Category: South Korea Chapter

South Korea

December 13th, 2024

Part 6

As my heart decrescendoed and my vision returned, I noticed that I was far from alone anymore, a group of spry, gray-haired women all dressed head-to-toe identical in boots, multicolored paneling synthetic pants and jackets, all under broad sunhats and carried by the sounds of gossip, laughter, and the flam clicks of hiking poles marched past, and another group sat across the trail from me, with the only differences being their sex and relative velocity. The men eyed me with curiosity, back to the trail and holding my camera at arm’s length, and generously shared rice crackers and took my picture in front of the trail marker. Various peaks were now but short jaunts above this ridge, the spine of the dragon, and everywhere there was signage or an elevation marker, there would be some group of septuagenarians who would magnanimously thrust food into my face and kidnap my camera off of my shoulder, then insistently gesture to my mark in front of the interpretive board. The trail along the top was no easy going, typically bouldering on the knife edge or scrambling up a near shear rock face where a couple of bolts had been anchored many vertical feet apart, testing the limits of the definition of a non-technical foothold, and I found myself the slow one, their junior by four decades and passed by band of a half dozen where the trail was wide enough, the echos of their annyeoung haseyos soon abandoning me too, swallowed by the forest.

Four 20 year olds stood looking out into the clouds obscuring the valley floor, and the five of us were the only that I saw the entire hike that deviated from the official uniform, both by our relative youthfulness and my green t-shirt and shorts and their, each one of them, shirts of deep blue, home during summer break from the University of Michigan. They were coming up while I was now headed down to complete the loop, and further down more and more people were rushing up, hikers bubbling from the source, a pagoda just below the ridge. Hundreds were here, resting, snacking, or chatting, amongst the picnic tables, taking celebratory group pictures, or refilling water bottles, while from speakers above the amplified chant of a deep, booming voice lead prayers that were, it seemed, mostly ignored. With midday coming all too quickly and along with it the unbearable humidity, I lingered no longer than necessary to film the scene myself and to catch a final glimpse into the deep gorge under the high sun, then dodged beneath the canopy, beating on against the current that continued to flow steadily up, until the last boulder gave way to tarmac. My watch read 12:37 pm.

The park entrance was bustling, shopkeepers shouting across the road, hawking their soup or dumpling special, families eating under the canvas tents propped behind the registers in the food stalls, and children mining the piles of toys on a storefront sidewalk for that perfect water gun, remote control car, or plastic katana. Despite the animation and with no knowledge of Korean, there was nothing identifiable as a taxi stand, but just beyond the park gate, where I had been dropped off five hours before, was both a bus stop and an information kiosk so, accompanied by annyeong haseyo, I inquired about a cab back to Daejeon. The woman’s reply was clear, unambiguous, that the bus stop was directly behind me and the next bus would arrive in 20 minutes, and started augmenting a local road map with the transfers and bus numbers and intermediate stops, for which I was grateful, but I would greatly appreciate if she could please call a cab. No, a cab is too expensive she volleyed, and dug back in to how I would have to cross the street at the second transfer, but I insisted that a cab was perfectly fine, and on she continued, that I would see one bus pass before the bus I needed to catch, thank you, but really a cab, and would be dropped of a few blocks from the hotel which hopefully wouldn’t be inconvenient, but if it was, please, please, please, went my pleading, I am happy to pay for a cab. With a look of disgust and frustration, she put down her pen and picked up the receiver.

