Part 3

The convention center was but a short walk, and most of our time this week would be isolated to a moderately-sized room on the second floor, equipped with broad tables that were convenient for collaboration over computer screens, to install and work with the software that would be advertised in talks and introduced in interactive tutorial sessions.  At its entrance, the local organizers had set a table with boxes filled with the standard welcome fare, name badges, wireless internet instructions, and a rather unruly queue had formed with those pushed up against the table saying then spelling then pointing at their name, and moving on with their handful of swag.  The chair of the local organizers had attempted to stay afloat as the waves of attendees splashed up, but his efforts to bail out the boxes was failing, his concentration slipping, and as the crowd grew, his cheeks flushed and beads of sweat rolled down his temples. He had, however, brought his wife to help with dispersal, and she bore the surge head on, shouting loudly over the dozens of miniature conversations for order, and we snapped into a weak, crooked line, but single-file nonetheless.  At my seat and still a few minutes before talks began, I pinned my badge to my shirt and looked through the things I had been handed now spread on the desk, one of which was a paper fan that I opened to reveal that the organizer’s wife had printed the name of the conference and year, and had written “Korea” in flowing script and signed in Hangul, and she had done this on the fans for all 80 attendees.

North of the river in Daejeon was rather isolated, the sole food options were depressing versions of Western dishes from commercial chain restaurants in strip malls, so each day at 12:30, as the morning session completed, we would stumble onto a couple of buses that dropped us off in a neighborhood downtown, at a mall with an expansive cafeteria, or for a barbecue restaurant on the tenth floor, or, on the first day, a pedestrian district with numerous noodle stalls.  I, and several others, followed an organizer into the entrance of one stall, up a few steps to an elevated platform where we placed our shoes, and continued into a long back room with a low table and pillows evenly spaced along it.  Negotiations between the waitress and the organizer commenced in Korean and the few soup options hastened ordering into a binary choice of vegetarian or not.  In the short time I was able to arrange my knees into a sort of pretzel-fold parallel and ever slightly under the edge of the table, a bowl was thrust in front of me, a pair each of chopsticks and scissors balanced on the lip.  Though still mid-May, the heat and humidity were solidly in midsummer form, and here was naengmyeon, Korean cold soup, barley noodles suspended in broth, much of which formed frozen, jagged peaks in the center.  The need for chopsticks was obvious, and they doubled as ice picks, but the scissors only became apparent once you tried to draw out a mouthful of noodles, and kept pulling and pulling but only a single strand unwound the pile.  Looking over to our organizer, he was now hosting a small tutorial, cutting up and then grabbing the now bite sized mounds, scissors and chopsticks working in harmony.

Buried in the weeds of the third footnote of a short paper on an unrelated topic was a claim that just felt wrong, that a quantity was incalculable within the context of the standard predictive framework of particle physics.  Technically, their claim was correct, but it simply made no sense from the results of thousands of prior studies that had demonstrated that everything behaved as expected, so there must be some underlying reason that both these things could be true.  This irritant lead my post-doc advisor and myself to establish its consequences in other situations, to slowly rise above this isolated example and map out the islands of confusion that bobbed in the sea of what we had, until recently, thought we knew.  Higher up, we could see that those islands were not islands, but connected by causeways and sandbars and isthmuses and all related to one another, and with some more general understanding, I set to deep dives in dusty math textbooks in the dark aisles of the loneliest stacks in the library, but tool after tool merely churned the waters, failing to break through the surface.  More chats at lunch and staring at equations on blackboards lifted us higher yet, and then, through the clouds, beyond the horizon, the tiniest glimpse of something peeked out, that we had been trapped on a two-dimensional surface like Square in Flatland, and that the answer spanned three, four, five, or more dimensions.  Once we had ascended high enough, the solution was trivial: calculate in higher dimensions and then project down to answer the specific question of interest, and we demonstrated that it worked over and over and over in every situation we encountered.  So we wrote up a paper.

My talk was rather unique amongst the week’s offerings, as I was neither presenting on the newest version of some open-source code for physics simulation nor was I asked to provide a general overview of some topic, to which the programs could be applied and tested.  My invitation had come with carte blanche to talk about whatever of my research I wanted, and so I polished up a talk on that paper that was nearing a year old, modifying the motivation for the study appropriate for this audience, but resulted in consequences that had since produced a number of additional papers.  For these simulations of the physics of particle collisions to make sense and believably represent Nature, there had been a 30 year old lore that there was a particular and restricted set of questions that one could ask of the synthetic data.  For questions outside this set, there were models and assumptions with numerous parameters that, ultimately, would need to be fixed in comparison to experimental measurement.  However, with my post-doc advisor, we had shown that the set of questions for which these simulations were robust was larger, much larger, than we had all been taught to believe, and these programs were unreasonably effective at describing physical phenomena far, far from the hypotheses of their justification and derivation.  After questions had died down and I was gathering my things to move on to lunch, two senior researchers and founders of this conference approached me and apologized for spoiling the surprise because, while they could now easily write the narrative of my contributions and a pithy citation to nominate me for a new research award for advances in studying the strong nuclear force, they would need an updated version of my CV.