Part 5

My watch read 8:51 am.  The wind through the open window of the cab was warm, comforting, just dry enough early in the morning to be refreshing, though the haze had settled and never left through the night.  The paved road continued another kilometer from the parking lot and gate, first past a row of dark and shuttered vendor stalls, with only one or two out and sweeping or counting the till, many hours yet to greet the hordes, then into the forest and along a trickling stream bed, the formal, sacred entrance to the park through hongsalmun, one simple, staid, painted red and adorned by a small taegeuk, another smaller though much more intricate, with soaring storks set above roaring dragons and all amongst the green, blue, and red pattern familiar from the eaves of temples.  More signage in Korean that I couldn’t read set rules and provided context for visiting the park, the accompanying pictures telling a complete enough story, the tall, stately Korean pines providing lumber for houses, while the nuts and pollen were widely used for food and in traditional medicine, warning of deer crossing roads, and a section of the park that was closed for the next 15 years and where camping, cooking, smoking, littering and making loud noises was strictly forbidden to protect the habitat of an endangered, endemic salamander.  Where the pavement ended and the trail began, a broad, clear stone path that crawled up the valley, I checked my watch.

It is altogether too easy to get lost in the weeds in physics, to get so absorbed in the minutiae of some calculation, or to work for weeks on end to streamline some bit of code just to eke out 10% faster compute times.  In many aspects of the profession, the rules are completely defined, and so you can take those rules and apply them to situations every so slightly distinct from others, and turn the crank, and keep turning and turning until some number pops out, or in other cases, you can even just apply the rules on simulated data and plot a whole distribution of points, one that has a bump over here and a deficit over there, and that is supposed to mean something and so in your paper you write some rhetoric to accompany the figure and claim victory in “understanding”.  However, physics was always meant to be simple, even if the path to simplicity is long, tortuous, unilluminated, and with many dead ends or false intersections, and is structured around concepts, not exclusively equations.  With new concepts, the cycle can repeat, slowly ratcheting up the mountain of knowledge through studying the details of an example and then another, identifying their common threads, then pulling them out to novel cases, and finally validating through prediction.

This had been the story in my subfield for several years now, with people drilling down on the rules, deeper and deeper into their own tiny pocket, seemingly becoming more disconnected from others who all attended the same conferences.  Everyone had their darlings and to everyone else they were ugly, ad hoc, contrived, and meaningless debates would ensue over which was the “best”, but everyone had their own, private metric for measuring success and could always find some scenario in which they won by their own rules.  The problem was that often any distinctions were only due to idiosyncrasies in the simulation, and not due to underlying, fundamental principles, and at any rate, experimental data would be the ultimate, dispassionate, unbiased arbiter.  A few of us had begun to claw our way up out of the murky depths, and identify those handful of rules that became perfectly, exactly true in sensible limits, and away from those limits, still dominated the description of these physical systems.  The beauty of working in asymptotic limits is that everything dramatically simplifies in such a way that any calculations are nearly superfluous, and we could see wide swaths of these techniques and procedures that had previously been host to the most bitter disagreements were actually identical in the limit, and differed most mildly in a realistic environment.  Being so simple, we doubted ourselves, had no one really ever thought of this before?, but as test after test passed our uncertainty subsided and we earnestly set to writing a paper.

Set apart from the trees and shrubs and chirping birds was the trail, paved in large stones when the grade was shallow and stacked into stair steps where steep was unavoidable, an orderly human construction taming the chaos of nature.  Up it went the mountain, completely devoid of deviation or switchbacks, exactly on the gradient of the slope, then as even the trees fell away due to the angle of repose of the scree, the trail went, and along with the stairs a handrail cemented into bedrock led the way and protected the hiker from the consequences of an errantly placed foot.  I had past 100 vertical meters, then 200, then 300 from the trailhead, and heavier came the salty stinging sweat from my brow into my eyes, its cohesion adhering my shirt and pack firmly to my back, but still trusted my feet to keep the steady cadence left, right, left one stair at a time.  Over 400 meters up, the false summits appeared where the hill briefly pulled away then disappeared and then another just behind it and on and on this went until I had passed 500 meters and my head grew light, darkness claimed my peripheral vision and the light that remained at the center was blurry and spotty, a crackling firework display within my retina, but my feet kept the tempo as the trees returned at the saddle below a few peaks where I slumped down for a breath and a drink of water, over 500 vertical meters in less than 2 kilometers of trail.