Category: Manchester Chapter

Manchester

August 2nd, 2024

Part 3

By the end of the week, run ragged from the talks and discussions and conversations and department seminars and lunches out and closing pubs down, the group had a tradition of celebratory beers on a patio where graduate students, post-docs, and faculty would all imbibe. Among institutes throughout the world, those in northern England and Scotland had an especially strong affinity for such revelry, but something like this was generally widely practiced. Back home, my graduate office was located in a building technically owned by the Department of Energy, and no alcohol was allowed indoors, but the land it sat on was owned by the private university, which had no such restriction. However, in addition to finding the funds to support this habit that were not tied up by the government, these logistics were a bit too challenging to negotiate, but a group on the main campus had many opportunities including scotch whisky tasting on Thursdays, the nice stuff came out then so inclusion was by invite-only, and wine-and-cheese on Friday with an associated informal blackboard talk, with the wine provided by a professor and the cheese and bread and olives and chocolate purchased by first-year students who were then reimbursed. This is all to say that nothing like that exclusivity or snootiness was present here, and before we could even say hi, a cold beer was pulled from its ice bath, a church key was deployed, the bottle thrust into a hand, and we were sipping like locals.

I had gravitated to the circle of post-docs, with whom I hadn’t interacted much that week, but recognized from passing in hallways or sitting opposite to during one of the workshop’s talks, and now after 5 pm with beer flowing any opportunity to talk physics had passed, for this trip at least. Here I was first formally introduced to one post-doc, with hand shakes, names exchanged, a mini question-and-answer session about Manchester, northern England, and what to do on the weekend, and thought little of this mundane interaction until much later, after we both attended the same conferences, my post-doc advisor and I had confused ourselves for months over a paper he had written, and had been so bewildered that we invited him to join a collaboration. Later yet, we shared a windowless office for a year, starting more new projects, until I moved across town and he to a faculty position, but I visited a couple times for a seminar and a conference, continuing these conversations and flow of ideas. I met his students on various continents, brought my family for work and vacation when he had returned home to Italy, our kids playing together and nearly getting lost running around the narrow cobblestone streets, their squeals of delight in avoiding capture by a pursuing adult echoing off of the slate buildings. We exchanged emails with thoughts motivated by chats with experimentalists, scheduled remote meetings at odd hours to accommodate time zones to brainstorm projects or who might be potential collaborators, and wrote more and more papers. Likely all of this would have happened anyway, the worldwide community is small enough that our paths were destined to cross at some point, but it did, first, before destiny intervened.

Edale is little more than a few houses and a couple of pubs and inns, a small village located in the center of the Peak District and a lazy 45 minute train ride from Manchester. To his night-owl chagrin, I had convinced my grad school collaborator that an early start was absolutely necessary and we reached the stone footpath that veered off the one road before 10 am, crossing first over the gentle brook that had weaved down the dale from the plateau high above. The trail climbed out of the verdant valley and up through the purple heather and dun grasses worn by the shoulders of Kinder Scout, the highest point in the Peak District, but the pleasant summer weather of that week had retreated, the sky was grey and the only scenic views afforded were down directly into the valley and to the immediate neighboring ridge. Sheep, looking surprisingly threatening with thick coats of wool and some with horns beyond one and a half full curls, grazed freely, and once we had reached the top up a couple thousand feet of spongy, boggy trail, the path leveled. There, it wandered amongst the enormous, high, overhanging rocks, appearing as thin, stacked layers here or thrusting up, hewn as the angular, spiked faces of giants there, and many other hikers we saw rested on them or had picked a route to scramble or climb their faces. We had been led far back, walking west along the southern rim but the afternoon was already running away from us, so we turned south, down with the tumbling of the brook.

I selected a cider and my hiking companion a cask ale and, with the weather turning for the worse, we were alone at the outdoor tables in the intermittent mist at the inn mere feet from the train station to ensure we couldn’t miss our ride. Small, two-car intercity trains stopped here often, as roughly the halfway point between Manchester and Sheffield, so we watched one pass with our half-full pints raised but caught the next around 4 pm just as the honest, continuous rain began to fall. My own hiking exhaustion and subsequent 20 ounce sleeping aid biased my perception, but the car, seats filled and even a few passengers forced to stand, was tired and fatigued, people stared blankly out windows, when from behind, near the doors, a couple of guitars were tuned together, first strummed lightly, then joined by another, and then drums, and then a flute. English folk songs carried us on those tracks, kept us awake just enough to alight correctly at Manchester Picadilly, to stumble back to the university, to drag on down Oxford to where it becomes Wilmslow Road and find the first falafel place, ordering from the backlit menu above the register and finding the correct change to the pence buried in pockets, stomach telling you that two hadn’t been enough, but overruled by drooping shoulders now surrendering to sleep just as the hotel door shut, shoes came off, and head hit pillow.

