Today begins a nearly one-month odyssey. I leave my home in California, laptop in hand, and head east to start a seminar tour. I’m currently on an AirTran flight from San Francisco to Atlanta, where I’ll transfer to a flight to Rochester, NY. I’ll be grabbing a rental car in Rochester and then driving to Ithaca.
The trip didn’t start out in a particularly auspicious way, though I’m hoping that this trip is like an experiment: if you encounter problems right away, you shake the bugs out of the process and the rest goes smoothly. When checking in for my flight yesterday, I tried to buy an upgrade that was offered to me. When I did so, the website gave me an error and informed me I had to check in at the airport. Normally this wouldn’t annoy me, except that I had a 7 am flight and checking in at the airport meant arriving a lot earlier than I planned. I like to build a comfort zone ahead of a trip: get the packing done early on the day before the trip, rest and watch a little TV, go to bed early, that kind of thing. Knowing I had to get to bed even earlier shifted my schedule, and combined with late meetings and last minute work yesterday was a pain.
We got to the airport this morning to learn that my reservation was completely screwed up as a result of the website yesterday. However, the AirTran agents were able to quickly sort it out and get me on my way. At that point, all that was left to do was deal with the frustration of knowing that I’ll be away from home for almost a month.
Deep down inside, I know this is all for a good cause. This trip, and the talks I’ll give at each stop, are an important way to share the work being done with the last data taken by the BaBar experiment. The flavor program at BaBar, Belle, CLEO, and the Tevatron carries on the long legacy of precision measurements and discovery in the quarks and leptons. This legacy is a gift, a lesson that through painstaking work and innovative investigation of the subatomic universe, we understand so much about these fundamental building blocks of the universe. But this gift is a white elephant, a cherished present that was exhilarating in the receiving but a terrible burden now that we have it. We know so much about only 5% of the universe, a stark realization that has only become clear in the last decade.
We have mapped, and continue to map, the mountains and fissures in the quarks and leptons. In every fissure we crawl to see how deep it goes, and whether it penetrates the surface of the known and takes us deep into the uncharted caverns of dark matter or dark energy. The burden of our understanding is that we have not found a way through, a way into the deep unknown. We know so much, and despite that it has only taken us so far.
My seminars and colloquia are a way to take one aspect of this search, BaBar’s work on the Upsilons, and illustrate the successes and the frustrations of our knowledge. We have learned something new about quarks – that there is, in fact, a ground state to the bottomonium system which can be identified and studied. We don’t know much about it yet, except that it exists. We have also used the Upsilon data to explore a fissure: the possibility that a low mass Higgs boson is lurking in the decay of the Upsilon meson. Between CLEO and BaBar, we have mapped out both detectable and undetectable final states of a hypothetical Higgs, and found no way through to a new understanding of nature.
I’ll hopefully make the case that we, as a physics community, have a white elephant on our hands. I have great hope that in the coming months and years, with all the new ground-based and space-based tools available to the field, we’ll find a way through or around our seeming impenetrable wall of understanding.
