Part 5

This Monday at the Institute was busier than anytime in the previous week, tripling the traffic in the hallways and the length of the line to the espresso machine, in preparation for the four-day conference nestled within the larger month-long workshop.  My talk had been snuck in just before this conference, producing an auditorium comfortably filled with physicists, and the first time I had presented to an overwhelming majority with research interests outside of my own area of burgeoning expertise.  Nevertheless, lacking the requisite discoveries for interpretation, discussions had pivoted to introduction of new analysis techniques motivated both by the unmatched volume of data to be collected by the experiments at the LHC and their exquisite highly-granular resolution that captured the most detailed images of the subatomic world in history.  Though speaking a rather different language than the fluency of others in new physics signatures from supersymmetry, say, there was interest in my subfield far and wide in particle physics, with what seemed like everyone hitching themselves onto some collaboration to explore novel ways of looking at collider events from this lens that was now just over three years old.  Riding this wave of enthusiasm, I stepped up to the desk brandishing a laser pointer and owning the next hour to persuade the audience that the bounty of phenomena that could be studied was ever richer.

Given just a bit of intellectual stimulation from, say, a course on quantum field theory, graduate students think that they soon know everything but also that everyone else knows everything that they do.  Presentations relatively early along one’s journey to the Ph.D. typically lack motivation as everyone knows why something is interesting and dive much too quickly and too deep into jargon, which is anyway often misapplied by the student who only heard of the terms a month ago and could still not define them to non-physicist family members, let alone their fellow students. A rather large part of one’s education in graduate school is in the wading through and crawling out of this morass, to develop a broader understanding of what is known, who knows it, and how to communicate it to a broader audience, all of which cumulates of course in the thesis defense.  Now in my fifth year, I had at least acquired a healthy collection of humbling experiences, whether or not I learned from them, but this would be my first real test.

From the third row came a question about the feasibility of calculations, first-principles predictions of these strange new quantities that I was describing, and if such calculations could be compared to experimental data.  We had only done a study on simulated data which, while impressively accurately reproducing the physics in honest data collected by experimentalists, is not the same as a calculation, something that you the theorist completely control and understand all approximations that are employed in producing a result.  So all I could do was mumble that yes, these observable quantities are calculable and that their performance on simulation motivated doing so, which was met with curt nod, a contemplative frown, and an extended whispered comment to their neighbor while I continued.  After the final slide, there were a few more questions here and there from people who wanted to know how this hammer would work with their nail, to which all I could respond was a reiteration of the points made in the talk, that this technique was designed to isolate the physics of the background and that the physics of their signal sounded rather distinct.  Over espressos, my seated neighbor, a senior theorist just arrived in Florence from his home institution of Fermilab, noticed who I was enough to thank me for the nice talk, and back in our office, my collaborator and roommate for these two weeks picked apart the answers to the fielded questions, but remained silent about my presentation.  That seemed good enough to give myself a passing grade.

400 years ago, the data were there, Tycho Brahe’s unrivaled astrophysical records, Johannes Kepler’s first quantitative relationships of planetary motion, and Galileo’s direct observation of new heavenly bodies that neither orbited the Earth nor the Sun, and the problem was to establish the simple, organizing principle to describe all of it logically, to cast off millennia of magic and mysticism.  The centuries that followed definitively transformed these enlightened, humanist endeavors from the nebulous realm of natural philosophy to rigorous, empirical physics. Increasingly, predictions required revolutions in pure mathematics for their formulation, from the Hookeian and Newtonian inverse square law of universal gravitation, to giant leaps away from forces and toward Lagrangians and Hamiltonians that marked baby steps to quantum mechanics, to finally Einsteinian relativity which is and has remained the most wide-reaching and powerful language of the universe’s dynamics at large.  This unbroken scientific lineage, from the early apostles to its contemporary priesthood, still plumbs its depths for riches and ever draws up surprises preventing stagnation and dogma, producing new paradigms from black holes, to dark matter, to accelerated cosmic expansion, the new mysteries to be understood.

