Category: Corsica Chapter

Cargèse

July 14th, 2024

Part 1

While chasing my damp and threadbare brown hand towel and fuzzy teal, pathetically inflated, airline neck pillow around the deck, whipped up by the howling midnight Mediterranean wind, I learned a valuable lesson on my first trip to Europe. Yesterday morning, I had parted from my girlfriend in Paris, watching her disappear down the escalator at Saint-Michel station off to Charles de Gaulle, ending our nine day vacation together in England and France. I then turned to walk upriver, against the Seine’s current, to Gare de Lyon, where the TGV would whisk me to Nice, my port for ferrying to Ajaccio and Corsica for a two-week summer school on particle physics. Hunched over my laptop 5,000 miles away in California, I had meticulously scheduled every stage of this journey, buying and printing tickets from French websites, scraping every ounce of the last vestiges of the language tucked into the recesses of my brain from studying years ago in college, cross-referencing arrival and departure times, and temporally sorting all of it into a folder in my backpack, so I could just pull out the top sheet and hand it over to the conductor. It was a perfect plan, save one detail: apparently a ticket for an overnight ferry only lets you board the boat.

Attending a summer school is a kind of rite of passage for a physics graduate student, especially for theorists who focus on particle physics at the highest energies and shortest distances, and often where one is first exposed to the breadth of research directions in the field worldwide. Even at a top ten research institution, the Stanfords, Harvards, Princetons, etc., the research interests represented by the faculty are limited, both by historical considerations in how hirings were made, but also because physics departments only have a finite number of people in them. Summer schools invite a dozen or so lecturers from all over the world to spend say two or three hours each providing just the thinnest, most superficial introduction to the subject they have devoted their lives to. Further, all of the students that attend a summer school are mid-career, as far as work toward a Ph.D. goes, and lecturers can assume a significant baseline knowledge among everyone there. I had just completed the third year of my Ph.D. with all of the required courses like electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, classical mechanics, and especially quantum field theory completed a year earlier, and I had been working on research for the past year. So this summer school was the perfect time for me to broaden my research interests, learn about the big names in my field, and, most importantly, befriend fellow students.

This particular summer school located at a physics institute on the beach in Cargèse was the modern incarnation of a preeminent school dating from the early 1960s at an institute founded by Maurice Lévy, a French physicist. Apparently Lévy’s only requirement for the location of the institute was that it received the maximal amount of sunshine of anywhere in metropolitan France, and Corsica is far south of the mainland, and Cargèse is dug into the mountainous island’s west coast, terraces of clay bricked buildings spilling into the sea, ensuring that summer’s twilight stretches late into the evening. A youthful Gerardus ’t Hooft, a future Nobel Prize winner for his work on demonstrating that our models of particle physics were mathematically consistent, attended the school in 1970 and his interest in solving this problem was piqued by lectures from Benjamin Lee, a professor at SUNY Stony Brook, and Kurt Symanzik, from the theory group at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, called DESY, in Hamburg. However, ’t Hooft’s questions baffled them and neither Symanzik nor Lee had any clue how to begin attacking this problem, so ’t Hooft returned home to school in Utrecht, Netherlands, with only the knowledge that it seemed that the giants in the field were as ignorant as him, a graduate student. So, with his Ph.D. advisor, Martinus Veltman, they solved the problem, demonstrated the procedure for making predictions in particle physics, revolutionizing the tools of theoretical physicists, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Now 40 years later, this generation of Ph.D. students had been promised a similar revolution. The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, the aptly-named experiment at CERN in Switzerland that collided protons, themselves a type of hadron particle, in the largest scientific machine ever created, had only been collecting data for about six months, but had been guaranteed to discover new particles and produce new mysteries that would need to be solved by a new generation of physicists. The organizers of the school had invited lecturers to discuss novel experimental techniques, advances in theoretical understanding, and classes of hypothetical particles or models designed to answer the outstanding questions about the universe, as well as to posit more. We had also been the recipients of some fortunate delays in the scientific program at CERN. The LHC was originally meant to begin data taking in 2007, but that was delayed by a year because construction hadn’t yet completed. Then, in 2008, a mere 10 days after the first proton beams successfully circumnavigated the LHC’s tunnel, cryogenic, superconducting magnets responsible for keeping the protons traveling in a circle exploded, releasing all of the helium that maintained the cold temperature and destroying a large section of the accelerator. After another year of delays to fix this mess, the LHC began its science in earnest in late 2009, and the 90 students descending on Cargèse had just come of age as physicists to explore this brave new world. But I had to get to Cargèse in the first place.
Cargèse

July 14th, 2024

Part 2

The heat and humidity of the Riviera arrived with a sudden slap as I descended the stairs from the air conditioned TGV, weighed down by my backpack carrying my clunky laptop with too many cables and outlet adapters, and dragging my rolling suitcase behind like it was a petulant child. I had printed a map of Nice, from the train station to the ferry terminal, and had no plan of how to occupy the next eight hours, but the famous beach lay between me and the dock, so I started there, slowly plodding over the mile of cobblestones in the high sun toward the sea. My shirt, shoulder seams extending down to my biceps and lacking any subtlety, screamed “STANFORD” in capital white on cardinal red, and as each block receded, picked something closer to burgundy that spread in blotches from under my arms and back and drips from my brow on my front. I had, for some reason, packed an ancient, frayed, brown hand towel I inherited from my parents, ragged from decades of children smearing various bodily fluids from various body parts, and dug around in my suitcase for it while on the sidewalk of the Promenade des Anglais. For the first time since the train, I peeled my pack off and dabbed my drenched back, providing some temporary relief, but the towel was nearly immediately soaked, and I was soon just pushing the perspiration around. Still in the heat of the day and further not wanting to mildew all of my recently-laundered clothes, I tied the towel around a handle so it could dry and be easily accessible for the next wipe.

Hours after the sun set but the stone and pavement still radiated warmth, cars and pedestrians poured off of the Mega Smerelda, the livery of the bandannaed Moor from the Corsican coat of arms in blue and yellow on the stack, long past the time when we were scheduled to leave port. It was a huge boat, vastly larger than any ferry I had ever been on before, with a few decks for cars at the waterline, then cabins, and finally two promenade decks just under the bridge. As a cheap grad student, I opted out of a cabin, and anticipated sleeping indoors on a padded bench with windows and tables, like I had seen on passenger ferries on Puget Sound, and joined the line of walk-ons, but was somewhat puzzled by the many of whom were hugging pillows or sleeping bags. The flow of cars and pedestrians now reversed, and we shuffled toward the steward who cancelled my ticket and gestured up to ponts huit et neuf, where passengers without a cabin could stay for the journey to Ajaccio. There were already several groups there, curiously working to blow up mattresses or roll out sleeping pads on the weather deck, placing themselves immediately under the solid railing at the bow. This all seemed ridiculous to me, because surely right inside this hatch were rows and rows of seating with ample space to sleep or to watch the sea in comfort, but it never dawned on me that the lack of windows might indicate otherwise. With the great grind and squeak of metal twisting in metal, the hatch revealed nothing within, merely a narrow passageway walled with solid metal, decidedly not a place to relax or sleep. Defeated, I turned round to accept my place for the night, far back on port side from the now completely packed bow, a small nook near the stairs.

