I’m writing this from Berlin, in my room at Harnack-Haus, a meeting center and guest house owned by the Max Planck Society. The institute itself has a fascinating history, of which I just found the following spellbinding

Immediately upon opening its doors, the Harnack-House began to feed the “Dahlem Legend.” Nobel Prize winners and their students met here in social exchange and for academic discussion, holding lectures and colloquia. The House served as a club for members of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Here they could lunch, read the international press, drink coffee in the garden, engage in sports, and play music. Foreign scholars were lodged in the guest apartments. The list of guests and lecturers reads like a “Who’s Who of Science”: Albert Einstein, Peter Deybe, Werner Heisenberg, Fritz Haber, Adolf Butenandt, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Otto Meyerhof, Max Planck, Max von Laue and Otto Warburg. One Nobel Prize winner, the biologist Hans Fischer, even received the news of his award during his stay at the Harnack-House.

I’m here on an extremely short visit (arrived in Berlin around 1pm yesterday and fly out early tomorrow morning) for the annual meeting of the editorial board of New Journal of Physics (NJP). While quite a trek, and a not inconsequential amount of work, this is nevertheless a fun meeting (even though I didn’t get to watch World cup games in London, like last year.)

One thing that NJP likes to do is publish a number of focus issues each year. These involve enlisting one or more guest editors and getting them to corral a group of experts to contribute original research to a volume tightly concentrated on a particular topic. Sean and I (and our students) contributed a paper to one last year (for which Sean was the guest editor), but there are many others across all fields (which is what NJP covers). A full list, going back to 2000, when focus issues began is

• Focus on Measurement-Based Quantum Information Processing
• Focus on Complex Networked Systems: Theory and Application
• Focus on Interference in Mesoscopic Systems
• Focus on Dark Energy
• Focus on Accelerator and Beam Physics
• Focus on Casimir Forces
• Focus on Nanophotonics
• Focus on Correlated Electrons, Magnetism and Superconductivity in High Magnetic Fields
• Focus on Cold Atoms in Optical Lattices
• Focus on Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Swift Era
• Focus on Nano-electromechanical Systems
• Focus on Spacetime 100 Years Later
• Focus on Solid State Quantum Information
• Focus on Negative Refraction
• Focus on Photoemission and Electronic Structure
• Focus on Brownian Motion and Diffusion in the 21st Century
• Focus on Ultrafast Optics
• Focus on Orbital Physics
• Focus on Single Photons on Demand
• Focus on Turbulence
• Focus on Neutrino Physics
• Focus on Nanostructured Soft Matter
• Focus on Carbon Nanotubes
• Focus on Pattern Formation
• Focus on Quantum Gases
• Focus on Complex (Dusty) Plasmas
• Focus on Clusters at Surfaces
• Focus on Quantum Cryptography
• Focus on Turbulence in Magnetized Plasmas
• Focus on Supersymmetry in Physics
• Focus on Quark Gluon Plasma Searches in Heavy Ion Collisions
• Focus on Microlaser and Cavity QED
• Focus on Dark Matter

You can find links to all these at the focus issues site, and I hope you’ll take a look if interested, because anyone can read them, since open access is one of NJP’s raisons d’être.

I particularly enjoy the part of our meeting in which we brainstorm about possible future focus issues, and there are a couple coming out relatively soon that I am quite proud to have been either the originator or co-originator of. And, at today’s meeting, I suggested one specific focus issue to be initiated that was well received and which I think, when it comes out, will be of particular interest to many of our readers. It wouldn’t be right to go into details here (and I won’t in the comments), but I really hope it works out, and assuming it does, I’ll link to it here with a covering discussion.

Anyway, time for bed - my taxi will arrive ridiculously early tomorrow.