This week as representing a selected sample of particle physics was nearly a perfect mirror image, inverted left to right, with opposite problems of data and theory.  The theory of particle physics as encapsulated in the Standard Model was effectively complete in the 1970s, and since some details have been added, masses of discovered particles and the like, or its predictions shored up with increasing precision.  Simply knowing the equations of nature does not mean that one knows all of its solutions, so many surprises have popped up along the way, though only, again and again, to be observed in experiment exactly as predicted.  Naturally, some gaps have been identified between observations and theory, though our increasingly sophisticated mathematical formulation enables an immediate remedy or patch that is sufficient for current experiments and can be improved in the future.  The lynchpin of the Standard Model was the Higgs boson, now approaching its 50th theoretical birthday though yet to be delivered in the data, but this was merely a matter of time, as its gestation in the LHC was surely to complete soon and already there was gossip that telling bumps had been seen in the most important plots.

Theorists, instead of called on to unify an embarrassment of experimental riches, were set to questioning the mathematical edifice of the entire field, seeking in the cracks and crevices for something, anything, that seemed awry, that had not been sufficiently tested and validated in the past.  The focus had turned most narrowly on the Higgs itself, not if it existed which was a given, but rather on if it actually was consistently described within the Standard Model.  The Higgs is an outlier out of all the known fundamental particles, the sole particle that has no spin, completely featureless under rotations, and for those with a predilection to pessimism can be seen as an unassailable complication.  The optimist’s natural solution was then to look beyond the Standard Model, for more and more exotic fields and particles and mechanisms that left experimental signatures, things like extra dimensions of space or symmetries that inextricably connected the known to a novel unknown, which gave experimentalists an ever increasing list of theorist’s laundry to search for.  The experimental update talks this week were more and more bounds, 95% confidence that nothing like the theorists’ collective imaginings existed, but ever onward went theorists, countering with talks of their own with another theory beyond the Standard Model that just, conveniently, technically, evaded these bounds.

This miniature conference’s banquet was a kilometer further up and into the hills south of Florence, a short pilgrimage along the serpentine roads that were by now late in the day devoid of traffic except for our dozens-numbered group, utilizing the entire space that lay between the stone walls.  Mid-week, the trattoria was empty too, and we ducked under salami, fuzzy white with penicillin and suspended from the ceiling by thin ropes, and passed into the dining room, half of which was usual four-tops sprinkled about and in the other half was set two rows of tables extending from the entrance stairs to the broad windows.  Wine was poured and mingling continued with most gathered around the twilit view, set at the top of an olive orchard, and far to the left and right, the arms of the ridge-top framed the scene, with its fingertips capped with sandstone villas hidden amongst the cypress and crowned with terracotta tiles.  Gently encouraged to both find a seat and to top off our neighbor’s glass in preparation for the antipasto, our hosts had gathered at the far end of the table to lead us in a toast, a secular, scientific prayer, to be sent forth from the week of conversations and arguments and insights and out into the world.

Part 4

A couple of weeks earlier, before traveling to Europe, I had taken the short flight down the California coast to visit UC Irvine to present a research seminar.  The theoretical physics group there always worked to load their fall quarter seminar series with a number of relatively local graduate students, supporting that year’s defending crop during application season to beef up their CVs and provide a friendly, unprejudiced audience for practice.  As physics questions and answers died down on the drive from campus to dinner, my hosts asked if I had other travel planned and I responded that I would be visiting Florence for the first time.  Recommendations rained on me from the driver’s seat, galleries and salons and paintings that were strictly unignorable, experiences that were requirements of an enlightened education on Western civilization, or tended sculpture gardens that immersed one into the classical Florence of the Romans.  Amongst this barrage of nostalgia, I mentioned that I was particularly interested in the trip because I had read La Divina Commedia that summer, but any further elaboration on my part was drowned out by condolences, anecdotes of excruciating intellectual suffering through Inferno in high school, and never mustering up the interest to climb Purgatorio nor to reach Paradiso.  While they droned on, I meekly eked out, “I liked it.”

