As an AMO physicist, the thought of losing any sleep over missing an APS March Meeting is hysterical.  And then Saturday night happened.  I had had one of those once in a lifetime magical days with my family; they had taken me out to see a Broadway show in New York City and out to a fantastic lunch.  Afterwards we did a little shopping in Times Square and hopped in the car and drove home.  We got some food from our favorite smoothie joint and immediately passed out from exhaustion.  It was 9pm.  One hour later, the phone started ringing, the text messages came in, and the emails piled up.  I was wide awake – the March Meeting was cancelled. I did not get to bed for sometime after.

In terms of physics, I work at a Primarily Undergraduate Institution and all of the students that were traveling with me were undergraduates – six in total, two from my research group and four from Sean Bentley’s team.  They were obviously disappointed and a little frantic.   Why couldn’t we cancel our flights?  What about all the time they spent preparing their presentations?  Will they get reimbursed for all the cancellation fees?  Money is tight for undergraduate students, despite what they may admit to when asked, can you afford this.

The only really answer I could give them was: do what you can tonight and we will figure the rest out on Monday.  That is easy for me, a tenured department chair, who finally – after years of saving and paying off debt – has enough money this kind of thing isn’t a big deal.  To make matters only slightly worse, there was a moment when a colleague suggested that APS might be hacked and that we should still plan on going.  That theory was quickly ruled out with when APS posted the cancellation on the website.

I spent the night coming up with ways to reassure my students that we will help them but also trying not to promise anything.  While I love and respect both my university and APS, like many Americans, my trust in institutions has been shattered recently.  While I am not 100% sure, I am 99% sure that everything will work out for myself and my students.  Here is some of what I said:

Of course it didn’t end there but it was a start.

So Why March Meeting?

As I mentioned at the start of this post, I am an AMO physicist and prefer to spend my time at DAMOP and other conferences around the world.  Then why do I go to the March Meeting almost every year now?  The APS March Meeting is amazing for undergraduate physics research.  They have so many sessions of undergraduate speakers that they have to run concurrent sessions.  They have a giant poster session for undergraduates.  The trade show is amazing – I tell my students to bring their resume and if you see somewhere you’d want to work, NETWORK, NETWORK, NETWORK!  They have a graduate student career fair and numerous other interesting workshops for students.

This year, I was particularly excited.  I am an APS Career Mentoring Fellow.  Still figuring out what that means, but loosely, I am a physics professional who plans to dedicate time to helping students build their careers.  I would do that by mentoring students during the presentations at the March Meeting and later giving talks on choosing one’s career.  (I love talking about this, if you need a speaker let me know.)

The six students that were going were to give the following posters:

Olivia Chierchio, Charanpreet Singh, Zafir Momin, James P St. John, and Matthew Wright. Generation Optical Beating between Hyperfine levels in the Decay of Rb atoms Excited by Different Pulse Shapes.

Thomas Danza, Richard O Mouradian, Mateo Murillo, and Sean James Bentley. Arbitrary Super-Resolution Patterns Formed in Quantum Dots.

Katherine Gifford, Zoya Shafique, and Sean James Bentley. Progress on the Development of a Magnetic Field Sensor.

The Fallout

My students were disappointed.  Undergraduate and early graduate students use these conferences to fuel their excitement.  That is gone.  But there are so many nice opportunities for undergraduates in physics, that there will be others.  Of the six students that were planning on going, five of them attended the 2019 PhysCon meeting in Providence.  The sixth student will attend a conference (fingers crossed) next month.

Of course one also has to feel for senior graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty who use these meetings to network for jobs.  Especially on the heels of a week in which there was a mini stock market crash and the future seems a bit uncertain.  Having been on the job market from 2007 – 2012 I know something about this.

Social media was crazy.  People were expressing these opinions very loudly.  One of my tweets ended up getting published in the Condensed Matter section of Physics World.  (As an AMO physicist that feels weird.)  It is also kind of ridiculous that I was saying “Chaotic shit storm” in a professional magazine – I am sure that will make mom happy.

This could not have been an easy decision for the VIPs at the APS.  I think it was the right one.  Events like this could be a hub for transmitting viruses.  While it is painful, we have to think about safety first. Even if as someone who lives near NYC, works at a university with large numbers of students from everywhere and takes LIRR everyday (which directly connects to JFK) my the chances of getting this bug likely remain unchanged.  At least I don’t risk being quarantined away from my family.

This is a difficult situation.  It is confusing.  But it will pass.  The physics will continue.  Hopefully everyone will stay healthy. 

I look forward to seeing y’all in Nashville next year.