz and sciencegeekgirl.com (a blog run by Stephanie Chasteen - a well known science education and communication expert who I was acquainted with).  They were both very helpful in giving me hints and their common advice was along the lines of "if you write it, they will come" and to "use Twitter".

And here you are!  :)

I hope that this blog is serving its purpose by letting you see what I do on a daily basis.  I know not everything is thrilling (like this post) but every now and then I get to tell you about a bit of excitement (like the "Big Dog" blind injection - which was picked up by Discover Magazine's Cosmic Variance blog and Discovery News).

I'd love to hear your thoughts!  Is there anything you would like me to talk about?  Just drop a comment below or send an email to amber@livingligo.org.

This xkcd Comic Hit Home With Me: "Teaching Physics"

xkcd is a comic that tends to be a bit on the academic side but I think their warning disclaimer tells you better what this comic series about than I can:

"Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)."

Of course, this warning is tongue-in-cheek but it does give you a flavor of what the comic series contains.

My husband forwarded this comic from this a few days ago called "Teaching Physics" (click on it to see the full size image on xkcd.com):

Now, I have talked at length on this blog about doing education outreach at LIGO.  In that process, I interact with many students, teachers and people from the public and I use the 'rubber sheet' analogy often when describing that gravity it really an effect of the curvature of space-time.  However, this only works if one thinks about a real rubber sheet that they could interact with on Earth, i.e. there is still gravity around to pull masses down on the sheet.  Most people have no problem overlooking the fact that we are using gravity to describe the curvature of space-time but there are the few who bring up the paradox to me.

This is where I disagree with how the instructor in this comic handled the situation.  To me, the correct response is not to sigh and dismiss this useful (if imperfect) analogy.  Instead, I recognize that the observation is a valid one and compliment the person on being insightful (usually including that most people don't see the problem).  I then ask them to take the gravity around them for granted and just use the rubber sheet as a visualization tool.  After all, there are many analogies in physics but if you think about any of them for too long you start finding imperfections in them.  (Like using water waves to describe properties of light [electromagnetic] waves - a few problems with this include that water waves need a medium [water] to propagate and water waves are easily damped when light isn't.)

I'm not criticizing the author of this comic!  After all, I don't think this instructor is doing "outreach" as much as teaching in a formal education setting.  I've had a lot of experience there too and, depending on the student (like are they the kind that try to be difficult at every turn or are they truly being insightful), I very well may have had the same reaction.  And I just love that there is a comic out there that makes me jump up and say, "That's happened to me!"

Giving a Talk on Behalf of LIGO & APS April Meeting Wrap-up

Sorry for taking so long to round out my summary of the APS April Meeting.  My talk was on the last day of the meeting (3 May) and by the time I got home the next day I was suffering from a nice case of jet lag.  I know that there is only a 2-hour time change between Pacific and Central time, but it really hurt me this time.  I am just glad that I was able to recover from it over the weekend!

Let's talk about giving talks as a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.  When we speak on results that took a substantial number of people to produce (which is most of our results) we need to give talks "on behalf of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration."  Not only does this let the audience know that the person giving the talk isn't taking all the credit for the work, but that the talk has also been reviewed by the respective collaborations and approved.  This process isn't meant to be censorship; it is meant to ensure that there aren't people claiming to have results that are later refuted or otherwise change before a paper is published (like "we detected gravitational waves yesterday" [we didn't, this is just an example]).  That being said, my talk was on behalf of LIGO and Virgo and discussed the work we have been doing to collaborate the EM observatories to image parts of the sky where we think a gravitational wave may have originated.  My talk needed to be done at least a few days in advance to be sent out for review to the specific committees that give the final OK and to the working groups that produced the results I was speaking on (I sent my talk out on Friday and my talk was on Tuesday afternoon).  The final approved talk that I gave can be seen in the LIGO Document Control Center (DCC) here.

The talk went well with the one exception that I ran a little long in time.  I tend to like to talk about things that get me excited, and the topic of my talk certainly did!  However, I had only 10 minutes to talk followed by 2 minutes for questions.  I did finally wrap it up before they got the hook out for me though!  :)

In a previous post, I talked about the "Physics of Hollywood" session at the APS Meeting that included some Hollywood veterans.  The APS "Physics Buzz" blog also covered this in much more detail than I did.  If you would like to read more about it, you can read the first post (Q and A with Q, et al) here and the second (Writing Science Fiction: Trying to Avoid “The Button”) here!