Yesterday morning I woke up moderately early to hie myself down to the NPR West studio in Culver City, where the magic of electromagnetism enabled me to participate in a BBC Radio 4 program, The Material World. Also appearing as a guest was Peter Woit, as we talked about — wait for it — string theory. It was fun, but to be honest, it wasn’t the most enlightening fifteen minutes I’ve ever spent, as too much time was spent talking about whether this ambitious scientific idea was overhyped or not, rather than making the effort to elucidate the idea’s successes and shortcomings in any substantive way. But perhaps I am just spoiled by blogs, where the constraints of time and space are felt much less keenly.

More interestingly, Peter in his post points to a blog I hadn’t heard of, The Atom Smashers. It’s by Clayton Brown, a filmmaker who is presently working on a documentary about particle physics. I won’t give too much away, except to encourage you to read it, and note that one of our bloggers plays a crucial role!

Then, a couple of hours after the BBC interview, I had a really interesting and fun meeting in Beverly Hills, which I’m not going to tell you about, or at least not now. Ha!

Tomorrow morning I will wake up truly early, in order to hop on a plane to scenic Billings, Montana, from which I’ll join an intrepid crew of bone hunters on a trip to the Kedesh Ranch in beautiful Shell, Wyoming. This is one of my occasional chances to join up with Project Exploration, as Paul Sereno and the gang lead some enthusiastic amateur paleontologists to dig up honest-to-goodness Jurrasic dinosaur fossils. I’ve done this a couple of times before, as recounted (naturally) in blog posts about the 2004 trip:

1. Dinosaur Report I
2. Dnosaur Report II

Here’s a picture of Paul and me, laughing in the face of danger as we stand astride an interesting geological formation:

Paul is the one who looks like a paleontologist in the field; I’m the one who looks like a theoretical physicist who someone dragged into the sunlight. He was also voted one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People” in 1997. But I am better at calculus!

Sadly, the seeming ubiquity of the internet has not managed to extend its way to the Kedesh Ranch. So no blogging. Cell phones don’t work there, either. In fact I’m pretty sure that this particular part of Wyoming is absolutely free of electromagnetic radiation of any sort. That’s the only explanation I can think of.

Extremely early this morning, I returned from a visit to the Perimeter Institute, the theoretical physics center in Waterloo, Canada, founded by Mike Lazaridis, Co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIM) - makers of your Blackberry. I had spent the last day at PI, delivering the institute colloquium yesterday afternoon, with a talk titled “Challenges of Explaining Cosmic Acceleration through Modified Gravity”.

Perimeter is a wonderful place, with an increasing number of researchers devoted to physics issues of “foundational” importance. These topics include Quantum Gravity (with members working on causal sets, loop quantum gravity and string theory); Quantum Information Theory, Cosmology, Quantum Foundations and Particle Theory. These people are housed in a beautiful new building that, as well as being aesthetically pleasing (to me, at least), is also a tremendous intellectual playground, with collaborative spaces around every corner, equipped with espresso machines.

Arriving in Waterloo the night before, I graded exams over dinner and a couple of beers before getting an early night so that I could get into PI reasonably early in the morning. This gave me plenty of time to get administrative details out of the way, settle into my office, and then meet up with postdocs Claudia de Rham, Andrew Tolley and Mark Wyman for coffee and a lengthy physics chat. We talked about what each of us was up to and then spent some time discussing the ghost states and strong coupling regimes of various modified gravity models. These are interesting questions, to do with some of the pathological problems that often arise when General Relativity is altered to try to explain cosmic acceleration.

My host, Cliff Burgess, grabbed me for lunch at noon, and we spent an hour or so talking about string theory, quantum gravity, the sociology of these fields, and generally chatting about life at PI. This gave me a half hour to look over my talk before the colloquium at 2pm.

