25 minutes

Until I am out of here for the night.

I had a good work day. I spent a lot of time doing data analysis - my favorite part of my job. Then a couple meetings. I had my mentor meeting, which is always fascinating and very insightful. I really did make a great choice in picking my mentor. He has pushed me in ways I would have never thought and today he provided some great feedback on the first half of a proposal I am writing. He also reassured me that my SDR rating (ME+) was acceptable and not to stress over it. Stated it was all politics, he got the same thing and there was flat out no explanation for it other than our division director dumbing them all down. He told me to believe what my manager told me in that SHE gave me an exceeds expectations.

The second meeting was with my good friend and co-project manager where we spent 30% yapping and whining (with my door shut) and 70% of the time staring blankly at some really fascinating data I have been collecting. Staring blankly and shrugging our shoulders.

Here's the situation... I accepted a task from our division director to design a particular experiment that to his knowledge had never been done before. In talking with him we concluded that we had about 75% chance of seeing absolutely nothing and in which case, we would stop the task and move on. What killed us is that not only did we see something happen, but we saw multiple effects. We spent the last two weeks going through papers from the mid 50's that were all either in any one of three foreign languages or were translations. It seems as though every single paper contradicts the previous and there is NO consensus on some similar type experiments. And apparently the experiments by these three international groups were then dropped. No more info.

Now here we are observing this fascinating "phenomena" on this very fundamental science project (a rarity in my division) and we have absolutely no freaking idea what is going on or why. I am feeling excessively stupid right now because I can't even offer up ideas on the mechanisms. We have months of experiments lined out and a peer reviewed paper to write that is due the first week in May (ha) - paper is for a conference associated with a preeminant journal.

Ok, then to top it off, there is a possibility that as of tomorrow the task could get cut. The external review committee (all applied people) stated that they didn't see the point to the task. My division director isn't one to just agree and do whatever the committee says (from what I have seen in the past and know of his personality), but he may just see the exact same thing that they do and couple it with the fact that we cannot explain what we are seeing.

I need to shut my door tomorrow and do some serious pondering about fundamental solid state physics. Why oh why did I not listen more carefully to those discussions on Brillouin Zones? Any experts on this, please contact me asap. Seriously.