Around the world

Deconstruction: Around the world

by Françoise Chanut
 

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Travel is an integral part of the life and work of particle physicists. Since the beginning of the year, some 30 physicists known as the Quantum Diarists have criss-crossed the world to meet collaborators at distant accelerators, attend conferences, teach a seminar, or interview for jobs. By planes, trains, cars, ferries, even hydrofoil—they got to where they had to be, by any means possible. They braved snowstorms and rough seas, endured poor air-conditioning and sub-par airline meals, and weathered jetlag and abrupt season changes, often with humor: "Einstein is right, seasons are strongly space-dependent," said Zhizhong Xing after a Beijing-Adelaide trip.

Some trips were marathons: Gordon Watts flew from Seattle to Geneva and back in three days, Karsten Buesser got up at 4:30 a.m. to reach Manchester, England, from Hamburg, Germany, and returned home before midnight. Other trips left some time for leisure, though work was never far from the travelers' minds: "Maybe we were conspicuous at the Waikiki beach, because we were chatting (about physics maybe) carrying big travel baggages," Shohei Nishida wrote after a conference in Hawaii.

Though they spent much of their traveling time preparing talks or writing papers, diarists kept an eye out for picturesque details. About a French institute near Marseille, where he was attending an antares meeting, Frank Linde remarked: "An idyllic location: a top research institute adjacent to a top-security prison."

But traveling physicists can also be the targets of other people's keen observation skills, as David Waller learned from his frequent trips to Sudbury, Canada. "The 'sandwich artists' at the Subway closest to Sudbury Neutrino Observatory can identify physicists by their choice in toppings: apparently we eat far more vegetables than the average customer," he wrote.

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