Part 8

We had settled into the rhythm of the school during the second week.  Morning lectures, then lunch with a bit too much wine, then in and out of consciousness for the afternoon lecture in the warm auditorium with the pleasant buzz of the booze, and then student talks after waking up with a shot of espresso during the break.  Tim was finally able to present that tutorial without interruptions and the other lectures skewed to new, hypothetical physics ideas, their motivation, how to predict them with sufficient precision, and how to find them in collider physics experiment, assuming, of course, that they actually exist.  That boat excursion had merely been postponed, and thankfully the plan now was just a short trip after lectures were over on Tuesday evening.  However, our emotions were thrown around like a landlubber on the deck in rough seas, with the decision Tuesday morning that the weather was too dangerous, but by Tuesday afternoon, everything was calm and the trip was back on.  Injecting a bit more spontaneity into the day, I walked to the harbor with other students, after quickly changing into swim trunks and leaving all of my valuables in my apartment, save my key.

Our destination was the Gulf of Porto, about 10 miles north along the coast and where the boat would anchor near a calanque or cove where we were promised some free time to swim in the sea.  However, we discovered the first surprise at the harbor, where we were joined by numerous others, not part of the school.  While we were never explicitly told, we had assumed that the boat would be our private charter, and instead it was just a regular tour boat, which diminished some of the charm.  Thankfully, I was early enough to board that I found a seat on the open-air deck, absolutely necessary for avoiding motion sickness on the slightly choppy water.  After the captain had welcomed us aboard and the organizers of the school translated to English for the students seated nearest to them, the second surprise was revealed.  Géraldine asked the captain how long the ride would be before stopping to swim, but the response was negative, apparently a liability that the tour company could no longer afford and a recent change as swimming had been permitted at a prior school.  All that us stripped-down students could do was watch the coast undulate back and forth as a bay waxed or a cape waned, or pick out Revinda, miles away in the hills that appeared less impressive from below, but had no way to photograph it.

The French Riviera and Corsica are blessed with dramatic cliffs that plunge into the sea, a consequence of erosion of soft minerals for millennia.  The calanque we approached now was a partially-submerged cave hardly wider than the boat, and the captain cut the engine so we coasted quietly parallel to land.  With the captain at the helm, the two others in the crew stationed themselves halfway toward the stern at both railings and would yell back to the bow as rocks encroached on the hull.  The novelty of this tour was for the boat to enter the calanque, with the bow now in the shadow of the cave, then slowly more and more, while the waves lapped in the inches separating floating from capsizing.  We paused, the boat about half in shadow, still bobbing with the water and just avoiding the sharp walls.  The captain reversed the engines and back into the sun we went, cheerfully announcing over the intercom that that maneuver was called a “French kiss.”  For everyone on the boat to get the calaque experience, next we backed into the cave, now the stern immersed in shadow but this time, no announcement was made on our way out.  A line of tour boats in the Gulf had formed in the meantime, engines turned back on, and we sped away, back to Cargèse when someone called to the bow what that move was called.  The response, a bit more grim than before, was “Tu ne veux pas savoir.”

As is tradition at conferences, a banquet for all attendees is hosted the night before the final day of physics, and this school honored that tradition with a dinner at the Institute on Thursday.  Grilled swordfish caught directly from the Mediterranean was served while the camaraderie and infinite wine made up for any shortcomings in the food.  Long since having forgiven me, I chatted with the three students who had needed more water on the hike until well after the sun set, and the cool pastel rainbow of twilight had sunk into the sea, replaced by twinkling stars.  With lectures starting as usual in the morning, little carefree partying took place, with most people working their way back up to Cargèse well before midnight.  With understanding nods from across tables over the bluff, my flatmates and I planned our exit simultaneously and walked to our apartment.  The iPhone 4 had been released just a couple of months earlier and one of our flatmates wielded his like Gandalf entering Helm’s Deep on the third day, pointing the overbrightened screen toward the ground, illuminating the pitch-black, rutted gravel road made even darker by the overhanging, creeping trees.  We sobered as the distance along the highway grew, and arrived at our apartment with clear minds, anticipating receiving the final pieces for a puzzle that no one yet knew how to complete, nor even if all had been identified.