Looking up from the basin, in white with the blessed water streaming over his forehead in cadence with the gentle prayer, Dante would have seen the gothic mosaic ceiling, a golden backdrop on which the ordered hierarchy of the heavens was portrayed.  His beautiful San Giovanni was the baptistry of the city for nearly a millennium, hundreds of years older than the extant Duomo, and thick with Christian numerology from its eight sides to the four levels of the dead to the seven folds on which the Christ rested.  Dante would have walked up and down the hills of Oltrarno, around the area designated as Piazzale Michelangelo and adjacent to the colonia felina protetta, slouching up the stone steps toward the Basilica of San Miniato al Monte like the souls on Mount Purgatory, whose reference from Canto XII of Purgatorio is now etched in stone.  Exiled from his beloved home under penalty of death, Dante completed Comedìa as a nomad, wandering city-states of northern Italy, until eternally resting in Ravenna.  Only once formally pardoned by the city five centuries after his death was a memorial constructed, an empty tomb in Santa Croce among the filled tombs of Florentine peers, Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, but his statue, shrouded and glaring, adorned with the classical laurel wreath, turns its back on the basilica.

My wanderings around the city this weekend led me through the Uffizi and its vast collection of pre-Renaissance religious art, where baby Jesus’s chubby and cherubic body with the clean-shaven face of a grown man was carried aloft by His Mother in the center panel of a two-dimensional tryptic, choirs of saints merely stacked upon one another to either side. Then, through the Accademia and into the hall lined by prisoners locked for now five centuries in marble, never set free by their jailer, and framing David, tall, muscular, masculine, illuminated from above and front by a skylight that seemed to hold him aloft, staring off toward the enemy at the horizon.  The pedestrian-only paths and piazzas were thick with canopy tents, sheltering vendor after vendor displaying wines, oils, jellies, or honeys from the threat of a mid-autumn rain, and from where I purchased a red leather-bound journal, deeply stamped with the giaggiolo on the cushioned cover, for my girlfriend.  Exhausted from the morning’s excursion, I retreated to the city’s most venerated gelateria, recharging for the afternoon with a cup filled with a scoop each of black sesame and lemon.

The remainder of the day was devoted to the Museo Galileo, a science museum especially dedicated to celebrating the birth of natural philosophy during the Enlightenment, led of course by Galileo but financed for generations by the House of Medici and for whom many of the artifacts were created to impress.  There were beautifully elaborate ramps, carved out of a piece of mahogany, with a small channel in which a steel ball could roll and toll small bells spaced at ever increasing intervals that would chime with fixed meter as the ball accelerated.  There were a pair of ramps to demonstrate the solution to the brachistochrone problem, that the shape on which a ball should travel to reach a destination displaced laterally and below its origin in the shortest time is on a cycloid, the path traced out by a pebble wedged in the tracks of a tire as it rolls on level ground, and not on a diagonal.  There were astrolabes on astrolabes, some exploded to show in detail the mechanisms, golden sextants likely mostly practically useless on the open sea but would complement the decor in a sitting room, and maps and both terrestrial and celestial globes including an extravagant armillary sphere that tracks Aristotelian and Ptolemyan epicyles of hundreds of bodies in the firmament, all surfaces richly covered in gold leaf with each of the Zodiac delicately painted on the ecliptic cycle and all of this universe held aloft by the heads of four sirens.

As a scientist, the most intriguing pieces were small, hollow metal spheres, the size of a modern-day baseball, with a single hole with tight-fitting cap, and every one of the dozens in the collection were lightly dented on the side opposite the opening.  Experimentation in the mid-second millennium was rather crude but nevertheless effective, as the curious developed a consistent logical framework from the ground up for establishing with certainty the mysterious hows of nature.  A particularly visceral empirical technique for determining the dependence of a body’s energy of motion on its speed was to launch a solid metal ball into a wall of clay and measure the depth of the resulting crater.  By doubling the speed of the ball by, say, increasing the tension of a bowstring and thereby increasing the pull weight on the bow, the ball would penetrate the clay four times deeper, evidence of a squared relationship between speed and energy of motion.  These now-hollow spheres were of similar simplicity, once filled to the brim with water and capped off, but then thrown to the ground or some other hard surface.  The hypothesis was that, as long as there was nearly no air in the sphere, the ability or inability to dent the sphere would be directly proportional to the compressibility of water as a dent would necessarily decrease its volume.  Water, it turns out, is extremely challenging to compress, to which the minimal denting testified.

