A Physicist Abroad

  • Vienna

    Part 3

    Lunches went typically like this: as a junior colleague of the organizer from MIT, I was among those regularly selected for a meal off campus, at some favorite place of the organizer from UWien.  Our cohort, relatively small and some days even small enough to fit comfortably at a four-top, would head out following our local guide and arrive at the restaurant that was, midday and midweek, almost always otherwise deserted.  If today’s group was on the larger size, a crowd-pleasing menu and long booths were called for, but a small group could sit outside at a bit fancier place and a favorite returned to a few times during my stay was informally referred to as the French academy, not because of the style of cuisine, but because of its proximity to an immersion school.  We would enter through a door that opened to a garden or park, tables set under the cooling shade of beeches, and request free Leitungswasser while the younger of the group chose a beer and the elder a Clausthaler, lest a full stomach and the heat of a summer’s afternoon lull them to sleep.  Physics specifically was rarely the topic of conversation, a mere hour’s break during the whole day, but instead recommendations for Viennese entertainment, places to travel on the weekend, or the state of regional politics were discussed.  At the request Zahlen, bitte the organizer from MIT would always wave off my attempts at pulling out my wallet, as Simons would be covering lunch.

    Another evening saw me back in the Institute after dinner, the sun having long since set, back again writing at the blackboard, pacing to and fro, or just staring at it seated at the edge of my desk, hypnotized, thoughts unfocused and hazy, tumbling around in my brain but going nowhere.  A cursory glance at my watch revealed that a respectable time for departure was long in the past, so I gathered my things and hurried down the stairs and out the door, walking at a brisk pace on the radiating pavement through the finally-cooled night air.  This night was no busier than previous, I was still all alone on the tram track street’s sidewalk, though behind I could hear a car speeding up and then passing me, its illuminated scarlet tail lights and rooflight fading as it turned a corner ahead.  Though it had seemed to be in a great hurry, once I had turned that corner, there the car was, parked, hazard lights blinking, and the driver’s door open and just off the sidewalk, at those same bushes into which that badger had waddled, I could make out the silhouette of a person, standing slightly hunched facing away from their car, legs astride of some invisible saddle, with the unmistakable sound of drizzling water.  My hotel would be on the other side anyway, so I thought this as good a place as any to cross the street.

    As with several times since I left, this Skype call had turned silent, staring, longing for each other, lonely and confined in 800 square feet with just blank pages of her thesis glowing from her screen.  I could tell her about the food I’ve eaten, or the research projects that I had made progress on, or the baroque architecture of palaces and cathedrals and museums, or that opera is piped into the public bathrooms of the Wiener Staatsoper, but it made the chasm deeper, the rift wider.  I was here surrounded by everyone in my field, days filled with busy lunches and talks and gossip with coffee and felt more alone, more that I was faking, putting on a face and acting to be excited by what I was doing around a hollow inside missing that part that inspired and motivated.  Now long after midnight here and dinnertime there, I had to saw goodbye and a weak, resigned goodbye was echoed, miss yous exchanged, and with a kiss closed my laptop.  The still air had done little to cool the room through the cracked window, so all I could do was lie in the dark on the springy double bed, a few inches too short for me so my feet hung over the edge, and stare at the ceiling until exhaustion succumbed to sleep.

    I had scoped out a nice five mile loop for a morning run through a combination of MapMyRun and Google Maps that would take me north, away from the city center to quieter neighborhoods that hugged the base of the grapevined hills, and had woke early with plenty of time to enjoy the crisp morning before the sun had aroused the ground from its slumber and into its humid, hazy hypnopompic state.  A few turns into the run, I had reached a waypoint, running adjacent to a stream, and jumped into and off of the road as the width of the cobbled sidewalk waxed and waned.  Next, I should turn right at a major intersection, but the name of that street had dissolved from my memory, so I had to trust that my subconscious had internalized the route and would just tell my feet the way.  My legs formed no such divining rod, however, and I was left to guessing, and this right seemed as good as I could expect, so away I went.  I had not noticed that my path north had drifted significantly west to become nearly parallel itself with the base of the hills, so a right turn started gaining elevation and the road I was on shrunk and shrunk, rather unlike the behavior of major thoroughfares, and soon I was on a one-lane path, the shoulder overgrown with brambles, and that transformed abruptly into a flight of concrete stairs once the pitch had become too steep.  Now certain I had missed my turn, I nevertheless beat on, with a certainty that a right turn would appear and transport me back to the familiar.