The lights of Nice twinkled and dimmed as we pulled away, now an hour postponed, and then further out, Monaco could just be seen off to the east. Most on the deck had already lowered their eye masks and snuggled into their blankets, the hum of the engines, the constant beating of the waves on the hull, and wind on the open sea combining into a somniferous white noise. I, on the other hand, had to get to work repurposing pieces of my luggage into a bed. My backpack and suitcase were immediately ruled out as pillows either being too bulky or housing my laptop, and my spare clothes were mostly clean, and the deck was not. Three items then remained: the sweat towel would be my mattress, my airline neck pillow would be my pillow, and my windbreaker would be my blanket. I had to lie on my back because my hips couldn’t bear weight on the rough, non-skid surface of the metal deck, and so I just looked at the night’s sky, hoping that my discomfort would succumb to my exhaustion. I slipped into sleep much later, but then had subconsciously shifted, the new posture waking me up to find that my pillow and towel were missing. The incessant wind had thrown them about the deck, and I ran around, catching my shit before it either blew overboard or onto a sound sleeper, and the process of lying supine for an hour, sleeping for a few minutes, and gathering up the flotsam repeated several times. Once the weakest hint of morning light arrived, I gave up.

Clouds glowed above the mountainous silhouette of Corsica and while I was packing away my things, a man with an expensive camera had arrived on the deck, presumably having slept soundly in his cabin below, and positioned himself near the bow. Brighter and brighter became the clouds, but everyone was still asleep, with only the two of us watching the sun struggle its way up the rugged, sawtooth peaks. I had a camera, too, but could tell this was something I wanted to see directly with my eyes and not filtered through a screen, and left it tucked away in my pack as I worked my way up the deck, tip-toeing over and around the unconscious bodies. Suddenly, like the crack of an egg, the golden yellow yolk burst, pierced by the rocky spires and oozed over the knotty canopy of the heavily timbered western pine slopes, framed by a brilliant halo of glowing albumen, then flowed onto the cerulean floor and spread out in a thinning semicircle until the spilled rays washed up against the boat’s port side. Then, just a few seconds later, it was over, the sun completely visible above Corsica, and the clouds receding into haze as the alpine air warmed and pushed them out to the water. The brightness caused some deck sleepers to stir, the first waking up, rubbing their eyes, and stretching their arms, and as we pushed south, more and more people crowded the deck to see Ajaccio and the ship land, the only ferry amongst the cruise ships in port.
Cargèse

July 14th, 2024

Part 3

The organizers of the school had arranged for a bus to shuttle the people arriving by air in Ajaccio to Cargèse, but for people arriving by sea, of which there were five including myself, we had to take a public bus. The five of us had arranged via email to meet in the ferry terminal after my boat had arrived, the last of those in our group, but my computer had most recently found an effete wifi signal from my lap while in a hard plastic bucket seat in a laundromat in Nice, nearly 12 hours ago, and my phone had no connection in Europe. Unfortunately, the delays had meant that I landed an hour late, so after another hour of waiting in the terminal, I resigned to exploring another Mediterranean city alone for several hours, starting with much-needed breakfast at a nearby café. As I perused the menu, I overheard a nearby table of twenty-somethings talking physics and I decided that the odds of physicists my age in Ajaccio that had nothing to do with the only summer school on an island with a total population of few hundred thousand was exponentially too small to be ignored. By simply walking over, they recognized me immediately through my well-labeled shirt, and pulling up another chair rounds of introductions began anew. They were all European with two from Germany, and one each from Spain and France, and so travel like this, across porous borders into a new culture and language, was familiar. Naturally, they had each slept in a cabin last night.

The old town of Ajaccio is a compact wedge that reaches into the Mediterranean from the lip of the Gulf of Ajaccio, and we wandered around most of it, past Maison Bonaparte, watching donkeys graze near the stone fort of the citadel, and poking our heads into the orange pastel cathedral. Our bus departed from the harbor, and with mid-afternoon rush hour and ancient narrow streets, leaving Ajaccio was slow, like a pinball continuously hitting the bumpers, and then the drive wound through the mountains and along the fractal coastline. Nevertheless, we conveniently alighted in the center of Cargèse, at its one major intersection, exactly when the school’s secretary was distributing apartment keys to the students who had flown in. My apartment sat above a row of businesses, with a small galley kitchen, a central dining room with a balcony that opened over the street, and three bedrooms shared amongst five students, two friends from Korea, two others from the US, and myself. I bunked with Alejandro, a self-proclaimed Anglo-Inca, from Peru but grew up and was currently a student in the US. The bedroom was simple, a mottled tiled floor with the window draped in a cream lace curtain, a single nightstand in the corner, and a sliding door wardrobe on the wall adjacent to the door, and while chatting with Alejandro I created a makeshift dresser by unzipping and opening my suitcase, and then sat on my bed, though nothing special and I could feel the individual springs, it was sufficient to keep my towel and airplane pillow packed away.

The small and only grocery store in town had probably never seen such a crowd on a Monday night, overrun with all of the students of the school coincidently acquiring breakfast and dinner provisions. While the selection was limited and dwindling fast, I was successful in finding usual morning fare like yogurt, bananas and fruit juice, and my Korean flatmates offered to make dinner this first night, a taste of home for them modulated by ingredients available in this rural French town. The gentle, warm, and salty breeze snuck into our flat by way of the balcony, drifted around our chairs and over the table, uniting new friends breaking bread in a foreign land. The conversation had been buoyed by the heaps of rice and sausages and fried greens and as our stomachs filled and the plattered mountains turned to hills turned to mounds and plates and trays returned to the kitchen, the quaintness of the apartment was amplified by its lack of internet, and none of us really knew how to entertain ourselves for the hours until sleep without it. Chasing rumors that there was some wireless signal back at the supermarket, we planned a surreptitious mission to nibble crème brulée and sip moscato at a café across the street, just close enough to wring out the minimal connection to check emails and let my world know I had made it.

