Yep. All done. Sitting in great cafe with a cup of camomile, listening to one of my favourite Mingus albums on the cafe’s overhead speakers, feeling that it all went well. (The latter – Mingus in a great cafe late at night? – is not really the Kentucky I remember.) I seem to have gone three for three. Class, seminar, colloquium. No disasters, besides skimping on the sleep a bit here and there and writing some of the material at the last minute. Good.
So I gave the seminar at noon*, talking about much the same material I did in my Santa Barbara talk I mentioned before here. We then went to lunch at a Korean place nearby that was rather good. I ordered the bi bim bap (as I often do at Korean places) and to my disappointment, it did not come in the super high temperature near-molten you-can-burn-yourself-any-minute stone bowl that I love about the dish, where the whole meal keeps cooking right until the last pinch of the chopsticks. So I asked, and it seems that I’d not known (in all these years of ordering the dish) that what I like comes under a slightly modified name (“dolsot bi bim bap”), and so I paid my extra two dollars and got it re-done the way the Gods intended. Excellent.
After lunch it was time to dash back to the guest office and spend 45 minutes writing some new slides for my next talk (the departmental colloquium at 3:30pm) and moving some things around. I was using pieces of several other talks here and there, and gluing them together with new transitional slides and so forth. At the last minute I decided that I’d kept the level too low and so cut out some things here and there, making it shorter and tighter (but still a bit on the long side once I put in some more technical stuff here and there). Finally, I made a mental note here and there to edit some slides out as I went along in live mode, depending upon the rhythm of the talk as I gave it. Then I had a bit of a panic when I remembered that all the modifications I’d made to several slides meant that the builds had to be redone on several of them… and so on and so forth. Managed to get most things done before the talk started, thank goodness…
It seemed to go down well. I’m very tired of giving (and listening to) the standard string theory colloquium to a mixed audience where the speakers present a grand picture, don’t really explain much of the core physics, apparently appeal to magic here and there, and promise so much. So I tried to bring it all down to earth and get across the view that I think is most honest, given our state of knowledge so far (you’ve hear it here several times) – the pragmatic one: String theory’s a useful toolbox, and here’s why. I don’t care whether you want to believe in all the extra dimensions, quantum black holes, and all that stuff. They play an important role that make the thing fit together and do the job, and here’s how. Who knows what else we’ll be able to do when we understand it better? The work continues. End of story.
People seemed to like it. It was especially good to say hello to lots of old friends and colleagues come up after the colloquium. Really felt like I’d come back to an old favourite friendly place, which is in fact true. I had some plain and simple good times here (this department, this university, this town), and it was nice to come back and say hi, even if just for two days.
The social part of the evening ended with some beer at a nearby bar (where I needed to introduce a young postdoc, Willie Merrill to the delights of Belgian beers) for a while and then dinner at an Italian restaurant with Wolfgang Korsch, Willie Merrill, and Adel Awad. Thoroughly good time had by all. Now, I’ve got to get up at 4:15am to get ready for a taxi to pick me up for my flight, but here I am blogging at 11:00 in a cafe (John Coltrane playing now…!) and I’ve not packed yet. Sigh…
Well, I’ll be back home in LA by at a decent time tomorrow to have a good day of activity. Some quiet reflective gardening would seem to be on the cards for a while, and then I’ll be off to a party on the West side. Bit of fun and reflection after two and a half hectic days on the road…
-cvj
(*Yes, I did go and find a hair brush or comb (see previous post), running into my old colleague Al Shapere on the way. I think he was amused by my fussing over this, although he was too polite to say so…)
I’m very tired of giving (and listening to) the standard string theory colloquium to a mixed audience where the speakers present a grand picture, don’t really explain much of the core physics, apparently appeal to magic here and there, and promise so much.
Amen to that! I’m a third-year undergrad in physics, and I’ve already heard The Cosmology Talk so many times that I could probably give it myself if I had to. I’d much prefer to hear a mixed-audience talk where, instead of giving a vague introduction to absolutely everything, the speaker supplies only the bare minimum background necessary to develop a specific, more-in-depth idea, and then concentrates on that idea for the rest of the presentation.
For example, The Cosmology Talk includes an obligatory pie chart (just Google Image universe pie chart) describing the composition of the universe. A speaker presenting on the Dark Energy Survey, for example, could save a minute or two by subsequently ignoring dark matter and baryons completely (even though DES wouldn’t be possible without those!), and spend the extra time on a more in-depth explanation of the dark energy equation of state. A speaker presenting on cluster finding could ignore dark energy (even though studying dark energy is a often the ultimate goal of cluster surveys!), and spend the extra time describing how astronomers determine redshifts. Et cetera.