Colloquium at the Perimeter Institute is a lively event. Certainly the faculty, at least, are happy to press and probe with many questions. My talk consisted of a broad introduction to the problem of cosmic acceleration, followed by an outline of the general issues presented by modifying gravity to account for this phenomenon. I used some specific examples to show how solar system constraints constrain certain models, and the appearance of ghost states renders other ones unworkable. I also talked about how we may exploit some loopholes in these constraints to arrive at viable modified gravity models. In the last part of the colloquium, I moved on to the question of the types of observations that might help distinguish modified gravity models from dark energy, or a cosmological constant, as competing explanations for cosmic acceleration - discussing comparisons between, for example, Cosmic Microwave Background measurements and large scale structure observations.

Even with the many great questions, I managed to finish roughly on time, tired, but having had a thoroughly enjoyable time during the talk. I always find speaking to an audience exhausting, and this was no exception. But here Perimeter’s ubiquitous espresso came in particularly useful. With the drug fresh in my system, Cliff and I spend a half hour in his office talking about the approaches he and his collaborators have to dark Energy in some string inspired models, before I met up with Lee Smolin to talk about approaches to related questions arising from loop quantum gravity.

Later in the afternoon I got together with my former colleague and friend Rafael Sorkin. Rafael is a remarkable guy - an experienced relativist with unique ideas about the right way to construct a quantum theory of gravity from causal sets. Some questions about my talk, an update on his progress in teasing out the physics of causal sets, and a sketch of Rafael’s other interests in the foundations of quantum theory took me all way up to when I had to leave and meet up with my hosts in the Black Hole Bistro (yes - really).

There my visit wound up with dinner, where I got to spend time with, among others, someone I’ve known for a long time - and even wrote a paper with once - the theoretical physicist Slava Mukhanov. Slava is visiting PI for a few months - he’s currently giving a cosmology mini-course there - and as well as being an accomplished physicists, is a hilarious storyteller - which made dinner wonderful fun.

I had spent an extremely long and full day at PI, punctuated with fascinating meeting after fascinating meeting. My drive home passed quickly partly because I found myself mulling over a number of the ideas people had mentioned to me during the day. This is one of the great things about traveling as an academic - the exposure to different ideas in an informal context (not like reading papers) in which you can get lots of insight and instant feedback to your questions. Nice to be home though!

I know that you’ve all booked your tickets for Chicago in August, for the big YearlyKos shindig. True, it’s not exactly like going to a physics conference; the halls will be filled with candidates trying to drum up votes, and people who use words like “netroots” unironically. But if last year’s event was any indication, there should be all sorts of fun people there, even if it’s harder to find poker tables in Chicago than in Vegas. (You have to go to the riverboats in Gary.)

Like last year, the inimitable DarkSyde is making sure that science is well-represented, including a high-powered Science Panel. Last year the role of “bearded ScienceBlogger battling against creationism” was played by PZ Myers; this year it will be played by Ed Brayton. The role of “clean-shaven 4-star general who will talk about cosmology and the anthropic principle” was played last year by Wesley Clark; this year it will be me, except for the 4-star general part. The role of Chris Mooney will continue to be played by Chris Mooney. I’m honored to be participating, even if the commenters at Daily Kos are wishing it was my fiancee instead.

I hope any readers who are at the event will give a shout. It will be fun to return to the old haunts, go down to 75th Street to listen to Vonski, maybe indulge at Alinea if we save our pennies. And we all know that the weather in Chicago in August is invariably pleasant and charming, so there’s really no exuse.

I spent yesterday at The Ohio State University, in Columbus, delivering the High Energy Physics/Astrophysics seminar in the physics department. It was a good time and, as well as the talk itself, it was great to see a couple of friends - John Beacom and Stuart Raby - and spend some time talking physics with several other people I know, most notably Samir Mathur and David Weinberg.

I spent some of the morning talking with Samir about his Fuzzball resolution of the information loss problem in a class of string-theoretic black holes, and the possible implications for cosmology. In the afternoon I sat down with Stuart and Akin Wingerter and they told me about their work on realistic compactifications of string theory. John and I chatted briefly about neutrinos and dark matter, but mostly gossiped, and David was nice enough to spend time chatting with me about the content of my talk - gravitational approaches to cosmic acceleration - since a scheduling conflict meant he hadn’t been able to attend.