CeeLo Green’s vulgar though catchy break-up tune and Alicia Keys and Jay-Z’s collaboration celebrating Gotham streamed from the first-generation iPod nano into my ears while walking to the Institute. Mornings were dark, the mountains keeping the sun at bay, and only the fact that the traffic on the highway was very sparse was the dirt shoulder that hugged the road out of Cargèse that could generously be called a trail safe at all. The flora consisted of some small trees but mostly just low scrub brush and dried grasses punctuated by a towering, flowering agave, and as the buildings disappeared, sweeping views of the Gulf of Sagone replaced them, dramatically bounded from the south by a long-fingered cape beyond 10 miles of sea. Well-labeled by signage, the narrow road to the Institute veered off, down the slope to the beach, and hung on to its pavement just long enough to pass beyond visibility from the highway. Our welcome packet claimed the total distance was only 2 km, but I had already passed that point above, and still had to dodge potholes in the steep gravel path that rendered the Institute completely inaccessible if you had any issues walking, which of course was never considered because this is France. Out of the brush the auditorium, the dining hall, and smaller outbuildings arose on a grassy bluff on which chairs painted in the Mediterranean palette were haphazardly placed, but all faced west, a few feet above the sandy beach. One couldn’t help but marvel at Lévy’s forethought.

The three physicist organizers and the secretary guarded the threshold to the auditorium, presenting a cotton tote bag on which the emblem of the Institute was silkscreened, an outlined drawing of the western and eastern rite churches of Cargèse that opposed one another across a canyon in town. Within was a folder with a detailed daily schedule, a scratch notepad, wifi passwords, and name badges to anyone who wished to enter. One of the organizers, Géraldine, was further armed with a camera for entering our photos in the trombinoscope, the official school directory, and immediately recognized me though we had never met, and asked if I was ready to give a talk. I had received no response to my email reply to the student speaker volunteer request, and so held out no hope of a talk, but why email when it’s so much easier to talk in person. The wind off the water lapped the breaking waves, then continued up over the lawn and lightly gestured me through the ever-open doors to the stage of the auditorium, with slate chalkboards hung on the back wall, though mostly obscured by the projection screen suspended from the ceiling. The number of participants at the school was clearly limited by seating as just enough rows of desks to fit all of the students very comfortably filled the stadium slope, parted by concrete stairs, and I made my way to a desk near the top to settle in as my office for the next 10 days.
Cargèse

July 14th, 2024

Part 4

The first lecturer took to the stage with their reflected slides illuminating them from behind and welcomed the room full of eager students to an introduction of the physics at particle colliders, like the LHC. Each day consisted of three lectures, scheduled for 90 minutes, with coffee breaks or lunch separating them. The fourth and final session was devoted to rapid student talks, no more than 7 minutes each plus time for questions, designed to provide some practice speaking as well as an overview to the myriad research directions represented. The breaks encouraged ample discussion with the lecturers, as limiting a broad topic to only 90 minutes was often interpreted as carte blanche to a rapid-fire survey which left students breathless but with only more questions afterward. Unlike some other summer schools, lecturers did not type up notes nor provide exercises for students to complete to dive deeper into a subject and develop a real understanding through focus and determination. No, the strategy of the Cargèse school for student engagement was markedly different: to provide a relaxed atmosphere to encourage deep conversations between tutors and pupils.

This philosophy was no more evident than over lunch. A grand affair, French through-and-through, and a two-hour crevasse separating morning from afternoon lectures, déjeuner was served buffet-style, centered around a different cut of flesh from a different animal every day, accompanied with pastries or crème caramel for dessert. Three long, broad stone-topped tables with wooden benches outside, though underneath bamboo screen sunshades, were the default dining rooms, each replete with white and red wine bottles under the Institute’s own label, of mostly Sciacarello grapes grown in the Ajaccio Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée. After several glasses of wine midday, it was only sensible to change into swimwear and launch from the rocks on the shore into the shallow, balmy cove during the second hour of the break. The water was almost exclusively the realm of students, and on the first day, only those from Europe were so adventurous, but as the school progressed more and more foreigners joined. The lecturers remained on shore, and were excessively generous with decanting both wine and conversation amongst students.

There is a story, almost assuredly apocryphal but perhaps all the more truthful, about a vegetarian who attended the Cargèse summer school an indeterminant number of years earlier. The story goes that lunch on the first day was a braised ham with a rich sauce formed from rendering other parts of a pig’s body. The vegetarian asks a server if there are any other food options because they do not eat meat. With a confused look on their face, the server excuses themself to ask the chef in the kitchen and soon comes back and says that the lunch meal is ham. This exchange goes back and forth a few times, but the responses from the server caught in the middle vary a bit, like mentioning the fact that pigs don’t eat meat, or that the sauce is just the broth from boiling pig trotters for hours, and not the trotters themselves. Finally, the chef is so confused that he comes out to talk to this person who refuses to eat the ham. Again, they explain that they are vegetarian, and suddenly the chef’s face brightens with a broad smile. “Ahh!”, he says, and runs back into the kitchen. He quickly returns carrying the ham on a plate in one hand, but the other is hidden behind his back. With a flourish and a “Voilà!”, the secret is revealed and on the ham he places a leaf of lettuce.

90 students from all over the world produced a representative sample of dietary restrictions that, for the most part, were effectively discounted and ignored among the offerings. Now, however, vegetarians could at least just fill their plate with the steamed, sautéed, or grilled green sides which probably weren’t cooked in animal fat, but no complete vegetarian meals were offered. Students with allergies would enlist the help of a native French speaker to act as a translator with the servers and chefs to consult on ingredients, and diligently pick through the food on their plate. One woman at the school kept kosher which simply could not be accommodated. Kosher meals would have to be prepared with completely separate knives and pans to ensure no cross contamination, and of the entire banquet presented each lunch, likely only the wine could have been considered even close to rabbinical acceptability. After the first day, her solution, though unfortunately suboptimal, was to pack her own lunch.

It is difficult to exaggerate the silent attention and enthusiasm of a room of physics Ph.D. students listening to a lecture by an acknowledged world expert. The students in the room couldn’t get enough school, so they continued to college after high school. Then, they still couldn’t get enough school, so they continued to graduate school after college. Then, they still couldn’t get enough school, so they are attending a school while already enrolled in another school. It’s not that unblinking eyes were locked onto the slides glowing on screen in a sort of intellectual Ludovico treatment, both because every lecturer presented in a unique way with a highly variable style and each student had their own research interests that were not necessarily represented in every lecture. However, every student had something to learn from every lecture, so one eye or ear was always focused up front, even if both hands were occupied on the keyboard. Science progresses not because of some flash of insight by some lone genius out of the blue, but rather because the diligent made connections between seemingly disparate fields to unify and simplify the story we tell about the universe. In amongst all of the details in all of the lectures, there was an overarching story yet to be told, and all of us sitting in that auditorium desired to be the one to tell it.

