APS Leftovers: I suppose this one's for you, Dad.

There are a few stories from APS that I wanted to write about but didn’t get around to doing so until now. This post is an observation and reflection that might come off as cheezy, but I don’t know how to make it not cheezy, so consider yourself forewarned.

At APS you expect to see talks, talks and more talks, interspersed with posters, coffee break conversations, and perhaps the consumption of a few too many beers at dinner. Something I did not expect to see at APS were children, especially children in sessions, but there they were.

In one of the sessions about the Pamela, Fermi and ATIC results I sat behind a fatherand his young daughter. Dressed from head to toe in pink and clutching a little pink purse, she must’ve been no older than nine or ten years old. She tucked her arm into her father’s and sat with her head on his upper arm as she listened to the talks. I was wondering why she was there when her dad got up to give a talk about the Fermi data. She sat up, clapping excitedly with a big smile on her face and listened attentively through out the presentation. When he came back to his seat after a well received talk she gave him a big hug and a little while later she left.

I saw another child at a session for one of the awards which are giving out at APS for lifetime achievements, thesis prizes, etc. In this particular session I heard featured talks by the winners of the the Sakurai Prize, which is given to people who have made important contributions to theory. When one of the speakers, Keith Ellis, was introduced, I heard whooping and cheering from behind me and turned to see his young teenage son cheering for his dad. When the talk was over the son again cheered loudly, amusing the audience.

Perhaps these observations made an impression on me because I am the child of a scientist. I remember how excited I was to go to the office on Saturdays with my dad and draw on his white board while he worked and how happy I was to see him come home from trips to overseas labs. To both Ellis’s son and the girl in the cosmic ray session, what their dads were saying probably seemed like gibberish, but it didn’t matter to them because they had been allowed into the world which claims so much of their dads’ time and energy. Of course, this desire for inclusion is not unique to children of scientists, it is probably true of the progeny of any workaholic. Scientists just tend to fall in that category.