    Enough right turns had eventually bore me back east, but not before gaining more and more and more elevation, the trees and brush had thinned down to tightly trimmed grass, and I had reached the pot-holed farm road that orbited the summit.  Just higher now was the farmhouse, but I turned away, and there below lay all of Vienna, filling my view but silent, the sounds of the city waking up had not yet permeated to these heights.  An emerald carpet of stringed vines rolled down and away, and stretched to the base of the hill into which the blanket of trees was tucked, quilted with the alleys and streets and avenues and boulevards.  The majestic Danube, broad and blue, cut the western bank and drew the eye along a line southeast into the heart of Vienna, to just where the domes of palaces and spires of cathedrals peeked above the apartment rooftops.  Farther yet, the haze had already started its morning meal, making its slow march north, devouring buildings and roads and leaving behind a formless, milky nothingness.  This sight soon required a more and more extreme twisting back while running forward, but then mercifully the path cut steeply down and into the darkened forest, growing broader as tributaries rejoined until its delta spilled into that street I had missed, now almost an hour ago.

  • Vienna

    Part 2

    Erwin Schrödinger, by some reckoning the inventor of quantum mechanics or at least of the equation that carries his name, posthumously leant his name to the Erwin Schrödinger International Institute for Mathematical Physics as the most famous scientist from Vienna.  The ESI was founded about 20 years earlier as a place of contemplative retreat and intellectual stimulation, hosting workshops and conferences, programs and summer schools on anything related to mathematics or physics with a sufficiently defensible amount of mathematics in it.  This month, the topic was of Jets and Quantum Fields for LHC and Future Colliders, a grand and sweeping enough name to justify its place there, but specific enough for essentially the entire world community of a couple hundred people whose research interests fit snugly under the title’s umbrella to be invited for a stay.  From the front door labeled solely by a faded sign lacking capitalization, stairs rose steeply to the main hallway, where each step with any gait and with any shoe on the stone tile floor echoed off of the blackboards lining the wall and the marble bust of the namesake, and to the right was the door to the main seminar room, straight ahead to the toilets, and left, where I turned, to the workspaces.  In the theme of promoting conversation and collaboration, any personal offices were basically non-existent, instead, broad, open rooms each with three or four desks, a bookshelf, and another wall of blackboards, and here, tucked in a corner with a view out the narrow window, I set down my backpack and settled in.

    Coffee was slowly beginning to grow on me, and being in Europe, free coffee, and the socialization that a huddle around the carafe provides encouraged me to join in the conversations and introductions already in progress over sips and around blowing away the wisps of steam.  However, as coffee is also wont to escape rather quickly, I excused myself for the bathrooms, around the corner, then through a swing door that didn’t quite shut completely, to the landing that lay in front of the couple of steps up to the row of stalls.  With now a few trips to Europe behind me, the privacy afforded one in public toilets as compared to the half-door with both excess leg room and inch-wide gaps in the stall corners familiar in the US, was no longer surprising but had yet to cease to amaze.  The toilets at the ESI were no exception, with hermetic, floor-to-ceiling doors and rubber weatherstripping in the jamb for a double layer of protection for each personal stall, and then inside, an immaculately clean head, several rolls of multi-ply toilet paper, and even a brush off to the side for clean up afterward.  This all was more or less consistent with the standard I had now come to expect, but what elevated the experience to the heavens was that on the wall to my right was a blackboard with a few pieces of chalk on the ledge, so that there was no inconvenient time for inspiration.  By the afternoon, once everyone had passed through at least once, the toilet boards were the talk of the coffee break.

    The informal and unstructured nature of the workshop encouraged unfocused drifting from one’s desk, to spontaneous, interjected questions thrown out to the two or three office mates, to eavesdropping on the calculations or scratching of chalk on board that had floated over the low dividing wall.  Sometimes the distraction would be intolerable enough that action was required, to set down your pen and walk over to stare directly at the mathematical expression that had already confused two others.  My own discussions had encouraged a visitor, just a couple years my senior and someone I had worked with when I was an older undergraduate and he a younger graduate student, and I started again, to explain the baby steps of a calculation I was setting up to just begin to understand a toy example of a problem that had been sharpening in the past couple of years.  He had also thought about some proto-cases and further had developed much of the necessary techniques to actually complete the calculation, so in my stilted explanation and terse, slanted board work, I eventually regurgitated all of my thoughts on the problem, and hints and suggestions for next steps were added by my my neighbor, who, at the same time, identified the leaps in logic that would need to be overcome.  With nothing more to contribute now, he excused himself, and I sat back down in my chair, copying the boardwork into my notebook and returned to staring out the window, my mind racing in confusion.