With the long drive back to Incheon and in my abhorrence for delayed inconveniences, I booked a ride on an excessively early shuttle bus and waited my turn to board in the orderly line at the stop, still deep in the darkness of night. Of course, the drive was uneventful, arriving with many hours to spare and the lack of a wait at customs provided no impedance, so I perused the shops to pass the time, picking up a ginseng tea for my wife as a souvenir. Now with only one fewer hour to wait, I settled in to a deep leather armchair in the United Lounge, where exclusively my yearly mileage and corresponding status provided entry, opened my computer and set to work replying to emails or polishing up the conclusions of a paper that we would soon post. The chores on the paper soon turned more intellectual, and I pulled out a pad of paper from my backpack and the ballpoint pen that was kept at the ready in my pocket and set to write some equations down and stare at them, to possibly divine some new connection or re-expression that illuminated the problem from a new angle. While pensively staring off at the lounge’s wood paneling, chin rested on the hand holding the pen, it slipped and landed tip first on my blaze orange shirt, rolling into my lap, and on my chest left an inky black line.
South Korea

December 6th, 2024

Part 5

My watch read 8:51 am. The wind through the open window of the cab was warm, comforting, just dry enough early in the morning to be refreshing, though the haze had settled and never left through the night. The paved road continued another kilometer from the parking lot and gate, first past a row of dark and shuttered vendor stalls, with only one or two out and sweeping or counting the till, many hours yet to greet the hordes, then into the forest and along a trickling stream bed, the formal, sacred entrance to the park through hongsalmun, one simple, staid, painted red and adorned by a small taegeuk, another smaller though much more intricate, with soaring storks set above roaring dragons and all amongst the green, blue, and red pattern familiar from the eaves of temples. More signage in Korean that I couldn’t read set rules and provided context for visiting the park, the accompanying pictures telling a complete enough story, the tall, stately Korean pines providing lumber for houses, while the nuts and pollen were widely used for food and in traditional medicine, warning of deer crossing roads, and a section of the park that was closed for the next 15 years and where camping, cooking, smoking, littering and making loud noises was strictly forbidden to protect the habitat of an endangered, endemic salamander. Where the pavement ended and the trail began, a broad, clear stone path that crawled up the valley, I checked my watch.

It is altogether too easy to get lost in the weeds in physics, to get so absorbed in the minutiae of some calculation, or to work for weeks on end to streamline some bit of code just to eke out 10% faster compute times. In many aspects of the profession, the rules are completely defined, and so you can take those rules and apply them to situations every so slightly distinct from others, and turn the crank, and keep turning and turning until some number pops out, or in other cases, you can even just apply the rules on simulated data and plot a whole distribution of points, one that has a bump over here and a deficit over there, and that is supposed to mean something and so in your paper you write some rhetoric to accompany the figure and claim victory in “understanding”. However, physics was always meant to be simple, even if the path to simplicity is long, tortuous, unilluminated, and with many dead ends or false intersections, and is structured around concepts, not exclusively equations. With new concepts, the cycle can repeat, slowly ratcheting up the mountain of knowledge through studying the details of an example and then another, identifying their common threads, then pulling them out to novel cases, and finally validating through prediction.

This had been the story in my subfield for several years now, with people drilling down on the rules, deeper and deeper into their own tiny pocket, seemingly becoming more disconnected from others who all attended the same conferences. Everyone had their darlings and to everyone else they were ugly, ad hoc, contrived, and meaningless debates would ensue over which was the “best”, but everyone had their own, private metric for measuring success and could always find some scenario in which they won by their own rules. The problem was that often any distinctions were only due to idiosyncrasies in the simulation, and not due to underlying, fundamental principles, and at any rate, experimental data would be the ultimate, dispassionate, unbiased arbiter. A few of us had begun to claw our way up out of the murky depths, and identify those handful of rules that became perfectly, exactly true in sensible limits, and away from those limits, still dominated the description of these physical systems. The beauty of working in asymptotic limits is that everything dramatically simplifies in such a way that any calculations are nearly superfluous, and we could see wide swaths of these techniques and procedures that had previously been host to the most bitter disagreements were actually identical in the limit, and differed most mildly in a realistic environment. Being so simple, we doubted ourselves, had no one really ever thought of this before?, but as test after test passed our uncertainty subsided and we earnestly set to writing a paper.

