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.