A Week in the North of England

We just got back from the biennial High Energy Physics conference held by the European Physical Society, this year in "The North of England, at Manchester".
The poster for the conference was a nice Lowryesque image of the city, with matchstick physicists heading for the brand new Bridgewater Hall, where the main sessions were held.

As usual with conferences, the days were filled with rather intense schedules of parallel and plenary talks, while most evenings were kept aside for social events, where attendees discuss the day's talks with their colleagues and new people they have met, and which are usually accompanied by refreshments to help the discussions along (including the Beer Tasting that was organised by Lee Thompson of Sheffield, which I certainly appreciated).

Most of these social events involved Dave Wark, our colleague on T2K at Imperial, in his role as the chair of High Energy Physics at the EPS, standing up and trying to tell jokes in a room seemingly chosen such that no one was able to hear him. The first of these was at the very impressive Manchester Town Hall, where it was clear to see (but not hear) that the Lord Mayor was enjoying Dave's speech very much indeed. I later learnt that he was rattling off the names of physicists from Manchester who had made Nobel Prize-winning contributions to our field. This list included the likes of Rutherford, Chadwick, Blackett, Bethe and several more, which is actually quite amazing.

On the Sunday off, Dave and I checked out "The Lowry" gallery, where many of LS Lowry's works are on display, along with artefacts from life in the Industrial North, with contrasting images expressed mainly through paintings, photographs, Coronation Street (the TV soap for our international readership), and Labour Party pamphlets. It is a great day out and puts Manchester as we see it now in proper perspective. It was curious to note, however, that the conference poster was for some reason not based on Lowry's Manchester as depicted in paintings such as "The Lake".

Coming out of "The Lowry", one is confronted by "The Lowry Outlet Mall". Perhaps celebrating Manchester's place as the centre of consumer culture in the North would have pleased the artist. Then again perhaps not.

One of the centrepieces of this conference is the presentation of the EPS Prizes. This year the main prize went to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa, of "Kobayashi-Maskawa Theory" fame, and the K and M in the "CKM Matrix", the "C" being Nicola Cabibbo. Their paper in 1973 showed that symmetry violations that had been seen in nature, but difficult to incorporate into the understanding of physics at the time, could be described if 6 quarks existed, which were linked together through a 3 by 3 component matrix. This was at a time when the existence of quarks themselves, and whether there were 3 or 4, was a point of contention (though I would like to state that was quite a bit before my time!).

I'll leave it to our colleagues on BaBar and LHCb and DZero to remind the world of the significance of that particular Matrix....

Kobayashi was able to make it here and gave a presentation in acceptance of the prize. Although both K & M were at Kyoto University when they wrote their seminal paper, he clearly wanted to demonstrate that the work was a result of the Nagoya tradition of theoretical and experimental physics, just like the earlier MNS (Maki-Nakagawa-Sakata) matrix that we have been probing in our neutrino experiments.

Later in the week I bumped into one of my 4th year project supervisors at Kyoto, Prof Masaike, who I hadn't seen for, well, shall we just say a very very long time. He is close to Prof Maskawa (whose Quantum Field Theory course I remember sitting in), and over a pint of some nice dark Mild, he let me know that not only was Maskawa unable to make it to this particular conference, but he has actually never left the country ever in his life. Perhaps it will take even more than the EPS prize to persuade him to travel outside of Japan....

What you missed at the Staff Party

Wednesday all Imperial Staff were invited to the Centenary Staff Party, basically a big garden party on Queen's and Prince's Lawns. If you didn't attend, here's what you missed:

• All shop and restaurant staff dressed in Edwardian style.
  
• A chance to see the inside of the giant marquee on Queen's lawn. Rumors that it's the largest marquee in the world are definitively wrong. It's not even the largest in the borough, as some websites claim the world's largest marquee was used at the Chelsea Garden show.
  
• The Fab Beatles, a Beatles cover band specialised in the early years up to and including Help! but without Yesterday. I learned that to make a good Beatles cover band you need four guys including one left-handed, one who can play the guitar, one who hardly can play drums and one wearing glasses, all of them with the appropriate hairdo. The latter John-guy didn't follow the rule and had anachronistic long hair. But he was clearly the best approximation among the four.
  
• Fake That, another tribute band. Honestly, I couldn't really judge how good they are as I don't really know what they are supposed to be faking... Ask Yoshi, he seemed to be much more knowledgeable. There's a picture of the band above, but my autofocus seemed more interested by the balloon in front of the stage.
  
• And of course, the rector's dance. Luckily youtube saved it for the posterity.

Overall it was a nice party. College should make it annual! I don't want to wait 100 years for the next one!

Royal Visit

I had a unique experience for an American this week: seeing the Queen in person. She visited the College as part of the Centenary events, and had a quite a busy day from what I've read---but I guess that's always the case when she visits someplace. In the picture I've posted, she is walking through Upper Dalby Court here in the South Ken campus with the Rector, Sir Richard Sykes, having just dedicated the new Biomedical Engineering Institute and on her way to congratulate the College on 100 years of greatness. I was one of the "well wishers" who gathered to greet her en route. I'll confess that it was fun because I have always been a fan of pomp and circumstance, but I was disappointed that she didn't have time to chat because I had honed my elevator pitch about experimental particle physics and was quite prepared to make her love our field. Another time, perhaps.