This is a pretty typical day when one travels to give a seminar - the talk itself takes up an hour of your time, but more important reasons to travel (and to have people visit you at your own institution) are the physics conversations you spend the rest of the day having.

However, the visit to OSU did have one unusual, and extremely enjoyable, difference. The astronomy department has a rather well-known daily journal club called Astro Coffee. Journal clubs exist at many institutions (we have one here), but they are notoriously difficult to do well. They do provide a useful way to keep up with the most interesting papers on the archive, and they are a good way of encouraging students to keep up with the literature. However, it can be difficult to maintain momentum, and the travel schedules of faculty members (I am particularly at fault here) often make journal clubs poorly attended and/or sporadically held.

AstroCoffee is different. Every day (that’s right, I said day, not week!) somewhere between fifteen and thirty people gather, from 10:30am - 11:00am, to discuss recent astro-ph papers. I’ve certainly heard of this, but haven’t attended on any of my previous visits to OSU. This time John invited me and I could see that these guys have clearly got it right. Students, postdocs and a bunch of faculty were there, had skimmed the papers in advance, and had interesting and detailed things to say. This isn’t typical at a weekly club, never mind a daily one. People were feisty too, meaning that you probably might not want to be there when they discuss one of your papers, although you’d undoubtedly learn things that would improve it.

The sheer size of the department is definitely one thing that helps this to work. But the unusual commitment of a significant number of faculty (and therefore their students and postdocs) is a big deal. Although the papers they focused on yesterday weren’t particularly close to my expertise, I’d be there every day if I was at OSU, because I’d clearly learn a huge amount and one couldn’t help but have new ideas in this environment. I’ve got to work on our journal club!

I finished up the day with a very nice dinner, got an early night at my hotel, and arrived back in Syracuse in time for lunch and to teach this afternoon. Unfortunately, because of my travel to OSU, I missed this week’s cosmology journal club here.

As promised before my extended season-of-indulgence break, I thought I’d report on my day at the 8th Northeast String Cosmology Meeting, organized by the Institute for Strings, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics at Columbia University, and held at the The New York Academy of Sciences in their new home in the rebuilt 7 World Trade Center.

This meeting is held once per semester, and up until now was held rather informally at Columbia. This time, for a variety of reasons, some due to scheduling conflicts, and some to do with an increased profile of the New York Academy of Sciences, it was held in this swanky new location, with a breathtaking view of Manhattan.

The format is to have four invited speakers so that, as well as my own talk, Nathan Seiberg, Justin Khoury and Raphael Bousso were also speaking.

Seiberg’s talk was a nice and interesting discussion of how one might break supersymmetry by living in a metastable vacuum state, and the implications that might have. While he didn’t discuss the cosmology of such a scenario, it did seem to me that there might be some interesting features, and I should definitely go and read his paper with Intriligator and Shih sometime in the near future.

Justin, as usual, did a very nice job of describing his very recent paper on fading gravity. Inspired by a specific proposal of Sundrum (the fat graviton scenario), Justin has studied general phenomenological properties of models in which gravity shuts off at short distances, including the discovery of self-inflating solutions predicting a blue tilt for the tensor spectrum.

After a lovely lunch overlooking downtown Manhattan, it was time for my talk. I spoke about the challenges of constructing a consistent infrared modification of gravity yielding late-time cosmic acceleration, provided some specific examples and showed how they run into problems with solar system tests and/or are plagued by ghosts. I then described work that Sean and I have done (with his graduate student Ignacy Sawicki and my graduate student Alessandra Silvestri) on Modified Source gravity, finishing up with a discussion of how structure formation observations may help distinguish between different models.

