Part 1

While chasing my damp and threadbare brown hand towel and fuzzy teal, pathetically inflated, airline neck pillow around the deck, whipped up by the howling midnight Mediterranean wind, I learned a valuable lesson on my first trip to Europe.  Yesterday morning, I had parted from my girlfriend in Paris, watching her disappear down the escalator at Saint-Michel station off to Charles de Gaulle, ending our nine day vacation together in England and France.  I then turned to walk upriver, against the Seine’s current, to Gare de Lyon, where the TGV would whisk me to Nice, my port for ferrying to Ajaccio and Corsica for a two-week summer school on particle physics.  Hunched over my laptop 5,000 miles away in California, I had meticulously scheduled every stage of this journey, buying and printing tickets from French websites, scraping every ounce of the last vestiges of the language tucked into the recesses of my brain from studying years ago in college, cross-referencing arrival and departure times, and temporally sorting all of it into a folder in my backpack, so I could just pull out the top sheet and hand it over to the conductor.  It was a perfect plan, save one detail: apparently a ticket for an overnight ferry only lets you board the boat.

Attending a summer school is a kind of rite of passage for a physics graduate student, especially for theorists who focus on particle physics at the highest energies and shortest distances, and often where one is first exposed to the breadth of research directions in the field worldwide.  Even at a top ten research institution, the Stanfords, Harvards, Princetons, etc., the research interests represented by the faculty are limited, both by historical considerations in how hirings were made, but also because physics departments only have a finite number of people in them.  Summer schools invite a dozen or so lecturers from all over the world to spend say two or three hours each providing just the thinnest, most superficial introduction to the subject they have devoted their lives to.  Further, all of the students that attend a summer school are mid-career, as far as work toward a Ph.D. goes, and lecturers can assume a significant baseline knowledge among everyone there.  I had just completed the third year of my Ph.D. with all of the required courses like electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, classical mechanics, and especially quantum field theory completed a year earlier, and I had been working on research for the past year.  So this summer school was the perfect time for me to broaden my research interests, learn about the big names in my field, and, most importantly, befriend fellow students.

This particular summer school located at a physics institute on the beach in Cargèse was the modern incarnation of a preeminent school dating from the early 1960s at an institute founded by Maurice Lévy, a French physicist.  Apparently Lévy’s only requirement for the location of the institute was that it received the maximal amount of sunshine of anywhere in metropolitan France, and Corsica is far south of the mainland, and Cargèse is dug into the mountainous island’s west coast, terraces of clay bricked buildings spilling into the sea, ensuring that summer’s twilight stretches late into the evening.  A youthful Gerardus ’t Hooft, a future Nobel Prize winner for his work on demonstrating that our models of particle physics were mathematically consistent, attended the school in 1970 and his interest in solving this problem was piqued by lectures from Benjamin Lee, a professor at SUNY Stony Brook, and Kurt Symanzik, from the theory group at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, called DESY, in Hamburg.  However, ’t Hooft’s questions baffled them and neither Symanzik nor Lee had any clue how to begin attacking this problem, so ’t Hooft returned home to school in Utrecht, Netherlands, with only the knowledge that it seemed that the giants in the field were as ignorant as him, a graduate student.  So, with his Ph.D. advisor, Martinus Veltman, they solved the problem, demonstrated the procedure for making predictions in particle physics, revolutionizing the tools of theoretical physicists, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Now 40 years later, this generation of Ph.D. students had been promised a similar revolution.  The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, the aptly-named experiment at CERN in Switzerland that collided protons, themselves a type of hadron particle, in the largest scientific machine ever created, had only been collecting data for about six months, but had been guaranteed to discover new particles and produce new mysteries that would need to be solved by a new generation of physicists.  The organizers of the school had invited lecturers to discuss novel experimental techniques, advances in theoretical understanding, and classes of hypothetical particles or models designed to answer the outstanding questions about the universe, as well as to posit more.  We had also been the recipients of some fortunate delays in the scientific program at CERN.  The LHC was originally meant to begin data taking in 2007, but that was delayed by a year because construction hadn’t yet completed.  Then, in 2008, a mere 10 days after the first proton beams successfully circumnavigated the LHC’s tunnel, cryogenic, superconducting magnets responsible for keeping the protons traveling in a circle exploded, releasing all of the helium that maintained the cold temperature and destroying a large section of the accelerator.  After another year of delays to fix this mess, the LHC began its science in earnest in late 2009, and the 90 students descending on Cargèse had just come of age as physicists to explore this brave new world.  But I had to get to Cargèse in the first place.