Category: Aspen Chapter

Aspen

December 27th, 2024

Part 2

I was out of my room shortly after 7 am, leaving my roommate, an enthusiastic and excitable Belgian, to wake up and adjust to Mountain Time, and tightly drew my coat around me as I passed through the door from the inner hallway to the outside stairs. The sun had officially risen a few minutes earlier though the town remained in darkness, and to the south over the tops of all the buildings and across Highway 82, only the peak of Aspen Mountain was illuminated, the terminator line separating sunlight from shadow now racing down the slopes. Dormant, bare quaking aspens punched through deep, untouched powder in a grove settled among the suites, bounded by the cleared path that snaked its way around the resort’s ample grounds, and I entered the reception area and past the vacant bar. Breakfast for physicists was isolated from other guests, downstairs where the maître d’ carefully checked and double checked that my name was on the list and allowed me to enter. I was early, but not the first to arrive, set my backpack down at a chair at the sole table with any occupants, walked to fill plate and cup at the buffet station, and returned to listen in on the conversation already in progress about technical, practical, and political minutiae of building the next particle collider.

An awkward line had already formed at the entrance to the Center for Physics, with a few people parked on the patio holding a door ajar, while the staff at the front desk serially checked in people as they arrived, handing over a name tag suspended on a lanyard and offering lift tickets for purchase. Though the conference spanned four full days and half of a fifth, I limited myself to three tickets and had already reserved my rentals through the Center’s preferred retailer, which again came with a significant discount, at least considering the location. The auditorium was on the opposite side of the building, accessible through the single main hallway lined with identical office after office, sliding wood doors that opened to desks to the left and right and walled with broad, tall windows rendering the overhead lights mostly redundant during the day. This week, the offices were first-come-first-served, and already the unmistakable sound of scratching chalk on a porcelain board could be heard sneaking out of a few offices, some participants squeezing in thoughts and conversations before the session began. Coffee and morning treats had been set out in the kitchenette, but I was untempted, and continued to the dual swing doors, pushing below the taped paper sign stating that just beyond which food and drink were strictly forbidden.

With sweeping generalization that is unfair to many physicists, it seems that there is a culture of extreme exercise or outdoor activity that a place like Aspen especially brings to the fore. There are of course the common and mundane sports well-represented like ultra-marathoning where people run a hundred or more kilometers over a weekend through the wilderness, with gross elevation changes measured in miles, or mountaineers who have scaled hundreds of peaks with median summit heights increasing with age. Then, there are off-scale adventurers who, for example, are nearly peerless cavers, members of exploration teams to the world’s the deepest cave system in disputed territory in the Caucasus, and who spend months of the year underground. For physicists of this demeanor, skiing was simply not enough of a challenge, and riding the lifts was inferior transport in addition to wasting all that money, and so, once we were released after the morning they would stick mohair to their skis and skin up the mountain, over the corduroy groomed snow, beneath the high-speed gondola. By the time the lifts stopped 30 minutes prior to ski patrol clearing the slopes, they would turn around for their one run down.

For the previous several years, my skiing excursions had been extremely limited, to a mere weekend each season either with my brother during a family visit or for a rare Tahoe vacation during graduate school, but I started on skis at age four over 25 years prior, my parents driving the 20 minutes from the foothills to Snoqualmie Pass, when tickets were only $19 and helmets were a decade in the future, for lessons week in and week out. Once my brother was sufficiently adept, we would close the lifts down under the lights after school, racing from top to bottom while either our mom or dad, whoever had taken us that night, used my wristwatch to time us and swore that every run was faster than the last. We moved when I was 11, and the drive to skiing increased to two hours, but every weekend during the winter we would click into our bindings and drop into the slopes at White Pass through middle school and then through high school, occasionally returning to Snoqualmie or exploring Crystal Mountain, especially if the conditions had been unusually favorable to permit north slope skiing in July. It was simply no longer feasible to ski every weekend once in college, but I always found time over holiday breaks and joined in to the yearly dorm trips to some BC resort which was enough to maintain my skills and my comfort on the snow. The mountains still called and I indulged when I was able, but had resigned to a casual relationship with them, and found a group of others who were perfectly content to only expose their skis to the snow when pointed downhill. This year’s indulgence began once the half dozen or so of us stamped in our hard-shell boots from rentals and across the street to the base of Aspen Mountain, secured our street shoes in the lockers, and stepped into the gondola.

To be able to reach the bottom of essentially any run, within ski area boundaries anyway, to look back up over moguls, around trees, or through chutes with accomplishment does not require significant technical skill, though with technical skill one does look a bit better doing it to the people on the lift looking down from above. Stopped at the edge of the cat track, ski tips dangling over the cornice, all you have to do to make it to the bottom is to lack fear of diving in, of pushing off, laser-focused on the bump just ahead and not where the hill sinks off beyond your sight, and then, if you do get overwhelmed, to keep your head and pull out into a slow traverse across the slope. By their size and vastly closer distance from their eyes to the snow, small children for the most part lack this fear and never learn it, but it is all the more impressive starting to ski as a teen or adult and determinedly embracing the thrill. Most of this group was in this latter category, skiing precisely because of conferences like these or from accumulated holidays in Switzerland, and in these few hours we ranged over the entire mountain, black and double black diamonds like research projects in miniature, from initial curiosity, to the struggle, confusion, and doubt mid run, to finally dropping onto the cat track below, flush with the exhilaration of achievement.
Aspen

December 20th, 2024

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.

Category: Aspen Chapter

Aspen

Part 2

Aspen

Part 1