Part 3

By the end of the week, run ragged from the talks and discussions and conversations and department seminars and lunches out and closing pubs down, the group had a tradition of celebratory beers on a patio where graduate students, post-docs, and faculty would all imbibe.  Among institutes throughout the world, those in northern England and Scotland had an especially strong affinity for such revelry, but something like this was generally widely practiced.  Back home, my graduate office was located in a building technically owned by the Department of Energy, and no alcohol was allowed indoors, but the land it sat on was owned by the private university, which had no such restriction.  However, in addition to finding the funds to support this habit that were not tied up by the government, these logistics were a bit too challenging to negotiate, but a group on the main campus had many opportunities including scotch whisky tasting on Thursdays, the nice stuff came out then so inclusion was by invite-only, and wine-and-cheese on Friday with an associated informal blackboard talk, with the wine provided by a professor and the cheese and bread and olives and chocolate purchased by first-year students who were then reimbursed.  This is all to say that nothing like that exclusivity or snootiness was present here, and before we could even say hi, a cold beer was pulled from its ice bath, a church key was deployed, the bottle thrust into a hand, and we were sipping like locals.

I had gravitated to the circle of post-docs, with whom I hadn’t interacted much that week, but recognized from passing in hallways or sitting opposite to during one of the workshop’s talks, and now after 5 pm with beer flowing any opportunity to talk physics had passed, for this trip at least.  Here I was first formally introduced to one post-doc, with hand shakes, names exchanged, a mini question-and-answer session about Manchester, northern England, and what to do on the weekend, and thought little of this mundane interaction until much later, after we both attended the same conferences, my post-doc advisor and I had confused ourselves for months over a paper he had written, and had been so bewildered that we invited him to join a collaboration.  Later yet, we shared a windowless office for a year, starting more new projects, until I moved across town and he to a faculty position, but I visited a couple times for a seminar and a conference, continuing these conversations and flow of ideas.  I met his students on various continents, brought my family for work and vacation when he had returned home to Italy, our kids playing together and nearly getting lost running around the narrow cobblestone streets, their squeals of delight in avoiding capture by a pursuing adult echoing off of the slate buildings.  We exchanged emails with thoughts motivated by chats with experimentalists, scheduled remote meetings at odd hours to accommodate time zones to brainstorm projects or who might be potential collaborators, and wrote more and more papers.  Likely all of this would have happened anyway, the worldwide community is small enough that our paths were destined to cross at some point, but it did, first, before destiny intervened.

Edale is little more than a few houses and a couple of pubs and inns, a small village located in the center of the Peak District and a lazy 45 minute train ride from Manchester.  To his night-owl chagrin, I had convinced my grad school collaborator that an early start was absolutely necessary and we reached the stone footpath that veered off the one road before 10 am, crossing first over the gentle brook that had weaved down the dale from the plateau high above.  The trail climbed out of the verdant valley and up through the purple heather and dun grasses worn by the shoulders of Kinder Scout, the highest point in the Peak District, but the pleasant summer weather of that week had retreated, the sky was grey and the only scenic views afforded were down directly into the valley and to the immediate neighboring ridge.  Sheep, looking surprisingly threatening with thick coats of wool and some with horns beyond one and a half full curls, grazed freely, and once we had reached the top up a couple thousand feet of spongy, boggy trail, the path leveled.  There, it wandered amongst the enormous, high, overhanging rocks, appearing as thin, stacked layers here or thrusting up, hewn as the angular, spiked faces of giants there, and many other hikers we saw rested on them or had picked a route to scramble or climb their faces.  We had been led far back, walking west along the southern rim but the afternoon was already running away from us, so we turned south, down with the tumbling of the brook.

I selected a cider and my hiking companion a cask ale and, with the weather turning for the worse, we were alone at the outdoor tables in the intermittent mist at the inn mere feet from the train station to ensure we couldn’t miss our ride.  Small, two-car intercity trains stopped here often, as roughly the halfway point between Manchester and Sheffield, so we watched one pass with our half-full pints raised but caught the next around 4 pm just as the honest, continuous rain began to fall.  My own hiking exhaustion and subsequent 20 ounce sleeping aid biased my perception, but the car, seats filled and even a few passengers forced to stand, was tired and fatigued, people stared blankly out windows, when from behind, near the doors, a couple of guitars were tuned together, first strummed lightly, then joined by another, and then drums, and then a flute.  English folk songs carried us on those tracks, kept us awake just enough to alight correctly at Manchester Picadilly, to stumble back to the university, to drag on down Oxford to where it becomes Wilmslow Road and find the first falafel place, ordering from the backlit menu above the register and finding the correct change to the pence buried in pockets, stomach telling you that two hadn’t been enough, but overruled by drooping shoulders now surrendering to sleep just as the hotel door shut, shoes came off, and head hit pillow.

No one in the community believed that faster-than-light neutrinos were detected, with Nobel Prize winners defending the century of experiments completely consistent with special relativity, and dozens of preprints that demonstrated that if they were faster than light, then faster-than-light electrons or muons should also be observed, or that there would be catastrophic energy losses from radiation that would almost instantly render the neutrinos slower-than-light.  Externally, the story withered for months, but internally, the collaboration was seething, its reputation tarnishing and oxidizing by the day and as more independent results from other experiments were produced consistent with Einstein’s relativity and inconsistent with them.  Finally, nearly six months later, the collaboration publicly resolved the issue: photographs taken as early as two weeks after that first seminar showed that there had been a loose cable that affected timing measurements and delayed the clock that established when the neutrinos had left CERN.  Accounting for the delay, the neutrinos traveled at the expected speed, slower than light, and, though they retained their scientific skepticism throughout the whole affair, maintained a transparent inquisitive investigation, and never presented results with malicious intent, the spokesperson resigned their post effective immediately after the error was discovered.