GeekPop festival
A somewhat belated note to the effect that M.'s scratch band of musical physicists finally submitted their song, "Ausgabe Drei" (written by Greg Feild), to the GeekPop festival. All recorded in M.'s old (and much missed) wood-panelled room in Ferney-Voltaire. I'd heard M.'s version of how the song was written and recorded, so enjoyed reading Jon Butterworth's account - especially his passing reflections on the politics of the German university system! All very self-referential stuff to an outsider, no doubt (which I guess sort of defines GeekPop material, anyway); or maybe not - non-physicists like myself can also look at it as (n.b. Bruno Latour alert) a window on a social world, and a view of 'doing science from the inside'. Which I guess is sort of how I relate to M.'s stories about his work. :-)
And this song to me (indulge me in a moment of over-analysis -- I was trained as a literary critic, after all...) is also partly about the nature of work and the 'texture', if you will, of the workplace. A mix of personal and inter-personal micro-routines and interactions, physical and mental habits, ways of being in particular spaces, patterns of thinking and doing. What Jon describes as the badness of the food at the DESY canteen is (or was) therefore as integral a part of the experience of doing physics at ZEUS / HERA as pondering analysis methods.
And this song to me (indulge me in a moment of over-analysis -- I was trained as a literary critic, after all...) is also partly about the nature of work and the 'texture', if you will, of the workplace. A mix of personal and inter-personal micro-routines and interactions, physical and mental habits, ways of being in particular spaces, patterns of thinking and doing. What Jon describes as the badness of the food at the DESY canteen is (or was) therefore as integral a part of the experience of doing physics at ZEUS / HERA as pondering analysis methods.