Part 1

I regretted it as soon as I did it, but there was no undoing, no turning back, and my personalized souvenir from the week was immediately buried in the pile by those behind me.  As we said our goodbyes and deliberately exited en masse from the lecture hall, the organizers shouted above the din of adieus that they would collect badges for recycling and a rough line formed and once the cardboard box was within an arm’s reach, off they were tossed.  This had been my first time in Asia, the first time I had ever walked the streets of an honest megalopolis, the first time I couldn’t get my bearings by sounding out the words on street signs, the first time I ordered food by merely pointing at a picture on a menu, the first time I truly had traveled somewhere unfamiliar.  Foot in front of foot, pushed along by the undulating mob outside meandering its way back to the hotel, I felt as though some of my soul had carelessly dropped away, that the part of me from this week was left back in that box.  I had, until just now and have ever since, kept all of the name tags from all of the conferences I attended, and the only conference which I did not was the only conference I attended in South Korea.

A year earlier, I attended the previous version of this conference, this time hosted at DESY, the premier German particle physics laboratory, located on the outskirts of Hamburg.  I had found an excuse to travel to Europe, with my ultimate destination CERN to effectively force a collaborator to complete a paper, but tacked on an extra half week to travel through Germany, where from Hamburg I would train to Heidelberg to visit a friend from graduate school who was now a post-doc there.  My own post-doc was already 7 months along, and while I had many research projects in the production foundry’s fire, hadn’t yet published a paper on work started since I graduated, so it seemed to me at the time only natural to correspondingly not give a talk.  For the three days of the conference, I sat in the auditorium, asked a few questions, sipped coffee and listened to conversations at breaks, joined in dinners with senior faculty to their favorite nearby restaurants, and reminisced with the old-timers who attended the banquet, who recounted the stories of the days when discoveries seemed to occur weekly, and who received credit and correspondingly eternal glory sometimes literally depended on who could sprint fastest across the lab to show their plot first.  But I didn’t give a talk.  As the applause after the final claps died away and we were left to say our goodbyes, I wished farewell to my Ph.D. advisor, who had presented an overview possible new physics scenarios, but he lightly chided in return: ”It was good to see you, but a post-doc is short; don’t go to a conference if you are not going to give a talk.”

By early the following year, I had both published multiple papers and been explicitly invited to this conference to give a talk, and further the offer of complete financial support, plane ticket, incidentals, hotel, prompted my almost immediate positive response.  This year’s host was a member of this research community who had recently started a faculty position at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, or KAIST, in Daejeon, and the Korean government had provided funding of which Principle Investigators in the US whose grants are sometimes scraped of 2/3 their awarded value by university overhead can only dream, effectively tens of millions of dollars to this single Institute for a vigorous visitor and conference program.  Particle physics in Far East Asia, Japan, China, and Korea, was a vibrant community, active in the experiments at the LHC, but to engage the global community required participation in large numbers from Europe and the US, and a reimbursement-guaranteed trip eliminated one source of concern of boarding the 5,000 mile trans-ocean or -continental flight.

I deviated far, far from the great circle, increasing the distance by well over 1,000 miles by traveling from Boston through San Francisco, but spent a few days there, giving my first talk at SLAC since I graduated and was able to attend a friend’s thesis defense and subsequent celebratory bacchanalia.  The talk was fine if a bit unpolished, as I attempted to present on the undersized blackboard in the seminar room, rather than  with slides through a projector, encouraging a more relaxed and colloquial discussion of the material apparently along with increasing the number of confused faces.  Much more enlightening for all was lunch that day, as I joined the research group of the youngest theory faculty member, who, when I was a student, had something like 10 advisees working on an enormous range of projects, was often requested for keynote talks at conferences around the world, and truly breathed life into the larger group of whom the next youngest faculty was nearly 20 years his senior.  Unfortunately, this energy had gained him enemies and his bid for tenure had recently been denied due in no small part to confusion and personal grudges.  He could have, of course, appealed, the case taken up by the broader faculty senate and to anyone paying attention it was impossible to believe that this would not have been successful, but that would mean he would be working side-by-side with these people for the rest of his career, a constant irritant that undermined open conversation and collaboration among colleagues.  Instead, he was to terminate his position early, moving on to a job in Silicon Valley proper, and across the table under the sunshade and between bites of sandwiches, he spoke of the future with a relaxed smile, and didn’t mention the past.

There’s an unofficial rule-of-thumb for how to structure one’s thesis defense presentation, as the audience is extremely varied in their knowledge of your expertise.  Your parents, assuming they are supportive of your career but otherwise ignorant of physics, should understand the first third; your friends, fellow physics graduate students but with research interests throughout the discipline, should understand through the middle third; and finally only your own research group, the people most familiar with your specific work and contributions, should understand through the end of your talk.  This thesis defense was perhaps the most polished I had ever witnessed, technical yet humorous and engaging, with fun, illustrative asides that drew analogies between Napoleon’s catastrophic losses in attacking and withdrawing from Moscow in the winter of 1812 as captured in Minard’s magnificent statistical graphic, with the struggles of research and the slog of graduate school, and the handful of photons from the initial billions and billions that had finally reached the detector.  Toasts to this new doctor extended late into the night, but I left for my hotel while all revelers were still conscious for a few short hours of sleep before starting the early morning’s trek.