Excerpt from an essay on visiting the Aspen Center for Physics in winter.

The slew of talks that welcomed evening framed the focus for the week: what is the future of particle physics and what experiment shepherds the field into the middle of the 21st century?  The dreams had at least become concrete conversations within the the past year, and several conferences hosted throughout the world at the great historical particle physics laboratories, SLAC, CERN, or KEK, had scientific programs that encouraged more dreaming and, hopefully, action.  In this sense, the conference at Aspen was nothing special, more or less the same crowd I had seen many times before, though as time had passed, the arguments for a collider that would probe a distance scale 10 times smaller than that of the Large Hadron Collider had sharpened.  At the top, the ultimate question to be answered by such a machine were the compounding mysteries of the Higgs boson, not yet three years post-discovery, but an outlier in the mathematical language of particle physics that seemed to require ad-hoc buttressing to make it fit.  Then, as others had suggested, if we would learn more from a collider ten times the size of the LHC, why not even larger, like Enrico Fermi’s vision of a “globaltron” that encircled the Earth that could probe distances ten times smaller yet?  Yet others had strayed further from legitimate scientific discourse and constructed a counter-conference in the snow, a dozen miniature snowmen enraptured by a near-human size specimen, who, with a finger of its woody arm, pointed at a rough-drawn figure of the ultimate collider that could probe distances yet a thousand times smaller, colliding particles that were accelerated in a machine just within Earth’s orbit, encircling the Sun.

Dying claps at 7:30 pm invited us to percolate from the auditorium, some pausing at offices to gather a bag, but most clustered in the kitchenette quickly leading to a severe traffic jam.  However, we all had the same question to ask and the high density allowed for fast diffusion of information on dinner, both the where and with whom.  A certain class of physicist who was in Aspen to play, who seemed to seek fame, television spots, and gala banquets over understanding Nature, had already reserved a table at some 5-star restaurant.  My skiing group had found a few others and starting walking into downtown, guided only by frugality, and small clusters would splinter if they spotted a place with cuisine that intrigued or matched their dietary restrictions, and after a few blocks of this, I remained with a few other junior people, post-docs or grad student stragglers that lacked the backbone to make a firm decision in these situations, and one of perhaps the top three or so most famous physicists in our entire field, director of the premier theoretical physics institute in Japan, a spokesperson and advocate for the future collider effort there, distinguished professor at the top public university in the US.  Naturally, he chose the restaurant and the rest of us followed, but devoted no energy to the decision and just ducked into a place around the next corner that served standard pub fare, craft beers, and an extensive selection of cannabis offerings.  So seated there, while we waited for our food and the others listened in, I animatedly described a paper I had recently finished, the old problem we had attacked and insight we developed, at the back of the dim dining room, his face only faintly illuminated by pharmacist’s neon green.