In addition to the beach and sea views, the Institute also had its own resident canine, a shaggy, sandy-haired dog that wandered as it pleased, and was especially congenial during lunch. He had just curled up at the base of the auditorium stairs as the first student started their talk in the final session of the day. Mid-Ph.D. students are an intellectually-interesting bunch: there is still some remaining holdover from college where they think they know everything there is to know, but at the same time are being introduced to open-ended research projects through their advisor. This puts them in a limbo, anticipating that the audience knows just as much about their project as they do, while simultaneously viewing their work as utterly revolutionary, even though it was probably a small side project that their advisor gave them for more of an educational experience, rather than rewriting the laws of physics. Providing students the opportunity to present to their peers is clearly valuable to developing communication skills, and limiting the talks to about five minutes was ideal for students to introduce their research, but prevent them from derailing and taking the entire room down a long and tortuous road pock-marked with distractions, speculation, and uncertainty. Once the last of the four students in this session had been applauded, the dog staggered up and shuffled back out, well-conditioned to the ebb and flow of the school and Institute.

Orderly bottles of the red and white wines and glasses were placed to one side of the pop-up bar stationed outside the kitchen and canteen building, while bottles of Pietra, the only beer brewed on the island, stood waiting for eager hands on the other side. Summer schools operate under the pretext of proselytizing to impressionable minds the most exciting and recent advances in physics, but their true, and sole, purpose is to introduce students to one another. The invited experts have lives and families away from the school, so they only attend around the dates of their scheduled lectures, but the students are there for the entire time, immersed in the science and the location for two weeks. If there had been any issues with student camaraderie, the solution always seems to be to throw more alcohol at the problem, and I walked away from the bar toward a semi-circle chatting and gazing on the water with a cold bottle of the chestnut flour beer. In this group of students, or that group seated at the table, or that one over there stepping down to the sand, were professors at institutions all over the world, from Georgia State University, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Durham University in England, UC San Diego, University of Debrecen in Hungary, University of Oregon, Oklahoma State University, Fermilab, Colorado State University, and Tata Institute in Mumbai. This evening in Corsica happened to be a decade before they were promoted to tenure, before they were the ones lecturing at a summer school about the work they did to forward the field, before they were drinking with students on far away shores.
Cargèse

July 14th, 2024

Part 5

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 computer 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.

One of the senior authors of that paper, Gavin, was lecturing at this school. I hadn’t thought much about the work from my undergraduate days since, and instead dived deep into a project presented to me by my advisor, and had even published a few papers on it, but felt neither ownership nor that it represented my research interests specifically. With these lectures, the excitement and intrigue for that undergraduate research came flooding back. That paper was just one of the three that Gavin and others posted in one month, February of 2008, that upended the game and now a couple of years later, had inspired a new international conference series, required the experiments on the LHC to write brand-new and greatly improved analysis software, and provided the skeleton for these lectures that had been filled out with pedagogical flesh. This truly felt like a calling, I could sense my brain analyzing and anticipating where he was taking us in the lecture and mentally engaging in a way that I hadn’t noticed for other topics. I internally criticized analogy or example choices, I quietly praised the lecture’s scope, vision, and goal, starting from simple assumptions and leading us to conversant fluency with the physics, and was determined to realign my research efforts with my research interests, and establish my own project in this field. I made sure to sit next to Gavin at lunch that day.

I had prepared by wearing my swim trunks as shorts today and after finishing my meal, joined the dozen or so people already splashing about in the sea. Like a hug from a warm blanket, the water was just above skin temperature, and I swam out to a sand bar about 100 yards from shore which others were using as a base camp for swimming further out into open water. My experience with swimming in nature was limited to the lake near my parents’ house or just getting my feet wet on the beaches of the northern Pacific, and so the harsh taste of salt on my lips with each breath of air was surprising, but not entirely unwelcome. My goal was modest, to just be able to say that I swam in the Mediterranean, so back toward shore I went with ample time before the afternoon lectures would begin. This afternoon, I had no towel, but the sun and wind conspired into a rapid blow dryer while I was seated on the grassy bluff and gazed at the swimmers in the distance. With a few minutes to spare, the exodus from the sea commenced, and lines formed about the bathrooms for changing back into street clothes. Already dry, I went directly to the auditorium, to settle back into my seat.

As the lecture began, so did the itching. The high salinity that makes the Mediterranean so pleasant to swim in was now crystallizing on my hirsute legs, tugging on the thousands of hairs in every which direction. I would rub my calf on my shin or scratch my thigh for relief, and it seemed at the time like I could hear the slough and then sprinkle of the salt from my skin onto the floor. Once one patch of hair was salt-free, another patch would be acutely painful and I kept itching and itching and the flurry of salt kept raining down. Now, my arms itched, next the hair on my head froze in place by the sea’s natural product and worse was that a sneaky scratch deposited white flakes all over my shoulders, like I was the star in a bad shampoo commercial. Only now did I understand the brilliance of bathing habits of Europeans, disciplined by decades of holidays in Cannes, Ibiza, or Marbella, and why there were so many showers in the bathrooms. While I encouraged the sun to extract sea salt from my skin, they quickly rinsed off with freshwater, dried with a towel, dressed, and were back in the auditorium, reinvigorated for the lectures. Once was enough swimming for me.

Shaking off the remaining salt during the afternoon break, I was able to relax and focus for the final session of the day. No students were talking today; instead, a lecturer, Tim, was presenting a tutorial introducing how to use a piece of software that he had developed several years earlier, but had since become a standard tool in the field. A rather unique and special feature of particle physics, unlike nearly every other realm of science even among other subfields of physics, is that there are extremely precise simulations that accurately describe the minutiae of collider experiment, despite the amazingly complicated nature of the events with thousands of detected particles of dozens of different types. Additionally, particle physics experimental collaborations hold the data they acquired in confidence, only presenting their results in a published paper, and only after significant analysis. As common practice, raw data was never shared, an unfortunate cultural phenomenon born out of jealously, arrogance, and pride amongst the famous personalities of the field who fought for Nobel Prizes to be the first to find that new particle buried in their data. The next best thing, and the only thing at the time that the hoi polloi who were not on an experiment could use, was to generate your own artificial data using one of the many offerings of simulation software that had been developed. The tutorial on this early evening was designed to orient and familiarize students with a particle event generator, and we could work along with Tim on our laptops.

