Attending BrunoFest

I was seized once again by an impulse to do something foolish - in this case, to attend a conference organized to honor the life work of Bruno Zumino, a 90-year-old retired Berkeley physics prof. and co-inventor of the so-far purely theoretical idea of supersymmetry. Attending was foolish because I was out of place among all these academics, most of whom knew each other more or less well, and because I couldn't even begin to understand half of the talks. However, I did get to hear some really good presentations by two lead experimentalists from CERN on the Higgs discovery and (so far unsuccessful) supersymmetry searches. One was by Fabiola Gianotti, formerly the spokesperson for ATLAS, the other by Gigi Rolandi from CMS.

The photo above is of the bad combover of the audience's obligatory local crackpot, a fellow who sported, along with his nametag, a pin bearing the handwritten text "HOPE 96-D" and something below in smaller writing that might have been "ask me about my theory". He piped up several times to ask truly obscure questions, which all of the presenters swatted away quite deftly - basically replying something like "I'm not familiar with that idea," and he didn't push the matter, so it wasn't too bad.

The presenter above is Peter van Nieuwenheizen who lost me before the second line of his first slide. But he lost all of the experimentalists and many of the theorists as well, so I don't actually feel quite as bad as I made it sound.

Mainly what I felt about the meeting is that it's not easy to wander into an academic circle as an outsider and feel comfortable. I knew a number of the Berkeley people in attendance and it was fun to catch up a bit with them, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

Regrettably, Bruno couldn't be there for most of the event because he is recovering from some fairly serious illnesses. His companion and my thesis advisor, Mary K. Gaillard was there, looking weary. It was fun to see her, though as always our attempts at small talk didn't last very long.