A brief history of mine (I)

[Bee wrote these drafts before she left, and asked me to publish them while she is away for your and my entertainment. - Stefan]

Occasionally I hear the remark I don't write much about me and my own work on this blog. True. Reason is I find writing about myself or problems I've thought about during the day rather boring, so this blog is mostly dedicated to other interests. What could I write anyway? The typical post would read like "Lost a minus, found a minus, found a second minus and started all over again. Found a factor two, renamed all variables, started all over again. Changed the gauge, introduced an additional vector field, fixed some degrees of freedom, decided that doesn't make sense. Started all over again." It gets very repetitive. If you thought being a theoretical physicist is all fun and travel to conferences in exotic places, I'm sorry to disappoint you.

One thing fun about being a physicist however are the conversations with the US border posts. In many instances they think I'm a physician (the Dr. in the passport doesn't help), I've been a 'theological physicist', a psychologist, a 'theorist', but most often I am a 'What??'. Could be worse though. A colleague of mine once classified himself as 'nuclear theorist', which was turned into 'nuclear terrorist'. Didn't help he was from Iran. I mean, obviously, I would think if you want to bomb down a place you better get a work permit that allows you terrorize appropriately, as classified in form I94 and DS2019. If I don't want to talk to the border post, I am a 'postdoctoral researcher'. According to my work permit I am a 'post-secondary teaching assistant', the European Commission classifies me as a 'mobile experienced researcher'.

Either way, I've come to think I owe you a CV, and it seems to be a good time to do so. I've scraped out most names and dates, I hope you will understand this. After estimating the amount of time you'd want to spend reading about somebody else's navel-gazing, I've taken apart the whole thing into three parts (Germany, USA, Canada and now).

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Germany

With apologies to my family, I will abbreviate the first 18 years of my life as I grew up near Frankfurt, Germany, were I also attended the University after high school. My intention originally was to become teacher for mathematics and physics. The problem was though that the aspiring teachers (Lehramtskandidaten) were in separate exercise groups and they simply speaking drove me nuts. Sad but true, the vast majority of them were women and the knowledge level was significantly below what I'd have expected from students who passed high school.

I filled out a form, changed some classes and switched to mathematics diploma. I made a BD in maths, 2nd field of study physics. Maths has never been a problem for me, but maybe for that very reason I've never found it tremendously interesting either. Physics on the other hand is where my interest lies, but that connection to reality comes with many concepts I don't actually understand. Since I couldn't quite decide between maths and physics, I took all the required classes for both majors, including the experimental physics, and laboratory stuff. Today I wonder how I managed that work load, not to mention getting oscilloscopes to show anything but the 50 Hz remnant.

At some point I had an argument with a Prof from the physics institute. He'd computed the same quantity twice with a difference of a factor 2, and then had an elaborate discussion to explain the 'physical' origin of this difference. Needless to say I told him the reason is simply one of the calculations is wrong, and obviously the correct result I derived agrees with the other calculation. He didn't listen to anything I said, remained convinced of his reasoning, but I was offered a position as a teaching assistant the next semester. Since I had to pay rent, and the math department was broke, it was a no-brainer.

So I got my first office in an institute for theoretical physics. I had to share it with three other guys, and my desktop computer was the main server of the network, no kidding. The first thing I was told was to never-ever switch off the computer, and obviously I was to blame whenever something went wrong. This was in the late nineties, emails came en vogue, the arXiv started getting useful, I set up my first homepage.

Unfortunately, I wasn't actually interested very much in the research done at this institute. It was then mostly heavy ion and nuclear physics, the biggest part numerical simulations, with a bit of QCD. The latter would have been interesting hadn't the person leading that group just left. I kept sneaking over to the maths department, which together with me being the only women at the institute at this time didn't exactly increase my popularity. It didn't help either that I simply refused to work on the topic I had been given as a diploma thesis (well, it didn't make sense).

After a while I managed to find a middle ground and worked on the Hawking effect in time dependent backgrounds. My Prof didn't quite know what to do with me, so my actual supervisor became a postdoc around the age I am now. He had to leave before I had any sensible results, and I got stuck with some problems I today wouldn't even call 'problems'. However, at this time it was a major issue for me, and contact by email didn't work out too well. If you check my publ list, you will see that the paper to my diploma thesis got published several years after the thesis was finished. Given that it was just a translation into English, this might give you an impression of the collaboration pace.

It took a bit of an extra dance making the MD in physics with a maths BD, eventually it came down to me explaining in length that algebra isn't identical to linear algebra and complex analysis isn't just closing paths in a plane. Physicists can be so ignorant.

After the exams, I worked for a while on the websites of the physics department. This was year 2k, I set up a script (that was in perl then) which avoided multiple frames and lots of single html files by querying a database, and producing the appropriate menu tree to the selected site with a predefined template. It even had a forum where students could discuss their homework and stuff, just that hardly anybody used it. That script created the websites pretty similar to how most websites are build up today - though today you have php, css, mysql support, and can download, install, and use the whole software without even knowing what html means. That btw was how I met Stefan who is now my husband. We worked together on that project for some months.

Since my time as an undergraduate hadn't been too motivating, I played with the idea of going into web design. It was a good area to work in then, lots of people needed, but I wasn't very convinced of it. Instead, Large eXtra Dimensions (LXD [2]) came along and landed literally on my desk, which I told you about in this earlier post. I had always been interested in the idea of extra dimensions, so two postdocs and I, we made an effort to set up a group at the institute. It worked quite well, students, postdocs, and profs were likewise interested. It was a good time, and I am still grateful today for the support we received from the faculty, even though most of them found the topic decidedly weird.

My own PhD topic however didn't go anywhere. It didn't have much to do with the 'new' LXDs, but built up on the 'early extra dimensions'. Without a supervisor - or anybody who was interested in what I was doing for that matter - I got stuck after two years. Hadn't it been for another postdoc who had just come back from the USA, I probably would never have finished anything. What he brought with him was sufficient motivation for me to drop my self-made misery topic. Instead, I wrote my thesis on black holes in extra dimensions, properties, production and decay with signatures for the LHC. I wrote the whole thing in 6 months in which I computed cross-sections, piped them into fortran and c++ codes, and cursed LaTeX and the broken paths to the CERN lib every single day. It took another 6 months to get the bureaucracy done for my defense and stuff, so I finished just in 3 years time before I run out of money.

Financing for the LXD group remained a problem. I for example sat for a while on a heavy ion position where I regularly had to write reports about a project I didn't know much more about than the number that was on my contract. Immediately after my defense, I wrote a grant proposal to the German Research Foundation (DFG) to put the LXD group on firm footing [3]. The proposal was declined with the argument the topic wouldn't fit to the existing research areas in Frankfurt [4]. Needless to say, that was the reason for the application to begin with. As things worked out however, I got a well paid 5 year contract after my defense. But with the proposal being declined, I didn't see myself getting anywhere I wanted to go. So I applied for a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) [5], quit my job, and moved to the USA. Where I will continue tomorrow.

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[1] The website still exists, and still works. Since it hasn't been updated for the last 8 years however it looks so embarrassing that I won't give you link, sorry.
[2] Credits for the abbreviation LXD go to Stefan, who helped me out when I was searching for an alternative to LED.
[3] It takes a PhD to sign it, so it had to wait. I tried to get others to file it in for me earlier, but without success.
[4] The idea of 'clustering excellence' in 'focus areas' is very popular in Germany. It has advantages but doesn't set a good atmosphere for diversity and interdisciplinarity.
[5] The DAAD works both ways. If you are from the USA or Canada and want to study in Germany, check this site.