Part 1

This live webstream presented results that were simply unbelievable, and not just unimaginable in the way that a first taste of a novel cuisine may be utterly alien to one’s sheltered tongue, but rather that there was no logical way they could be correct.  To the experiment’s spokesperson’s credit, they didn’t believe it either, and yet here it was, and encouraged the community to make sense of it or to find the error in the analysis, but was completely transparent in the due diligence of tests and validations the experiment had done.  Because this was CERN, news spread to popular media rapidly and seemed poised to dethrone the intrigue of hints of the Higgs boson as the lay person’s exposure to particle physics because headlines would now read “Einstein was Wrong”.  By late morning, our host, Mike, cleared the afternoon of meetings as he now had a surprise interview with the BBC, as his colleague and the usual contact for discussion of anything that came from the world of particle physics was off filming an episode of a show in Mexico or some place.  This was an extremely tall ask because what this experiment had done, producing a beam of ghostly neutrino particles at CERN in Geneva and then detecting them hundreds of kilometers away in a mine in central Italy, itself was easy enough to explain, but what they observed was not.  These neutrinos had, miraculously, traveled from CERN to that mine faster than light.

My first presentation on a project of my own creation, independent of my PhD advisor, had occured the previous spring, at a conference hosted that year at Princeton University.  The reception to my approach and insight to the problem I discussed in my talk, an already standard signal-versus-background discrimination problem in a field that just celebrated its third birthday, had been overwhelmingly engaging, if not totally positive at the time.  At coffee breaks and over lunch, senior researchers approached me with insightful and uplifting questions, encouraging further work in this direction or wondering at what else it could be applied, while others had a more defensive or even aggressive strategy, brows furrowed and mouths frowning, testing for fail points or weaknesses or pointing out strengths of their technique that couldn’t possibly be strengths of mine.  I would come to slowly learn through accumulating experience attending more conferences and presenting more talks, that these were simply representations of the personalities of the people asking questions, and not personal affronts.  Part of the reason for these interactions was likely inspired by the fact that some motivation for this technique had come from rather off-axis, at least with respect to the established paradigm and linear progression of the field at the time, from a paper by string theorists a few years earlier who had reinterpreted some ancient results from the early days of the strong force, quantum chromodynamics, from their vantage point above the clouds.  While my memory of the faces I saw in the audience during my talk is completely blank, at other talks and during the coffee breaks, I did see the senior author on that paper, faculty at the neighboring Institute of Advanced Study, and who was known far and wide by their singular first name: Juan.

Conferences such as these would have summary or review talks and the established approach was for some invited speaker, typically a well-known expert in the field or immediately adjacent, to discuss all of the results presented during the week and then to add some of their own criticism or insight into what next steps for each could be.  The summary this week was presented by Mike, who rather legitimately claimed to perform the first such analysis in this field while he himself was a student, a full 17 years  before it took off.  Mike’s review of my talk was amazingly generous and positive, that the way that I had represented these particle physics events not traditionally, as points on a two-dimensional globe and the continents representing the correlated structure or substructure we had discussed all week, but rather as a one-dimensional curve representing all pairwise connections between particles, could be printed out for every event and posted on one’s wall or hung from a mobile and stared at, structure and substructure divined from this very distinct projection.  Despite the now obvious connection and familiarity with my work, I was still too shy or timid to introduce myself to Mike, and instead departed the conference after the final talk quietly, walking to the train station alone, but carried this external enthusiasm as an internal badge of success and inspiration for continuing this work.

I was nevertheless still surprised a few months later when I was among the 20 or so recipients of an email from Mike inviting a random collection of people he had met at that conference to visit him, to spend his excess travel funds before they expired for a sort of mini, informal workshop.  My immediate reply was yes, please, but received no reply for several weeks, and began to lose hope that such a trip would happen, or that so many more, and more important people, had replied earlier, and the offer had dried up.  On the contrary, however, Mike emailed again, and only three of us had expressed interest, one of the two others was my fellow grad student collaborator on that project, but this mini-workshop would still happen, and offered the final week of September, days before the funds would vanish.  So, I set to work organizing flights and hotels with his department administrator, and correspondingly worked to coordinate my trip with my collaborator, ensuring that we had an extra, non-work day to explore the area.  Amusingly, my fiancée would be attending a very different conference a couple weeks later, but there was no way we could construct an itinerary that overlapped to meet there, so both of us traveled alone and apart to Manchester.

Manchester’s reputation and history within particle physics was legendary and the whole subatomic physics endeavor was initiated by Rutherford in his Mancunian laboratory scattering alpha particles on thin gold foil and subsequently discovering the structure of the atomic nucleus.  Nearly a century later, the particle physics group had continued this legacy, though experimentalists collected data for probing the substructure of the proton, itself substructure of the nucleus, from the Large Hadron Collider and had not collided particles in the basement for decades, while theorists were leading experts on quantum chromodynamics, the theoretical foundation and explanation of the nucleus which had been formalized over 50 years after Rutherford.  At the time, I amusingly had only experienced particle physics of the UK in northern England, with my first exposure to Durham during a visit in the previous year, which was another legendary department and group, but the setting could not be more different.  Durham is a small medieval town in the rolling downs of the northeast whose thousand year old castle and towering cathedral sit on a peninsula protected on three sides by the looping River Wear, while much of the university lies on a wooded hill to the south.  Red brick, street art, the rush of buses and cars and pedestrians, and a gritty industrial haze lingered in the lows of the urban valley bounded by the ridges of buildings as I walked along Oxford Road from my hotel room to the department, settling into my chair and desk for the week, adjacent to the vacant office of Brian Cox.