| Message: Lorenzo's Comments (improved format) | Not Logged In (login) |
|
Message from Lorenzo, Ciao Vera PS Please send your comments and/or let me know where and when I can reach you by phone! -----Original Message----- From: Lorenzo FOA [mailto:foa@cern.ch] Sent: Monday, April 11, 2005 2:07 AM To: Luth, Vera G. Subject: Re: Draft of Write-up Dear Vera, I have taken some days to see if with time I could digest your proposal of 10f signatures for each physicist on the basis of consortia interested in 10 different physics subjects. I must tell you that I remain very skeptical and strongly support the arguments brought by Max in his long and interesting mail. I start from the point of view of a person working since 5 or 8 years in CMS with the perspective of starting to produce physics results from 2008. I also assume that each physicist, from the start up of data taking, will share his/her work in two parts: a continuous work of maintenance, calibration, recovery of dead channels, software improvements and so on on one side, and the participation to a physics analysis study group on the other. Clearly each person will report to two bosses, the group leader for the M&O activity and the responsible of the chosen physics group, on the other. This is relevant because this person will have collected a deep knowledge on some particular aspect of the detector, be it hardware or software. Most of this work and expertise has not been chosen by him/her but by the group leaders according to the financial and technical capabilities of their institution. The consequence is that he/she will choose the physics working group in which his experience and knowledge can be of strongest help. Our physicist has accepted all this under the assumption that he/she will participate to the whole experiment. Immagine a brilliant student who works in the tracker and therefore participates in the working group on b, tau physics where he/she can take best advantage of a specific competence on secondary vertices. How should he/she feel when the study group on Higgs physics discovers the Higgs boson through the decay into two photons and cannot participate to the discovery? What I want to say with this exemple is that it is largely too late to force each physicist into a 10f the physics results of the experiment at this late stage of the life of the collaboration.. I fear that such a decision would give origin to a real revolution and to a disgragation of the collaboration through a nasty competition among detector people, analysis groups and individuals inside the groups. I can easily imagine that the collaboration would split into fighting gropus of people, refusing a common vision and a common effort, contrary to what happens now, each community making sacrifices in order to help others when they encounter serious difficulties. For me the only mechanism to convince a person not to sign a paper is his/her judgement of not beind enough involved in and aware of the content of the paper. In this direction I can imagine to proceed further, for instance we could ask the supervisors of PhD students and post-docs to interrogate the students and suggest to sign or not a paper according to his/her capability of defending its content. In conclusion I cannot imagine a short-cut decision changing the commonly accepted rules. I can see the evolution of the meaning of a signature which requires a more and more active role of each member of the collaboration. The minimum result is an increased responsibility of people who sign and a much better capability of defending the physics result. But it is even possible that such a procedure, if taken really seriously by supervisors, group leaders and Collaboration management, could bring with time towards the ratio 1 to 10 without distroying the collaboration spirit. Sorry for this long mail but the subject deserves a really big attention and I conside mine only a contribution to move to a deeper understanding Ciao Lorenzo |
| Inline Depth: | Outline Depth: | Add message: |
|
to: |