Set apart from the trees and shrubs and chirping birds was the trail, paved in large stones when the grade was shallow and stacked into stair steps where steep was unavoidable, an orderly human construction taming the chaos of nature. Up it went the mountain, completely devoid of deviation or switchbacks, exactly on the gradient of the slope, then as even the trees fell away due to the angle of repose of the scree, the trail went, and along with the stairs a handrail cemented into bedrock led the way and protected the hiker from the consequences of an errantly placed foot. I had past 100 vertical meters, then 200, then 300 from the trailhead, and heavier came the salty stinging sweat from my brow into my eyes, its cohesion adhering my shirt and pack firmly to my back, but still trusted my feet to keep the steady cadence left, right, left one stair at a time. Over 400 meters up, the false summits appeared where the hill briefly pulled away then disappeared and then another just behind it and on and on this went until I had passed 500 meters and my head grew light, darkness claimed my peripheral vision and the light that remained at the center was blurry and spotty, a crackling firework display within my retina, but my feet kept the tempo as the trees returned at the saddle below a few peaks where I slumped down for a breath and a drink of water, over 500 vertical meters in less than 2 kilometers of trail.
South Korea

November 29th, 2024

Part 4

At the word that we were to meet back here in one hour, I turned on my heel and set away through the packed streets, dodging shoulders, stuffed animals, and variegated arrays of “JonSport” backpacks, drawn toward the red and white spire that punched through the background of the neon signs that extended stories and stories above the pavement. Three hours by bus had landed us at Gyeongbokgung Palace for the mid-week break, an ancient site but continually restored to its imperial grandeur since the 1990s, brilliant lotus flowers set on fields of blue and green punctuating the free end of every ceiling beam, and the fat, gold Hanja script bowing slightly over the thresholds of each temple. The day had long since been hot and sticky, the masses of tourists and school groups resigned to the remaining cool that clung tightly under gateways and only braved venturing across the bare, open stone courtyard to reach the next shaded island, or to strike a pose amongst the explosion of pastels on the gabling. We had no formal tour, but were instructed by our self-appointed handler to maintain a rapid clip, determined to pass every structure and every wall and every moat if but for the few seconds required to depress a shutter and to listen for a word of what it was we were pointed at.

The ascent began once past Soong Eui Women’s College, a cluster of stately buildings etched into the hillside, where the winding road shook off its dashed centerline for slim, parallel bicycle and pedestrian paths and tucked itself into the thickening green canopy, and I banked left, glancing at the plaque map and up the first granite stair. Lunch awaited us outside the palace walls across boulevards lined with cute, anthropomorphized blue buses, around a statue of an enormous calligraphy brush sweeping a glossy circle onto its concrete pedestal, and into a pedestrian shopping district where I joined three others at a table adjacent to a restaurant’s peaceful interior garden. Positive reinforcement, gamsa hamnidas to bus drivers or annyeoung haseos from baristas, had encouraged my Korean, so I courageously asked the waiter for mul while the others searched through the menu. Complete apathy, no acknowledgement whatsoever, unblinking eyes and relaxed, open mouth responded, and again I said mul, and again the response was zombie-like, lifeless, no wheels turning behind the vacant stare. I could stand there and repeat myself all afternoon, but I resigned and said, in English, water, and something finally snapped, the waiter quickened and excitedly replied, “Oh mul!” When four full glasses arrived, we simply pointed to a few meals to share and raised all the fingers on one hand on the page with the pints of OB.

Thousands of steps lay before me, unrelenting and weaving up the hillside, passing synthetic cascades spilling into calm, shallow pools, kissing the decaying fortification then retreating back into the trees, and occasionally peaking through to the open sky at the vertex of a zigzag, progress tracked by the roofs of buildings now visible and those yet to be. The heart of the country lay bare, ripped from its chest and rent apart with the pieces, thousands on thousands of yellow ribbons tied to the hundreds of vertical metal poles, sandwich boards with prayers and drawings of a great lotus flower bearing the souls from the sea to heaven, and simple paper boats arranged in a grand flotilla floating on the grass, each with a toothpick mast but no sail. From its core, the tendrils of grief extended to the ideal point of boulevards, fluttering in the breeze on ropes hung from railings and on makeshift installations of bicycle wheels lashed together into a giant cracked eggshell. Only a month after 306 died in the sinking of the MV Sewol, outrage was directed all the way to the top, claims of incompetence and negligence, censorship and manipulation, and the golden blaze of city hall’s courtyard reflected back from the glass building and the hopes of 50 million rest in the assurance that it was transmitted through, too.

