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CHAIR’S WEEKLY MESSAGE
“Do You Snowmass?”
Something wonderful happened yesterday. After an email went out to the department urging everyone to participate, if they can, in next week’s “Snowmass” community planning meeting, one of our graduate students rightly said this (slightly paraphrased): “Can someone tell me what the Snowmass meeting is and if I should join? It sounds interesting.” This was wonderful for two reasons: it is a great example of the communicator (person sending the email) assuming the audience understands the main premise of the invitation; it also illustrates the right approach to learning. All learning begins with “I don’t know” … it’s why I encourage my students in classes, pressed to answer a physics question, to reply with this if they actually don’t know the answer. The second-worst sin a (budding) scientist can commit is to pull answers whole cloth out of nowhere, with no thought or justification, just to try to impress an authority figure.
I thought this issue might be a great opportunity, then, to help all of us understand better what is “Snowmass.” Basically, “Snowmass” is a name left over from an earlier time that stands for a concept less than it stands for the place where this concept was originally implemented: Snowmass, Colorado. Since the debut of “big science” during the era of the Manhattan Project, where it was realized that no one institution or lab by itself can accomplish a large task (in that case, the development of a terrible weapon), the basic research community has more and more adopted the idea of project organization and planning that transcends single institutions. Projects like the Large Hadron Collider, or the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or the SuperCDMS detector, are too complex and/or expensive for any one college, university, laboratory, and often even one nation to undertake. Whole communities spread across many institutions, countries, and continents are often needed to tackle the largest scientific questions.
Snowmass is now more an idea – the idea that a community of people can come together, transcending boundaries and using a series of conversations (e.g. meetings and papers), to struggle in the marketplace of scientific ideas and gather people together around the best ones. Those ideas would then be prioritized and placed at the center of future funding initiatives, construction efforts, and operational plans. Of course, like all human endeavors, Snowmass is an ideal in addition to being an idea – in truth, it’s messy, stressful, complicated, and even the people trying to organize the discussions can feel frustrated with how organic the process feels. But like all ideas that, in actuality, are merely asymptotic limits of human behavior, Snowmass is a chance for communities to form, grow, and eventually flourish … if they can germinate their ideas in the first place.
In this issue, you’ll find information about next week’s community planning meeting for Snowmass, ahead of the formal Snowmass culmination in 2021. If you want to learn about the broadest perspectives, the newest ideas, the grandest schemes, then you should register for and participate as much as possible in next week’s events. It’s all virtual.
Closer to home, we preview a fast machine learning (virtual) workshop that is hosted by SMU and locally organized by members of the physics department and the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute. That event will be in very late November and early December, and we encourage people interested in the interface of machine learning and science to register and participate! Our next general-interest Colloquium is on Monday, setting the stage for October’s speaker series theme, “Probing the Unknown.” Finally, don’t miss Astrophysics Lunch on Monday, especially if you like topics that are really and truly out-of-this-world.
Sincerely,
Stephen Jacob Sekula Chair, Department of Physics |
DEPARTMENT VIEWS
Fast Machine Learning For Science (Virtual) Workshop at SMU, Nov. 30 – Dec. 3 – Register Today!
A four-day event, “Fast Machine Learning for Science”, will be hosted virtually by Southern Methodist University from November 30 to December 3. The first three days (Nov 30 – Dec 2) will be workshop-style with invited and contributed talks. The last day will be dedicated to technical demonstrations and coding tutorials.
As advances in experimental methods create growing datasets and higher resolution and more complex measurements, machine learning (ML) is rapidly becoming the major tool to analyze complex datasets over many different disciplines. Following the rapid rise of ML through deep learning algorithms, the investigation of processing technologies and strategies to accelerate deep learning and inference is well underway. We envision this will enable a revolution in experimental design and data processing as a part of the scientific method to greatly accelerate discovery. This workshop is aimed at current and emerging methods and scientific applications for deep learning and inference acceleration, including novel methods of efficient ML algorithm design, ultrafast on-detector inference and real-time systems, acceleration as-a-service, hardware platforms, coprocessor technologies, distributed learning, and hyper-parameter optimization.
Workshop Description
The organizing committee for this event consists of Prof. Allison Deiana, Prof. Tom Coan, Dr. Rohin Narayan, and Elizabeth Fielding from the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute. More information, including registration information, is available at the workshop website: https://indico.cern.ch/event/924283/
Do You “Snowmass”? You Should!
The Particle Physics Community Planning Exercise, affectionately known as “Snowmass,” will culminate in 2021. However, the roughly decadal process takes years to execute, and preparations have already been underway this year to lay the groundwork for collecting input from the particle physics community. Next week, October 5-8, is the “Virtual Community Planning Meeting“. If you are interested in participating in this event, even if it’s just to learn a little about everything going on in the field, you are encouraged to register for the event. Students and post-doctoral researchers are especially encouraged to participate and learn more about the ideas, projects, and directions the field might be headed in during the next decade. This is also a chance to offer your own perspectives on the field.