    Rather quickly, the groups and subgroups of us that had naturally divided up had relaxed to standard, comfortable dinner choices, initiated by whoever was first and most hungry and then, like a snowball, more and more of us capped our pens, closed our laptops, and zipped up our backpacks and set out.  Each night, we would be flung to some other corner of Vienna, to either a biergarten out back of a pub, long wooden tables densely packed in a courtyard between brick buildings, open to the sky save the broad leaves of an ancient chestnut, or for schnitzel, though budgetary constraints restricted us to the schwine version and not the local delicacy Wiener variant with fried veal.  Our beers drained as the sun set, and we would be on the move again, some ending the night and walking to their hotel rooms, and others such as myself, back to the Institute for a few more hours of work before a Skype call to the States and bed.  Dark afforded a contemplative silence that was absent during the day, a chance to focus and distill and process the conversations into an equation or two to write on the board, left for tomorrow’s work.  My walk home mostly followed the tram line north, away from the center of the city, tracks along the center of a wide boulevard, and just beyond a stop adjacent to towering pines to one side and flats on the other, I saw a badger waddle by across the deserted road, disappearing into the sodium-yellowed shrubs underneath the ground floor apartment windows.

    Sprinkled throughout the unscheduled discussions and spontaneous meetings was a touch of regularity, with a few participants selected each week to present a talk during the morning’s coffee break.  I was one of the lucky ones this week, and chose to discuss a recent paper I had published with my post-doc advisor on a strange and surprising feature we had identified in the process of performing calculations for predictions of physics that would be observed at the LHC.  Ample time was allotted with the suggestion that a small fraction would be for presentation and a larger fraction for the inevitable arguments that would and should arise in any good and sufficiently controversial talk.  So, standing in front of the rows of green sliding chalkboards, I kept my goals limited, pledging some motivation verbally for why the calculation was interesting and that, naively at least, should make no sense whatsoever.  Perhaps the thing that was hardest for the audience to grasp was its simplicity, as all I did next was calculate the area of a couple of triangles, relate that to the probability of observing a particle, and then with a swish of my hand to push a board up, revealed the turn on the final board.  I had hidden nothing, every step had been completely transparent and obviously next in the logical series, but the prestige was that from the answer, there was no going backward, there was no way to return to the start again as the process had washed away the footprints in the sand.  Complaints and whataboutisms rained from a pair of people seated in the back row, this was just some special case, what if more realistic effects were included, and I initially tried to respond but was soon drowned out by rebuttals from the other side of the room and piling on from the front, and silently gained a renewed determination to understand this better.

  • Vienna

    Part 1

    I stared out into the void, or as much of the void as provided by the view of the upright and locked tray table in front of me, squished in the center row of seats on a trans-Atlantic flight after dinner and once the cabin lights had been dimmed for a precious few hours of sleep.  I had left my wife home, alone, working on writing her dissertation in a city 3,000 miles away from where she was still a student, her patience and focus of typing and typing and typing from a corner in our apartment wearing thin, and my absence for these two weeks further straining our rather complicated living arrangements for the past year.  We had lived apart on opposite coasts for four months, her finishing her Ph.D. and me starting a new job, though my flexible position afforded a visit every few weeks, and then she moved with me in the new year, but was far from her lab, her colleagues, and her advisor, so deadlines seemed to keep drifting for actually finishing and moving on.  Nevertheless, she was excited for me to go to this conference, but deadlines for accepting invitations and planning had been months in the past, and as the departure date neared and the prospect of two weeks away became more real, some doubts began to arise if now was indeed the best time.  Moments before we kissed goodbye on our apartment’s threshold, I had slipped the thin book into my backpack, something I had always been interested to read and was short enough I could finish it on the flight, but now, the closed book on my lap alone under my seat’s spotlight amongst a raft of snoring travelers, questioned the intelligence of bringing Camus’s L’Étranger.

    One year into my post-doc, my personal research portfolio was beginning to slowly grow.  Casting off projects assigned to me by my Ph.D. advisor had been relatively easy and something I had already done three years ago, in favor of a project I had started with a fellow student that had since taken on a life of its own.  This co-student project tapped into a burgeoning subfield of particle physics whose inaugural yearly conference had actually taken place in an adjacent building to where my graduate school office was, and now only a few years along regularly had over 100 attendees and strong representation from all of the large experiments at the LHC.  My first presentation on this project at this conference had been unique and impressed the community enough that the following winter, I had been offered multiple post-docs in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, alone, accepting MIT as my intellectual home for the next three years.  Essentially on my arrival to campus, I vowed to put aside those graduate school projects, to start something brand new, something original that would be indelibly identified as my own intellectual creation.  This was, by contrast, not easy and progress on anything was slow, indirect, and sometimes frustratingly failure-prone, seeing the tiniest of light rays peeking through a hole only to calculate and calculate and calculate and realize that what you had been doing that whole time was not logically consistent.