What a sight Seoul was from the summit of Namsan: the sounds of shoppers and buses and the stroboscopic lighting from advertisements on advertisements had already been filtered out through monochromatic high-rise sieve hundreds of feet below, replaced by the uncountable undulations of buildings that either disappeared into the haze miles away or abutted the verdant hills to the north, and an eery, lonesome breeze under which the conversations of 20 million were hidden. The Han river wriggled its way through the grey that itself had sloshed like a tsunami through the wide valley, low and quiet far away, rising then cresting as it approached Namsan, set far above as a refuge, and then crashing on its way toward the sea. N Seoul Tower reached another 230 meters to the sky behind me, with a single-file tail of tourists that weaved around the mountain’s summit waiting for their ride to the viewing platform, and as the spike near the heart of the city’s compass rose it was visible from anywhere, a waypoint for pedestrian dead-reckoning navigation. Some quick pictures was all the time I had, then a rushed descent retracing my path to the square where our group lazily waited, wandering in small circles, seated on benches, or chatting about the view from the top, easily accessible by a couple block walk from here and then hopping on the cable car.

The final two days of the conference ended much the same as it started, with lunches at locations strewn throughout Daejeon, including the local college’s canteen, and loud conversations over too many Dry Finish lagers after the sun had set. As I had no talk of my own to prepare for anymore, my attention to the remaining talks drifted as the weekend approached as I had arranged for an extra day of hiking in the nearby Gyeryongsan National Park, for which its kinked, rocky backbone ridges soaring 2,000 feet above the valleys resembled some unholy union of its eponym of a chicken and a dragon and bore the most qi of any mountain on the peninsula. I pored over trail maps, estimating potential elevation gains and optimal routes, reading reviews for the best viewpoints, and pieced together a three-transfer bus route from my hotel to the main gate, writing down the number of stops between transfers, on my laptop while at the front of the room there was pointing at the screen and some droning on about some other technique that could separate signal from noise. After the final talks, and after inadvertently lightening my burden by one badge, I thanked the host and casually mentioned the convoluted hiking plan for the following day. He was excited by this idea, for while he and the younger generation in general, apparently, rarely hiked, his parents found a trail every weekend, but vehemently refused to permit my bus plan to materialize. He took his notebook from his backpack and tore out a leaf of paper, writing directions to Gyeryongsan in Hangul for me to pass to a cab driver.

The brilliant red and embossed gold print menus were passed around to the eight of us that remained on the final evening, though rich in flowing Chinese script and lacking photos most of us could do nothing until a native speaker translated. Apparently, we had decided as a group that we had grown tired of Korean cuisine during the week, and so sought out a Chinese restaurant near the hotel that indulged our weary palettes. In hindsight this seemed rather unreasonable, but as the size of this group increased, so our collective ambition decreased and choices were limited to something on this side of the river, away from the hustle and bustle and breadth of options downtown. The dining room was quiet, empty, though dinner time on a Friday, but decorated extravagantly, exposed, knotty beams in the ceiling, marble and jade carvings in every niche along the walls, and an octet of high-backed leather seats arranged about each circular table. Before sitting down, before the waitress returned to inquire about our orders, the menu had been summarized into English and, as the ambiance suggested and the prices confirmed, this was an extremely nice restaurant where nothing was inexpensive. With harried shaking of heads and hurried pushing of chairs, we handed back the menus and searched for dinner elsewhere, somewhere where the house specialty wasn’t shark fin soup.
South Korea

