Part 1

I stared out into the void, or as much of the void as provided by the view of the upright and locked tray table in front of me, squished in the center row of seats on a trans-Atlantic flight after dinner and once the cabin lights had been dimmed for a precious few hours of sleep.  I had left my wife home, alone, working on writing her dissertation in a city 3,000 miles away from where she was still a student, her patience and focus of typing and typing and typing from a corner in our apartment wearing thin, and my absence for these two weeks further straining our rather complicated living arrangements for the past year.  We had lived apart on opposite coasts for four months, her finishing her Ph.D. and me starting a new job, though my flexible position afforded a visit every few weeks, and then she moved with me in the new year, but was far from her lab, her colleagues, and her advisor, so deadlines seemed to keep drifting for actually finishing and moving on.  Nevertheless, she was excited for me to go to this conference, but deadlines for accepting invitations and planning had been months in the past, and as the departure date neared and the prospect of two weeks away became more real, some doubts began to arise if now was indeed the best time.  Moments before we kissed goodbye on our apartment’s threshold, I had slipped the thin book into my backpack, something I had always been interested to read and was short enough I could finish it on the flight, but now, the closed book on my lap alone under my seat’s spotlight amongst a raft of snoring travelers, questioned the intelligence of bringing Camus’s L’Étranger.

One year into my post-doc, my personal research portfolio was beginning to slowly grow.  Casting off projects assigned to me by my Ph.D. advisor had been relatively easy and something I had already done three years ago, in favor of a project I had started with a fellow student that had since taken on a life of its own.  This co-student project tapped into a burgeoning subfield of particle physics whose inaugural yearly conference had actually taken place in an adjacent building to where my graduate school office was, and now only a few years along regularly had over 100 attendees and strong representation from all of the large experiments at the LHC.  My first presentation on this project at this conference had been unique and impressed the community enough that the following winter, I had been offered multiple post-docs in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, alone, accepting MIT as my intellectual home for the next three years.  Essentially on my arrival to campus, I vowed to put aside those graduate school projects, to start something brand new, something original that would be indelibly identified as my own intellectual creation.  This was, by contrast, not easy and progress on anything was slow, indirect, and sometimes frustratingly failure-prone, seeing the tiniest of light rays peeking through a hole only to calculate and calculate and calculate and realize that what you had been doing that whole time was not logically consistent.

The intellectual support and environment of the group at MIT at that time was definitely the most magical experience I have ever had and was perhaps the most special place to be in the entire world at the time for what I was doing.  My post-doc advisor was merely two years into tenure track and publishing at a breakneck rate, his office across the narrow hallway from mine and stopped by each morning he arrived to chat about the new papers that appeared on the arXiv preprint server last night, or to see how a calculation was going, or to show me a mysterious and confusing plot that would then occupy my daydreams for the next several hours.  His door was always open, and I returned the favor, dropping in unannounced numerous times throughout the day, to sit in his square high-walled pleather chair across from his desk, and at least puzzle over something together verbally, or one of us would walk over to his floor-to-ceiling blackboard to write an equation that we could then stare at in pensive silence.  Each week, there were at least three topical seminars on particle physics to attend, in addition to the physics department colloquium, so everyone who was working on the great problems in the field were continually passing through, dispelling their wisdom in their formal talk, and then the truth would actually come out during the hosted dinner.  There would have been no way that I could have learned what projects were interesting, useful, and impactful by merely sitting in my room all day, door closed, head down, hunched over my desk.

Two major ideas had been born in this environment and had correspondingly resulted in papers by the following spring.  While both broadly addressed physics relevant for making predictions in particle collider experiment, they were otherwise relatively unrelated, which troubled me.  At one level, they were obviously deeply connected, and I could imagine the first glimpses of nearly bottomless research potential if I could marry them successfully.  Some conversations with others in the group at MIT had helped broaden my perspective, but something was still lacking.  Another professor in the group had recently won funding through the Simons Foundation, the philanthropic arm of billionaire mathematician Jim Simons who left academia to found Renaissance Technologies, and helped organize a relaxed, discussion-focused workshop in Vienna, Austria, with a long-term collaborator and faculty at UWien.  One was required to spend at least two weeks there, but, as members of the MIT group, Simons would be graciously covering our expenses, so saying yes was all too easy.  This would be the place to have those conversations with global experts, to stare at equations on a board, to find and recruit new collaborators, or even to just convince the community that this was a question worth thinking about.

The Rathausplatz was converted into a summers-long festival setting, thousands of seats arranged in rows facing the city hall’s façade, itself covered with an enormous white curtain for the nightly film screenings, and then lining the promenade and spilling into the bounding park were dozens of food stands, serving a sampling of every cuisine imaginable, at least through Viennese interpretation.  To ward off jet-lag for the night, I had walked the mile or so from my stifling greenhouse of a hotel room to observe the party, making a slight detour from the geodesic path to find the front door of the Institute and where my office for the next two weeks would be.  The door was nondescript, but across the narrow gasse faced the US Embassy in Austria which, at the time anyway, had garnered minor celebrity status as the place that Edward Snowden would have been taken if he had actually been on the Bolivian president’s plane.  Capturing a selfie with my laptop monitor’s camera, I then continued on, drawn along by the growing noise of the crowd and wafting smells of classics like pretzels, schnitzel, sausages, and kraut, truck-stop diner recreations of greasy burgers, fries, and a Coke, yeasty, malty lagers sloshed sloppily into masskrugs, and even ice cream carts offering the Vermonter staple of Ben & Jerry’s.  For my first meal off the plane, I chose boldly, asking for ein burrito, bitte, with all the fillings, and over the counter it was passed, tucked snugly in foil and cradled it while moving over to a vacant standing table.  It was stuffed to bursting with ground beef, black beans, corn kernels, something passing as sour cream, maybe some iceberg lettuce, and probably white rice and was perfectly, ideally, flawlessly flavorless.