I am a member of the American Physical Society (APS) http://www.aps.org, which is an organization of physicists and other people in the physics community. As a member you get to subscribe to physics journals and other publications. I’ve always taken advantage of that aspect of membership. Another big part of being a member of APS is you get to go to meetings. Unfortunately, I had never had a chance to go to one. They were always to far away from where I live, which is Hanford, California. They have different types of meetings, one of which is their APS meetings. Every so often, they have a APS meeting in some city somewhere in the U.S. I originally thought that they had these meetings every month, because there was a March Meeting and an April Meeting, but these are the only two they have a year. Last November, I received their list of upcoming meetings, and to my great surprise, I saw that the April 2000 Meeting was to be held in Long Beach, California. First of all, this was close enough for me to go to. Second of all, it would especially easy for me to go to Long Beach, since I had been a physics undergraduate at California State University at Long Beach (CSULB), from 1988 to 1992. During that time, I would frequently take Amtrak back and forth between Hanford and Long Beach, so it would easy for me to do that again. Therefore, last November I registered for the April 2000 APS Meeting.
Shortly after Easter, I made reservations at the Motel 6 in Long Beach, which happens to be close to CSULB. I was used to taking the city bus from the Amtrak stop to there. Also, the Amtrak stop would be within walking distance of the Long Beach Convention Center and the Long Beach Hyatt Regency which is where the meeting was located. I got train tickets, and took money out of the Credit Union for the hotel. For some inexplicable reason, my mother did not want for me to go to the meeting, and I still have no idea why this is. Despite the name of the meeting, it was held from April 29 to May 2. I would only be there on the first three days, April 29 to May 1, which was from Saturday to Monday. I printed off the Internet, a schedule of the meeting for the time I was going to be there. They have physics talks all day, and at any one time, there were several going on simultaneously, so you have to choose which you want to go to. I printed off emails I had received about the meeting, and maps showing the locations of the Amtrak stop, Convention Center, and Motel 6. In my jacket, I put the money, Amtrak ticket and schedule, small clock, and driver’s license. In my black bag which I put over my shoulder, I put changes of clothes, a manila envelope containing stuff I’d printed off and paper, the confirmation letter, pencil, a copy of “Physics Today”, and a small bag of stuff to much on, like party mix.
The Amtrak train left Hanford on Saturday at 10:18 am. I got on the train and went to the train station in Bakersfield. Then I changed to an Amtrak bus, which stopped in Los Angeles, and then went to Long Beach. On the bus, I looked at the copy of “Physics Today”. It was supposed to arrive in Long Beach at 3:20. I was a little late, about 3:30. It dropped me off at the Denny’s near Long Beach Plaza. It had been eight years since I had been in Long Beach, so it felt weird being there again, and it was interesting to see how it was different. I walked south down Long Beach Blvd. to the Long Beach Convention Center. I had never been there before, so I had a hard time finding it. Throughout most of Long Beach, you would never guess you were within 1000 miles of the ocean. However, as I continued walking south, the character of the city changed, and it began to look like it was near the ocean, although I still couldn’t see the ocean itself. When I found the Long Beach Convention Center, it was giant airy white building, rounded on top, with multi-colored pennants fluttering down the side. There giant windows. It was two stories with each story being taller than a gymnasium. I had exchanged email with Trish Lettieri (lettieri@aps.org), and she had said that you were supposed to check in to the meeting in the lobby of the Hyatt which was adjacent to the Convention Center. I walked to the hotel, and went in. From where you walk in, it’s just a landing from which you take escalators either up or down. I went down to the lobby. Many people attending the meeting were staying at the hotel. It was about $300 a night. I don’t know if they were all paying for it themselves. When I was offered to give a talk on pharmaceuticals in Washington D.C., they offered to pay for the whole thing for me. The Hyatt had the look of an expensive hotel, with those gold things on wheels people use to cart luggage around. You could tell they were trying to recreate the atmosphere of an expensive hotel from 1920’s or 1930’s, like the sort of thing my mother’s Grandma T would have lived at. I asked someone about the meeting, and they said you were supposed to register at the Convention Center.
I walked in the Convention Center. The carpet was sort of a paisley pattern. There were large black and white signs around on easels, saying what events were being held where. A sign said that APS registration was on the second floor. I went up there, and into Ballroom I. On the right-hand side of the room were a bunch of booths. They had signs saying things like “on site registration”. I went to the right most booth which was for “pre-registered W - Z”. It was manned by an old woman. I handed her the confirmation letter but she didn’t look at it. She gave me the name tag, a book titled “Bulletin of the American Physical Society, Program of the April Meeting 2000”, and a couple other papers and brochures. She said, “Enjoy the talks”. They misspelled my name on the name tag, of course. It said, “Jeffrey Scott Winkler”. It had a safety pin attached which I used to pin it on my shirt. I walked out, and picked up other papers from a table.