No one in the community believed that faster-than-light neutrinos were detected, with Nobel Prize winners defending the century of experiments completely consistent with special relativity, and dozens of preprints that demonstrated that if they were faster than light, then faster-than-light electrons or muons should also be observed, or that there would be catastrophic energy losses from radiation that would almost instantly render the neutrinos slower-than-light. Externally, the story withered for months, but internally, the collaboration was seething, its reputation tarnishing and oxidizing by the day and as more independent results from other experiments were produced consistent with Einstein’s relativity and inconsistent with them. Finally, nearly six months later, the collaboration publicly resolved the issue: photographs taken as early as two weeks after that first seminar showed that there had been a loose cable that affected timing measurements and delayed the clock that established when the neutrinos had left CERN. Accounting for the delay, the neutrinos traveled at the expected speed, slower than light, and, though they retained their scientific skepticism throughout the whole affair, maintained a transparent inquisitive investigation, and never presented results with malicious intent, the spokesperson resigned their post effective immediately after the error was discovered.
Manchester

July 26th, 2024

Part 2

With only three external visitors, Mike, and a couple of his students and post-docs, the mini-workshop was planned to be exceedingly relaxed, with a few short talks planned each morning to inspire discussion throughout the day, scheduled around the university’s Welcome Week and Mike’s meetings with the new students. I was still in the process of the trial-by-fire learning experience of an exclusively student-led project, and so progress was slow, plodding, and only advanced through significant banging of one’s head on the problem, and the elegance and foresight of a broader, sweeping view, of simplifying and simplifying until that one, absolutely necessary calculation revealed itself was years in my future. Correspondingly, my talk was little modified from what I had said that spring, with a couple of slides at the end on some new thoughts and results that we thought were interesting enough to eventually motivate another paper on the topic. Talks by other students were of a similar spirit, more a collection of thoughts and overly detailed calculations tied together by some minimal and mostly glossed-over motivation, all of which had the consequence that rather little conversation sprouted during those free and open hours we had in the afternoon.

The benefit of a student’s talk as a student in the audience, however, is that even if the topic is well outside your own narrow area of burgeoning expertise, the limited elapsed time since starting graduate school means that the speaker simply cannot be that far ahead of your own education. So, while there may be missteps, incorrect conclusions, and a lack of context or historical citations, a talk by a student is relatively easy to follow. A talk by one local student fit this formula perfectly for me, as while I had attended a summer school, religiously went to seminars multiple times each week at home, and had started traveling to the relevant conferences, there really was no one locally where I was a student who was an expert in the field that I had started wading in to. I had maintained a permeable membrane to absorb any stray bit of knowledge and insight from whoever and wherever, but this osmotic approach can only possibly pick up on those things that have a non-zero concentration in your immediate vicinity. I had become well-versed in supersymmetry or models and motivation of dark matter, but those are of little help for interpreting and predicting the data in your face, that is mostly not anomalous and for which we have a solid theoretical framework. To see a student of a leader in this field work through a calculation, even if I couldn’t follow the motivation nor understood the import or impact of the outcome, provided a glimpse of a skeleton I could apply to my own work.

There is a limit to osmosis and diffusion if the concentration is too high, and nodding one’s head in assumed agreement with the point presented on the slides is actually not the way to learn. To his credit, Mike treated all of us, roughly 20 years his junior, as colleagues, peers, who had years and years of calculations in their past, who had seen the strange but non-pathological circumstances under which expectations fail, and had been confused enough over the past decade that they devoted their careers to understanding it. Words I had never heard before were tossed around, jargon but of a technical precision that simply their statement was a complete explanation and justification, sketches of diagrams were obvious enough to be translated losslessly into an exact mathematical expression, and their evaluation was clearly observed to be utterly inconsistent with the theorems or at least accepted lore on the topic. It wasn’t Mike’s duty to hold our hands through it all or shine a light along every step of the path, for, if he had, nothing of substance would have been covered in that half hour, it was my own responsibility to question and prod and challenge when I was confused and in that I had failed. For the rest of the week, I worked to start a conversation about next steps during lunch or passing by his office, presenting some blended collection of words I had heard him use in his talk, but once he had started to reply I was completely lost, and never understood it until much, much later, once I had honestly and humbly dived deep into books and papers.