Tim’s introduction, before computers were pulled out, was informal and funny, and he emphasized that we were ambassadors for the field and should talk physics with everyone we meet. He had a wonderful way of talking laterally to us, as colleagues, putting smiles on faces while we watched him on screen do perhaps the most boring thing possible of just opening up his laptop and navigate around the desktop. There was a website interface to use the software, which would actually run on a dedicated computing cluster at Tim’s institution. Of course, it is not a good idea to just have access to a computing cluster out there on the internet, so a general user would have to first register and validate that they were from a legitimate institution of higher learning and needed to perform particle physics calculations. I and a few others in the audience had used this software previously, so had usernames, but most did not and with finite lecture time, Tim had created a general username and password that could be used by everyone at the school. So, 90 people logged in simultaneously and immediately the site crashes, and only the first and quickest few successfully begin the simulation generation. With a generous estimate of a couple thousand people in the world needing this program, there was effectively 0 probability that several percent of them had accessed the site at precisely the same time, so the system had never been tested in this way. We could read on Tim’s face that while this was a minor setback it was discouraging for the active participation he had envisioned.

With time limited and vanishing faster than anticipated, examples from the end of the tutorial were eliminated, and we were pivoted to form small groups with only one computer per every few students logged in, sufficient to reduce the load on the server and ensure everyone had a screen to stare at. Carefully balancing student engagement in the seats with the presentation at the front, Tim cautiously continued, and demonstrated the syntax for entering a desired process to simulate through the online form. Tap, tap, tap went fingers on keyboards, and a few dozen thumbs hovered over their “return” keys when the banshee peal of the fire alarm filled the auditorium and pushed all of us outside, suspending our event simulation. It was immediately apparent that there was no smoke, no fire, just a rogue electronic alarm that scattered students to the far ends of the institute to avoid the noise, that required the organizers to run from building to building to find any site staff that remained into the early evening. Efforts to turn off the alarms were unsuccessful and eventually, randomly, silence clawed its way back into the auditorium after a 20 minute absence. However, an alarm that randomly stops ringing is not an alarm that has been extinguished, and with just enough time to get seated again, open computers again, and start the simulation again, that rascal alarm shrieked again. The time flew by with all of the distractions, and 6 pm had already arrived so we all gathered our things, holding our ears as we were able. Defeated, Tim joined the train hiking back up and out of the Institute, his tutorial postponed until the following week.

While Tim had made his name through development of these simulation tools and the subsequent predictions they enabled, recently his interests had shifted to physics education research, and in between servers failing and alarms blaring he hinted at it, giving us little slices of pedagogical insight while computers were loading. Physics education research was beginning to grow in acceptance as a legitimate discipline and necessary for reaching students who were otherwise frightened of the subject, while at the same time introducing techniques that provided all students of all interests and abilities a richer and more profound personal connection with physics. More and more universities were offering Ph.D. tracts in education research, and big names in science were moving that direction late in their careers, with no bigger name than Carl Wieman, Nobel Prize winner for creating a novel super-cooled state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate, who had founded an open, online education resource for virtual physics demonstrations through the University of Colorado Boulder, but had since been adopted by institutions throughout the world. I had some familiarity with physics education research, as I worked as a teaching assistant as an undergraduate in a department with a long and storied history of education research, and was deeply entrenched in the philosophy, techniques, and inquiry-based approach pioneered there. As the din receded in the distance behind the trees, I introduced myself to Tim and mentioned my work in physics education and his smile returned, knowing that, despite the interruptions, he had connected with the audience.
Cargèse

July 14th, 2024

Part 6

With a forecast of high winds and choppy seas, the boat excursion scheduled during our day off was canceled, leaving a completely free Sunday with nothing organized by the Institute. This seemed to be generally welcomed by students, especially myself, as I had been privately dreading the thought of a full day stuck on a boat under the blazing Mediterranean sun reflected and focused off of the water onto my pale skin. During the early lectures or during breaks, I set to work scouring the internet for an appropriate hike to instead fill the day. Corsica is blessed with world-class trails, of which the GR20 is probably the most famous, but is not a feasible option for a one-day excursion from Cargèse as it runs roughly north-south in the center of the island, a long drive or train ride away. Instead, signage for the southern terminus of the Tra Mare e Monti is planted just outside the central business district of Cargèse, and quickly rises with the mountains from the sea. Further, about 13 km along the trail was a small village, the first refuge in this direction and the perfect place to snack and turn around. Once settled, I spread the word at lunch and advertised my plan with a mass email: meet at 8 am tomorrow morning in front of the grocery store to stock up on water and snacks and hopefully return by dinner.

In high school I had played trumpet in our small, rural school’s mediocre band, and the director would joke with us that the faster we played the quicker our mistakes passed. My talk was scheduled with four others in the late afternoon. I had had some practice giving talks from attending a couple of conferences or presenting at an informal Friday seminar at home, and I suppose then that I thought that my preparation and experience was exceptional, but now, my memory separated from my experience by a vast rift of time, so was my naïveté. Those previous talks, however, were allotted at least 20 minutes or even an hour, which allowed for significant background to be developed while simultaneously exposing bare the gaps in my knowledge. This latter feature was typically interpreted as an endearing, teachable moment by a more learned audience for a graduate student’s talk, one necessary stage along the educational journey of the Ph.D. Here, the audience was nearly entirely other students and each talk was very short to ensure high student volume throughput. The slides for this talk were hacked carelessly out of those previous talks, introduction and motivation reduced to a single page, calculational details eliminated, and my goal was to speed through it, just slow enough to enable a few students with adjacent research to jump on my train of thought while passing by a waypoint marked by a reference to some famous paper.

Presenting was a healthy mix of high and low tech with a video projector long since replacing transparencies and the glass platen of an overhead projector, but for gesturing and pointing on the screen, a dowel was used, more mechanical and easier to visually follow than a laser pen. This ensured that speakers would only have to press a single button on a remote to advance their slides, which definitely helped reduce distractions of my already unfocused mind. The strategy I employed during my talk was mostly successful, though I did overstay my allocated time by a minute or two, but received several engaging questions suggesting that other students had been paying attention. When I returned to my seat, my neighbor poked me and stated not quite inquisitively that they thought the techniques I had employed were only esoteric, and not of practical relevance. I was a bit taken aback; I somewhat understood what they meant as my advisor and I had attempted to use a method that had been developed effectively for its pure mathematical properties, but for making concrete predictions in collider experiments. However, all I had shown on those few slides were equations with abstract symbols and notation and nothing concrete or nothing predictive, no plots, no numbers to compare with measurement, not even much detail as to what the symbols represented. By the time my brain had processed this and a reply and explanation had reached the tip of my tongue, my lips remained firmly shut as the final student speaker of that day and of the first week was shuffling from their seat along the row of desks, and was now handed all of the tools for presenting.