The gems, however, in the museum’s collection crown were Galilean relics set in an oval room with an alabaster marble bust carved only years after its sitter’s death at its center, the scientist gazing right and clutching his inventions of the geometric and military compass and telescope tight to the robes of his chest.  A few second-class relics were found here, original telescopes and objective lenses through which he first observed the four largest Jovian moons, and subsequently initiated the tradition of naming heavenly objects after patrons, the inversion of the telescope into the compound microscope for viewing the miniature universe, and original compasses presented to the Medicis. Numerous third-class relics filled out the shelves behind glass, items created by students of Galileo or improved designs of his inventions in the generations that followed.  Not to be overshadowed by the reliquary of the Duomo which housed the finger that John the Baptist pointed while declaring Agnus Dei, here too was the middle finger of Galileo’s right hand, which, allowing an anachronistic mythology and provenance, was used to tell off Pope Urban VIII in Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo.

Part 3

Little of the workshop was planned in advance, the idea being that spontaneity was a spark vital for the germination of new ideas, and anyway the nature of the highly fluctuating attendance week-by-week and day-by-day, often decided at the last minute, prevented firm scheduling of a speaker at the time of invitation.  Instead, the talk in a few days time was assigned on a volunteer basis, and if that failed, with gentle suggestions during the lunch hour, when everyone chatted convivially and any barriers to acceptance had been lowered by a couple glasses of wine.  There was yet one vacancy in the calendar on Monday, and my flatmate and I sat side by side, across the table from one of the organizers when the question was asked.  We had, starting about a year ago, collaborated on a project which ultimately lead to a publication that spring that had received an encouraging response from the community as an original way to look at a problem in collider physics.  In the months since, I presented talks on this work at topical conferences and for small group seminars and as a consequence had honed my presentation, while my flatmate had avoided public speaking, though attended much the same conferences I had, and so I interpreted this as tacit approval to agree to be the one to fill the hour on Monday.

As the mid-afternoon doldrums hit, we filtered up to the dining room again, and the few that had arrived before us were already deep in lively debate of the politics of one country or another.  This was Italy and this was espresso time, and I joined out of external social pressure rather than a love or need of coffee, which, before this week, I had drank of very little.  The air of the room was heavy with the stench of burnt beans atomized into steam and expelled from the machine into beige plastic demitasse, and I joined the queue, then walked to an open seat bearing the drink and a stick packet of sugar, the only way that I could stomach it.  A whole packet of sugar for one shot of espresso rendered what was in the cup thick and syrupy and I was able, just, to maintain a straight face while I sipped, but needed the strength of all my faculties to do so, and did not engage in the conversation.  Every day I did this, and every day about 30 minutes later, jitters would take over and I would crash, humorous head-on-keyboard style, slumped in my chair for a nap before I could wrest control from this vile drink.  Convinced that this was the fault of the coffee, I swore off the stuff when I returned home, ordering a hot chocolate while my girlfriend ordered a latte, and only minimally engaged with it when I would return to Europe.  Years later, when I had come to adore black, unadulterated pour-over coffee for its therapeutic properties to children screaming at hours of the day I had previously been unaware existed, it finally dawned on me that my issues with Italian espresso had not been the espresso at all, but the sugar.

My Ph.D. advisor was a highly cultured, worldly individual, known far and wide by his universally-adopted textbook on quantum field theory, often telling a story of visiting a women’s college in Tokyo where he was to be met at the subway station by his hosts, but not informed how he would recognize them.  Off the platform and up the stairs he went, and there were three young women, broadly smiling, each proudly bearing a copy of his book.  After physics, it seemed the one thing of which he was most knowledgable was opera, often making obscure allusions to some egregious betrayal in aria during a physics seminar that was typically met with silent confusion by the rest of the audience.  I had accompanied him on a number of conference road trips up and down the West Coast, and one particularly memorable drive was on the 9 hour trek to Eugene, weaving up Siskiyou Pass in a pounding late winter rainstorm, his lead foot accelerating his VW Golf past 85 miles per hour, and Aida blasting at near pain volumes, hands off the wheel conducting the orchestra, and explaining the minutiae of the stage and how the tenor and soprano were finally together, forever.  Though not in Florence for this conference, he had visited the Institute a number of times previous, and before I left his only recommendation was that I climb the dome.