    The intellectual support and environment of the group at MIT at that time was definitely the most magical experience I have ever had and was perhaps the most special place to be in the entire world at the time for what I was doing.  My post-doc advisor was merely two years into tenure track and publishing at a breakneck rate, his office across the narrow hallway from mine and stopped by each morning he arrived to chat about the new papers that appeared on the arXiv preprint server last night, or to see how a calculation was going, or to show me a mysterious and confusing plot that would then occupy my daydreams for the next several hours.  His door was always open, and I returned the favor, dropping in unannounced numerous times throughout the day, to sit in his square high-walled pleather chair across from his desk, and at least puzzle over something together verbally, or one of us would walk over to his floor-to-ceiling blackboard to write an equation that we could then stare at in pensive silence.  Each week, there were at least three topical seminars on particle physics to attend, in addition to the physics department colloquium, so everyone who was working on the great problems in the field were continually passing through, dispelling their wisdom in their formal talk, and then the truth would actually come out during the hosted dinner.  There would have been no way that I could have learned what projects were interesting, useful, and impactful by merely sitting in my room all day, door closed, head down, hunched over my desk.

    Two major ideas had been born in this environment and had correspondingly resulted in papers by the following spring.  While both broadly addressed physics relevant for making predictions in particle collider experiment, they were otherwise relatively unrelated, which troubled me.  At one level, they were obviously deeply connected, and I could imagine the first glimpses of nearly bottomless research potential if I could marry them successfully.  Some conversations with others in the group at MIT had helped broaden my perspective, but something was still lacking.  Another professor in the group had recently won funding through the Simons Foundation, the philanthropic arm of billionaire mathematician Jim Simons who left academia to found Renaissance Technologies, and helped organize a relaxed, discussion-focused workshop in Vienna, Austria, with a long-term collaborator and faculty at UWien.  One was required to spend at least two weeks there, but, as members of the MIT group, Simons would be graciously covering our expenses, so saying yes was all too easy.  This would be the place to have those conversations with global experts, to stare at equations on a board, to find and recruit new collaborators, or even to just convince the community that this was a question worth thinking about.

    The Rathausplatz was converted into a summers-long festival setting, thousands of seats arranged in rows facing the city hall’s façade, itself covered with an enormous white curtain for the nightly film screenings, and then lining the promenade and spilling into the bounding park were dozens of food stands, serving a sampling of every cuisine imaginable, at least through Viennese interpretation.  To ward off jet-lag for the night, I had walked the mile or so from my stifling greenhouse of a hotel room to observe the party, making a slight detour from the geodesic path to find the front door of the Institute and where my office for the next two weeks would be.  The door was nondescript, but across the narrow gasse faced the US Embassy in Austria which, at the time anyway, had garnered minor celebrity status as the place that Edward Snowden would have been taken if he had actually been on the Bolivian president’s plane.  Capturing a selfie with my laptop monitor’s camera, I then continued on, drawn along by the growing noise of the crowd and wafting smells of classics like pretzels, schnitzel, sausages, and kraut, truck-stop diner recreations of greasy burgers, fries, and a Coke, yeasty, malty lagers sloshed sloppily into masskrugs, and even ice cream carts offering the Vermonter staple of Ben & Jerry’s.  For my first meal off the plane, I chose boldly, asking for ein burrito, bitte, with all the fillings, and over the counter it was passed, tucked snugly in foil and cradled it while moving over to a vacant standing table.  It was stuffed to bursting with ground beef, black beans, corn kernels, something passing as sour cream, maybe some iceberg lettuce, and probably white rice and was perfectly, ideally, flawlessly flavorless.

  • July 4, 2012

    Part 3

    My throat was still sore and my 5:30 am alarm did nothing to assuage my headache, but intellectual motivation overpowered corporeal weakness and I dressed and walked down the stairs and back into R1.  Word had spread that Higgs and François Englert, just one of the numerous physicists who came to similar conclusions as Higgs at about the same time, were on site, dignitaries specifically invited to attend the announcement in person.  Along with the CERN brass, founders of the LHC endeavor, or leaders of experimental committees who would all have reserved seats, this still left about half of the auditorium vacant.  The most energetic and physically-able, youthful summer students, graduate students, and post-docs, took advantage of this availability of seats and began lining up after dinner the night before, orderly, out of the way of major walkways, and with sleeping bags, pillows, and games to pass the night.  Without a lingering cold, I would have been there, too, but now, strolling in just before 6:00 am, I was already a few hundred people away from the auditorium, down the stairs, past the shuttered travel agent, bank, and convenience store, up the ramp and standing next to the empty, stationary conveyor for dirty dishes.