Finally, I want to continue what seems to be a tradition of mine in sharing some of the more mundane views from my life by sharing the view from the 15th floor of the hotel I stayed in while I was in Anaheim, CA: 

This is facing south, if I was only facing north I would have had a peek at Disneyland!

Weekend at the APS April Meeting

The APS April Meeting started in full swing on Saturday 30 April.  The meeting is composed of many (~12 or so) parallel sessions during the day (form 8:30 am to 5 pm).  These sessions are composed of invited talk (about 30 minutes each) and contributed talks (about 12 minutes each).  In the evenings, there is usually a feature presentation and on Saturday night was on of the best ones I've been to.  This event was titled "The Physics of Hollywood" with panelists Bill Prady (executive producer and co-creator of "The Big Bang Theory"), Bruce Miller (executive producer of "Eureka") and John de Lancie (the character "Q" from "Star Trek: The Next Generation").  Junnifer Ouellette (author of "The Physics of the Buffyverse" was the moderator.  The picture below is from the back of the room when they were showing a clip from "The Big Bang Theory":

The panel at the front is hard to see here, so here is a zoom:

The people seated by the screen are (from right to left): Ouellette, Prady, Miller and de Lancie.  It was great!  They even answered one of the questions I have wondered about for a while:  Exactly what positions do these characters hold at the university?  They are clearly not grad students but they don't seem to be faculty members either.  Well, it turns out they are just like me...  They are postdocs!

I also had another "in the wild" sighting of the "Gravitational Waves" poster I worked on with the APS.  The picture below is the poster as it was distributed on the APS outreach table:

 

After another full day of listening to talks (I primarily go to sessions focused on gravity or education, unless there is something I don't specialize in that seems especially appealing) on Sunday, I had the Executive Committee Meeting of the Forum on Education (I serve on the Committee as an APS-AAPT Member-at-Large).  The FEd is just one of many units that members of the APS can join that address their special interest and their executive committees are the way these units are governed.  (Perhaps I should write a blog post detailing the governance structure of the APS - but perhaps that is more bureaucracy than anyone is really interested in...)  I may be very early in my career, but I have always felt welcomed by these physicists who are much more distinguished than myself.  So, I love going to these meetings (we only have one face-to-face meeting a year) and I get fed too!

That pretty much sums up my weekend at the APS April Meeting!  There are 2 more days left and I speak on the last day (Tuesday).  I am in the final stages of getting my talk approved by the LIGO and Virgo Collaborations since my talk is on their behalf.  I will write more about this process, how the talk went and about a few other things I got to do while at the meeting.

April APS Executive Board & Council Meetings

I've arrived at the site of the APS April Meeting after a few delays in my flights (the storms in the south and mid-west on the 27th required flight plan changes and congestion at airports).  As long as I make my connections (which I did since I had a 3.5 hour layover), I don't mind since I have a Kindle full of books (vampire books are my guilty pleasure).  However, I did land over an hour late at the Orange County Airport and after taking the SuperShuttle, I arrived at the hotel over a half an hour into the Executive Board dinner.  I was disappointed since the food is usually wonderful and the conversation even better but it wasn't horrible to jump into the shower and get to bed early.

The Executive Board Meeting started at 8:30 am on the 28th.  Like the last Board Meeting, strategic planning for the future years of the Society took up more than half of the day.  This planning is led by a facilitator to focus our discussions on a topic and organize the brainstorming conversation that results.  The experience has been a fulfilling one since I had a few ideas develop in the process and feel that they may become a reality in the future.  It feels good not only to have your ideas valued, but to feel like you are making a lasting impact on something.

Today is the Council Meeting.  Since I am writing this during this meeting, I don't have much to share so far.  However, the schedule for today is very similar to the meeting I described last November.  I did take a short walk to the back of the room and I thought you might be interested in what a meeting of the Council looks like:

Here, we are discussing the budget for 2012 and comparing it with the actual income and expenses for different activities (like publishing journals and professional meetings) of the society in past years.

As far as the April Meeting is concerned, over the last two days preparations for this have become apparent.  Registration booths have gone up outside of the hotel lobby, and display boards for research posters are up (see this post about what professional conference posters are like).  There are also more physicists milling about.  I find it interesting that I can identify other physicists but I'm not exactly sure what it is about a person that indicates that they are like me...  Is it they way they carry themselves?  Or is it they way they dress?  Or is it that these are the people who don't look like they are planning a day of fun at Disneyland (just up the road)?  By tomorrow, it will be very easy to tell since all of us will have name tags!

Well, it is almost break time in the Council Meeting...  I write more soon.  Have a great weekend!