A Physicist Abroad

  • Florence

    Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Manchester

    Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

  • Manchester

    Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Manchester

    Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

  • Cargèse

    Part 1

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

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

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

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

  • Cargèse

    Part 2

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

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

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

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

  • Cargèse

    Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

  • Cargèse

    Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Cargèse

    Part 5

    As an undergraduate, I had worked with two professors and two graduate students on a fledging research direction motivated by the new realms that the LHC would probe and the exquisite precision of the data it would produce.  This was fall 2006, still a few years before the LHC would turn on in earnest, but unfortunately progress on the project suffered from several competing destructively-interfering effects.  The senior professor was highly-esteemed but had little time for day-to-day work, the junior professor was engaged, but was secretly hunting for jobs elsewhere, and us three students were very young, and lacked perspective or a broad picture of the project.  I did some simple calculations and others performed some computer simulations, but nothing materialized into something worthy of a paper by the time I graduated, and I moved on, distracted by all of the trappings of graduate school.  Then, early in 2008, a group of researchers from the UK and France published a short, simple paper presenting a novel technique for analyzing the data of the LHC, a method for discovering undiscovered particles.  This was it, this was the paper that we had been trying to write, but failed because we were out of sync or inexperienced.  This paper changed the playing field, re-imagining what could be possible at the LHC.  Searches for new particles that had been abandoned were now re-evaluated and an entirely original research direction was initiated that eventually infiltrated every aspect of the scientific program at CERN.  It was humbling to realize that in some sense I had been so close to being a key player in a major revolution, but at the same time acknowledging that there had still been so many pieces I had missed that there was no way I could have assembled the puzzle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Cargèse

    Part 6

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

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

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

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

    We only had time to run to our apartment for a quick dinner before getting back to the Institute.  Exploiting the lack of a schedule for tomorrow, students throughout the school had planned events to fill it, from sunning and swimming at Plage de Péru, the main beach in Cargèse, to short walks around fortified Genoese towers that dotted the coastline, to the longer trek I had scheduled into the mountains.  A group of Spanish students realized that no schedule implied that there was no need to wake up before, say, 3 pm, so tonight they had planned an extravagant party on the beach, buying up the booze and finger foods from the supermarket and hauling it down the slope, and distributed it all over the tables.  AV equipment was carried from the auditorium and arranged in front of the canteen, casting the Euro techno beats curated by the hosts out to the sea.  Even the school organizers partied in solidarity with all of us students, who had clearly been overworked for the week, and needed a release. 

    Among the relatively small group of American students, we had privately and quietly complained about the music and the deejaying of the Spaniards.  Diplomacy was not an option because we were vastly outnumbered, so we opted for a direct attack, wresting control of the speakers by plugging in an iPhone that was pre-loaded with hits.  Dead air and bated breaths occupied the bluff while we huddled to decide on the best selection for wowing and winning over these skeptical and discriminating Europeans, well-trained to associate song with nationalistic pride from Eurovision.  Now settled, one of us scrolled through the phone and tapped the song that was so quintessential Americana that everyone else hated it: “In the day we sweat it out on the street…” grated The Boss while we rocked out on air guitar and Max Weinberg’s drumming.  However, it was clear that we were on a very short leash and were nearing mutiny when the final fermata of “Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oooh ooooooh” and the wail from Clarence Clemons’s saxophone stretched to silence, so we switched it up to something that everyone could at least dance to.  On came Miley Cyrus and her dream of making it big in LA, which we were generously allowed to play to completion, but further American meddling in the music was strictly forbidden and associated with the harsh punishment of being subjected to it.

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