What do I do, when I get to work in the morning?

I debug programs.

I debug programs literally, in that most of the calculations I do are far to complicated to do by hand. I write programs to do my calculations, and invariably these programs have bugs. So, I debug.

I debug programs in a broader sense, too.

In science, a research program is a broad approach, taken by a number of people, used to make progress on some set of important scientific questions. Someone suggests a way forward (“Let’s try using an ansatz of transcendental functions!” “Let’s try to represent our calculations with a geometrical object!”) and they and others apply the new method to as many problems as they can. Eventually the program loses steam, and a new program is proposed.

The thing about these programs is, they’re pretty much never fully fleshed out at the beginning. There’s a general idea, and a good one, but it usually requires refinement. If you just follow the same steps as the first person in the program you’re bound to fail. Instead, you have to tweak the program, broadening it and adapting it to the problem you’re trying to solve.

It’s a heck of a lot like debugging a computer program, really. You start out with a hastily written script, and you try applying it as-is, hoping that it works. Often it doesn’t, and you have to go back, step by step, and figure out what’s going wrong.

So when I debug computer programs at work, I’m doing it with a broader goal. I’m running a scientific program, looking for bugs in that. If and when I find them, I can write new computer programs to figure out what’s going wrong. Then I have to debug those computer programs…

I’ll just leave this here.