The Octave of Pentecost

The calendar I made at the beginning of the year, the schedule of events for the next twelve months, had me in Prague this week, for a physics conference.

Of course the conference didn't happen, at least not in the physical-space sense. Instead we gathered in a virtual version, researchers from a dozen different nations, to give talks and listen to each other.

The host was in Jerusalem. We've known each other for many years, having been at the first conference together in Houston twenty-two years ago. We were both graduate students of two men, an Israeli and an American, who had co-founded the organization and had organized that first conference, but who had since retired. My friend in Jerusalem stayed with physics in Israel kept the organization going.

We had planned on Prague while the last conference was still in session in Mexico. My friend, who is the organization president now, had already contacted someone at the Czech National Technical University, who like many European regulars hadn't been able to make it to the Yucatán conference, but who was willing to organize the next one, as by alternating tradition it would be in Europe.

Through incredible effort, everyone involved (which didn't include me) was able to adjust all the contracts last minute to turn the conference into a big Zoom meeting, which is what everyone has been talking about having to do in business, because of recent events and folks working from home. I'm used to video conferences from tech, but this was my first one as a physicist, and the first one since before the shutdown a couple months ago, in the New Normal.

I had asked the Holy Spirit to help me with my talk. It was the first real physics talk I'd given since Houston. Fortunately I had plenty of material for a dozen talks back then, so it was easy to present some old stuff, which was very new to everyone else, since many of the same issues that were open and unresolved in physics in 1998 are still unresolved today.

This last point was a central part of my talk, along with a look back at relativity over the last century (since a famous 1920 equation) and also since that first conference.  At the end I gave everyone lots of equations I myself had derived and published with my advisor, so it was a real physics talk, even if it was old stuff. I made fun of myself back then and told them I didn't even have the chance to see if the orbits I derived were real ones made by real particles, and not just mathematical artifacts of our axioms. We had run out of time, I said. There was so much left to do back then. As I prepared my talk I knew could still give a dozen talks on that old material, just using the overhead slide transparencies I made back then, which are now relics of a different era of science.

Now for this talk I used a computer program to create a colorful animated slide show, which was distributed on the conference website in PDF form beforehand, so folks could peruse them. I was shy about submitting mine, as it was the first one I'd ever done. I brought all of my design and presentation skills to bear on making it.

I used techniques from tech conferences to introduce humor, to provide at a retrospective of the organization, and to give everyone a brief Virtual Tour of Prague with photos of famous art work and historical figures of Prague, including some great scientists who did their work there.

Right before it was my turn to present, I got very nervous. I asked the Holy Spirit to help me, and that if my talk had no merit, to make it sound like jibberish, but if it had merit, to help me make it clear to my audience.

The talk turned out well, as it happened. People liked it mostly and had many comments. I was asked to give the opening talk at the next conference two years from now (location undetermined), and by acclamation it was agreed so, and I accepted.

It is much, much easier to receive gratitude from others, when, even in your own mind silently, you can pass the gratitude onward to Whom it belongs, and not have to bear it for yourself, with your stumbling ego.

It is one of the many psychological tricks available to a believing Christian, which to my experience arrive only after the decision to believe, but which in the wake of that decision seem to furnish a method of living in a state of Joy and Gratitude amidst the great Suffering that exists in the world, and to find Peace.