Dear Physics Community,

Thanks to Cam Fox at IS&T, my blog is now at fisherp.mit.edu.  Cam nicely cleaned up the mess I made with the update and moved me off of x.dailup to a place where there is plenty of space and the server is kept more current.  Thanks, Cam!

No Academic Continuity Meeting Today

Physics Department

Department Commencement – happened Tuesday.  Thanks to Emma for the great slide show and Cathy for making sure everyone made it.  You can see it here. 

Hooding – happened today.  Thanks to Syd and Cathy for a moving ceremony!  I’ll post a link when I get it.

Radioactive beams – Ronald Garcia Ruiz, a new MIT Assistant professor, do spectroscopy on radioisotopes to discern their nuclear properties.  Ronald is sheltering in Switzerland and just has a Nature paper on his work.  Story here.

ITER – means “The Way” in Latin, but stands for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.  ITER is a magnetic confinement fusion project in France designed to reach scientific break-even.  Construction is so complex that they decided not to stop because of COVID-19, the story here.  

Machine learning – is all around us.  Physicists played a role in their early development and now, according to this article, physicists are supposed to figure out how they work. I’ve used a machine learning algorithm for a long time and they can be quite useful, but I wonder if understanding how they work is really part of our writ.

Los Endos

Commencement is tomorrow, we had hooding today and celebrated our undergraduates last Tuesday.  The end of a long, hard term.  MIT came through okay, but there will many decisions to make in the coming months and work to do as we enter Fall.  This is the time of year when I slow down and change gears.  I sense that doing so will be harder this year, but I am going to do it anyway. 

I have complained to Deans, Presidents, Provosts, Chancellors, and many others about how much MIT asks us to do and MIT is objectively demanding.  I am learning, through help of the squad of experts paid to help me, that stopping this is up to me – the things MIT asks are all important and worthy of my time and effort, but I have to be much more careful about which I choose to do. I’ve taken 25 years to learn this and I’m telling whoever reads this for free right now – resist the fear of missing out and triage what you do to what you can manage.

Peter