Raphael was the final speaker, with the provocative title Predictions in the Landscape. Based on his recent paper, the topic was a suggestion that the way to assign probabilities in a theory with multiple metastable vacua (like the landscape) is to construct a measure based only on a causally connected region.

One thing I loved about this meeting was the large number of people who I know from various nearby and not so nearby institutions who attended. For some reason I hadn’t expected to see so many of them and it made for a fascinating day. It was also nice to see so many friends.

That I got to spend the rest of the weekend in New York with Sara and a couple of friends who met us there was a wonderful bonus. This seems like as good a place as any to thank Brian Greene, Joel Erickson and Sash Sarangi for such a stimulating and fun day.

Last Wednesday I dropped my parents and brother off at the airport, after having them here for a few weeks, including a fun trip to Virginia with my in-laws over Thanksgiving. My how things have backed up over this period!

One of the many bloggable things that occurred during my family’s visit was Lisa Randall’s appearance on campus to deliver one of our celebrated University Lectures. As a University Lecturer, Lisa follows in an illustrious tradition, including such speakers as Steven Pinker, Salman Rushdie, Richard Leakey, Rem Koolhaas, David McCullough, Paul Krugman, Tobias Wolff and Maya Lin. I love this series and it is particularly fun when a friend turns out to be the speaker. Lisa’s talk was based on her book - Warped Passages - and was a terrific popular-level description of the idea of extra dimensions and their applications in modern particle physics.

This is not an easy subject to make accessible at a general level; I found it hard enough recently doing it for a scientifically trained, but non-physicist audience, never mind a general educated one. But Lisa did a wonderful job, focusing on warped extra dimensions (as one might expect) and getting across the main motivations, ideas and consequences. While string theory was given its proper recognition for providing motivations for the Randall-Sundrum constructions, Lisa didn’t focus on that, and instead presented the idea mainly as a phenomenological construction. I thought this worked very well and allowed the audience to focus on the more immediate applications and testable aspects of the models without throwing up the many other questions that go along with string theory.

Earlier that afternoon we had Lisa over to the department for a discussion on extra dimensions, which ended up as a long and detailed chat with my colleagues Kaustubh Agashe, Cristian Armendariz-Picon and me. This was great, and I certainly learned a lot about the most recent work on this topic. Part of my work is in this area, but there are so many interesting avenues being explored that it is hard to keep up with the literature and it is always useful to hear what’s going on from someone involved in some of the aspects one is not working on.

After her talk there was time for Lisa and I to grab a couple of glasses of wine at Ohm Lounge. I have known Lisa for quite a long time, since I was a postdoc at MIT back when she was a faculty member there, but this is the first time we’ve managed to get together in Syracuse and it was great fun to have her here.

After a busy semester, Thursday was my last day of classes, and on Saturday I went to Toronto to spend a long weekend there, culminating in a seminar at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) on Monday. I spoke on modified gravity and had an interesting day discussing physics, and an entertaining dinner discussing other topics entirely, with Neal Dalal, Latham Boyle, Jonathan Sievers, Mike Nolta, Lev Kofman, Dick Bond, and others (told you I’d give you a shout-out Neal).

I was supposed to leave this evening to spend tonight in New York and get up refreshed to give a talk at the 8th Northeast String Cosmology Meeting, organized by the Institute for Strings, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics at Columbia University, and held at the The New York Academy of Sciences in their new home at 7 World Trade Center. However, since my flight was horribly delayed I’m getting a very early one tomorrow instead - cross your fingers for me please! Also speaking at this event are Nathan Seiberg, Justin Khoury and Raphael Bousso, so I definitely don’t want to miss any of their talks, never mind making it in time for my own.

Maybe I’ll see some New York CV readers there, since the event is free to non-members as part of some special promotion, as long as you sign up (full information here).

Anyway, I’ll report on this event when I return - better try to get to sleep early so that I can get up at 4am!