Out of the apartment before 7:30 am, my flatmate and I walked downhill, backs to the Institute, for a small adventure before we set to work.  The physicist desires to explain the universe in a limited set of mathematical equations, which require a logical structure and repeatability, but such a strict reductionist approach, confining the universe to a box with a pretty bow, is but a few hundred years old and for millennia prior, people still erected buildings and bridges that yet stand, though Newton’s laws were never employed because they did not yet exist.  Some structures are perhaps not so impressive from our modern view, while others, such as the pyramids or the henges, are miracles though only because we implicitly and unfairly limit the intelligence and ingenuity of our predecessors.  A dome is another wonder, masses on masses that curve and extend over nothing, and as the size of the dome grows so do the lateral forces, until beyond some point where it would collapse, the sides exploding outward and the crown crashing inward.  A simple modern solution would be to provide extra support, trusses underneath or buttresses outside, but both significantly undermine the awe, which is an especially crucial quality if you are contracted to build the world’s largest cathedral.  After the eighth bell’s toll, the small wooden door at the side, under a mosaic of the Annunciation, a genuflecting Gabriel and the dove presenting to Mary, opened and we started the climb up and into Brunelleschi’s cupola.

The stairs immediately ascend, spiraling up an inner wall marked by regular balistrarias, tracking progress as windows of buildings across the piazza, then roofs, then the blue sky become visible, with occasional rest in a vestibule that housed the dusty statues of some old popes or holy men.  The way first opens to the interior of the cathedral, 70 meters above the altar, to a walkway that semi-circumnavigates the base of the dome and provides an intimate perspective up into the insatiable belly of Satan and some of the damned in the process of degloving themselves; Jesus is, however, a bit further up and opposite the path.  Then plunging back into the dim corridor comes the two domes and the genius of Brunelleschi.  On the right, a shallower, internal structure built of bricks herringboned together for strength and then cemented over that supported the external structure on the left, high, peaked, and magnificently bricked, the gem of the city, though itself fragile.  Two domes, individually either weak or simple, together doing what neither could alone, and solving the problem through pure intuition.  Now, out the top we walked and around the lanterna, well over 100 meters above the square, shirts stuck to skin with sweat, and took a few pictures, but were soon descending, as the Institute lay 45 minutes and another 100 meter vertical climb ahead.

That my simple, American stomach vehemently requested the day’s last nourishment before, say, 9 pm was advantageous when focused and directed toward a specific goal.  At the time, the top-rated restaurant in all of Florence on some popular, community-driven website was a pizza place, a single, small room situated in a corner of a building in Oltrarno.  By opening at 7 pm, there was only a short line at the entrance door, off the main street behind a row of bollards, where the minimal menu of half a dozen pizza options hung and we soon shuffled in, ordered, and waited at one of the three stand-up tables, great glass disks set on wooden barrels with bills, coins, and tickets squeezed between.  Simultaneous with our order, a pizzaiolo scraped up one of the poofy, proofed dough balls, stretched it with his knuckles, and then spun and twirled it in the air, and by the time we reached our table, the crust had already been dressed with crushed San Marzanos, calabrese sausage, and pinches of the creamy burrata and then slid into the wood-fire oven.  After but a few sips of Moretti, the pizzas, cheese still bubbling and mottled with charred spots like miniature mountains wearing a light dusting of white flecks of flour like snow on their summits, were placed in front of us and devoured, sounds of the multiplying orders and shouts from the kitchen drowned out by the divine pie.  By 7:15, we stepped out of the dining room, now shoulder-to-shoulder standing room only, and navigated the bunches on the sidewalk, a pizza box held aloft between each pair, and set to rejoin the passeggiata, just as night overwhelmed twilight.

Part 2

The sun had arisen, but long, sharp shadows of trees and boutique bed & breakfasts were still cast across this imperial hill’s broad boulevard, and at its zenith, the cloudless sky wore a navy mantle and ushered in the morning with fall’s dry, crisp bite.  The sidewalk, from our apartment, was set above the road by a minimal curb and bounded from the left by a low retaining wall from where olives, cypresses, and pines reached out as a cover, and as we walked up, the sidewalk narrowed and narrowed until reaching a point where a single stone brick was pinched between the road and wall.  Its full width was restored by the first major intersection and beyond the road lay as the aisle entrance to an all-female boarding school, in a palace once controlled by the Medici and later a gift to Napoleon’s sister, guarded by lions in repose and who kept a watchful eye on Atlas bearing the weight of the world.  The path swept to the east around the great lawn and onto a one-lane road with a foot or so of shoulder off the white line, fenced in by stone barriers that extended above my head.  At a sharp, blind corner was the pedestrian back gate that opened to a drive, exclusively for the use of authorized vehicles, most of which would be going to the observatory further along, but once around the side, stairs led us up, through the grand wooden door, and into the Institute.

