My first March meeting

I’ll begin with a bit of background about myself. I earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from North Carolina State University in 2005. I worked in fields outside physics for the next seven years before Physics Today hired me to help with website production.

As part of my job, I had the opportunity to go to the American Physical Society’s March Meeting in Baltimore. If you’re not familiar with the March Meeting—and I wasn’t either—APS hosts or cohosts about two dozen meetings a year. Some of these are regional, such as the April New England section meeting. Others are disciplinary, such as the June divisional meeting of optical, molecular, and atomic physics. Sponsored by 17 of the society’s 33 units, the March meeting is by far the largest. Indeed, it bills itself as ‘the largest physics meeting in the world.’ This year’s event drew 9224 attendees.

My first inkling of the nature of the conference came when I looked at the list of session topics for the day I attended, Wednesday, 13 March. My undergrad degree was general physics, and I immediately recognized that the majority of the topics were in pretty specialized areas. But I also found a few that appealed to my interests in science education and policy. And I saw that there would be press conferences, and I suspected that those would be less technical.

Jobs in science policy

Planned schedule in hand, I headed out to my first session, titled ‘Physics Jobs in Government and Science Policy.’ Amy Flatten, APS’s Director of International Affairs, opened the panel with a talk describing her career path from newly minted PhD through industry and business jobs to a position in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

One of Flatten’s main points was that you should recognize the skills you learn in jobs and be able to identify what things you really enjoyed. That awareness helps you better understand how you want to progress in your career. Her story really reflected my own experience of taking jobs that were unexpected or even surprising, but that have helped me prepare for and advance to the next step, and that I hope will ultimately move me into science policy as well.

Laura Berzak Hopkins of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory followed with a presentation that described her experience as a AAAS Congressional Fellow . She emphasized that there are two kinds of policy: policy for science and science policy. The first defines funding and goals, and scientists provide its rationale. The second includes topics like arms control, waste management, and others. Scientists provide analysis, technical background and other data, from which policy decisions are then made.

Policy making is a role that scientists are uniquely trained for, Berzak said, because their experience with research methodologies allows them to easily understand a range of scientific issues, not all of which are immediately obvious. For that reason, she said, more scientists need to be involved in policy, and the scientific community needs to eliminate the perception that non-academic, non-industry, non-researchers are abandoning science.

Something I noticed about both talks, and that I continued to experience throughout the conference, was that the speakers targeted graduate students as the minimum level of professional engagement in the community. This is understandable, since the research sessions are fairly technical and specialized; but for someone with only a bachelor’s degree, the complexity was very noticeable.

Janus particles

My next stop was the session ‘Self Assembly: Janus and Other Colloids.’ The topic was interesting for someone like me, who has no familiarity with the concept of the self-assembly of colloidal molecules or Janus particles (nanoparticles whose surfaces have two or more distinct properties). In this panel, speakers were allotted six or seven minutes, compared to the 20 minutes that the policy speakers received.

Both speakers described research projects in which alternating magnetic fields were used to cause magnetic colloid particles to assemble in various structures; the structures created depended on the frequency of the field oscillations. Although I couldn’t follow some of the details, the underlying concepts were easy to understand. The talks focused entirely on the pure science aspect of the work, with no indication of whether the research offered application. Similar to colloquia I remember from my undergraduate experience, the questions after the talks encompassed requests for clarifications, minor challenges of the scientists’ explanations, and queries about experimental setups.

After the session I took a tour of the exhibit hall . I’ve both worked and wandered floors at other conventions before, so I was familiar with what I found there: vendors of lab materials and equipment, publishers of physics textbooks, popular texts, and magazines, and representatives from various physics institutions. While there, I ran into a fellow NC State alumnus who is completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Maryland. We talked with folks from Webassign , an online homework resource for universities developed at NC State, and remarked how the software has changed since we used it as undergraduates. The publishing companies seemed to be the most popular stops for the conference attendees, though many of the equipment vendors had pretty consistent crowds as well.

Press conference

My next stop was a press conference, ‘Material Advances with Virtual Particles: Plasmons and Majorana Fermions.’ These three panelists received 10 minutes each. Peter Nordlander of Rice University spoke about plasmon-induced steam generation and distillation. Using a Fresnel lens to heat nanoparticles in water, he caused the particles to resonate until they released hot electrons, which allowed for the creation of steam without substantially warming the water itself. He indicated that the technique could be used for water purification, desalinization, sterilization, sanitation, and distillation. His project was inspired by efforts to provide cheap methods for such processes in developing countries.

Lunch in the pressroom was interesting. I got to listen to people who’ve been involved in various physics organizations for decades recount past events and catch up with each other. Everyone was very friendly, and the food was good.

After lunch I headed back down to the exhibit hall, but this time to wander through the research posters. Polymers, materials science, and liquid crystals formed the focus for that afternoon’s session. I noticed, with amusement, that paper and poster titles for physics research suffer from syntactic ambiguity of the garden path or crash blossom style. They become so noun- and adjective-heavy that it’s easy to lose track of modifiers. I also could also deduce, from its number of posters, that the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is a large and productive center of materials science research.

One of the poster presenters I talked to was, to my pleasant surprise, an undergraduate. Though I did feel like most of the content of the conference was geared toward graduate students and professional researchers, it was very nice to see all levels of education being represented. However, it did call home my regret that I didn’t pursue research opportunities as an undergraduate. It’s hard not to wonder where such activity would have led me, especially in light of Flatten’s career talk.

Energy, climate, and the environment

Up next was the big event of the day, The Kavli Foundation Special Session: Forefront Physics for Real World Problems: Energy, Climate, and the Environment , which opened with Nobel laureate and former Energy Secretary, Steven Chu. The conference organizers planned for Chu to be a big draw, so his talk was scheduled for the largest ballroom available. The foot traffic along the way showed that they hadn’t miscalculated.

In a short conversation with a group of 20-somethings on the way to the talk I remarked about how funny it is that we, as physicists, can be ‘fanboys’ over our own ‘superstars’ like Chu. And in a rather charming moment of self-awareness, one of the group replied, ‘Yeah. We like to think that, as scientists, we’re better than that, but we really aren’t.’

Chu’s talk focused on the needs and driving forces of alternative energy sources, especially solar. Although the talk covered familiar ground, Chu did inform his audience that Suntech Power, a Chinese manufacturer of solar panels, had declared bankruptcy about six hours earlier. Unfortunately, I found the most memorable part of his presentation to be the color scheme of his PowerPoint slides. Using green, red, and yellow lettering on a black background in a darkened room rendered the text almost unreadable for anymore more than 20 feet away. I hope the fanboys still enjoyed the talk.

More press conferences

I attended two more press conferences before leaving for the day. Diego Sanz of the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotà, Colombia, and his colleagues had developed a simple system for detecting methanol levels in beverages based on variances in the dielectric of the solution. Rodney Yoder of Goucher College in Baltimore discussed the development of millimeter-sized and smaller laser-powered particle accelerators, which trade a decrease in the number of electrons per bunch for higher numbers of bunches, and could be useful in any number of medical and security imaging applications.

Though I’ve been to conventions for other organizations and for science fiction and gaming culture (in fact, I attended PAX East just two days later), this was my first professional convention. Like all conventions, it projected a sense of community, where thousands of people come together to share in their passions.

My personal interests point toward involvement in science and technology policy, and as I make progress in that area, I hope to continue to attend events such as the March Meeting. The developments in public and private research reported there are very likely to be significant to future policy decisions.

Greg Stasiewicz is Physics Today‘s website production assistant. He lives in Washington, DC, where he hopes to survive the inevitable heat death of the universe.