November 22nd, 2024

Part 3

The convention center was but a short walk, and most of our time this week would be isolated to a moderately-sized room on the second floor, equipped with broad tables that were convenient for collaboration over computer screens, to install and work with the software that would be advertised in talks and introduced in interactive tutorial sessions. At its entrance, the local organizers had set a table with boxes filled with the standard welcome fare, name badges, wireless internet instructions, and a rather unruly queue had formed with those pushed up against the table saying then spelling then pointing at their name, and moving on with their handful of swag. The chair of the local organizers had attempted to stay afloat as the waves of attendees splashed up, but his efforts to bail out the boxes was failing, his concentration slipping, and as the crowd grew, his cheeks flushed and beads of sweat rolled down his temples. He had, however, brought his wife to help with dispersal, and she bore the surge head on, shouting loudly over the dozens of miniature conversations for order, and we snapped into a weak, crooked line, but single-file nonetheless. At my seat and still a few minutes before talks began, I pinned my badge to my shirt and looked through the things I had been handed now spread on the desk, one of which was a paper fan that I opened to reveal that the organizer’s wife had printed the name of the conference and year, and had written “Korea” in flowing script and signed in Hangul, and she had done this on the fans for all 80 attendees.

North of the river in Daejeon was rather isolated, the sole food options were depressing versions of Western dishes from commercial chain restaurants in strip malls, so each day at 12:30, as the morning session completed, we would stumble onto a couple of buses that dropped us off in a neighborhood downtown, at a mall with an expansive cafeteria, or for a barbecue restaurant on the tenth floor, or, on the first day, a pedestrian district with numerous noodle stalls. I, and several others, followed an organizer into the entrance of one stall, up a few steps to an elevated platform where we placed our shoes, and continued into a long back room with a low table and pillows evenly spaced along it. Negotiations between the waitress and the organizer commenced in Korean and the few soup options hastened ordering into a binary choice of vegetarian or not. In the short time I was able to arrange my knees into a sort of pretzel-fold parallel and ever slightly under the edge of the table, a bowl was thrust in front of me, a pair each of chopsticks and scissors balanced on the lip. Though still mid-May, the heat and humidity were solidly in midsummer form, and here was naengmyeon, Korean cold soup, barley noodles suspended in broth, much of which formed frozen, jagged peaks in the center. The need for chopsticks was obvious, and they doubled as ice picks, but the scissors only became apparent once you tried to draw out a mouthful of noodles, and kept pulling and pulling but only a single strand unwound the pile. Looking over to our organizer, he was now hosting a small tutorial, cutting up and then grabbing the now bite sized mounds, scissors and chopsticks working in harmony.

Buried in the weeds of the third footnote of a short paper on an unrelated topic was a claim that just felt wrong, that a quantity was incalculable within the context of the standard predictive framework of particle physics. Technically, their claim was correct, but it simply made no sense from the results of thousands of prior studies that had demonstrated that everything behaved as expected, so there must be some underlying reason that both these things could be true. This irritant lead my post-doc advisor and myself to establish its consequences in other situations, to slowly rise above this isolated example and map out the islands of confusion that bobbed in the sea of what we had, until recently, thought we knew. Higher up, we could see that those islands were not islands, but connected by causeways and sandbars and isthmuses and all related to one another, and with some more general understanding, I set to deep dives in dusty math textbooks in the dark aisles of the loneliest stacks in the library, but tool after tool merely churned the waters, failing to break through the surface. More chats at lunch and staring at equations on blackboards lifted us higher yet, and then, through the clouds, beyond the horizon, the tiniest glimpse of something peeked out, that we had been trapped on a two-dimensional surface like Square in Flatland, and that the answer spanned three, four, five, or more dimensions. Once we had ascended high enough, the solution was trivial: calculate in higher dimensions and then project down to answer the specific question of interest, and we demonstrated that it worked over and over and over in every situation we encountered. So we wrote up a paper.

