Incomprehensible

The structure of a number of physics mid-summer presentations given on Friday:

BackgroundBackgroundBackgroundBackgroundBackgroundBackgroundBackground
BackgroundBackgroundBackgroundMethodsMethodsResultsResultsThankyou

My research group's presentation was one of the trues examples of that, since Mike spent his entire allocated 5 mins (and a little extra) making sure that everything to be said in my and Zach's presentations would be comprehensible. It's a little daunting that the direction of my academic life points towards increasingly arcane work that won't be understood by anyone but my immediate collaborators. It's not much consolation that all academic fields require increasing specialisation as you get deeper in, just because the situation is so much more pronounced in physics, especially particle physics. It's bad enough trying to comprehend gauge-group transformations and Minimal Flavour Violation (which, I confess, I do not comprehend to a degree beyond what I need to know to write Mathematica and Fortran scripts to tell me something about colour octet scalars), explaining them in ways that doesn't require astoundingly complicated mathematics is a much bigger challenge. I've had trouble toing the same with fairly elementary quantum computing (the Deutsch Algorithm is hard to appreciate in the abstract). That's the gap that the popular science writers fill, I suppose. More power to them.

Maybe it's fortunate that I have various means of expression available, although given that most of my violin playing is rehearsal either individually or alone, and the other involves stabbing people... Hey, there we go. Stabbing people is about as unambibuous as it gets. I didn't include blogging and talking, because they're more a matter of course, as reading used to be before college. I suppose that's not really addressing the issue of discussing my intellectual pursuits, although I did go the other way and momentarily consider the cross-section of a foil-foil collision (tips) or a foil-target collision analogously to a proton-proton collision at the Large Hadron Collider.

I'm doomed, aren't I?