The Personal Blog of Stephen Sekula

Summer at the Frist

I am in Nashville, TN for the third in the conference series “Frontiers in Contemporary Physics”:http://www.fcp05.vanderbilt.edu/. This conference is held at Vanderbilt University, a lovely Methodist university nestled just beside the heart of Nashville. I arrived late last night and spent today finishing my talks, then taking a walk around the Vanderbilt campus.

If you check out the maps below, you can see the walk I took. I started by finding the Scarritt-Bennett Center, the conference venue. This cluster of stone buildings, including a lovely chapel, reminded me of Yale University. One step off the street, and your inside a quaint green lawn surrounded by the center’s buildings. Archways connect different courtyards, with benches scattered all along the pathways.

The yellow line indicates my path before lunch, while the green indicates my path after lunch. One of the things that I noticed was the Frist Center (I can only assume it’s named after a member of the family Frist, to which Senator Bill Frist belongs). There were posters all over the place advertising art exhibits at the Frist Center, all with the header “Summer at the Frist”. I got a kick out of it all.

Tomorrow the conference begins, with my first of two talks in the late afternoon at 4:20 pm. Whew! It’s good to be here!