How many physicists does it take to go through a buffet line?

For some reason, this is one of the defining questions of my first day at the CTEQ summer school. (The answer, by the way, is “all of them.”) Nothing brings scientists together quite like coffee and donuts, except perhaps figuring out exactly where the end of the coffee-and-donut line is.

I won’t be posting daily updates or anything, but I figured this whole “sharing experiences” thing is just what normal people do with blogs, so why not try it? I arrived in Madison on Sunday, which shall henceforth be referred to as “yesterday,” and the first thing I noticed was how fancy the housing accommodations are. Granted, they’re probably putting us in the nicest building on campus, but seriously, no other college I’ve been to has anything like this: a 24-hour front desk, in-building dining, lounges on every floor, bathrooms with walled and curtained shower stalls, individual rooms with a mini-fridge and TV (equipped with expanded basic cable), daily housekeeping service… okay, to be fair the students never get most of that. But still, it’s remarkable how much the housing accommodations feel like a hotel, despite actually being college dorm rooms. Let it be known that life as a conference participant is sweet.

The people are a whole different story. Some of them come in groups who already seem to know each other, but outside of those… let’s just say I never properly appreciated just how much sheer social awkwardness can fit in one room. As a grad student, you’d think I’d be accustomed to it, but remember, this is CTEQ we’re talking about — truly the nerdiest of the nerdy.

The school itself only occupies 4 hours a day of actual class, but thanks to copious breaks between classes and after meals, plus assorted evening activities, it actually winds up being a 13-hour day. The first class starts at 9 AM and the “night cap” informal discussion session ends at 10 PM. To be clear, when I say “informal discussion” I actually mean “drinking.” CTEQ provides the booze. Again, life as a conference participant is sweet.^*

Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure that when your school offers an officially sanctioned happy hour with the lecturers, it means you have officially become a physicist, Ph.D. or not. A side benefit of officially being a physicist is that the entire school is set up with the understanding that we are here, voluntarily, to learn. There are no tests, no grades, no homework (well there is homework in the “exercise for the reader” sense, but nobody checks), basically no pressure to perform up to a certain standard. It’s just about absorbing information, which turns out to be a lot easier when you don’t have to worry about doing any more extra work than you need (or want) to.

This is assuredly a good thing, because there will be a lot of information to be absorbed over the next 8 days — not just about the physics, but about the other people here. I hear that most of the benefit of these conferences (schools, whatever) is in networking, which is completely believable since the first day’s lectures have mostly covered QCD and standard model basics that everyone here knows, more or less. Naturally, having to actually get out and interact is not exactly my favorite thing to be doing, and it’s not helped by the fact that I’m sure everyone else here feels the same way, but I’ve managed to do reasonably well with random comments so far. I even met two people who know other grad students from Penn State. Small world indeed. (Literally — both because the number of people studying perturbative QCD worldwide probably numbers in the low thousands, and also because we spend our lives staring at objects that make atoms look like the sides of a barn. Look it up.)

Anyway, my ability to keep pretending it’s still Monday is rapidly diminishing, so any actual substantive content will have to wait until later. Note to future self: try to get more than 3 hours of sleep one of these nights. Onward to Tuesday!

^*The fact that I say this despite being a non-drinker I blame squarely on the Princeton Band. I would never be surviving grad school without you guys ;-)