    There’s a scene in the documentary Particle Fever, as the start time of 9:00 am approached, that follows the line from the auditorium, down the stairs, and stops right after the convenience store.  Obscured by a wall but just two people beyond where the scene was cut was where I was standing.  The idea for Particle Fever was conceived long before it was released and was originally planned to capture the energy of particle physics as the LHC turned on and proton collisions were analyzed.  However, as the rumors swirled, the filmmakers pivoted the story around the prospect of the discovery of a new particle, but the late hour of the announcement of the seminar prohibited the producer and physicist David E. Kaplan from being at CERN in person.  The tracking shot could have continued for next minute, as even by 8:00 am, the line to the auditorium stretched deep into R1, with hundreds more behind me.  The filmmaker’s absence meant that they used the record of this internal excitement from the formidable press office of CERN, their cameras walking up and down the line, with jovial smiling faces, waves, and thumbs up from everyone.  A friend of mine who had recently started a physics blog was here to communicate the atmosphere and consequence to the public, but had completely given up on queuing and joined the train of pacers up and down the line.  Shaking his head but wearing a mirthful smirk, he passed me and said “You’re not getting in.”  

    Across an ocean and a continent, my wife was logging into the live-stream at midnight and once she had connected, messaged my closed laptop on my desk in my room.  The line to the auditorium started to inch forward, and perhaps I moved about 20 feet total before it completely dissolved.  There were only enough seats for those people who had arrived before 3 am, and as the doors to the auditorium shut again, the message was quickly relayed like a pulse down a telegraph line that we all needed to find a computer screen fast.  Watch parties had been planned in smaller auditoria throughout CERN, including in the theory group, but I went back to my hostel room, and opened my computer to learn that my wife was already viewing the speakers get wired up with microphones, test out their slides, and the Director-General pace back and forth on our projection screen.  Joe Incandela and Gianotti, the spokespersons for CMS and ATLAS, respectively, were only 100 feet away from me to summarize the work of their thousands of colleagues, but I was resigned to viewing them on my laptop, though to be fair that 100 feet required breaking through the wall of my hostel then floating through the air and boring through the roof of the auditorium.  With the most minimal introduction, Incandela and CMS were up first, and back and forth went the messages with my wife as we settled in for a once-in-a-generation experience.

    Five sigma is the magical phrase, like a mysterious incantation that conjures up a new particle from the darkest depths of ignorance, thrusting it into the light of collective knowledge.  Five sigma is the most rigorous standard in all of science, representing a confidence of better than one part in 3 million that your observation was more than just an unhappy conspiratorial accident of the noise.  Incandela flipped through his slides and bigger and bigger became the signal’s bump on the background’s hill.  One result combined with another result piled shovelful by shovelful of data on top until that hill became a mountain and CMS could claim discovery of the Higgs boson at five sigma confidence.  Not to be outdone, Gianotti took the stage while the thunderous applause was still reverberating through the auditorium.  For every plot that CMS had displayed, there was one for ATLAS, just as impressive and just as significant.  Gianotti’s conclusion echoed Incandela’s: ATLAS had discovered the Higgs boson at five sigma confidence as well.  However, it was more than just that each experiment had claimed discovery, but that all of their results were completely consistent, validating each other and demonstrating the necessity of two distinct yet comparable experiments on the LHC.  If the CMS and ATLAS results were completely independent, the likelihood that they would both discover something so similar exclusively in the noise would be like winning the Powerball jackpot 30,000 times in a row.  Rolf Dieter-Heuer, the Director-General but not a particle physicist himself, spoke for all of humanity when he summarized, “As a layman, I would say, I think we have it!”

    Everyone at CERN was in a daze, stunned, shocked, exhilarated to be at the place where it had happened.  The usual incoherent cacophony of conversation at lunch in R1 was replaced by harmony.  There was only one thing to talk about.  Three sigma fluctuations happen all the time, it seems, with a probability of one in one thousand to come from the noise, which is rather large in particle physics because so many measurements are performed.  When three sigma deviations are announced, opinions diverge amongst any subset of particle physicists: some will immediately salivate and daydream of the new physics it may imply, others will express hesitation and conservatism, hedging their comments on data yet to be collected, still others will categorically dismiss the result as irresponsibility from the experiment and present the laundry list of contradictory previous results.  Today, the consistent, five sigma significant results from both ATLAS and CMS shut everyone up.  We now knew something we did not even just a few hours before.