Physicist Chris Quigg provided useful perspectives on the history of the “Snowmass” exercise, as well as a guide to embracing the spirit of this event:
The Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society provided a model for these community efforts in 1982, when it organized a Summer Study on Elementary Particle Physics and Future Facilities open to all active particle physicists in the United States, joined by representatives of the European physics community, the DOE, and the NSF. Some 150 participants gathered from June 28 to July 16, 1982 in the beautiful isolated setting of Snowmass, Colorado, a mountain resort above 2500 meters altitude.
In his Preface to the Proceedings, DPF Chair Charles Baltay wrote,“In some ways, the 1982 DPF Summer Study represents a new departure in the field of particle physics. In the past, studies were typically held by the large laboratories to address problems specific to that particular laboratory. The 1982 DPF Summer Study was the first attempt in recent years to bring together physicists from the whole country to consider the future of our field from the point of view of the best overall national program. The DPF Executive Committee feels that this summer study was sufficiently useful in this last respect to hold similar summer studies at appropriate times in future years.”
The avowed purpose of Snowmass 1982 was to “assess the future of elementary particle physics, to explore the limits of our technological capabilities, and to consider the nature of future major facilities for particle physics in the U.S.”
Chris Quigg, “How to Snowmass,” August 26, 2020
Physics Speaker Series Continues with Colloquium: Dr. Tim Hobbs (SMU) speaks on “Hadronic Physics as a Bridge from Low to High Energies”
The Physics Department Speaker Series continues on October 5 with our own Dr. Tim Hobbs, post-doctoral researcher at SMU and Fellow at the Electron-Ion Collider Center at Jefferson National Accelerator Laboratory, speaking on “Hadronic Physics as a Bridge from Low to High Energies.” This colloquium will mark the beginning of our “Probing the Unknown” speaker series for October. This talk, intended for a broader audience, will focus on the study of the particles that compose the core of atomic nuclei, the mapping of their structure, and the impact of that mapping on finding new laws of nature and building blocks of matter. Dr. Hobbs will provide an overview of these issues while highlighting how a combination of theoretical developments and powerful new computational tools will blend with next-generation user facilities like the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) to push this field to unprecedented precision in the coming decade. Zoom connection information is available to SMU-affiliated participants; the public YouTube stream is available for everyone.
https://www.physics.smu.edu/web/seminars/
Next Astrophysics Lunch: Cynthia Trendafilova Leads Discussion on Exoplanet Searches
At the next Astrophysics Lunch on Monday, September 28, Dr. Cynthia Trendafilova will lead a discussion about searches for planets outside our solar system (“exoplanets”). Join this event to learn more about this hot topic! To learn how to connect, contact Prof. Joel Meyers.
Learn more about the Astrophysics Lunch: https://astrohep.org/organizations/smu/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=astro_journal_club
Miss a Colloquium or Seminar? Don’t Panic … They’re Recorded!
If you missed an event in the Department Speaker Series, never fear! A positive side-effect of remote-only talks is easy recording. You can find all events so far this semester streaming online here:
Most Recent Talk: Rohin Narayan (SMU)
FACULTY NEWS
Next Faculty Meeting: October 9, 2:45pm
The faculty are reminded that the next faculty meeting is on Friday, October 9, at 2:45pm. An agenda, and supporting documentation, will be circulated early next week.
Prof. Krista Lynne Smith Receives New External Funding from NASA
Prof. Krista Lynne Smith is pleased to report that she just received official word from NASA that her “Phase II” proposal to study quasi-periodic oscillations in Active Galactic Nuclei with the NICER instrument (installed on the International Space Station) was successful!. This award will result in $41,000 in new external grant funding to support this work at SMU.
STAFF NEWS
Staff In-Office Schedule for Week of October 5
The in-office staff schedule for the week of October 5 is as follows:
- Monday: Michele
- Tuesday: Michele
- Wednesday: Michele
- Thursday: Lacey
- Friday: Lacey
Of course, both are always available on Microsoft Teams, by Email, or by phone.
Full staff in-office calendar for October:
STUDENT NEWS
We have no student news items this week, so we simply remind everyone that if you have something to share please feel free to send it along. Stories of students in research, the classroom, internships or fellowships, awards, etc. are very welcome!
ALUMNI NEWS
If you are an alum of the doctoral, masters, majors or minor programs in Physics at SMU, or have worked in our program as a post-doctoral researcher, and wish to share news with the community, please send your story to the Physics Department and we’ll work with you to get it included in a future edition.
THE BACK PAGE
From The Physics Teacher: October Physics Challenge!
SPS Faculty Advisor and our department’s informal “Puzzle Master,” Prof. Randy Scalise, invites you to try to solve this month’s physics challenge from The Physics Teacher. The first correct solution he receives (scalise@physics.smu.edu) from a student member of our Society of Physics Students will be awarded a prize. The winner will get to select from the following four books,
- Gleick, J. “Chaos: Making a New Science“.
- Crease, R. P. and Mann, Charles C. “The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics“.
- Thorne, K. “Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy“.
- Greene, B. “The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality“.
Solutions must be complete enough to understand your strategy, reasoning, and methods; providing answers with no explanations are not acceptable. Dr. Scalise urges submitters who believe they have the correct answer to, of course, also submit their solution to The Physics Teacher using the email address challenges@aapt.org. Make sure to follow the journal’s guidelines for submissions (see below). The deadline is the last day of this month.