What a Week!

I’m sitting, for the second night in a row, in a rather pleasant restaurant in Oxford, somewhere on the walk between the physics department and my hotel. They pour a pretty good Malbec, and tonight I’ve had the wood-fired Guinea Fowl. I can hear snippets of conversation in the distance, telling me that many people who come here are regulars, and that correlates well with the fact that I liked the place immediately last night and decided I’d come back. The friendly staff remembered me and greeted me like a regular upon my return, which I liked. Gee’s is spacious with a high ceiling, and so I can sit away from everyone in a time where I’d still rather not be too cavalier with regards covid. On another occasion I might have sought out a famous pub with some good pub food and be elbow-to-elbow with students and tourists, but the phrase “too soon” came to mind when I walked by such establishments and glanced into the windows.

However, I am not here to do a restaurant review, although you might have thought that from the previous paragraph (the guinea fowl was excellent though, and the risotto last night was tasty, if a tiny bit over-salted for my tastes). Instead I find myself reflecting on the week that has gone by. It has been a successful one overall, and very enjoyable. As it is the longest I’ve been away from my family for some time, and since I don’t know when I’ll get away again for this long, I packed a lot into the trip, and now on the last night here I feel I can relax a bit and look backwards instead of to the next meeting.

I’ve packed in a lot of meetings – over cups of tea and coffee, lunches and dinners – sometimes with family but mainly with friends and colleagues discussing work matters and surrounding topics. And I managed to get a recording done for a BBC program as I mentioned before. The most important family meeting was a lovely lunch with my mum on her 91st birthday, accompanied by my brother and sister. Getting us all together was quite an achievement!

My first half of the week involved fruitful physics chats with Andy Svesko (UCL) and (after jumping on a fast train to Cambridge) David Tong (over, to start, a Chelsea bun at FitzBillies’, of course). I always thoroughly enjoy talking physics with them, and so that was a great start to the week. Oxford (where I was for the second part of the week) had me giving a seminar to the Theoretical Physics group and than talking with lots of students and postdocs, as well as John Wheater, about all sorts of physics, particularly random matrix models, quantum gravity, and triangulations of 2D and 3D surfaces. It’s interesting that I probably met (briefly) John back when I was a student over 30 years ago, maybe when we were both thinking about matrix models and 2D gravity in the late 80s!), but this is the first time we’ve talked physics at length, as far as I recall, and it is matrix models and 2D gravity that have brought us back together!)

I’ve learned a lot, and hopefully have taught a lot too, and I completed the days with an afternoon’s walk around Oxford (the Weather turned out nice). You can see some of the photos above. Of course it includes the Radcliffe Camera since I cannot ever seem to take Oxford photos without getting that in there.)

Besides the physics, what have I learned from this trip? While it is nice to come for longer and beat jet lag and so forth, a week is not a bad amount of time to pop away to here, and it might be doable in the future. If I plan it well I can get a lot done (especially given the swiftness of trains from London to Cambridge and to Oxford). I can check in with family, which is hugely important – It had been too long since I’d done that, and for a variety of reasons, I should not leave it so long again.

Finally, even though I managed to do a little morning run almost every other day, and quite a bit of walking around in London and Oxford, I think I’ll have to do a string of daily 4 mile runs next week in order to work off all the Full English Breakfasts I’ve had nearly every day since Sunday!

-cvj