thanks to you for enjoyable lectures and conversations.

As regards to the physical world, I’ll have more questions than anwers by the end of the school. This is probably a positive net balance.

Having attended Joanne’s extra dimensions lectures last summer at Les Houches, I can say that Trieste will have another good science communicator in september.

Sean, I can picture the scene, a funny kind of dance between two out-of-the-ordinary groups, who have little idea what the other group represents. My adventurous colleagues, who enjoy some of the same hobbies that I do, have been known to jump fences while exploring an island in their one free afternoon of a week-long workshop to accidently find naturist beach parties in progress. (They joined the celebration, which was the naturist club’s commemoration of a new ladder that reached the sea from the rocky shore). All it takes is a curious mind, open heart, and an adventurous spirit to find those precious nuggets of unforgettable moments.

Kip Thorne quote: “CALIFORNIA magazine, in an article on “The Man Who Invented Time Travel”, even ran a photograph of me doing physics in the nude on Palomar Mountain. I was mortified—not by the photo, but by the totally outrageous claims that I had invented time machines and time travel.”

And Amara, as luck would have it, the end-of-the-week party was held at a beach that was in fact quite naturist, although on the Italian side. The physicists uniformly did not get into the spirit of things, and some of the students were quite a bit disconcerted — the joke was to wonder which group would drive off the other first, although they ultimately coexisted peacefully.

One (small?) difference I’ve noticed in astronomy / planetary science here (Europe) is _alot_ of “schools” (often in the summer, but not always) for the PhD students. They are relatively cheap, you go someplace pleasant but isolated for 1-2 weeks once or twice a year, with 30-50 other students, focussed on a topic, and learn with lectures and sometimes hands-on work. If such a thing was available to me in the States when I was taking my graduate courses, then I somehow missed the advertisements. These schools seem to take the role of the ‘practical’ or ‘real-world’ application of the theory that the students learn in the European universities.

Last year I was a lecturer for an October one-week astrophysics school in Volterra, and I agree with Sean’s experience. It was way more fun to hang out with the students!