Excerpt from an essay on attending a summer school in Cargèse, Corsica, France.

As an undergraduate, I had worked with two professors and two graduate students on a fledging research direction motivated by the new realms that the LHC would probe and the exquisite precision of the data it would produce.  This was fall 2006, still a few years before the LHC would turn on in earnest, but unfortunately progress on the project suffered from several competing destructively-interfering effects.  The senior professor was highly-esteemed but had little time for day-to-day work, the junior professor was engaged, but was secretly hunting for jobs elsewhere, and us three students were very young, and lacked perspective or a broad picture of the project.  I did some simple calculations and others performed some simulations, but nothing materialized into something worthy of a paper by the time I graduated, and I moved on, distracted by all of the trappings of graduate school.  Then, early in 2008, a group of researchers from the UK and France published a short, simple paper presenting a novel technique for analyzing the data of the LHC, a method for discovering undiscovered particles.  This was it, this was the paper that we had been trying to write, but failed because we were out of sync or inexperienced.  This paper changed the playing field, re-imagining what could be possible at the LHC.  Searches for new particles that had been abandoned were now re-evaluated and an entirely original research direction was initiated that eventually infiltrated every aspect of the scientific program at CERN.  It was humbling to realize that in some sense I had been so close to being a key player in a major revolution, but at the same time acknowledging that there had still been so many pieces I had missed that there was no way I could have assembled the puzzle.

Excerpt from an essay on attending a summer school in Cargèse, Corsica, France.

We only had time to run to our apartment for a quick dinner before getting back to the Institute.  Exploiting the lack of a schedule for tomorrow, students throughout the school had planned events to fill it, from sunning and swimming at Plage de Péru, the main beach in Cargèse, to short hikes around fortified Genoese towers that dotted the coastline.  A group of Spanish students realized that no schedule implied that there was no need to wake up before, say, 3 pm, so tonight they had planned an extravagant party on the beach, buying up the booze and finger foods from the supermarket and hauling it down the slope, distributing them over the tables.  AV equipment was carried from the auditorium and arranged in front of the canteen, casting the Euro techno beats curated by the hosts out to the sea.  Even the school organizers partied in solidarity with all of us students, who had clearly been overworked for the week, and needed a release. 

Among the relatively small group of American students, we had privately and quietly complained about the music and the deejaying of the Spaniards.  Diplomacy was not an option because we were vastly outnumbered, so we opted for a direct attack, wresting control of the speakers by plugging in an iPhone that was pre-loaded with hits.  Dead air and bated breaths occupied the bluff while we huddled to decide on the best selection for wowing and winning over these skeptical and discriminating Europeans, well-trained to associate song with nationalistic pride from Eurovision.  Now settled, one of us scrolled through the phone and tapped the song that was so quintessential Americana that everyone else hated it: “In the day we sweat it out on the street…” grated The Boss while we rocked out on air guitar and Max Weinberg’s drumming.  However, it was clear that we were on a very short leash and were nearing mutiny when the final fermata of “Baby, we were born to run” stretched to silence, so we switched it up to something that everyone could at least dance to.  On came Miley Cyrus and her dream of making it big in LA, which we were generously allowed to play to completion, but further American meddling in the music was strictly forbidden and associated with the harsh punishment of being subjected to it.