This week I have been in the Mithical Land of Sandy Eggo for the “Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics”.   Here are some highlights in handy bulleted form.  Apologies for the digressions into physics-ese!

  • My favorite quote of the conference so far: “Somebody’s wrong, and statistics doesn’t handle wrong very well.”  I am definitely using that in the future.
  • The central theme of the conference seems to be “we have no signal, but are really hopeful we’ll have one soon.”
  • I finally got to publicly present the results of my thesis research!
  • Some theorists talked through the whole damn thing (my presentation, that is).
  • The public lectures were possibly the most interesting and informative of the whole conference, which either says something bad about me or the talks aimed at physicists.  Maybe both.
  • Fermi (a space-based gamma ray telescope) have turned their data into some very cool movies.
  • The hot word in the CKM/Heavy Flavor talks was “tension”.  You don’t say disagreement or agreement anymore — you say tension.  As in “there is a 1 sigma tension between theory and experiment”.  Which actually means that theory and experiment agree very well!
  • One theorist began his plenary talk by stating that he would explain the origin of all mass in the universe.  This is a kind of an inflammatory thing to say, just before the 10 billion dollar machine designed to understand the origin of mass begins to take data.  It turns out he was only explaining the portion of mass that comes from binding energies, which he claimed to be 95% of the mass in the universe, by some definition of “mass in the universe”.
  • Apparently, the organizers of this conference have been getting hate mail.  It does seem to be kinda poorly organized.  It’s in San Diego, but is walking distance from nothing, so those of us who did not rent a car are stuck eating the scandalously expensive hotel food and without much non-physics entertainment.  I’ve been to the gym about zillion times.
  • The talk entitled “flavor theory” turned out to be a talk on warped extra-dimensions.
  • We still don’t know what dark matter is.  Some people still think that an excess in the cosmic positron spectrum is evidence of dark matter annihilation, but one speaker here said he hoped that “they will be able to overcome their irrational delusion and rejoin the ranks of productive people.”

Overall, it has been interesting and I’m glad I came, but the conference is now in its 6th day and I’m ready to go home.  Howard has renegged on his promise to post cute pet pictures on his blog while I’m away, so I’m doing it instead:

dsc_3477dsc_3567dsc_3408dsc_3529I sure do miss those guys!