    Our mini-collaboration had planned a dinner together in Geneva that night, a collection of a few physicists visiting CERN, our host, and his family.  Time had begun to slowly lift the surprise we felt, and glasses of wine helped broaden discussion and understanding of this new landscape of particle physics.  To the non-physicists around the table, we each attempted to provide our perspective on what the results meant and their impact, but it was not apparent if any bridge was built beyond that our work day was exciting and that the presentations that morning were neat.  Little did the conversation stretch to the next frontier, though it was obvious that there was still much work to be done to establish every property of this new particle and truly validate that it was the boson that Higgs had postulated so long ago.  Nevertheless, there was an unsaid undercurrent of something verging on disappointment, in the way that the night before Christmas seems brighter than Christmas once all the presents have been opened.  A mere two years into the LHC it had accomplished its goal, planned nearly three decades in the past.  Physics at the LHC would continue for about 25 years into the future, but what was next?  Was there anything that we could anticipate, to look forward to?  Or, was there just a long march up the ever-growing mountain of data, occasionally pulling out a gem or two, until that stopped?

    A ray of sunshine pierced through the clouds from above the Jura, illuminating Meyrin, a subtle nod of approval from above it seemed.  This was my last full day at CERN and only now was I finally shaking off my cold, just in time to greet my wife later that day.  I was able to work until after lunch and an espresso, and then said goodbyes and returned office keys.  This week of intense collaboration had helped us focus on the work needed to complete this project, and now it was time for me to continue that work on my own.  From being alone in the CERN hostel I would be moving to a hotel in downtown Geneva with my wife, a short walk from the Cornavin train station and our transportation to Italy.  I tapped my badge a final time to open the sliding door that lead outside, facing the new tram that provided quick and direct access from CERN to Cornavin.  Normally I would have one more piece of business before boarding and moving on, but I tucked the badge that proved that this week wasn’t just a dream, that I was here, into my backpack and stepped onto the platform.

    Nine months later I found myself at CERN again, again to visit a collaborator, and again my first stop was to the badging office.  That same agent from the previous summer was there, not so much greeting me but accepting that their next few minutes would be occupied by my presence.  My “bonjour” went unanswered and over the desk I handed my passport, bracing for the approaching rage as the agent typed my details and read the damning information.  Welcome to CERN.

  • July 4, 2012

    Part 2

    The automatic door to the canteen, Restaurant 1 or R1, rotated open with its unmistakable swish, and I walked from the far end through the rows of empty tables, passing the lone cashier on my way to picking a tray and some cutlery at the entrance to the breakfast buffet.  I quickly learned during my previous visit that the ornais aux abricots were fantastic, two soft, ripe apricot mounds like a fresh poached egg yolk on a light and crunchy puff pastry, and added some fruit and juice to round out the meal.  My head still hurt and I had stared at the ceiling much longer than expected after my alarm, but I was here now, slowly shaking off Pacific Daylight Time, with a few old timers who arrived at work early in the morning for coffee and bavarder.  Soon, I was back toward the buffet, placed my tray on the conveyor, and continued on, past the convenience store, bank, and travel agent, up the stairs to the main entrance of the auditorium.  This was also at a threshold where the floor changed, and a line of tiles in the center of the hallway gestures one past the library around a corner through a corridor of offices and up another flight of stairs to the administrative office for the theory division.  It is joked that theorists can’t remember how to get to R1, but all they have to do to find food is to keep their nose down and follow the line.

    Theoretical physics at CERN is as storied as its experiments, with Felix Bloch and Victor Weisskopf early Directors-General of the entire laboratory, and Niels Bohr himself the first director of the theoretical physics group.  All members of the current group were luminaries in their respective disciplines, and it seemed like every other famous theorist throughout the world visited for a sabbatical year.  In no way was this esteemed tradition more tangibly manifest than in the theory building itself.  I had a friend describe the habitat of CERN theorists as an “East German Mental Hospital,” with flickering fluorescent lighting, wooden doors warped by humidity, the plastered walls covered with posters from decades of yore or cabinets stacked with piles of folders, books, or teetering sheets of paper, reaching above my head and rendering the hallway dangerously narrow if a quick escape was required.  Some of the offices of the oldest members in the group had been occupied for 50 years by a sole resident, and 50 years of papers covered every open space, leaving just a small cave around their computer screen.  This was perhaps one of the oldest places in the entire CERN site, at the time not remodeled since its construction, and simply by turning a corner one received an instant and fully-immersed baptism into the theoretical particle physics of the latter half of the 20th century.