With the title slide on screen, the speaker looked down at the remote and their brain must have been a bit frazzled because their thumb moved to the prominent red button and the projector turned off. The audience tittered, but one of the organizers ran up to the front, calming the speaker down, but waiting for the innumerable fan cycles of the projector to work through before pressing that button again, and then re-emphasizing the left and right arrows. While this exchange was happening, the resident dog sauntered in, but this time didn’t curl up on the steps. The speaker’s gesturing was animated and lively, and the titters grew to chuckles as it became obvious that the dog’s one-track mind was utterly engrossed by that great stick stalked by the dog’s snout as it went this way and that over the screen. Like a tractor beam, the dog was slowly pulled in, one paw deliberately placed in front of the other, and now the speaker noticed and realized if it came to it, he would definitely lose the battle. He placed the stick on the table and began to point digitally when the dog pounced on the desk, and proudly began munching on the dowel, now lying, at ease, on the floor. There was no holding back, and the room erupted in laughter, nearly everyone completely doubled over, but Tim kept his wits about him, gently retrieving the pointer and shooed the dog back outside, allowing the speaker to continue with whatever dignity remained. However, the dowel, a bit wet and gnawed, remained on the desk for the rest of the day.

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 walks around fortified Genoese towers that dotted the coastline, to the longer trek I had scheduled into the mountains. 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, and distributed it all 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 “Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oooh ooooooh” and the wail from Clarence Clemons’s saxophone 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.

I kept half an eye on my weathered Wenger watch, setting a personal curfew of midnight so I would get at least a few hours of sleep. From our American rashness there had been a positive outcome as the playlist became more eclectic as the night deepened. After a necessary and sufficient number of beers, someone got the idea to play Hava Nagila and hoist the Israeli student high up on a chair, dancing a particularly poor rendition of the hora. I joined in, grabbing a leg of the chair, and most importantly and surprisingly, no one fell. At that moment I also learned that even with four people lifting, coordinating dancing with raising and lowering the chair to the beat was hard work, so once we had repeated “Hava Nagila” a few dozen times or so, because none of us knew any of the other verses, the seated student was lowered and I migrated to the less strenuous pursuit of final advertisement for the morning’s hike. Alejandro would be joining, so with some brief waves and goodnights, we walked back to our apartment together, helping each other navigate the treacherous path out of the Institute. On Monday, once we had all returned to the unforgiving, brutal regular school schedule with a 9 am lecture, I learned that, long after every other student departed for their bed, the Spaniards had partied until dawn.
Cargèse

July 14th, 2024

Part 7

Tucked into my daypack was my camera and snacks, a high-fat selection with a sleeve of the gloriously light and crisp Petit Beurre biscuits by LU and a small net of Babybel cheese, and I picked up six 1.5 liter bottles of water to share. Our volunteer hiking crew consisted of seven students: myself and two others who were experienced hikers, my roommate Alejandro who hadn’t hiked much but was in great shape, and three inexperienced hikers including the two flatmates from Korea. As I had suggested this trail and organized our departure, I carried most of the responsibility for the latter three, and passed the water around to them, but conveniently ignored their small, but significant, red flags. These were just minor things, like wearing denim jeans for a strenuous hike in high summer, or flat-soled skater shoes for walking on a rocky, uneven trail, or slinging a camera with a long, heavy zoom lens over a shoulder. Everyone was all smiles posing with the trailhead marker, but all we had done so far was walk about half a mile along paved streets rising out of Cargèse.

Evidence of civilization in Corsica stretches back more than 8000 years, to the late Stone Age, with the most famous archeological site at Filitosa, a hamlet at the southern end of the island. Scattered throughout the site are numerous carved statue-menhirs, tall, thin stone pieces with detailed faces, weathering and watching beyond the past 80 centuries. From its terminus, the Mare e Monti trail quickly gained elevation along the northern face of a hill, generously granting views of the jagged coast and interior mountains topped with bare granite, until it reached a grassy plateau, skirting fences that divided private property. Before diving back down the hillside into a deep valley, the trail kissed a road at a hairpin turn through the driveway of a farmhouse or chambre d’hôtes, ringed by manicured hedgerows, and where, now an hour into the hike, we enjoyed a brief hydration break. Framed by four large protective timbers, each solidly planted in the ground for the practical purpose of preventing farm equipment from driving over it, was one of these statue-menhirs, unadorned by any informative signage and standing about eight feet tall, simply set out in the middle of the front yard and I, oblivious to its provenance, casually snapped a picture.

The cacophony of a rural menagerie filled the valley, goats, sheep, horses, and dogs all making their presence known. The trail had followed the descent of a broad, dried stream bed from the farmhouse, thankfully marked by orange blazes that prevented us from wandering off into a field, and now coincided with a dusty dirt road on the valley floor. The livestock were all securely pastured behind fences, but otherwise able to graze freely. The oddest sight was dozens and dozens of dogs tied to trees in a clearing just off the road, their terrible yelping and the clattering chains casting a foreboding pall like something out of a horror movie. I had thought they might be hunting dogs and tying them up ensured that wildlife wasn’t frightened away, but as we walked closer and could see through the space in the trees, these dogs were in no shape to hunt. Mangy, emaciated, and exposed bare to the fiery sun in the heat of the day, we could only hope that they were somehow cared for. The barking continued clawing at our backs long after we had passed, only mercifully drifting away with the zephyr as the trail veered off and cut uphill.

I grew up on CCC trails in the American West, diligently planned and carefully chiseled from the sweat of millions of men that supported their families during the Depression. In general, there had been no maintained historical trails, and starting fresh, the Forest Service and other government organizations designed switchbacks in trails during sections of significant elevation gain on a sheer slope which both reduced erosion and the pitch of the trail. By contrast, if you needed to climb up an incline for whatever reason, it seems only natural that you would simply walk directly, and not meander back and forth. Indeed, that is what this trail, an ancient path to homesteads in the mountains, now did. Hundreds of meters up it went, and the loose, cascading gravel made the going even slower as we were constantly losing our footing. Only years later did I gain the perspective that this was the norm, with trails in Appalachian New England, for example, venturing straight up thousands of feet to the peaks of the White Mountains, and not even diverting for massive boulders or rock faces, and that I had been spoiled by paths for summiting that were born out of recreation, and not necessity.