My talk was rather unique amongst the week’s offerings, as I was neither presenting on the newest version of some open-source code for physics simulation nor was I asked to provide a general overview of some topic, to which the programs could be applied and tested. My invitation had come with carte blanche to talk about whatever of my research I wanted, and so I polished up a talk on that paper that was nearing a year old, modifying the motivation for the study appropriate for this audience, but resulted in consequences that had since produced a number of additional papers. For these simulations of the physics of particle collisions to make sense and believably represent Nature, there had been a 30 year old lore that there was a particular and restricted set of questions that one could ask of the synthetic data. For questions outside this set, there were models and assumptions with numerous parameters that, ultimately, would need to be fixed in comparison to experimental measurement. However, with my post-doc advisor, we had shown that the set of questions for which these simulations were robust was larger, much larger, than we had all been taught to believe, and these programs were unreasonably effective at describing physical phenomena far, far from the hypotheses of their justification and derivation. After questions had died down and I was gathering my things to move on to lunch, two senior researchers and founders of this conference approached me and apologized for spoiling the surprise because, while they could now easily write the narrative of my contributions and a pithy citation to nominate me for a new research award for advances in studying the strong nuclear force, they would need an updated version of my CV.
South Korea

November 15th, 2024

Part 2

On exiting customs and entering the arrivals hall, I noticed some familiar faces scattered about and others I did not recognize but who looked around shiftily, assessing the group of students huddled together and all wearing the same white t-shirt that we had been instructed to identify and follow. Our group became more well-defined as we shuffled forward, but to an outsider the only thing it seemed that we all had in common was that we were not Korean. Thankfully, the conference organizers had arranged for a few coaches to leave Incheon and take us the three hours to our hotel’s doorstep, and there was no worry about subway tickets, catching trains, and transferring buses, and we were led to the curb where one student placed our luggage in the undercarriage, another checked off the name written on the sheet immediately above a pointed finger, and we stepped on to find a seat. The exterior had been unassuming, it was just a bus, but the inside was identical in nearly every way to the one in which PSY jumped, wriggled, and thrusted while singing “Gangam Style,” with technicolor overhead lighting, quilted antimacassars thrown over the leather seats, and embroidered window draperies embellished with tassels. Only the disco ball and the Korean grannies, dancing uninhibitedly in the background, were missing.

The rest stop’s oasis was a long, squat building, filled to bursting with food stalls, shops, and cafés set beneath a restaurant on the upper floor, with illuminated neon signage for those that were open. The day, as marked by the sunlight scattered red through the horizon’s smog, was quickly becoming short, so few people were out and the half-full lot dripped cars back to the highway, set off on the final legs of their journeys. Korea is serious about driver attention and now our coach, just over an hour on, was required to pause for about 20 minutes, allowing us passengers our first deboarded glimpses of the country. I had simply stared agape through my window for the length of the drive thus far, watching the incessant march of the skinny, nearly-identical 40-odd story apartments that was only rarely broken by construction cranes and even taller unfinished structures, and here walked by the storefronts but only took a few pictures while attempting to divine a deeper meaning in the English names, like “Angel-in-us Coffee” and its ubiquitous winged theme. The lot was bordered by a cyclone fence and behind that any view was mostly obstructed by a berm, but the hill fell away near the oasis and a small tear had formed in the green windbreak privacy screen. A rural scene peeked through, hazy mountains in the distance, scooters crisscrossing the narrow gravel roads, and then directly below was a rice field, some shoots just emerging from the pierced black plastic, but not yet flooded for summer.

The profile of a cross atop the Baptist Church glowed a stark blood-red against the night’s blackness from out my hotel room window and over the street, the highest floor of a multi-use building, set above a bank, a home store, and a few restaurants on the ground floor. Though my hotel was no high-rise and I slept on the third floor, the beige box set in the corner was troubling should an evacuation be required during my week’s stay. Rather than lock the elevators and run down the stairs, and thinking back I can’t even remember that there were stairs, you were supposed to open the window, latch a cable onto the convenient hook, harness into a life line, then rappel to the sidewalk from the outside of the hotel. The instructions on the box were written in both Korean and stilted English, but the illustrated instructions, vaguely reminiscent of assembling Scandinavian furniture and complete with a person setting the belay symbolized by an oval floating above a rectangle with ramrod arms but amputated of legs, was the most disturbing outcome of an impending disaster. Moving on to set my toiletries on the shelf above the sink, I noticed that the shampoo was the same brand as my cell phone and the washing machine in my apartment back home, all produced by one of the four largest chaebol that control almost every aspect of Korean life.