The first order of business was the usual check-in procedures, office keys, the name tag, the welcome packet with maps, recommendations for local attractions, and wireless internet instructions, and signing a form to acknowledge that you would receive some minimal reimbursement.  Then we were led on an abbreviated tour with the most important stop first, the dining room and espresso machine, but then past the lecture hall where all talks would take place, blackboards and projection screens at the front, and a grand wooden desk facing stadium rows in the now-familiar European style of chairs and desks continuously extending from one set of aisle stairs to the other, then the central cloister utilized heavily for conversations and cigarettes at breaks, and then finally to our shared office on the lower floor, a couple of desks with a single blackboard and a window whose views to the sky were mostly blocked by dense bows of a large tree.  As we set to extracting computers and outlet adapters, the secretary off-handedly mentioned that if we wanted lunch, we would have to send her the order by 10 am.  I wanted lunch and the risotto sounded decent enough, so I emailed my order immediately after she left us alone, to assist another newcomer.

It is so beyond cliché that the food in Italy is spectacular, Julia Roberts having traveled there exclusively for the food the year previous, that I simply could not comprehend the notion of food that transcended anything my, admittedly, simple and vulgar palette had experienced.  Additionally, these lunches cost only a handful of Euros, so I was certain to be disappointed in the quality or quantity, and more likely both, and then I would be hungry until late, late at night, every day for the next two weeks.  When noon arrived, we joined the procession of attendees that had diffused from their offices to the dining room where stacks of clear plastic clamshells, steam quickly condensing and fogging the view of the food inside, were placed and sat ourselves down with plastic utensils.  One spoonful was mind-altering, an elevation and clearness of soul to risotto ecstasy, creamy but with a bright, funky bite of aged Parmigiano Reggiano, and mouthful after mouthful seemed to do little to empty the dish, and on and on went this heightened bliss, the entire room in utter silence save clicks of plastic on plastic.  I ordered the risotto every week day I was at the Institute, and only once was lunch merely adequate, a mundane, terrestrial experience, the day when all of the staff were on holiday and nearly all of Italy was closed down, November 1, All Saints’ Day, when we couldn’t order from the Institute anyway.

The rather awkward thing about this was that November 1 was the second day of the workshop, so the lights were off when we arrived at the Institute, no talks were scheduled, and hardly anyone else made the trek up the hill that morning.  This was, then, a good excuse to leave early at midday to find lunch first, but this required walking up, down, and around roads throughout Oltrarno searching for anything that was possibly open, until finally finding an alimentare with a passable pasta al forno that I am sure had been sitting and drying out in the glass warming case for a couple of hours. Nourished nevertheless, our first destination was Piazzale Michelangelo, a grand square elevated above the river featuring a bronze cast David amongst the parked cars and hawkers squatting over their blankets covered in worthless thin plastic tchotchkes of the nude warrior lining the railing.  The side parallel to the Arno was stacked, shoulder to shoulder, with tourists ingesting the view, with the Duomo, Florence’s cathedral topped with Brunelleschi’s terracotta tiled dome, the first since antiquity’s Pantheon and the largest until Michelangelo’s at St. Peter’s, flanked on the left by the Vecchios, both Palazzo and Ponte, and on the right by Santa Croce and the city’s Great Synagogue with its contrasting turquoise dome.  Once we had drunk our fill, we continued downhill, past the stairs bounded by a feral cat sanctuary, through the archway in the inner city walls, and across a bridge into the heart of the old city.