The smiles in the group photo at the top, looking down at the valley that slides into the bay from over 2000 feet above, were demure, fewer sets of teeth visible through ear-to-ear grins and much more sweat than at the trailhead. Closing in on noon, we paused for lunch here, and spotted the few ocher clay-tiled roofs of Revinda, our destination, peaking out of the trees across the valley. Our naked exposure to the sun as it rose higher accelerated eating, but rendered the scenery that much more spectacular, the sapphire zenith yielding to a cirrus haze at the horizon and then inverted until broken by the verdant tans of dried fields that stretched up the hills until the slope became too much and the oak shrubs dominated all the way until the boulder field in which we sat, so we all took the necessary pictures and moved on in hopes that we could find more pleasant and shaded rest soon. Revinda was hardly more than a handful of buildings indeed, mostly for animal husbandry, with one store-front business run by a hardy woman who live in these rugged hills. She seemed to do it all, offering beds for the night, preparing lunches for the day, and harvesting pure Corsican honey, the prized maquis d’été, proudly advertised by a sign aside the entrance to the modest dining room. We settled under a broad chestnut tree just above a stone wall, drinking down the diminishing bottles and petting the lone donkey who was also escaping the midday sun.

That much water and walking challenges the sturdiest of bladders and I was asked by one of our group if I knew where the bathroom was located. While I was far from fluent, a couple years of French in college easily pushed me to the most conversant among us and I approached the proprietress, who was intermittently chatting with the two men eating. “Excusez-moi, où est la toilette?” I asked, with the reasonable expectation that she would point through the open door and say something like “À la gauche” and then it would be simple to relay the message and we would line up patiently waiting to use the facilities. Instead, she spread her arms wide, seemingly embracing the earth from which all is taken and to which all must be given, and raising her head toward the heavens replied in a sort of mystic prayer, chanting “Pas de toilette; la nature est votre toilette.” We each searched for our own altar of micturition among the widest-trunked trees set a bit further back from houses and roads, but only slowly through the fog of mild dehydration did her solution become more obvious. We were patently foreigners forcing ourselves upon this tiny village and our group outnumbered its entire exterior population by more than a factor of two, not including the donkey, and anyway he pissed outside all the time. With a couple more sips of water, we came to admire the generosity of her poetry when she was well within rights to stare me down, eyes boring into my soul, and bluntly say “Va chier derrière cet arbre”.

The fellowship began to crumble on the slog back. One of our group thought that we were going too slow, and decided to run the miles that remained to Cargèse. The inexperienced hikers fell further and further back from the rest of us, now burdened by useless plastic bottles, and I shared what I could to maintain both morale and their health. The shade returned as the trail transformed into the stream bed, but lacked any reprieve due to the climb. I was becoming legitimately scared; this was the only way back, three of us were suffering from dehydration, and the Petit Beurre biscuits and a shoulder to grasp I could offer were rendered effete. Foot planted in front of foot purely from the feeble motivation that at the top was that chambre d’hôtes and the promise of water, water, water. With the trees thinning and the crest approaching, I ran ahead, passing by the hedgerows, crying out “Avez-vous de l’eau?” and luckily the woman tending the flowers looked up and gestured me to the house, filling bottle after bottle with water from the hydrant. “Merci, merci beaucoup!” I called over my shoulder sprinting back, and her confused look changed to concern as she could now see the reason for my haste, three people crumpled over in her driveway and two others doing their best to calm and comfort. Their first sips were like fresh breaths of life, averting total disaster.

Bearing several bottles of Powerade in my arms, I passed them around, demanding they be drank here, in the supermarket parking lot, in my presence. 5 pm was already long in the past, and the hike was ultimately more than 17 miles and close to a full mile of gross vertical elevation gain on a trail whose quality varied enormously. I had both severely underestimated its arduousness and had been irresponsible in advertising the hike, very nearly paying a dear price for it. With the Powerade down, one of my flatmates excused themselves from our circle, and passed back into the supermarket. He returned a few minutes later, wearing a fresh, wide grin, and cradling a liter of vodka.
Cargèse

July 14th, 2024

Part 8

We had settled into the rhythm of the school during the second week. Morning lectures, then lunch with a bit too much wine, then in and out of consciousness for the afternoon lecture in the warm auditorium with the pleasant buzz of the booze, and then student talks after waking up with a shot of espresso during the break. Tim was finally able to present that tutorial without interruptions and the other lectures skewed to new, hypothetical physics ideas, their motivation, how to predict them with sufficient precision, and how to find them in collider physics experiment, assuming, of course, that they actually exist. That boat excursion had merely been postponed, and thankfully the plan now was just a short trip after lectures were over on Tuesday evening. However, our emotions were thrown around like a landlubber on the deck in rough seas, with the decision Tuesday morning that the weather was too dangerous, but by Tuesday afternoon, everything was calm and the trip was back on. Injecting a bit more spontaneity into the day, I walked to the harbor with other students, after quickly changing into swim trunks and leaving all of my valuables in my apartment, save my key.

Our destination was the Gulf of Porto, about 10 miles north along the coast and where the boat would anchor near a calanque or cove where we were promised some free time to swim in the sea. However, we discovered the first surprise at the harbor, where we were joined by numerous others, not part of the school. While we were never explicitly told, we had assumed that the boat would be our private charter, and instead it was just a regular tour boat, which diminished some of the charm. Thankfully, I was early enough to board that I found a seat on the open-air deck, absolutely necessary for avoiding motion sickness on the slightly choppy water. After the captain had welcomed us aboard and the organizers of the school translated to English for the students seated nearest to them, the second surprise was revealed. Géraldine asked the captain how long the ride would be before stopping to swim, but the response was negative, apparently a liability that the tour company could no longer afford and a recent change as swimming had been permitted at a prior school. All that us stripped-down students could do was watch the coast undulate back and forth as a bay waxed or a cape waned, or pick out Revinda, miles away in the hills that appeared less impressive from below, but had no way to photograph it.

The French Riviera and Corsica are blessed with dramatic cliffs that plunge into the sea, a consequence of erosion of soft minerals for millennia. The calanque we approached now was a partially-submerged cave hardly wider than the boat, and the captain cut the engine so we coasted quietly parallel to land. With the captain at the helm, the two others in the crew stationed themselves halfway toward the stern at both railings and would yell back to the bow as rocks encroached on the hull. The novelty of this tour was for the boat to enter the calanque, with the bow now in the shadow of the cave, then slowly more and more, while the waves lapped in the inches separating floating from capsizing. We paused, the boat about half in shadow, still bobbing with the water and just avoiding the sharp walls. The captain reversed the engines and back into the sun we went, cheerfully announcing over the intercom that that maneuver was called a “French kiss.” For everyone on the boat to get the calaque experience, next we backed into the cave, now the stern immersed in shadow but this time, no announcement was made on our way out. A line of tour boats in the Gulf had formed in the meantime, engines turned back on, and we sped away, back to Cargèse when someone called to the bow what that move was called. The response, a bit more grim than before, was “Tu ne veux pas savoir.”