There were several sessions held in different rooms. Each session includes about a dozen talks, one after another. The sessions were supposed to be synchronized so that the talks would begin and end at the same time. That way you could go to different talks in different sessions. Most people would stay in one session which pertained to their field. Therefore, there are basically four levels of participants. There are the people who organized the meeting itself. There are the session chairs who are in charge of a given session. There are the speakers who stand up and give their talk. Then there are the attendees who sit in the audience. The session chairs announce each speaker, set the timer, and tell them when their time is up. The speakers usually just recite a paper that they had been involved in writing, and use an overhead projector. They are also given a red light pointer similar to that which my uncle Mark uses to tease his cat. The attendees sit there, take notes, and ask questions at the end of each talk. On Saturday, I went to a session called C15 which was about heavy flavors. When I first went in, there was a Chinese guy talking but I only caught the end of his speech. Then a younger guy stood up and talked about resonance and decay, basically talking about the data coming from particle accelerators. He talked about different types of decay modes that account for kaon (K [K bar]) decay.
After that, I went down to the first level. There was a huge crowd of people. They had a huge buffet set out. I got a bunch of crackers. They had a bar with a bunch of alcoholic drinks. I don’t drink alcohol but they had coke which they use in mixed drinks, so I asked for a coke by itself. He handed it to me. I tossed a 20 dollar bill on the bar. To my astonishment, he said, “It’s hosted”. I realized that all of this was free. I sat down and ate a bunch of crackers.
They had a thing called a poster session. This is when the physicists take their paper and post each page to a bulletin board. The poster is then supposed to hang around all day to answer questions. They had it set up in the same room as you register, on the right hand side of the room. I walked through looking at the papers. They had fewer people there than actual papers so some had probably wandered off. They had good papers on looking for Higgs particles and supersymmetric particles. These are examples of trying to find data coming from particle accelerators where you can point to it, and say that’s it. One guy standing next to his exhibit was a very flamboyant man named Alan McCone Jr. He had a stack of papers about his work, which he was passing out. He also had an orange with suckers stuck into it, which he was using as visual aid. His paper was titled “Sub-Quantum Physics”. Later when I looked through it, I sensed that it almost had the feel of the crackpot sites I look at on the Internet. It was not as bad as that, but it wasn’t serious physics. It contradicts what we observe.
I wanted to go to Session C5 on the nucleon in Ballroom DEF in the Hyatt. However, I looked around and couldn’t find this ballroom. There is no map of either the hotel or convention center. The only way to find things is to wander around until you stumble across it. I didn’t find Ballroom DEF until the physics talk was over. It was on the floor above where you enter the building. When I got there, they were setting up a wedding reception. It’s so expensive to rent these ballrooms that it’s only done by companies, government agencies, or large non-profit organizations like APS. The only exception would be a wedding or funeral, when individual people feel compelled to spend that kind of money. Just walking around the Hyatt Regency, you get the feeling that the people who stay there are paying for the ability to pretend to be very wealthy 1930’s people. It doesn’t cost much money for a woman to wear a strapless dress, high heels, fake pearls, and put her hair up. However, by doing that, she’s pretending to be wealthy, playing into the atmosphere deliberately created by the hotel.
My hotel was not nearly as pretentious as all that. I was staying at the Motel 6. If you have reservations, they only hold your room until 6:00, after which, they give it to someone else. Therefore, I wanted to go to the motel to check it. I left and walked back up Long Beach Blvd. At this point, I did not actually know which bus to take. I tried looking at the simple maps posted near the bus stops but couldn’t divine anything meaningful. I walked to a bus stop that was near the Denny’s where the Amtrak bus had dropped me off. When I attended CSULB, I took a bus from this stop to the college, which is near the Motel 6. However, I could not assume that the buses would still be the same after all this time. I asked a bus driver, which bus to take, and showed him where the Motel 6 was. He said to take the 91 or 94. It turned out that the routes really were basically the same as before. While I was waiting for the bus, there was a man of some eastern ethnicity I couldn’t place, with triplet little girls. They were sitting on the ground in such a way so that you could clearly see their panties. The 94 arrived, and I got on. The woman bus driver said she went by the Motel 6. It turned out the price had gone up from 75 cents to a dollar. I rode the bus to the Motel 6.
I arrived at the Motel 6 at 5:50, ten minutes before they stop holding the room for you. I went and checked in. The flunky behind the desk was a person of obviously low intelligence. The rooms were $50 a night. I was staying for two nights, so it came to $108.62. He asked for my driver’s license number, for some unknown reason, so I showed him my driver’s license. A black girl came in, and asked if they were hiring. He gave me and card with a magnetic strip to open door. I had room 206 on the second floor. I went up to the room, and looked around. I had signed up to go to a dinner that night at 6:30. I looked at the clock, and it was 6:00. So then I left, and tried to find a bus stop on that side of the street to get back to Long Beach Plaza. In the process of looking, I caught a glimpse of one of the buildings of CSULB from the distance. I found a bus stop, and rode the bus back to Long Beach Plaza. Then I walked back to the Long Beach Convention Center and the Hyatt.