I was a reasonably observant, but perhaps not wholeheartedly devout, Catholic, and my flatmate had been baptized though had long since enjoyed the liberation of practical atheism, but had still, begrudgingly, agreed to join me on the immersive cultural excursion to the one activity that was definitely open and accepting today.  Though a holy day of obligation in the country principally associated by its relationship with the Church, pews were only prepared for the mass in tight rows under the apse, encircling the altar, a long, echoing walk from the Duomo’s arch doors.  To maintain its empyreal reverence, the heart of the cathedral was cordoned off during open visiting hours, keeping casual sightseers to the periphery, close to the tombs or statues or 1€ votive candles to implore Mary’s intercession, and anyway the austere ceiling of the nave was whitewashed, accented by a few windows, but nothing much to look at.  However, for a mass or adoration, the faithful genuflected directly under the mural of the Last Judgement, a cosmic Dantean vision of the punishments of sinners and rewards of the saints, Jesus illuminated by the rays of the sun, seated under the banner carried aloft by a seraph and bearing Pilate’s judgement “ECCE HOMO”, and smaller, opposite, though grotesquely more engaging to the eye was Satan, horned, wings menacingly stretched, in the process of devouring two lost souls while the ranks of his demons set to torturing others in curiously evil ways with tridents or molten metal rods.  My gaze often drifted domeward as the words were Italian, but the order of mass was familiar, so I understood little save E con il tuo spirito, whose English transliteration had just recently replaced the response “And also with you,” ingrained into every American Catholic born since Vatican II. 

Part 1

Our host had risen and was tinkling his glass in which he had generously poured from one of the wicker fiasco chianti bottles, which had been placed with such a density on the long tables that no more than two people were anticipated to finish one.  The dining room fell silent and a toast was made to the frontier that all of us gathered were now exploring together, pushing and testing and probing, to be the first to find a loose brick or a cracked foundation, anything that would suggest that something deeper and simpler lay below.  A toast was made to the next generation, those who would carry the field into the future, buoyed by the bounty of riches yet to be delivered by the Large Hadron Collider, but with an unwavering faith all believed them to be there, extending an unbroken line of discoveries in the increasingly subatomic realm beginning with the nucleus a century ago.  The toast’s valediction reached back through time, the determined and certain spirit embodied by those present was reminiscent of another, a saint of saints in physics, who had refused to recant approaching the heresy of understanding the heavens that could now be seen and nearly touched.  Our host turned and raised his glass toward the entrance of the restaurant, mere feet across the cobblestone road, to a bust in a relief in the wall of the apartment, set above olive orchards and with a commanding view over the valley, where under house arrest Galileo had lived his final days.

In November 2011, the LHC had only been collecting data for about a year and a half, but the deadline for applications was six months earlier and the planning and approval was earlier still, so it was optimistic to painfully idealistic to title a conference “Interpreting LHC Discoveries.”  To overstate the hype and anticipation within particle physics for honest data at higher energies and more of it is impossible, as the dearth of discoveries in collider physics had now stretched to 15 years since the top quark revealed itself in the experiments at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron in 1995.  The Tevatron had just shut down while the Large Electron-Positron Collider at CERN, which had occupied the ring of the current LHC, had been shuttered for a decade which mostly left theorists unchecked to dream up anything and everything that could be measured, and even more that could not.  The primary motivation for all of this work was the still elusive Higgs boson, conjured up in the early 1960s, but had yet to be observed, with more and more models introduced to explain the properties of the Higgs, extra dimensions of space, new symmetries, or new interactions, all of which required dozens and dozens of new particles to support the edifice.  These ideas were simply too beautiful for Nature to ignore, went the argument, so once the LHC was turned on, the experiments would light up like a Christmas tree, giving experimentalists more than a life’s worth of work to interpret and earning theorists their deserved Nobel Prizes.  By November 2011, there had been no discoveries by the LHC.

This reality did nothing to dampen enthusiasm or reduce participation in the conference, though “Interpreting Discoveries” was almost assuredly not the reason most people attended.  Five years earlier, the Italian government and the University of Florence created a new institute in Arcetri, an ancient lecture hall repurposed with a modern, glass-walled wing and numerous offices, set at the top of a rolling Tuscan hill.  It was named in honor of Galileo Galilei and bore the street address of another Italian native son, Largo Enrico Fermi, who had taught at the University for a few years.  Anyone wishing to visit would have to stay a minimum of two weeks of a month-long workshop, with a seminar by a visitor every couple of days and a week-long conference in the middle to focus discussions and to ostensibly start a collaboration that the generous resources and idyllic surroundings provided.  People that came to this conference did so because they could spend weeks in Florence, paid for by a discretionary travel budget and with some requisite physics distractions, but could carpool to Siena or bus to a Sangiovese vineyard tour or stay local and simply enjoy Donatello or Botticelli or Michelangelo in their home.  