Us three foreigners were nearly always left to our own devices for dinner, though Mike organized one group banquet early in the week that enabled more casual and personal introductions, and practically this meant asking around for recommendations or sleuthing on the internet ourselves for something that seemed good and, equally importantly, was cheap enough. The latter requirement wasn’t too challenging to accomplish as we had been supplied with a per diem upon arrival, a stack of bills totaling £300, and I had taken out the same amount from an ATM in the airport, so our palates were free to range throughout the city, from a bangers and mash place just off the University, to Indian and Pakistani food on Curry Mile, to more upscale Italian or steaks and Yorkshire pudding downtown. Just dinner was usually never enough and morning discussions or meetings never started before 10 am, so along with an evening stroll, we kept an eye out for a place to drink until the universal 11 pm close, and thankfully rather early in the visit stumbled across Marble Bar, a place that specialized in high gravity beers. On more than one night, we found ourselves seated at tables on the sidewalk, the last agreeable weather of summer clinging to life just for this week, pouring a Rochefort 10 or something similar into a snifter glass, and toasting to physics.

The process for applying to post-docs in theoretical physics had become standardized some years earlier, and shared some qualities with applying to graduate school, but diverged significantly in most respects. Similar to graduate school, a post-doc application required three letters of recommendation from faculty who could comment on your strengths as a researcher, and, ideally, one would want a letter to be able to provide specific, unique examples of your brilliance, cleverness, maturity, originality, and whatever other qualities make a good physicist, and definitely not just a bland, boilerplate regurgitation of vacuous platitudes. Also similar to graduate school, one must write a research statement, a personal account of who you think you are as a physicist, of your own identified strengths (probably a good idea to skip the weaknesses, however), and what questions and problems you are most interested to dive into in the future. The grad student-to-post-doc transition version of this statement would be significantly less banal than that of the undergrad-to-grad, because one actually has something meaningful to say with now a few honest years of research in the past. Beyond that, post-doc applications shared no qualities with grad school applications: applying for a post-doc is completely free of application fees, there is a near-universal application website so you and your letter writers only need to upload documents once, and, of course, there are no standardized tests. Application deadlines are also near-universal because the deadline for accepting an offer had been fixed by a common accord, at the time anyway, to January 7, to prevent the earlier and earlier creep of institutions strong-arming applicants to accept before all of their options were known.

Networking was the way that you received post-doc offers, and your network was represented by the people you selected as letter writers. One was, naturally, your Ph.D. advisor, who should have deep and far-reaching connections with groups around the world, as a famous physicist themself. I found another letter writer in my local institution, someone who was familiar with my work, having seen me give a talk or two and had served on the committee for my advancement to candidacy, but could also speak to a broader context and how my research would influence their community. After that, I had no obvious letter writers, as three letters from your own institution starts to smell of parochialism and lack of engagement with the wider world of physics, but I had a couple potential options to consider. One was a researcher at CERN who I had first met at a conference two years before, and had maintained a relationship through connecting my early grad school research to their current portfolio and we had just begun the initial stages of a collaboration. However, we had no results yet, and that early work hadn’t received much interest from the field, at least as measured by citation count. My other option, of someone who was familiar with work that had made an impact, that had seen me give a talk, and had even invited me to an all-expenses paid workshop, was Mike, and so, on one quieter afternoon, I gathered up my courage and dropped by his office to ask. He said yes.
Manchester

July 19th, 2024

Part 1

This live webstream presented results that were simply unbelievable, and not just unimaginable in the way that a first taste of a novel cuisine may be utterly alien to one’s sheltered tongue, but rather that there was no logical way they could be correct. To the experiment’s spokesperson’s credit, they didn’t believe it either, and yet here it was, and encouraged the community to make sense of it or to find the error in the analysis, but was completely transparent in the due diligence of tests and validations the experiment had done. Because this was CERN, news spread to popular media rapidly and seemed poised to dethrone the intrigue of hints of the Higgs boson as the lay person’s exposure to particle physics because headlines would now read “Einstein was Wrong”. By late morning, our host, Mike, cleared the afternoon of meetings as he now had a surprise interview with the BBC, as his colleague and the usual contact for discussion of anything that came from the world of particle physics was off filming an episode of a show in Mexico or some place. This was an extremely tall ask because what this experiment had done, producing a beam of ghostly neutrino particles at CERN in Geneva and then detecting them hundreds of kilometers away in a mine in central Italy, itself was easy enough to explain, but what they observed was not. These neutrinos had, miraculously, traveled from CERN to that mine faster than light.