    My office for the week was a graduate student bullpen, with several desks arranged along the walls and a large blackboard hung amongst the bulletin boards, maps of the CERN Meyrin site, of the greater Geneva area, and of all of Europe, with an ironic demotivational poster titled “BURNOUT” centrally featured, bearing portraits of Ludwig Boltzmann and Paul Ehrenfest.  The Jura filled the view out of the window above the flat rooftops of the rest of CERN and provided a necessary relaxing, meditative background to distract away from my laptop’s screen.  Much of my work that week would be spent looking over a shoulder at my collaborators’ screens in their office just a few feet down the hall.  We were working to expand the particle physics simulation software that Peter developed with calculations I had performed with my advisor a few years earlier.  I was much more comfortable with low-technology calculations with pen on paper than with their implementation into computer code, so as much as possible I left the programming to Peter.  He was, however, an author on perhaps the most widely-used program in all of particle physics so I used these opportunities to soak up his knowledge and then eke out whatever I could when I was called on to code.  A rap at the door marked that the gathering for lunch had begun, so I left my computer on my desk and joined the group in the hall.

    The essence of CERN is distilled into lunch at R1.  Thousands throughout the site descend on the canteen, and viewing the hot lunch options at the various stations is slowed by the crush of people bearing trays and waiting in nebulous lines that fan away from the sneeze guard where the cook spoons the pasta, steak haché, or frites onto a plate.  The first through the cashier would wait a short distance away between opposing currents of people finding food or a seat and wave their arm and nod generally to where a table with enough seats had been claimed.  The beverage with lunch was most commonly water, free and filled into small glasses from a many-spouted fountain by pressing a red button for a few seconds.  The water station was probably the densest place in all of R1, sandwiched between the cashiers and the major thruway in and out and set on the wall immediately below the live status updates of the LHC’s beam projected from a television, its announcement displayed in bold, green font though only operating at just over half of its designed energy.  The roar from the innumerable layers of conversations was intoxicating and any little bit that your ear could single out was an immediate physics education in miniature, spilling into the courtyard with even more tables.  Our group was perched near the end of the concrete patio, with a view to the southeast punctuated by Mont Blanc’s white peak stabbing the blue sky 50 miles away, and a sky-blue cylinder set on the lawn and around which frisbees were tossed and avoided that would house a superconducting magnet of the LHC 50 feet away.  Painted in white on the cylinder was CERN’s motto, “Accelerating Science,” in the lab’s two official languages and everyone now enjoying lunch did their part to make the ride just a little bit faster.

    Lunch was not complete without an espresso and for theorists there were a couple of options.  A coin-operated machine was located right at the tray conveyor, where everyone after lunch would have to pass through, but the commotion from R1 prohibited a relaxed group conversation and the line stretched out of the doors to R1 and down the ramp to the convenience store.  Today, we ventured on, back to the seminar room on the theory floor which would both be vacant and quiet and with two machines that just needed a coffee pod from those rationed to visitors on arrival.  I turned the final corner a bit too tight and nearly collided with Fabiola Gianotti, the spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment, who was escorting Peter Higgs on a tour of CERN, and their entourage that trailed throughout half of the hallway behind them.  This was a curious development in the whispers surrounding this upcoming mysterious seminar: the outward-facing leader of one of the main experiments at the LHC was hosting the man who postulated the particle that had eluded discovery for 50 years.  This was about as close in physics as we get to juicy gossip of global impact, and we shared our speculations between sips of coffee.

  • July 4, 2012

    Part 1

    Interacting with the carelessness, absent-mindedness, and superiority-complexes of physicists all day must be a nightmare to the Swiss.  A well-known, senior professor from a major US university was ahead of me in line at the badging office, and their irresponsibility provoked the wrath of the security agent.  He had visited before, and the information on file that the agent reviewed on their computer was troubling, effectively detailing a most heinous grand theft from the world’s most prestigious physics laboratory.  A stern, pointed rebuke rained like hellfire, all the more frightening because it was not yelled, that their previous badge was missing, was the property of the lab, and must be returned at the end of every visit.  The professor whimpered and shuffled over to the white backdrop, mustering his best smile while the agent snapped the photo and out of the printer popped the new, warm badge.  No love was shared as the agent slammed the badge on the counter and then turned to me, before the professor had left.  “I’m here to get my badge,” I stammer, and “Yes” was the curt reply, as this was the badging office after all.  This famous hospitality still rattled me as I stepped outside to walk back to my hostel room, reviewing my fresh badge expiring on 6 July 2012.  Welcome to CERN.