As is tradition at conferences, a banquet for all attendees is hosted the night before the final day of physics, and this school honored that tradition with a dinner at the Institute on Thursday. Grilled swordfish caught directly from the Mediterranean was served while the camaraderie and infinite wine made up for any shortcomings in the food. Long since having forgiven me, I chatted with the three students who had needed more water on the hike until well after the sun set, and the cool pastel rainbow of twilight had sunk into the sea, replaced by twinkling stars. With lectures starting as usual in the morning, little carefree partying took place, with most people working their way back up to Cargèse well before midnight. With understanding nods from across tables over the bluff, my flatmates and I planned our exit simultaneously and walked to our apartment. The iPhone 4 had been released just a couple of months earlier and one of our flatmates wielded his like Gandalf entering Helm’s Deep on the third day, pointing the overbrightened screen toward the ground, illuminating the pitch-black, rutted gravel road made even darker by the overhanging, creeping trees. We sobered as the distance along the highway grew, and arrived at our apartment with clear minds, anticipating receiving the final pieces for a puzzle that no one yet knew how to complete, nor even if all had been identified.

The first picture on the web was a photo of four women, dressed like a ’60’s doo-wop quartet with the elbow-length satin gloves and everything, under a banner with their group’s name, Les Horribles Cernettes. By the time of this school, this image was nearly 20 years old, and its initialism coincided with the next particle collider experiment at CERN, itself conceived over five years prior to Tim Berners-Lee uploading the photo to info.cern.ch. The complete physics program of the Large Hadron Collider had been planned to collect data for about 25 years, until the mid-2030s, so now, just months into the first proton collisions, was the time to think about the machine that would succeed it. Fittingly, the final lecture of the school looked toward the far future, to the problems that the LHC would address, and to problems that would require a bigger collider at even higher energies. For the LHC, it was widely understood that it would be the experiment to discover or invalidate the existence of the Higgs boson, named after one of its proposers and the fundamental particle responsible for the masses of other particles. Previous experiments had established lower bounds on its mass, while mathematical consistency of our theory of particle physics forced a strong upper bound, and the LHC had been designed to be maximally sensitive to the allowed range. All we could do now, sitting in the auditorium, was wait and salivate for more and more data to be collected, that eventually a signal would pop up over the noise. All we could do now was hope that Nature heard and requited the Cernettes pine “Hey Mr. Higgs do you wanna do the twist?”

The filled bus waved to Alejandro, who sipped un café at a cafe and who wasn’t departing until tomorrow, while driving off to the Ajaccio airport. I had taken an early seat and so was positioned near the back of the bus and at an inland window, which I would soon learn was doubly undesirable for the drive. The rocking of the bus and the rolling of the hills harmonized at vertigo resonance, my vision narrowed and muddled, and my stomach turned over and over. I wasn’t alone as several students throughout the bus went bent over, working with all their might to keep their breakfast private, but with abundance of caution, the secretary passed around emesis bags from the driver’s vast collection. Thankfully, my neighbor was unaffected, so changing seats to the aisle with a clearer view to the front helped, as well as an offered stick of gum to chew. Ajaccio arrived not a moment too late, and as we pulled into the lot my peripheral vision returned, and the sight of the bright, midday harbor washed away the nausea. Thankfully no changing clothes or mopping of aisles was required.

While the destination of most of the students on the bus was the airport, others dispersed in search of their next travel stage, so it was time for goodbyes. Goodbyes to my flatmates who would be ferrying to Nice, though during the day and so my advice about reserving a cabin was less necessary. Goodbyes to the first students I met in Ajaccio, two of whom would be staying on the island, either continuing hiking or road-tripping. Goodbyes to the European students whose flights were departing in minutes, rushing into the terminal to check in. The airport was my final destination on Corsica, traveling next to Nice and then on to London, but had several hours to wait until my flight in the early evening. In this wait, I had a few compatriots, people traveling ultimately to the US or east Asia and so their flights were also later in the day. After security and Duty Free, European airports, especially small ones like Ajaccio, are rather austere, so we found a clearing near a wall and slumped over our luggage for a brief nap before the long journey through the night ahead of us.

Pinned into our corner as the density of people grew with the progression of the afternoon, we were helpless to defend ourselves from the repulsive actions of our fellow humans. One of our group, Ryan, was stuck next to a row of seats on which a young family had established as their own private base camp. Still in diapers, the youngest member of this family had relieved themself and was apparently exuding a stench that stimulated the parents to action. A good, say, two feet from Ryan’s facial sensory organs was the south end of the child, on their back on the seat, heels to the sky, soiled diaper making way for their bare bottom. I could only spare a couple of quick glances otherwise I would have been overwhelmed by complete, uncontrollable laughing fits myself, but that was enough see Ryan’s wide-eyed, slack-jawed shocked disgust as wipe after wipe pulled the mustardy substance off and was gathered in a crumpled pile in mom’s left hand, revealing pink, plump flesh underneath. The coup de grâce, though, was yet to come as once baby and bum were cleaned, but prior to a fresh diaper, mom pulled a thermometer from the changing bag and in it went. With a few exchanged words in French, the parents were apparently now satisfied, the family packed up and moved along, vacating their defiled seats, and ever so slowly and deliberately Ryan turned his head to me, wearing a thousand-yard stare.

Heathrow after 10 pm is silent. I had landed on British Airways but would takeoff to the US on United Airlines, so I would have to transfer terminals on the airport’s shuttle bus. I apparently found nothing odd about following signage to the bus, down escalators, completely alone in one of the busiest airports on Earth, until spotted by a member of the janitorial staff who snapped that I wasn’t supposed to be there. Confused and apologizing profusely, I was reassured that no blame lay on me, but rather on security for not closing the area, and was kindly lead back to the correct path to the open areas of the airport toward the border crossing. I sat alone and uninterrupted in the vast, vacant luggage hall prior to customs for long enough to access wifi, write an email or two, and then be yelled at again this time by a border agent that I would have to move along, and actually leave this secure area. Finally past any security were rows of seats and a few souls scattered around already sleeping under the fluorescent lights, with the intermittent announcements, the distant screams of a vacuum, and the incessant advertisements strobing and shouting from the wall-mounted televisions. Here I was again, presented with my bed made by my miserly decision to forgo a hotel room, but at least my nest of luggage, jackets, backpacks, and pillows tucked into the hard molded plastic chairs would lay undisturbed by any sort of breeze.

Category: Corsica Chapter

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8