Part 1

Our host had risen and was tinkling his glass in which he had generously poured from one of the wicker fiasco chianti bottles, which had been placed with such a density on the long tables that no more than two people were anticipated to finish one.  The dining room fell silent and a toast was made to the frontier that all of us gathered were now exploring together, pushing and testing and probing, to be the first to find a loose brick or a cracked foundation, anything that would suggest that something deeper and simpler lay below.  A toast was made to the next generation, those who would carry the field into the future, buoyed by the bounty of riches yet to be delivered by the Large Hadron Collider, but with an unwavering faith all believed them to be there, extending an unbroken line of discoveries in the increasingly subatomic realm beginning with the nucleus a century ago.  The toast’s valediction reached back through time, the determined and certain spirit embodied by those present was reminiscent of another, a saint of saints in physics, who had refused to recant approaching the heresy of understanding the heavens that could now be seen and nearly touched.  Our host turned and raised his glass toward the entrance of the restaurant, mere feet across the cobblestone road, to a bust in a relief in the wall of the apartment, set above olive orchards and with a commanding view over the valley, where under house arrest Galileo had lived his final days.

In November 2011, the LHC had only been collecting data for about a year and a half, but the deadline for applications was six months earlier and the planning and approval was earlier still, so it was optimistic to painfully idealistic to title a conference “Interpreting LHC Discoveries.”  To overstate the hype and anticipation within particle physics for honest data at higher energies and more of it is impossible, as the dearth of discoveries in collider physics had now stretched to 15 years since the top quark revealed itself in the experiments at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron in 1995.  The Tevatron had just shut down while the Large Electron-Positron Collider at CERN, which had occupied the ring of the current LHC, had been shuttered for a decade which mostly left theorists unchecked to dream up anything and everything that could be measured, and even more that could not.  The primary motivation for all of this work was the still elusive Higgs boson, conjured up in the early 1960s, but had yet to be observed, with more and more models introduced to explain the properties of the Higgs, extra dimensions of space, new symmetries, or new interactions, all of which required dozens and dozens of new particles to support the edifice.  These ideas were simply too beautiful for Nature to ignore, went the argument, so once the LHC was turned on, the experiments would light up like a Christmas tree, giving experimentalists more than a life’s worth of work to interpret and earning theorists their deserved Nobel Prizes.  By November 2011, there had been no discoveries by the LHC.

This reality did nothing to dampen enthusiasm or reduce participation in the conference, though “Interpreting Discoveries” was almost assuredly not the reason most people attended.  Five years earlier, the Italian government and the University of Florence created a new institute in Arcetri, an ancient lecture hall repurposed with a modern, glass-walled wing and numerous offices, set at the top of a rolling Tuscan hill.  It was named in honor of Galileo Galilei and bore the street address of another Italian native son, Largo Enrico Fermi, who had taught at the University for a few years.  Anyone wishing to visit would have to stay a minimum of two weeks of a month-long workshop, with a seminar by a visitor every couple of days and a week-long conference in the middle to focus discussions and to ostensibly start a collaboration that the generous resources and idyllic surroundings provided.  People that came to this conference did so because they could spend weeks in Florence, paid for by a discretionary travel budget and with some requisite physics distractions, but could carpool to Siena or bus to a Sangiovese vineyard tour or stay local and simply enjoy Donatello or Botticelli or Michelangelo in their home.  

That was, anyway, my reason.  Still a graduate student, I didn’t expect to be the one to lead this charge, but it would be an excellent opportunity to meet more big names in the field and I had never been to Italy.  In the spring, I had won a travel award through an NSF-sponsored initiative to support graduate and post-doctoral theorists, for efforts relating to the LHC, which had been, perhaps inauspiciously, modeled after a similar program from 20 years earlier for the Superconducting Super Collider.  This permitted at least the perception of a relative freedom for travel compared to my peers, though the $2500 award was drained completely once I had purchased plane tickets, reserved an apartment for two weeks, and paid for the workshop registration.  Nevertheless, my advisor and the theory leader at SLAC were both pleased that the group’s budget would be relieved of at least one traveler, as three other graduate students and two faculty would also be finding their way to Florence.

I was feeling my way around a ticket machine in Stazione Termini, Rome’s central train station, upon arriving in Italy after a short visit to a friend and to give a talk in Amsterdam, and the hesitation with which I pressed buttons searching for “English” and my suitcase were obvious enough marks that I was not local.  A man who apparently hustled here, loitering about the ticket machines searching for prey like me, descended and took charge, asking my destination and rapidly producing a ticket for the next departing express.  I would have eventually figured it out, but was grateful for the help, and reflexively passed over a 5€ bill but later agonized over it as other travelers might be more desperate and exploited than I had been.  The decision to travel through Rome and then train was unorthodox and probably not recommended as there were plenty of flights throughout Europe to Florence, but the 90 minute ride, from the blocks of high-rise apartment projects of modern insulae as we pulled out of the station, then accelerated through the sweeping farms that lay fallow for the season or green with stalks of wheat, then slowed as towering cypresses punctuated the drawing twilight, was a meditative preface to my stay.

The tracks leading into Santa Maria Novella, the central train station and named after the adjacent basilica, was the sole puncture in Florence’s ring road, built on the demolished ruins of its ancient fortified walls.  I purposefully passed the waiting taxis, for some reason at the time I refused any transportation except by foot within a European city, and set off with my printed map to walk the two miles to my fortnight flat.  The path I chose was meandering, one among the many out for the evening’s passeggiata, ensuring that I hit all of the major sites in their dramatically and artificially lit glory, the alabaster Carrara marble façade of the Duomo strikingly punctuated by greens and pinks with the saints wearing shadowed halos, the replica David in its original location, a bare sentry nearly three times my height for the Palazzo Vecchio, the gold and jewelry vendors on the Ponte Vecchio closed, guarded by the watchful eye of the bust of Cellini, and then into Oltrarno, below the commanding Palazzo Pitti, set back from the road and framing its stone piazza, then further along past the remote gate of the Boboli Gardens, and finally through the Porto Romana, formally leaving the safety of medieval Florence by its southernmost gate, the most magnificent of the extant sections of the 700 year old structure.  

My apartment lay just beyond the statue of Romulus and Remus suckling at the she-wolf, to a gate that divided a low stone wall and hedgerow, where I pressed the intercom.  Both on a Sunday and long past any reasonable time to be available at the management desk, I was lucky and surprised to hear an answer at the other end and the buzz of the bars unlocking, and while led up the stairs was informed that mere minutes later, already an hour or so after I claimed I would have arrived, I would have been shut out for the night.  The flat was a rather grand three rooms, ceilings extending to nearly 15 feet with the door opening into a common room with a couch and desk hardly fit for two computers, while the kitchen was set in a loft up a spiral staircase, and a bedroom with two twins and then a bathroom were connected in series.  My flatmate was a fellow student with whom I shared an office back home and had already claimed a bed and the desk where he was set to researching the local environs.  Both our stomachs had bore us long past a reasonable American suppertime, so, on the advice he had recently gained, we set out for dinner to a pizzeria, and waited until the lazy 7:30 pm plus a few minutes opening when the hostess and back of house had finished their animated and vociferous conversation.  With a due, we were the very first sat in the dining room, and were the only for nearly the next half hour.