My first presentation on a project of my own creation, independent of my PhD advisor, had occured the previous spring, at a conference hosted that year at Princeton University. The reception to my approach and insight to the problem I discussed in my talk, an already standard signal-versus-background discrimination problem in a field that just celebrated its third birthday, had been overwhelmingly engaging, if not totally positive at the time. At coffee breaks and over lunch, senior researchers approached me with insightful and uplifting questions, encouraging further work in this direction or wondering at what else it could be applied, while others had a more defensive or even aggressive strategy, brows furrowed and mouths frowning, testing for fail points or weaknesses or pointing out strengths of their technique that couldn’t possibly be strengths of mine. I would come to slowly learn through accumulating experience attending more conferences and presenting more talks, that these were simply representations of the personalities of the people asking questions, and not personal affronts. Part of the reason for these interactions was likely inspired by the fact that some motivation for this technique had come from rather off-axis, at least with respect to the established paradigm and linear progression of the field at the time, from a paper by string theorists a few years earlier who had reinterpreted some ancient results from the early days of the strong force, quantum chromodynamics, from their vantage point above the clouds. While my memory of the faces I saw in the audience during my talk is completely blank, at other talks and during the coffee breaks, I did see the senior author on that paper, faculty at the neighboring Institute of Advanced Study, and who was known far and wide by their singular first name: Juan.

Conferences such as these would have summary or review talks and the established approach was for some invited speaker, typically a well-known expert in the field or immediately adjacent, to discuss all of the results presented during the week and then to add some of their own criticism or insight into what next steps for each could be. The summary this week was presented by Mike, who rather legitimately claimed to perform the first such analysis in this field while he himself was a student, a full 17 years before it took off. Mike’s review of my talk was amazingly generous and positive, that the way that I had represented these particle physics events not traditionally, as points on a two-dimensional globe and the continents representing the correlated structure or substructure we had discussed all week, but rather as a one-dimensional curve representing all pairwise connections between particles, could be printed out for every event and posted on one’s wall or hung from a mobile and stared at, structure and substructure divined from this very distinct projection. Despite the now obvious connection and familiarity with my work, I was still too shy or timid to introduce myself to Mike, and instead departed the conference after the final talk quietly, walking to the train station alone, but carried this external enthusiasm as an internal badge of success and inspiration for continuing this work.

I was nevertheless still surprised a few months later when I was among the 20 or so recipients of an email from Mike inviting a random collection of people he had met at that conference to visit him, to spend his excess travel funds before they expired for a sort of mini, informal workshop. My immediate reply was yes, please, but received no reply for several weeks, and began to lose hope that such a trip would happen, or that so many more, and more important people, had replied earlier, and the offer had dried up. On the contrary, however, Mike emailed again, and only three of us had expressed interest, one of the two others was my fellow grad student collaborator on that project, but this mini-workshop would still happen, and offered the final week of September, days before the funds would vanish. So, I set to work organizing flights and hotels with his department administrator, and correspondingly worked to coordinate my trip with my collaborator, ensuring that we had an extra, non-work day to explore the area. Amusingly, my fiancée would be attending a very different conference a couple weeks later, but there was no way we could construct an itinerary that overlapped to meet there, so both of us traveled alone and apart to Manchester.

Manchester’s reputation and history within particle physics was legendary and the whole subatomic physics endeavor was initiated by Rutherford in his Mancunian laboratory scattering alpha particles on thin gold foil and subsequently discovering the structure of the atomic nucleus. Nearly a century later, the particle physics group had continued this legacy, though experimentalists collected data for probing the substructure of the proton, itself substructure of the nucleus, from the Large Hadron Collider and had not collided particles in the basement for decades, while theorists were leading experts on quantum chromodynamics, the theoretical foundation and explanation of the nucleus which had been formalized over 50 years after Rutherford. At the time, I amusingly had only experienced particle physics of the UK in northern England, with my first exposure to Durham during a visit in the previous year, which was another legendary department and group, but the setting could not be more different. Durham is a small medieval town in the rolling downs of the northeast whose thousand year old castle and towering cathedral sit on a peninsula protected on three sides by the looping River Wear, while much of the university lies on a wooded hill to the south. Red brick, street art, the rush of buses and cars and pedestrians, and a gritty industrial haze lingered in the lows of the urban valley bounded by the ridges of buildings as I walked along Oxford Road from my hotel room to the department, settling into my chair and desk for the week, adjacent to the vacant office of Brian Cox.

Category: Manchester Chapter

Manchester

Part 3

Manchester

Part 2

Manchester

Part 1