North a block, past a clutch of serial-addressed high-rise apartments, rose a long, stretched ridge, densely blanketed with second-growth pines. Though an hour before buffet breakfast was offered, the sun had long since crested the horizon and warmed the air into a weighty haze stuck to the contours of the Earth and limiting vision to a few hundred yards. I was far from alone on the trail that cut straight uphill, joining a well-spaced line of walkers, each geared up in bright pastel synthetics, heavy-soled boots, and bearing at least one hiking pole, but all my seniors by about four or five decades. Though only a cleared dirt path through the thick underbrush that filtered out any of the sounds of the city waking up, street lamps were placed so regularly that in straight legs, you could see up to four that bounded the trail as it slalomed through. Up here was a small cemetery, a handful of headstones and monuments terraced into the slope at a small clearing, and I continued, passing Hangul signage marked by distances and arrows that I could not understand, but noted as a waypoint for my trek back. When the trail descended again, the scenery changed too, now a ferris wheel dominated the sky through the open canopy and once the trees on my left were replaced by the loop-the-loop of a roller coaster and the damp hem of my shirt no longer swayed with my stride, I turned around.

Set at the side wall in the grand meeting room, two story high ceilings and mostly vacant circular tables filling the floor, an almost exclusively Western and further American breakfast was offered in the warming plates. Actually, the juxtaposition of familiar, wet, limp scrambled eggs, soggy, undersalted tater tots, yet crisp and brittle bacon rashers, with traditional Korean, mounds of kimchi drenched in fermented chilis and chopsticks as the only cutlery, was perhaps the most authentic way to enjoy the meal. Though I could hardly claim being adept with any chopsticks, the standard Korean issue was another challenge, solid metal and tapered flat like a screwdriver, it took practice over a few mornings to find balance and cradle, and not slice, each bite. Though nothing special, the kimchi saved the meal, like dousing a plate from a truck stop with Tabasco to render it edible, and I took up a piece of Napa cabbage with each tot or egg curd between the bits of conversation that had landed on me as it danced around the circle. Later in the week, one of the local organizers noticed my original approach and said that most Koreans don’t even each kimchi every morning.
South Korea

November 8th, 2024

Part 1

I regretted it as soon as I did it, but there was no undoing, no turning back, and my personalized souvenir from the week was immediately buried in the pile by those behind me. As we said our goodbyes and deliberately exited en masse from the lecture hall, the organizers shouted above the din of adieus that they would collect badges for recycling and a rough line formed and once the cardboard box was within an arm’s reach, off they were tossed. This had been my first time in Asia, the first time I had ever walked the streets of an honest megalopolis, the first time I couldn’t get my bearings by sounding out the words on street signs, the first time I ordered food by merely pointing at a picture on a menu, the first time I truly had traveled somewhere unfamiliar. Foot in front of foot, pushed along by the undulating mob outside meandering its way back to the hotel, I felt as though some of my soul had carelessly dropped away, that the part of me from this week was left back in that box. I had, until just now and have ever since, kept all of the name tags from all of the conferences I attended, and the only conference which I did not was the only conference I attended in South Korea.