    This was my second trip to CERN, and both times were to visit a collaborator, Peter, who worked in the theory division.  The first was just a few months earlier, in the height of winter, and we had planned to ski in the Jura mountains, visible from CERN and just a few miles into France.  That week, however, brought the coldest weather to Europe in many years, and at CERN itself were blizzard-like conditions with high winds and temperatures dipping to -25 C.  Our ski trip never materialized, but conditions were perfect for a dinner of fondue at Bains de Pâquis on Lake Geneva.  Now, in summer, I had coordinated this work trip with my honeymoon, first a few days at CERN, then meeting my wife for some sightseeing and travel to Italy for the main event.  The work excuse was convenient, as it meant that my trans-Atlantic plane ticket could be paid from research travel funds, helping spread our frugal graduate student and newlywed budget a bit further.  The specific dates for this second CERN visit was correspondingly set by our honeymoon, the tours we had scheduled or museum tickets we had reserved, and no other physically-motivated considerations.

    By this time, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was the only high-energy particle collision experiment on Earth, as the Tevatron at Fermilab had completed data collection the previous year.  A visit to CERN, located in Meyrin, a municipality of Geneva right at the Franco-Swiss border, as a particle physicist was a religious experience, bestowing intellectual indulgences on pilgrims like a visit to Rome’s basilicas.  This was the center of the universe, with all eyes and ears focusing with intensity on every little result that was put forth and its consequences for our interpretation of Nature and drawing everything and everyone into its orbit like a black hole.  Its first period of data collection, Run 1, was coming to a close in the next six months, having collided about 100 trillion protons on protons for the past nearly three years, and the tens or hundreds of particles in each collision was pored over by thousands of graduate students from nearly every country on the planet.  There had been some whispers in the hallways and over lunches that something had been found, but had it been verified? was it just a fluctuation? was this created gossip to advertise CERN?  There was no other game in town, so all waited with anticipation.

    The singular, largest yearly international particle physics conference, perhaps the biggest deadline for completing analyses, drawing conclusions, and writing talks for any experimentalist, was starting this week, too, but it was very literally on the opposite side of the planet, hosted in Melbourne.  Physicists arrived in Australia that weekend from CERN, from the US, from East Asia, and beyond, seeking their own little vacation before talks and discussions started in earnest mid-week.  This had the strange effect of displacing a significant fraction of CERN, and in this vacuum in late June, it was announced that there would be a special seminar on the morning of 4 July to present recent results from the LHC.  However, this seminar was to take place at CERN, undercutting the thousands in Australia, but no mind, it would be live-streamed throughout the world.  The rumors and secrecy surrounding these “results” only produced more intrigue as to what would be reported, and institutions in every time zone scheduled watch-parties and post-talks for interpretation.  My planning from months earlier had unwittingly plopped me at CERN in the middle of it all.

    I dropped my suitcase and backpack on the floor and crumpled onto the bed in my hostel room with a headache, a sore throat, and nasal congestion certainly acquired from the lack of sleep and breathing in the miasma while above 30,000 feet.  I forced myself to sit up and stay awake, as it was just afternoon and a nap would perpetuate jet lag throughout the week.  There were two things that I could do now: first, I always forget that power outlets at CERN in particular have a narrow, squashed hexagonal profile that fits none of my adapters, so I would have to borrow from the front desk.  Second, the internet at CERN is only accessible if you have an official account or are an official visitor and then your host must validate your request.  Soon my email was churning out all the messages since I closed my computer to board my flight and, now knowing that I was in town, I had received an invitation to a party at Peter’s apartment in Geneva that night.  Eyelids drooping and head throbbing, I set an alarm for three hours in the future, which would be enough time to clean up but also force me to stay in this timezone.  My head hit the pillow and instantly my eyes opened again, but it was darker and the sun was low out my window.  My alarm had stopped chiming four hours ago, and all I could muster for the rest of the night was to drag myself to the cafeteria in the neighboring building for a meager dinner of the light, crisp, yet lacking a fluffy interior pommes frites scooped from under the heat lamp and pulled myself a draft Feldschlösschen that was at least half limp, foamy head.

  • Florence

    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.

  • Florence

    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.

  • Florence

    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.

  • Florence

    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.