In China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, there is a scene in which Mayor Rudgutter parleys with the ambassador of Hell. It’s a negotiation he has performed before, but is nevertheless disconcerting; although the ambassador appears as a well-spoken and immaculately dressed man, his words are accompanied by a faint echo from deep in the Pit below, “in the appalling shriek of one undergoing torture.”

I’m pretty sure I heard the same thing on the phone with Orbitz last night.

Our story begins several months ago, when I booked a round-trip ticket to attend a conference in Greece. (I normally wouldn’t even bother relating this little adventure, except that extensive focus-grouping has revealed that readers love nothing more than chronicles of our travel-related follies.) It was in September, just after I had moved to LA, and various things came up that couldn’t be neglected — unfortunately, and uncharacteristically, I ended up canceling the trip at the last minute. Which was too bad, as I had paid $1600 for the fare on Orbitz.

But all was not completely lost — they let you keep the unused ticket for up to a year, and later on you can exchange it for some other international trip on the same airline (paying whatever change fees and fare differences apply, of course). As it turns out, I’ll be traveling to England later this month, so last week I attempted to use my credit from the Greece flight to pay for the ticket.

It wasn’t as easy as it might have been. First, despite being one of those explicitly web-based companies that wants you to do everything online, and makes some effort to hide their phone number from you, this specific transaction is one you can’t do on the web, you have to call them up. Where, of course, the department you want to speak to is not one of the options you are given by the automated voice system that answers the phone. But that’s not the issue here. Once I did reach a human being, I explained what I wanted to do, and was told that I needed to mail the paper ticket back to them via a service that could track its progress, and call back once I could demonstrate that the package was in transit.

So okay, I did that, and Sunday called back, ready to get a new itinerary. In fact I had previously gone onto Orbitz and found exactly the itinerary I wanted. It was a little complicated, since I wanted to fly from LAX to London, take the train to Durham a few days later, and then fly back to LA from Durham, but I found a semi-reasonable set of flights that got me back to LA only half an hour after midnight. And a tiny bit of extra trickiness, as the return flight from London to LA (after a short flight from Durham to Heathrow) actually stopped at Dulles for two hours before continuing on with the same flight number — as I painstakingly described to the guy on the phone.

But at least it was a relatively cheap ticket — only $700 or so. Once they added a $200 change fee and various miscellaneous gouging add-ons, the whole thing came to about $1000. Which was less than the $1600 I had originally spent, so I was going to be out about $600. (What, you didn’t think they were just going to give it back to me, did you?) But I accepted that, as you always lose big-time when you try to make such changes.

But then yesterday when they emailed me the itinerary, there was a bit of a surprise. (Yes, for some reason it takes a day to email the itinerary — some times the Tubes are just a little clogged, you know.) And the return flight had me going from London to Dulles and staying there, not continuing on to LAX. I might not even have noticed, had I not gone to choose seats on the flight — all of the flight numbers and departure times were right, which is all I usually pay attention to.

So I called again, and explained the problem. In particular, I explained that I had asked to take that flight all the way back to LAX, and their agent had obviously not typed that in, which was their mistake. They pointed out that the agent verified the itinerary with me before booking it, which I’m ready to believe is true. It was my mistake not to catch that the flight he had me on didn’t continue to LA, although an easy mistake to make — that’s what happens when you pay attention primarily to the flight numbers and departure times.

Can they fix things by putting me on the flight that I had asked for, the leg going from Dulles to LAX? Sure they can — for the fare difference, plus another $200 change fee, for a total of $300 extra. Even though they had screwed up? Yes. Could that $300 come out of the $600 of free money I was already giving them? No. How many minutes of frustrating phone conversation would it take to uncover these pleasant truths? About 45.

So $300 of my money has disappeared into the ether, as the result of an easily-correctable mistake. It’s not my first bad experience with Orbitz — they are notorious for doing things slightly wrong, and making them nearly impossible to fix, or at least gouging you whenever a fix is required. For example, if you book a hotel through them, the hotel is completely unable to fix or alter anything about the reservation; only Orbitz can do so, and they’re not always so helpful about it. (Other examples of Orbitz’s evil ways here, here, here.) But it will be my last, as I’m not going to be using them any more.