That was, anyway, my reason.  Still a graduate student, I didn’t expect to be the one to lead this charge, but it would be an excellent opportunity to meet more big names in the field and I had never been to Italy.  In the spring, I had won a travel award through an NSF-sponsored initiative to support graduate and post-doctoral theorists, for efforts relating to the LHC, which had been, perhaps inauspiciously, modeled after a similar program from 20 years earlier for the Superconducting Super Collider.  This permitted at least the perception of a relative freedom for travel compared to my peers, though the $2500 award was drained completely once I had purchased plane tickets, reserved an apartment for two weeks, and paid for the workshop registration.  Nevertheless, my advisor and the theory leader at SLAC were both pleased that the group’s budget would be relieved of at least one traveler, as three other graduate students and two faculty would also be finding their way to Florence.

I was feeling my way around a ticket machine in Stazione Termini, Rome’s central train station, upon arriving in Italy after a short visit to a friend and to give a talk in Amsterdam, and the hesitation with which I pressed buttons searching for “English” and my suitcase were obvious enough marks that I was not local.  A man who apparently hustled here, loitering about the ticket machines searching for prey like me, descended and took charge, asking my destination and rapidly producing a ticket for the next departing express.  I would have eventually figured it out, but was grateful for the help, and reflexively passed over a 5€ bill but later agonized over it as other travelers might be more desperate and exploited than I had been.  The decision to travel through Rome and then train was unorthodox and probably not recommended as there were plenty of flights throughout Europe to Florence, but the 90 minute ride, from the blocks of high-rise apartment projects of modern insulae as we pulled out of the station, then accelerated through the sweeping farms that lay fallow for the season or green with stalks of wheat, then slowed as towering cypresses punctuated the drawing twilight, was a meditative preface to my stay.

The tracks leading into Santa Maria Novella, the central train station and named after the adjacent basilica, was the sole puncture in Florence’s ring road, built on the demolished ruins of its ancient fortified walls.  I purposefully passed the waiting taxis, for some reason at the time I refused any transportation except by foot within a European city, and set off with my printed map to walk the two miles to my fortnight flat.  The path I chose was meandering, one among the many out for the evening’s passeggiata, ensuring that I hit all of the major sites in their dramatically and artificially lit glory, the alabaster Carrara marble façade of the Duomo strikingly punctuated by greens and pinks with the saints wearing shadowed halos, the replica David in its original location, a bare sentry nearly three times my height for the Palazzo Vecchio, the gold and jewelry vendors on the Ponte Vecchio closed, guarded by the watchful eye of the bust of Cellini, and then into Oltrarno, below the commanding Palazzo Pitti, set back from the road and framing its stone piazza, then further along past the remote gate of the Boboli Gardens, and finally through the Porto Romana, formally leaving the safety of medieval Florence by its southernmost gate, the most magnificent of the extant sections of the 700 year old structure.  

My apartment lay just beyond the statue of Romulus and Remus suckling at the she-wolf, to a gate that divided a low stone wall and hedgerow, where I pressed the intercom.  Both on a Sunday and long past any reasonable time to be available at the management desk, I was lucky and surprised to hear an answer at the other end and the buzz of the bars unlocking, and while led up the stairs was informed that mere minutes later, already an hour or so after I claimed I would have arrived, I would have been shut out for the night.  The flat was a rather grand three rooms, ceilings extending to nearly 15 feet with the door opening into a common room with a couch and desk hardly fit for two computers, while the kitchen was set in a loft up a spiral staircase, and a bedroom with two twins and then a bathroom were connected in series.  My flatmate was a fellow student with whom I shared an office back home and had already claimed a bed and the desk where he was set to researching the local environs.  Both our stomachs had bore us long past a reasonable American suppertime, so, on the advice he had recently gained, we set out for dinner to a pizzeria, and waited until the lazy 7:30 pm plus a few minutes opening when the hostess and back of house had finished their animated and vociferous conversation.  With a due, we were the very first sat in the dining room, and were the only for nearly the next half hour.