The annual congress of the Canadian Association of Physicists was held last week in Calgary. This is Canada’s biggest and most important national physics conference. The Canadian physics community is small and quite diverse, so it’s not the most important conference of the year from a scientific perspective, but I find it extremely useful politically and socially, and I always learn something there. In fact, because of the diversity of talks at the meeting, it’s an opportunity to attend some good talks on subjects outside of my own field.

This year’s meeting was attended by 619 people. That’s not as much as in Toronto two years ago, but it’s pretty good overall. Our department was represented by faculty members Giovanni Fanchini and me, grad students Tahani Aldahri, Arash Akbari-Sharbaf, Eric Barbagiovanni, and Sergey Dedyulin, and undergrad but soon-to-be grad student Masha Goiko. (If I missed you, I apologize! Please let me know and I’ll edit this post to include you!) There were, I think, a lot of students there. I attended the final session of the conference where the prizes for the student talks were decided, and heard 8 excellent presentations on subjects ranging from the tracking of ionized blobs in the ionosphere to the characterization of the plexiglass used in a planned dark-matter detector.

There were excellent plenary talks on the Alpha experiment to trap anti-hydrogen atoms at CERN and on using nanotechnology for biophysical experiments – in both cases, both the physics and the technical skill involved in doing the experiments were amazing. The winners of the various CAP medals all gave talks. Included among these were two of the best talks about quantum field theory and string theory that I have ever heard. It appears that superstring theory is now making predictions of new, measureable phenomena. If these predictions are borne out, I might start to believe that superstrings are more than just fancy math and actually have something to do with explaining reality.  There was a public talk in the Red and White room at McMahon Stadium (where the Calgary Stampeders  play) about quantum computing. In my opinion (and my wife’s), this talk was less accessible to the public than it should have been, and I remain unconvinced about the prospects of quantum computers to change the world. I also attended sessions on physics education, magnetism, soft matter and surfaces, graphene, Monte Carlo techniques, and others that have already faded from my memory.  The poster session on Tuesday evening was extremely well attended and I had good conversations with many people about my poster (co-authored with Alyssa Gilbert) about Canadian publications (or rather, the relative absence of Canadian publications) in the field of physics education. My voice was hoarse and my feet were sore by the end of the evening.

On the science policy front, we had extensive and constructive discussions with Samir Boughaba, the NSERC staffer in charge of physics and astronomy. One topic discussed in detail was the RTI program.  I learned that the decision to cancel RTI and MRS was more complex than I had thought, with part of the cause being a federal decision to disallow the re-targeting of unspent year-end money. Since RTI has always been funded by exactly these funds, NSERC was more or less stuck. I can tell you, however, that NSERC has heard loud and clear that the community views RTI as extremely important, and they are trying to find a way to keep some form of the RTI program operating for the next few years, albeit with a smaller budget, until they can find a way to fund it properly. That is very positive news. CAP decided to commission a bibliometric study of Canadian physics (see my post a few months ago about bibliometrics) in preparation for the upcoming NSERC reallocation process.  Ted Hsu, MP for Kingston and the Islands, who has a PhD in physics and is the Liberal science critic, spoke to us by Skype after the conference banquet Thursday evening about his life as a politician.  CAP remains active in lobbying Parliament Hill on matters relating to science and research, and I think that their message is getting through – the facts that NSERC’s budget was cut by only 1.7% while other government departments were cut by an average of 7%, and that “basic research” was mentioned explicitly in the budget speech have to be taken as strong indicators that there is some recognition by the government of the importance of research to the country.

I am now on the CAP executive as Director for Full Members, as well as being the CAP Councilor for Southwestern Ontario. If you have any gripes, or want more information about anything to do with CAP, feel free to let me know. Meanwhile:

–          If you are a CAP member and have not yet filled out their survey about NSERC funding, please do so as soon as possible. The survey will remain open until the end of June.

If you are not a member of CAP, please join. Given the CAP’s role in promoting our discipline to government decision makers, I can’t see that you have any excuse not to be a member. Undergrads can join for free, and grad students get a year’s membership at no cost. And for my astronomy colleagues, bear in mind that you can get a joint membership in CAP and CASCA at a special discounted rate.