I gave my talk on the fourth and last day of the conference. I was scheduled to go on the second day, but Martin had changed the schedule. His idea was to have each of the four officers preside over one of the days of the conference, and give our respective talk in the morning of our day of playing emcee. He would start off the first day, as president. Folks had such a great reaction to my Zoom presentation in 2000 when we had our virtual conference (in Virtual Prague) that the idea was for me to go early and give people a similar "welcome to the conference, and to the City of Prague" presentation as before, and summarize what was to come in the rest of the conference. It is surprising how little of that kind of thing there has been. Physicists are into their work. On the other hand, I think a lot about these things and I love doing them, so I find it joyful when I can fulfill that kind of role for people.
As it happened, I had to switch to the fourth day, however, which was in a way a ego deflation, because it mean less exposure, and many folks leave after the third day. In particular our esteemed treasurer, an octogenarian from a black university in Washington, D.C., who like Martin and I were at the first conference in 1998, was one of the early departers, so I was volunteered to switch with him, which I gladly accepted. Ego deflation is good.
Besides it mean extra days to prepare for my talk, which I knew would be a big deal when people heard it. For the first three days I floated the idea around to people during breaks, and especially over dinner, which was always a social occasion when we swapped that kind of information. Physicists don't do physics over dinner. But they will talk about the talk they are going to give. No one wants to get too deep into thinking about theory when you don't have the data or equations at hand, and moreover, physicists like doing other things besides physics. In fact, most of the time we talk about everything under the sun, which is why it is so great to be a physicist.
As such I was working on my talk up to the last minute, rising super early in my flat near Hradcanska Metro. By then I knew I could get coffee and a chocolate croissant at the cafe across the street, but it opened only at eight in the morning, so for several hours in the early morning, without coffee, I churned through my final slides using the Apple Keynote application on my Macbook Air. Later that morning I'd have to give my talk right off the same slides. I was nervous that I would let people down by not being prepared enough.
This was an important topic, one that I'd been promising people for three days running now. Our vice present, a young fellow who is chairman of a physics department in a rural New England private college, was particularly eager. The young generations are clued into these kinds of things. They know something is wrong, and has been wrong for a long time. We knew it was wrong too. We just thought the way forward was to keep on going, and bust through the other side, from falsity into the truth.
It turns out we have to back up. We have to go back in time. We have to fix what went wrong. It got off track. It's too late for most of us, but for the young folk, they will need a path forward.
As I would pose to my audience in my talk: Consider a hundred years from now, when they are writing about this time, and of physics in the second half of the Twentieth Century. Will they say they spent a century valiantly exploring and discovering the subtle and fundamental intricacies of matter and energy relationships, or will they say they spent sixty years mired in the minutiae of beta decay, based on a faulty model of the neutron?
No comments:
Post a Comment