The first picture on the web was a photo of four women, dressed like a ’60’s doo-wop quartet with the elbow-length satin gloves and everything, under a banner with their group’s name, Les Horribles Cernettes.  By the time of this school, this image was nearly 20 years old, and its initialism coincided with the next particle collider experiment at CERN, itself conceived over five years prior to Tim Berners-Lee uploading the photo to info.cern.ch.  The complete physics program of the Large Hadron Collider had been planned to collect data for about 25 years, until the mid-2030s, so now, just months into the first proton collisions, was the time to think about the machine that would succeed it.  Fittingly, the final lecture of the school looked toward the far future, to the problems that the LHC would address, and to problems that would require a bigger collider at even higher energies.  For the LHC, it was widely understood that it would be the experiment to discover or invalidate the existence of the Higgs boson, named after one of its proposers and the fundamental particle responsible for the masses of other particles.  Previous experiments had established lower bounds on its mass, while mathematical consistency of our theory of particle physics forced a strong upper bound, and the LHC had been designed to be maximally sensitive to the allowed range.  All we could do now, sitting in the auditorium, was wait and salivate for more and more data to be collected, that eventually a signal would pop up over the noise.  All we could do now was hope that Nature heard and requited the Cernettes pine  “Hey Mr. Higgs do you wanna do the twist?”

The filled bus waved to Alejandro, who sipped un café at a cafe and who wasn’t departing until tomorrow, while driving off to the Ajaccio airport.  I had taken an early seat and so was positioned near the back of the bus and at an inland window, which I would soon learn was doubly undesirable for the drive.  The rocking of the bus and the rolling of the hills harmonized at vertigo resonance, my vision narrowed and muddled, and my stomach turned over and over.  I wasn’t alone as several students throughout the bus went bent over, working with all their might to keep their breakfast private, but with abundance of caution, the secretary passed around emesis bags from the driver’s vast collection.  Thankfully, my neighbor was unaffected, so changing seats to the aisle with a clearer view to the front helped, as well as an offered stick of gum to chew.  Ajaccio arrived not a moment too late, and as we pulled into the lot my peripheral vision returned, and the sight of the bright, midday harbor washed away the nausea.  Thankfully no changing clothes or mopping of aisles was required.

While the destination of most of the students on the bus was the airport, others dispersed in search of their next travel stage, so it was time for goodbyes.  Goodbyes to my flatmates who would be ferrying to Nice, though during the day and so my advice about reserving a cabin was less necessary.  Goodbyes to the first students I met in Ajaccio, two of whom would be staying on the island, either continuing hiking or road-tripping.  Goodbyes to the European students whose flights were departing in minutes, rushing into the terminal to check in.  The airport was my final destination on Corsica, traveling next to Nice and then on to London, but had several hours to wait until my flight in the early evening.  In this wait, I had a few compatriots, people traveling ultimately to the US or east Asia and so their flights were also later in the day.  After security and Duty Free, European airports, especially small ones like Ajaccio, are rather austere, so we found a clearing near a wall and slumped over our luggage for a brief nap before the long journey through the night ahead of us.

Pinned into our corner as the density of people grew with the progression of the afternoon, we were helpless to defend ourselves from the repulsive actions of our fellow humans.  One of our group, Ryan, was stuck next to a row of seats on which a young family had established as their own private base camp.  Still in diapers, the youngest member of this family had relieved themself and was apparently exuding a stench that stimulated the parents to action.  A good, say, two feet from Ryan’s facial sensory organs was the south end of the child, on their back on the seat, heels to the sky, soiled diaper making way for their bare bottom.  I could only spare a couple of quick glances otherwise I would have been overwhelmed by complete, uncontrollable laughing fits myself, but that was enough see Ryan’s wide-eyed, slack-jawed shocked disgust as wipe after wipe pulled the mustardy substance off and was gathered in a crumpled pile in mom’s left hand, revealing pink, plump flesh underneath.  The coup de grâce, though, was yet to come as once baby and bum were cleaned, but prior to a fresh diaper, mom pulled a thermometer from the changing bag and in it went.  With a few exchanged words in French, the parents were apparently now satisfied, the family packed up and moved along, vacating their defiled seats, and ever so slowly and deliberately Ryan turned his head to me, wearing a thousand-yard stare.

Heathrow after 10 pm is silent.  I had landed on British Airways but would takeoff to the US on United Airlines, so I would have to transfer terminals on the airport’s shuttle bus.  I apparently found nothing odd about following signage to the bus, down escalators, completely alone in one of the busiest airports on Earth, until spotted by a member of the janitorial staff who snapped that I wasn’t supposed to be there. Confused and apologizing profusely, I was reassured that no blame lay on me, but rather on security for not closing the area, and was kindly lead back to the correct path to the open areas of the airport toward the border crossing.  I sat alone and uninterrupted in the vast, vacant luggage hall prior to customs for long enough to access wifi, write an email or two, and then be yelled at again this time by a border agent that I would have to move along, and actually leave this secure area.  Finally past any security were rows of seats and a few souls scattered around already sleeping under the fluorescent lights, with the intermittent announcements, the distant screams of a vacuum, and the incessant advertisements strobing and shouting from the wall-mounted televisions.  Here I was again, presented with my bed made by my miserly decision to forgo a hotel room, but at least my nest of luggage, jackets, backpacks, and pillows tucked into the hard molded plastic chairs would lay undisturbed by any sort of breeze.