A year earlier, I attended the previous version of this conference, this time hosted at DESY, the premier German particle physics laboratory, located on the outskirts of Hamburg. I had found an excuse to travel to Europe, with my ultimate destination CERN to effectively force a collaborator to complete a paper, but tacked on an extra half week to travel through Germany, where from Hamburg I would train to Heidelberg to visit a friend from graduate school who was now a post-doc there. My own post-doc was already 7 months along, and while I had many research projects in the production foundry’s fire, hadn’t yet published a paper on work started since I graduated, so it seemed to me at the time only natural to correspondingly not give a talk. For the three days of the conference, I sat in the auditorium, asked a few questions, sipped coffee and listened to conversations at breaks, joined in dinners with senior faculty to their favorite nearby restaurants, and reminisced with the old-timers who attended the banquet, who recounted the stories of the days when discoveries seemed to occur weekly, and who received credit and correspondingly eternal glory sometimes literally depended on who could sprint fastest across the lab to show their plot first. But I didn’t give a talk. As the applause after the final claps died away and we were left to say our goodbyes, I wished farewell to my Ph.D. advisor, who had presented an overview possible new physics scenarios, but he lightly chided in return: ”It was good to see you, but a post-doc is short; don’t go to a conference if you are not going to give a talk.”

By early the following year, I had both published multiple papers and been explicitly invited to this conference to give a talk, and further the offer of complete financial support, plane ticket, incidentals, hotel, prompted my almost immediate positive response. This year’s host was a member of this research community who had recently started a faculty position at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, or KAIST, in Daejeon, and the Korean government had provided funding of which Principle Investigators in the US whose grants are sometimes scraped of 2/3 their awarded value by university overhead can only dream, effectively tens of millions of dollars to this single Institute for a vigorous visitor and conference program. Particle physics in Far East Asia, Japan, China, and Korea, was a vibrant community, active in the experiments at the LHC, but to engage the global community required participation in large numbers from Europe and the US, and a reimbursement-guaranteed trip eliminated one source of concern of boarding the 5,000 mile trans-ocean or -continental flight.

I deviated far, far from the great circle, increasing the distance by well over 1,000 miles by traveling from Boston through San Francisco, but spent a few days there, giving my first talk at SLAC since I graduated and was able to attend a friend’s thesis defense and subsequent celebratory bacchanalia. The talk was fine if a bit unpolished, as I attempted to present on the undersized blackboard in the seminar room, rather than with slides through a projector, encouraging a more relaxed and colloquial discussion of the material apparently along with increasing the number of confused faces. Much more enlightening for all was lunch that day, as I joined the research group of the youngest theory faculty member, who, when I was a student, had something like 10 advisees working on an enormous range of projects, was often requested for keynote talks at conferences around the world, and truly breathed life into the larger group of whom the next youngest faculty was nearly 20 years his senior. Unfortunately, this energy had gained him enemies and his bid for tenure had recently been denied due in no small part to confusion and personal grudges. He could have, of course, appealed, the case taken up by the broader faculty senate and to anyone paying attention it was impossible to believe that this would not have been successful, but that would mean he would be working side-by-side with these people for the rest of his career, a constant irritant that undermined open conversation and collaboration among colleagues. Instead, he was to terminate his position early, moving on to a job in Silicon Valley proper, and across the table under the sunshade and between bites of sandwiches, he spoke of the future with a relaxed smile, and didn’t mention the past.

There’s an unofficial rule-of-thumb for how to structure one’s thesis defense presentation, as the audience is extremely varied in their knowledge of your expertise. Your parents, assuming they are supportive of your career but otherwise ignorant of physics, should understand the first third; your friends, fellow physics graduate students but with research interests throughout the discipline, should understand through the middle third; and finally only your own research group, the people most familiar with your specific work and contributions, should understand through the end of your talk. This thesis defense was perhaps the most polished I had ever witnessed, technical yet humorous and engaging, with fun, illustrative asides that drew analogies between Napoleon’s catastrophic losses in attacking and withdrawing from Moscow in the winter of 1812 as captured in Minard’s magnificent statistical graphic, with the struggles of research and the slog of graduate school, and the handful of photons from the initial billions and billions that had finally reached the detector. Toasts to this new doctor extended late into the night, but I left for my hotel while all revelers were still conscious for a few short hours of sleep before starting the early morning’s trek.

Category: South Korea Chapter

South Korea

Part 6

South Korea

Part 5

South Korea

Part 4

South Korea

Part 3

South Korea

Part 2

South Korea

Part 1