The second day of the BaBar Physics Jamboree has come to an end, beginning with heaping plates of physics and ending with heaping plates of delicious food in our host’s beautiful home. A lot of topics got covered in parallel sessions today. We heard about more efforts in the search for evidence of a low-mass Higgs boson, efforts to study time-reversal symmetry (well, to be fair, this was ON the schedule but that session didn’t actually happen due to a time-related mishap), and efforts to understand strange patterns of decays of B mesons to two particles by looking for those same two particles being produced directly from electron-positron collisions. By the time we finished the latter topic, I needed a walk. My students and I set out to check out the Univ. of Cincinnati campus, with its many hills and vast expanses of tasteful modern architecture.
I think my favorite sight on the campus has been the “stairs to nowhere,” or as I am starting to think about it, my living example of the title of the blog. Walking this mysterious stairwell (see the photo below) has become the living embodiment of “going up alleys to see if they are blind.” Start out on the wrong staircase, and you’ll end up at a dead-end rail that requires you to jog to the left to get back on the path.
The day ended, as I said, with a big reception at the home of one of the workshop organizers. We were treated to plates of food and more plates of dessert, cheese and chips and crackers. There were a number of other new students at the dinner, as well as my own peers and colleagues. Jodi and I used to joke that at collaboration meeting social events, a “kids table” and an “adults table” would naturally form. Back then, we were at the “kids table.” Tonight, I realized that though the adults in physics don’t actually act “grown up,” we were talking about funding as much as we were half-joking about splitting off big collaborations and forming our own experiments.That’s “adult table” stuff, no matter how goofy we were actually acting.
