Yesterday I gave a Journal Club Seminar at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Giving talks is one of the things I both enjoy and fear most as a physicist. Ironically, what I enjoy is what I fear. I enjoy explaining what I do to others. I find that it helps me think more clearly about my research and my motivation for doing that research. However, opening yourself up to a room full of brilliant, insightful people often means that your knowledge of any particular subject will be brought to it’s limits. This can be quite humbling, but also what I need to become a more knowledge scientist.
By the time I reached the end of my seminar at Cornell yesterday, I remembered why the CDMS (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search) was so appealing to me when I was starting my postdoc career. The breadth of science — from astrophysics to particle physics to superconductivity — required to master how it is we go about trying to detect the elusive dark matter with our experiment is quite impressive. The same can be said about many experiments. But for me, it was the unique collaborative effort that brought together not only particle- and astro-phyicists, a combination we often see now-a-days, but also low temperature physicists that sold me. At the time my experience in low temperature physics was a couple of trips to the South Pole and phonons where kind of like photons with a slightly different spelling. 🙂 So, joining CDMS presented me a challenge to really expand my knowledge.
So as I sit here in the very comfortable Ithaca airport, waiting for my delayed flight back home, I realize that over the four years I have been working in the Cabrera group at Stanford University I have learned much and that I really enjoy spreading that knowledge and understanding to others.