In fact, I’d like to call for a boycott. If I remember correctly, Bill O’Reilly was able to bring down the government of France by asking his listeners to stay away from French products. Surely if CV readers stayed away from Orbitz in droves, the company would spiral into a tailspin of bankruptcy and shame. (Or at least give me a sense of personal vengeance, which is more important.) So let’s get on that right away, okay? It’s about time we used the power this blog to make the world a better place.

And suggestions for alternative sensible ways to make complicated travel arrangements are welcome.

As I write this, it’s a cold dreary rainy Saturday morning here in the BlueGrass Airport in Lexington, Kentucky – I’m waiting for my delayed flight. Testimony that life as a physicist is not always so glamorous. In fact, readers of CV could get the opposite impression - that we are globetrotting celebrities, darting here and there to deliver lectures, attend meetings, and work with colleagues. It is true that physicists tend to have a heavy travel load. Going home today, I will log my 90,000^th flight mile for 2006 on United Airlines alone. Sometimes we visit exotic locales, but most of the time we travel so that we can spend our days discussing science in a windowless room in places like Batavia, Illinois. Sometimes, even when we travel to popular tourist destinations, we still spend our time in windowless rooms, prompting the phrase Travel Abroad, Stay Indoors. In particular, I remember a meeting in Paris, where all I saw was the inside of lecture halls, and even had working dinners in hotel restaurants with bad food. I might as well have been in Cleveland.

So, why do physicists travel so frequently? My family continuously asks that question and one aunt in particular is convinced that my life is one big vacation. The answer is simple: science is all about interaction. The image of an eccentric white-haired gentlemen working away, alone, in his ivory tower couldn’t be more false (on several counts). There are two main aspects to progress in science:

• Research: Yes, a scientist does have to sit down and do the actual work, and yes, that can sometimes be rather tedious. However, before one sits down to do the work, you gotta have an idea. Preferably an interesting idea. That idea usually does not arrive in a single eureka moment while sitting in isolation. Well, actually maybe it does, but only after interaction with colleagues. After listening to lectures, reading papers, discussing points, and then churning ideas over (and over and over) in your head.
• Dissemination: Even if you’ve done Nobel prize winning work, it doesn’t matter if no one knows about it. You’ve got to sell your work. Publication in a prestigious journal (or posting on the arXiv) is not enough. A significant fraction of the new material physicists learn is absorbed by listening to talks. I guess we never abandon the notion of learning at lectures.

So, what are the sorts of business trips that physicists take? My trips have included all of the following this past year:

• Conferences: We attend conferences to (i) give talks describing our own results, performing the dissemination part of our job, (ii) listen to other talks, gathering new ideas and staying up to date, and (iii) interact with a wide variety of colleagues.
• Workshops: These are usually working meetings, where we perform a calculation that is oriented towards a specific goal (i.e., study of XYZ at the LHC) and have intense discussions with fellow workshop participants.
• Summer Schools: Here we present a lecture series to a group of students. I must admit that I like summer schools that are held in nice or unusual destinations where I can spend time walking and taking pictures after my lectures are finished.
• Seminars/colloquia/public lectures: We give individual lectures for dissemination and attend them to learn and gather new ideas. It’s particularly important for young researchers to go on the seminar circuit so that they can become known.
• Collaboration meetings: This is mainly for experimenters to stay abreast with the results within their detector collaboration. Can you imagine the LHC detector collaboration meetings, with roughly 2000 participants, discussing the intricate details of Higgs searches and possible discoveries! As a theorist who works closely with experimenters, I have been invited to give pep talks (a theoretical interlude if you like) at many collaboration meetings, and I always thoroughly enjoy doing so.
• Visit a collaborator: This is clearly on the performing research side of the job, when collaborators meet face to face to develop ideas and further progress on a project.
• Committee/panel meetings: This is taking an increasingly larger fraction of my time. Most commonly, we serve on peer review panels to review a set of grant proposals or potential experimental projects for their scientific merit. I have also served on panels which advise the DOE and NSF on broader funding issues and which have written literature to explain the merits of a project to various audiences.

