Part 1

It was a reasonable question.  Here we were, suspended 15 meters above the ground, feet dangling free, two of us separated by a single, vertical bar and making our way slowly back up.  Technically, it was this, the up going rather than the down, that we had paid so much for, and in the five to ten minutes we had one-on-one, the conversation was essentially exclusively physics and our voices only had to compete with the occasional squeaking hum of a tower’s rollers and the muffling from our helmets.  In other contexts, social and camaraderie-building activities were valid for reimbursement, the price of the banquet or the registration fee that covered the group excursion to a museum, or perhaps, depending on the funding source, a receipt wasn’t necessary if the cost could be swept into the per diem.  We had come here for the physics, to see and engage with other physicists, to give talks and collaborate, and conveniently there was nothing officially scheduled from 11 am through 4:30 pm, and during that time most of the physicists found themselves out of the confines of the Center.  So shouldn’t the funding agencies at the DOE or NSF proudly support our reduced-price lift tickets valid at Aspen Mountain, Highlands, and Snowmass that cost $130 dollars per day?

A place filled with billionaires and physicists, and physicists only because of the billionaires, Aspen is some real-world Galt’s Gulch, the town at 8,000′ elevation tucked in the folds between 12,000′ summits.  Like many physics institutes founded in the ‘50s and ‘60s, in Cargèse, Erice, Bariloche, or Les Houches, the philosophy of the Aspen Center for Physics was that the secrets of the universe would reveal themselves more readily in a place of spectacular natural beauty, where scientists could collaborate in front of blackboards, tramping up a 14er, or deep in powder off-piste.  Though a team of physicists from any subfield could propose a program, a week in winter or a month-long summer workshop, particle physics in particular was always well-represented occupying at least two of the 10 weeks of winter and a workshop in the summer each year.  Summer gatherings were informal, the extended length encouraging and fostering the initial stages of a new project, when physicists from all over could ask those spontaneous questions to the expert now in the neighboring office, and the pace was correspondingly slowed, with but a few formal talks per week, an outdoor barbecue here and there, but most of the time devoid of any strict organization.

Winter was markedly different, a week densely packed with buffet breakfasts, 30-minute talks, and many more attendees than available blackboard space.  Physics began at 8 am in the mornings, too early to get up for some and much too late to stay up for others, so the audience usually started small, the speaker, the session chair, and a handful people hunched over their coffee despite the prohibition on food and beverages in the auditorium, but grew steadily until all seats in the back of the room were beyond occupied by the late comers three hours later.  The next five-and-a-half hours were free until the start of the evening session, beginning as the morning had with minimal turnout but returning to a maximum at the day’s end three hours later.  Dinner was typically on one’s own, but always small groups would snowball into larger groups to go to one of the few and dwindling cheaper options, with a barbecue joint a popular choice enjoying one of the highest food-to-cost ratios in town, or a Chinese restaurant especially if a native Mandarin speaker was also there that week and could do the ordering for you.

Though not unheard of, it was definitely not terribly common that junior scientists, graduate students and first post-docs, found themselves in Aspen, at least four reasons being the significant financial burden, that professors wanted to play and vacationed under the guise of working, that there were better fora to present one’s work to a broad audience, and, most importantly, attendance was by invitation only.  My invitation came by way of my post-doc advisor, who, now five years along the tenure track, was offered more opportunities to talk than could be physically accommodated around teaching, departmental duties, and days in a year, so volleyed to the organizers that I should be contacted in his place.  Such requests are almost always honored as they ensure that nearly the same talk is presented, they diversify the group, and the organizers expend no more energy agonizing over whether to invite someone else with similar research interests or to excise that topic from the program altogether.  While this occasion to attend an Aspen workshop was definitely exciting, as the date of my flight neared, the anxiety of arranging the trip grew, especially around lodging, and I was less convinced that my advisor couldn’t go, but rather at this time did not want to deal with the headache.  The special deal offered at the resort hotel a few blocks from the Center was that they would offer reduced room rates to physicists, a rather reasonable $130 per night and a lifeline to everyone attending with travel budgets at most in the mid four-digit range for a calendar year, with the catch that two would share a room.  

While ferrying a half-dozen passengers to the resort, all of whom had been on the ORD-ASE flight, the driver made small talk with the physicist sitting in the front seat, where they came from, what the topic of this week was, had they been to Aspen previously, and I simply listened, feeling somewhat out of place, given my research interests and those of the people around me.  As was necessary for these things, the workshop was titled something extravagant, over-the-top, and verging on the unscientific, “Exploring the Physics Frontier with Circular Colliders”, and virtually all scheduled talks were a summary or preview of what may lie beyond or yet unfound, buried deep in the data, with the person sitting in front of me having developed a new, popular model for dark matter, an exciting perspective on the hierarchy problem from the brain to my left, and from behind an improved solution to the strong CP problem and its profound consequences for early-universe cosmology.  I hid my self-conscious blushing cheeks, I had no model to my name and couldn’t rattle off the litany of experimental anomalies that apparently needed an explanation beyond the whims of finite statistics, and in comparison my research seemed mundane, merely exploring the consequences of the 40-something year old theory that dominates the physics at a collider experiment.  Precisely because the analyses I proposed and predictions I calculated could be directly tested and validated in data that exists today using techniques now firmly middle-aged, some of its sheen seemed to dim and fade, especially compared to theories, speculative though they may be, in infancy or spirited adolescence.  I had successfully deflected answering any probing questions by the time the van parked in front of the resort’s foyer but at the time was completely oblivious to the irony of the source of my anxiety.