Interview with Physicist jtbell

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Meet the Mentor: jtbell

Can you give us a brief history of jtbell?

I went to a small, liberal-arts college in a Midwest village in the US. There were only three physics professors and three or four physics majors per year, but we covered the core subjects and got to do some research. We had the run of the department and keys to the labs, so we spent most evenings there doing homework, working on personal projects, and socializing. I enjoyed it a lot.

Besides studying physics and other subjects, I got into computer programming in a big way. This was in the early 1970s, before personal computers existed, so I started with the college’s single Fortran programming course, using punched cards on an IBM 1130, then did some projects on my own. One of them used a graph-spanning algorithm to find the shortest path between two stations on the Dutch railway network.

The physics department later acquired an IBM 1620 and a Digital Equipment PDP-5, which I programmed in assembly language using punched paper tape. I spent many evenings experimenting with those two machines. All this turned out to have a major effect on the rest of my physics career.

When I started graduate school at the University of Michigan I thought I might try low-temperature physics. Instead, the bubble-chamber group learned I was into programming and invited me to consider doing my Ph.D. with them. I ended up in experimental high-energy particle physics, writing Fortran code to analyze neutrino interactions recorded in the 15-foot bubble chamber at Fermilab. My dissertation was a search in that data for neutrino oscillations — of course, I didn’t find any.

After I finished my Ph.D. in the early 1980s, I decided to try to recapture my undergraduate experience by seeking a teaching-oriented position at a small college like the one I had attended. I first took a two-year temporary position in upstate New York and then a tenure-track position at a small college in the Southeast, where I’ve been ever since.

I was partly hired for my supposed ability to teach courses for a computer science minor (in addition to the physics major), even though my only formal academic training in CS was that single Fortran course. For about 15 years roughly one-third of my teaching schedule was introductory computer science — first in Fortran and Pascal, then in C++. The remaining two-thirds was physics, including a variety of upper-division courses. Later the college started a computer science major and hired a couple of faculty with CS degrees who took over most of the CS courses.

When the college first went online in the early 1990s, I learned enough Unix system administration to help manage what was for several years our only Internet server.

Now, as I approach retirement, I’ve moved to the administrative staff doing various computing-related tasks and occasionally teaching a physics course as needed.

How did you become interested in physics?

It might have been the space program — the first astronauts went up when I was a kid. I dabbled in model rocketry for a while. Up through high school I read a lot of science fiction and popular science books. Isaac Asimov and George Gamow (One Two Three… Infinity and Thirty Years That Shook Physics) especially impressed me.

When I graduated high school I was about equally interested in chemistry and physics. Then I took calculus-based freshman physics (Halliday & Resnick). Maxwell’s equations blew me away, and I decided to stay with physics.

How was it going from a small liberal-arts college to the big University of Michigan?

In terms of the everyday academic environment, they were actually pretty similar. In grad school you spend most of your time within one department. The physics department at UM was probably about the same size as the entire faculty of my undergraduate college. When I started research, I worked mainly with my advisor and about three other professors in the bubble-chamber group. Classes were a bit bigger — 15–20 people instead of the 6–8 I remembered from upper-division undergrad courses.

There were, of course, many more things to do outside class at UM. Ann Arbor is a great place to spend a few years (I actually spent eight). I went to classical concerts — both visiting soloists (including Vladimir Horowitz twice) and the university orchestras. I joined the local bicycle club and took long country rides most weekends. I also spent a lot of time in the original Borders bookstore (it didn’t become a chain until after I left Ann Arbor).

What parts of your physics education/training were difficult and how did you overcome them?

Grades in grad school were the hardest part. I ended up with an unacceptable grade in Thermo/Stat Mech (a B− or C+, I don’t remember which). Not only did that mean I had to repeat the course, it pulled my average down enough that my teaching assistantship was reduced from half-time to one-quarter time. To bring in extra money I taught a math class at a nearby community college after an introduction from a grad student friend who had been teaching there.

Then I got the invitation to join the bubble-chamber group, which provided a research assistantship. I retook Thermo and the final exam was open-notes; my two semesters’ worth of notes let me ace it.

What is it like to be a physics professor?

This is a teaching-oriented undergraduate college. My usual semester schedule was either three one-hour lecture classes per week plus two three-hour labs, or two lectures and three labs. One common combination was second-year modern physics (lecture and lab), third-year optics (lecture and lab), and a C++ programming course. Most of my time was spent reviewing material, preparing lectures, working out homework solutions, writing and grading tests, and answering students’ questions.

I also served on at least two committees every year and did two nonconsecutive terms as department chair. For a couple of years early on I worked with a nearby university’s high-energy physics group and even visited Fermilab a few times to help run their experiment, but that work fell away during my first turn as chair.

Being involved with using computers in science early on, how have computers changed over the years in progressing science?

When I began programming and through grad school, using computers in science mostly meant writing Fortran programs targeted at specific tasks on multiuser mainframes or “minicomputers.” At UM the physics department had a PDP-10 and later a VAX 11/780, both from Digital Equipment Corp.

That kind of work still exists, but personal computers are now far more powerful than those machines and offer graphics capabilities that were unheard of then. Generic analysis software like Mathematica and Matlab has largely replaced custom Fortran programs for many routine analyses.

It’s still useful for physics students to know how to program, but much of their work today is in scripting languages built into analysis environments or in general-purpose scripting languages that automate tasks across different software tools.

If you could solve one question in physics what would it be and why?

I was into neutrinos and neutrino oscillations in grad school, so I’d most like to understand how the neutrino mixing parameters became the way they are.

Do you have a favorite thread at PF?

It’s a toss-up between the “Lame Jokes” and “kittens” threads!

What are some of your favorite movies, music and foods?

My wife and I don’t go to movies very often because we’re in a small town without a convenient theater. Most of the movies I’ve seen in the last 30 years I watched on TV or Blu-ray. My tastes lean toward science fiction (2001, Star Wars), animation (The Incredibles, Monsters, Inc.), fantasy (The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter), and older comedy/animated shorts (Laurel & Hardy, Looney Tunes).

My primary cultural interest is classical music. Over the last 40 years I’ve accumulated the equivalent of about 6,000 CDs, covering most mainstream composers from Bach and Vivaldi up to the 21st century, with a specialty in Finnish, Scandinavian, and Baltic composers. We have season tickets to a nearby city’s symphony orchestra for six concerts a year.

Locally we don’t have very exotic food choices. For lunch I usually walk home for a sandwich or, occasionally, get pizza, a Philly cheesesteak, or Mexican. For dinner when we go out I often order fried oysters at the local fish restaurant. Sometimes we visit a German restaurant in a nearby town.

Thanks for participating, jtbell! The next interview will be posted next Monday.