Question: From your typical day I ask you how you manage to stay focus since you are staring at a computer all day? I know you hve breakes but it is bad for your eyes, also, does any of your work help the society in any form?

Pierre Lasorak answered on 8 Nov 2014:

Hello
So keeping the concentration high is actually something quite complicated. But I start to be trained in this and it’s better than what it used to be. The other way is to change what I am doing, it’s good to have several tasks that you have to do, and when you stay too long in a dead end, you work on something else. I talk and ask around for help quite often too in the day, so all in all it’s not too bad! Yes it is quite bad for my eyes, I can feel the differences during the weekend when I am not staring so much at screens.
For my work if it helps for the society, this is something that is quite hard to tell. There is an example that a physicist gave once: When Hertz found the radio-waves in 1887, he did not name them radio-wave. Why? There was no radio at this time! So at some point if we want to come up with something completely different we have let the scientists play around without expecting anything from them.
Now for neutrinos some ideas have come but I am not sure at all if this will happen at any point… For example people are talking about communication with neutrino, the advantages would be that you can send directly the neutrinos through the Earth, instead of going to the satellites… Less crazily, we could use the neutrinos to detect factories of nuclear weapons or nuclear reactors…