Excerpt from an essay about a trip to a conference in South Korea and the content of the talk I presented.

Buried in the weeds of the third footnote of a short paper on an unrelated topic was a claim that just felt wrong, that a quantity was incalculable within the context of the standard predictive framework of particle physics.  Technically, their claim was correct, but it simply made no sense from the results of thousands of prior studies that had demonstrated that everything behaved as expected, so there must be some underlying reason that both these things could be true.  This irritant lead my post-doc advisor and myself to establish its consequences in other situations, to slowly rise above this isolated example and map out the islands of confusion that bobbed in the sea of what we had, until recently, thought we knew.  Higher up, we could see that those islands were not islands, but connected by causeways and sandbars and isthmuses and all related to one another, and with some more general understanding, I set to deep dives in dusty math textbooks in the dark aisles of the loneliest stacks in the library, but tool after tool merely churned the waters, failing to break through the surface.  More chats at lunch and staring at equations on blackboards lifted us higher yet, and then, through the clouds, beyond the horizon, the tiniest glimpse of something peeked out, that we had been trapped on a two-dimensional surface like Square in Flatland, and that the answer spanned three, four, five, or more dimensions.  Once we had ascended high enough, the solution was trivial: calculate in higher dimensions and then project down to answer the specific question of interest, and we demonstrated that it worked over and over and over in every situation we encountered.  So we wrote up a paper.