So, my trip to Kentucky? To give a physics department colloquium on Discovering the Quantum Universe. I enjoy communicating the excitement of my field and the impending scientific revolution we expect at the LHC!

I spent the end of last week at the National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center in Irvine, California. This happens annually, and is a fascinating meeting at which young (-ish, i.e. below 45 years old) scientists from across the disciplines come together to speak and participate in discussions about a range of topics.

I was there to chair and give the introductory talk in a session titled “How Many Dimensions does the Universe Have?”. I was supposed to give an overview of the idea of extra dimensions, how they might avoid detection, and why one might want to think about the idea in the first place. After that, I was followed by Gary Shiu, who talked about the role of extra dimensions in string theory, and then Jonathan Feng, who talked about testing extra dimensions.

Our session was fun, and people seemed to enjoy it. But I had most fun at the other sessions. The complete list was:

• Artificial Photosynthesis / Alternative Energy Sources
• Biometrics: Identity Technologies
• Evolutionary Origins of Human Cognition and Behavior
• Extrasolar Planets
• How Many Dimensions Does The Universe Have?
• Memory and Learning
• Paleoecology
• Prepare Immediately for Whatever Happens Next

As has probably become clear from my posts, I travel to a lot of different conferences of different styles. There are always some interesting sessions and plenty of creative people to talk to. Even so, this meeting was the most intellectually stimulating such event I’ve been to in quite some time. I attended every session and spent almost all the time outside of them discussing aspects of the science either with the speakers or with some of the other attendees. Some of these were in my own, or related fields (David Berenstein, Albion Lawrence, Per Berglund, Fred Adams and our very own Risa), while many others were experts in some of the non-physics topics listed above.

There were far too many excellent talks to report comprehensively, so I thought I’d just focus on one that I particularly enjoyed. In the session on Memory and Learning, Matthew Walker delivered a highly entertaining and fascinating talk on the role of sleep in learning and consolidating memories. Matthew spoke at length about his work, but it was a particularly simple experiment that seemed to get most people’s attention.

The method was to take two groups of students (who, apparently, are a plentiful and cheap source of subjects for these experiments) and to put them through the same set of events. First, they were taught to perform a simple task that, if I recall correctly, involved rapidly punching in sequences of numbers on a pad. The students were then tested twelve hours later and again twenty-four hours later, to measure how well they had learned to perform this task. The difference between the two groups of students was that one group underwent the initial training in the morning, while the second group did so in the evening.

So what were the results? Well, the group that trained in the evening showed a large degree of learning (success on the test) on both tests - the morning afterwards and later that day. However, the group that trained in the morning showed only some degree of learning in the evening, but a much greater degree (a 40% increase), equal to that of the first group, the following morning, after a good night’s sleep.

This is pretty fascinating, demonstrating that a significant amount of important learning goes on during sleep. But there’s more. You might think, just from this experiment, that you don’t properly learn something until you sleep, and so you just have to wait until you get a chance to go to bed and you’ll finally learn what you studied. However, other experiments show that if you don’t get a good sleep in the twenty four hours following studying or training, then you never get the benefits of learning during sleep, no matter how much sleep you get when you eventually go to bed.

There are many examples of situations in which these results are important but, for those of us in education, it is worth pointing out to our students that that all-nighters are awful if you really want to learn your subject matter and that a good night’s sleep may make the difference between failing and acing an exam.

Talks like this for two and a half days, followed by a delightful dinner with Risa and Sean (who drove out to see us on Saturday) made this just about the perfect trip.