Part 4

The first lecturer took to the stage with their reflected slides illuminating them from behind and welcomed the room full of eager students to an introduction of the physics at particle colliders, like the LHC.  Each day consisted of three lectures, scheduled for 90 minutes, with coffee breaks or lunch separating them.  The fourth and final session was devoted to rapid student talks, no more than 7 minutes each plus time for questions, designed to provide some practice speaking as well as an overview to the myriad research directions represented.  The breaks encouraged ample discussion with the lecturers, as limiting a broad topic to only 90 minutes was often interpreted as carte blanche to a rapid-fire survey which left students breathless but with only more questions afterward.  Unlike some other summer schools, lecturers did not type up notes nor provide exercises for students to complete to dive deeper into a subject and develop a real understanding through focus and determination.  No, the strategy of the Cargèse school for student engagement was markedly different: to provide a relaxed atmosphere to encourage deep conversations between tutors and pupils.

This philosophy was no more evident than over lunch.  A grand affair, French through-and-through, and a two-hour crevasse separating morning from afternoon lectures, déjeuner was served buffet-style, centered around a different cut of flesh from a different animal every day, accompanied with pastries or crème caramel for dessert.  Three long, broad stone-topped tables with wooden benches outside, though underneath bamboo screen sunshades, were the default dining rooms, each replete with white and red wine bottles under the Institute’s own label, of mostly Sciacarello grapes grown in the Ajaccio Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée.  After several glasses of wine midday, it was only sensible to change into swimwear and launch from the rocks on the shore into the shallow, balmy cove during the second hour of the break.  The water was almost exclusively the realm of students, and on the first day, only those from Europe were so adventurous, but as the school progressed more and more foreigners joined.  The lecturers remained on shore, and were excessively generous with decanting both wine and conversation amongst students.

There is a story, almost assuredly apocryphal but perhaps all the more truthful, about a vegetarian who attended the Cargèse summer school an indeterminant number of years earlier.  The story goes that lunch on the first day was a braised ham with a rich sauce formed from rendering other parts of a pig’s body.  The vegetarian asks a server if there are any other food options because they do not eat meat.  With a confused look on their face, the server excuses themself to ask the chef in the kitchen and soon comes back and says that the lunch meal is ham.  This exchange goes back and forth a few times, but the responses from the server caught in the middle vary a bit, like mentioning the fact that pigs don’t eat meat, or that the sauce is just the broth from boiling pig trotters for hours, and not the trotters themselves.  Finally, the chef is so confused that he comes out to talk to this person who refuses to eat the ham.  Again, they explain that they are vegetarian, and suddenly the chef’s face brightens with a broad smile.  “Ahh!”, he says, and runs back into the kitchen.  He quickly returns carrying the ham on a plate in one hand, but the other is hidden behind his back.  With a flourish and a “Voilà!”, the secret is revealed and on the ham he places a leaf of lettuce.

90 students from all over the world produced a representative sample of dietary restrictions that, for the most part, were effectively discounted and ignored among the offerings.  Now, however, vegetarians could at least just fill their plate with the steamed, sautéed, or grilled green sides which probably weren’t cooked in animal fat, but no complete vegetarian meals were offered.  Students with allergies would enlist the help of a native French speaker to act as a translator with the servers and chefs to consult on ingredients, and diligently pick through the food on their plate.  One woman at the school kept kosher which simply could not be accommodated.  Kosher meals would have to be prepared with completely separate knives and pans to ensure no cross contamination, and of the entire banquet presented each lunch, likely only the wine could have been considered even close to rabbinical acceptability.  After the first day, her solution, though unfortunately suboptimal, was to pack her own lunch.

It is difficult to exaggerate the silent attention and enthusiasm of a room of physics Ph.D. students listening to a lecture by an acknowledged world expert.  The students in the room couldn’t get enough school, so they continued to college after high school.  Then, they still couldn’t get enough school, so they continued to graduate school after college.  Then, they still couldn’t get enough school, so they are attending a school while already enrolled in another school.  It’s not that unblinking eyes were locked onto the slides glowing on screen in a sort of intellectual Ludovico treatment, both because every lecturer presented in a unique way with a highly variable style and each student had their own research interests that were not necessarily represented in every lecture.  However, every student had something to learn from every lecture, so one eye or ear was always focused up front, even if both hands were occupied on the keyboard.  Science progresses not because of some flash of insight by some lone genius out of the blue, but rather because the diligent made connections between seemingly disparate fields to unify and simplify the story we tell about the universe.  In amongst all of the details in all of the lectures, there was an overarching story yet to be told, and all of us sitting in that auditorium desired to be the one to tell it.

In addition to the beach and sea views, the Institute also had its own resident canine, a shaggy, sandy-haired dog that wandered as it pleased, and was especially congenial during lunch.  He had just curled up at the base of the auditorium stairs as the first student started their talk in the final session of the day.  Mid-Ph.D. students are an intellectually-interesting bunch: there is still some remaining holdover from college where they think they know everything there is to know, but at the same time are being introduced to open-ended research projects through their advisor.  This puts them in a limbo, anticipating that the audience knows just as much about their project as they do, while simultaneously viewing their work as utterly revolutionary, even though it was probably a small side project that their advisor gave them for more of an educational experience, rather than rewriting the laws of physics.  Providing students the opportunity to present to their peers is clearly valuable to developing communication skills, and limiting the talks to about five minutes was ideal for students to introduce their research, but prevent them from derailing and taking the entire room down a long and tortuous road pock-marked with distractions, speculation, and uncertainty.  Once the last of the four students in this session had been applauded, the dog staggered up and shuffled back out, well-conditioned to the ebb and flow of the school and Institute.

Orderly bottles of the red and white wines and glasses were placed to one side of the pop-up bar stationed outside the kitchen and canteen building, while bottles of Pietra, the only beer brewed on the island, stood waiting for eager hands on the other side.  Summer schools operate under the pretext of proselytizing to impressionable minds the most exciting and recent advances in physics, but their true, and sole, purpose is to introduce students to one another.  The invited experts have lives and families away from the school, so they only attend around the dates of their scheduled lectures, but the students are there for the entire time, immersed in the science and the location for two weeks.  If there had been any issues with student camaraderie, the solution always seems to be to throw more alcohol at the problem, and I walked away from the bar toward a semi-circle chatting and gazing on the water with a cold bottle of the chestnut flour beer.  In this group of students, or that group seated at the table, or that one over there stepping down to the sand, were professors at institutions all over the world, from Georgia State University, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Durham University in England, UC San Diego, University of Debrecen in Hungary, University of Oregon, Oklahoma State University, Fermilab, Colorado State University, and Tata Institute in Mumbai.  This evening in Corsica happened to be a decade before they were promoted to tenure, before they were the ones lecturing at a summer school about the work they did to forward the field, before they were drinking with students on far away shores.