The dinner was for physics students. Even though I was no longer a physics student, I signed up to go to it anyway. It was in the Pacific Room in the Hyatt. Again, I had a hard time finding it. The rooms had names like “Pacific” and “Seashore”, evidence of the fact we were near the ocean. Throughout 90% of the city, you don’t see that. I past a man playing piano, simple musak for some other group in another room. I found the Pacific Room and walked in. It was a small room with three circular tables. The tables were set in a formal manner. Two tables were surrounded by physics students, and two adults, and one was empty. I put down my bag and coat, and sat at the empty one. They tried to make room for me at another table, but I said I’d rather be at the empty one. Even though the students were all dressed every casually, the Hyatt which was putting on the dinner, were doing it as a very formal thing. They were doing it like the sort of thing Miss Manners would go to. Each place setting had several plates and a dozen utensils. The waiter was in a tuxedo and was doing the snobby waiter routine. It’s rare you have a man in a tuxedo pretending to be obsequious to a bunch of kids in shorts and T-shirts. One difference between a normal formal dinner was that they didn’t have wine, presumably since most people there were under 21. Instead, they served ice tea. Since I’d rather drink skunk urine than ice tea, I asked if I could have a Pepsi. The expression on the waiter’s face was reminiscent of the anecdote of “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman”. After a long pause, he said, “of course”, and then walked off. Later, he brought me a Pepsi. The dinner itself was not something I would normally eat, but fortunately, it was possible for me to eat it. First I had a salad. Then there was the main course, which was chicken, noodles, and then green beans which I obviously didn’t eat.
A fat black woman came and sat next to me. She was part of the administration of the Society of Physics Students (SPS), which is part of APS. The leader was Trish Lettieri, a thin white woman sitting at another table. They were getting feedback from students on what they would like from SPS. I talked to the black woman. I told her how I wrote weekly articles on advanced physics for Suite 101. She was very impressed. I gave her the URL of my homepage. I talked about the Internet. I said how my cousin Ian had given a talk at one of these meetings. Then she left, and I eavesdropped on the other conversations. One guy said that when he says he’s majoring in physics, people say, “That must be hard”, but if he says he does astronomy, they say, “Cool”. A girl was saying its hard being a girl if you’re a physics major because you’re not taken seriously. She also said other physics major continue to use acronyms when talking to non-physics majored even though she does not. She said that she told her mom that there’s a finite probably that you can walk through a wall, and she got excited and said “Wow! You can walk through a wall!” I cringed when I overheard this since its a popular misconception based on a misunderstanding of barrier tunneling of electrons. An electron is not like a tiny marble. An electron barrier tunneling is not analogous to a macroscopic object passing through a solid wall. She was misunderstanding particle-wave duality. Also, when talking about quantum mechanics, people often deliberately ignore relativistic effects. Of course, if you do not ignore this, you know its not possible for an object to disappear and reappear somewhere else. It also reminded me of when my 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Azevedo, said she once met a man named Master Kootume who could walk through walls. Another guy complained that the only telescope anyone has ever heard of is Hubble, and they instantly think of the colorful pictures which are never used by actual astronomers. At the end, they passed out dessert. I think I got something different than the others. The others looked like they got something square. I got a triangular piece of chocolate cake, with a semicircular wafer stuck vertically into the top. There was also strawberry liquid on the side of the plate.
After dinner, I picked up one of the red plastic cups they had sitting in the back. They were souvenirs from the APS meeting. They also had them in the Convention Center. They said, “Don’t Drink and Derive”, and were covered with inaccurate formulas. They took famous equations that would be recognized by anyone with a background in physics and made them inaccurate. E = mc^2 was changed to E = mc^3. F = ma was changed to F = [squareroot of ma] PV = nRT was changed to PV = n + R + T. F = G (m1)(m2)/(r^2) was changed to F = G (m1)(m2)(m3)/(r^3) The average person looking at this cup would not realize these were fake equations. Then I went back to the Motel 6.
That night, I looked at the brochures and stuff that I had got. I read through the copy of “Physics Today”. I turned on the TV, and they were talking about a police officer in Long Beach being shot.
The next day, Sunday, I got a Pepsi from a vending machine at the motel. I went to the office to break a $20 bill to get quarters for the bus. I left and got to the Convention Center at about 8:20. Each morning of the meeting, they had plenary sessions. These are talks in a huge giant ballroom with several hundred people in the room. I went to the Plenary Session II, in Ballroom II, which is a very big room. I arrived about 10 minutes and listed as they milled around. One guy said he knew people who wrote for APS News. It began at 8:30. An old man named Cowley began the talks and introduced the speakers. The first was a woman with red hair, named Janet Conrad, from Columbia University. Her talk was titled “Front Page Nu’s”. The Greek letter nu is the symbol for the neutrino, which is what her talk was about. She talked about neutrino oscillation. If neutrinos have mass, you have right handed neutrinos called sterile neutrinos. This gives information on the mass hierarchy. Chemical extraction and electron-neutrino scattering experiments show that you have half the neutrinos you’d expect from the standard solar model. She gave a good talk on neutrino experiments, sterile neutrinos, etc. The idea that neutrinos have been mentioned in the popular media gave her the idea to do funny puns like “Nu’s weak”, etc. She answered questions.
Next there was a very boring talk about K - 12 science education by Patricia Heller. She was basically saying that the ignorance of the average person about physics is so enormous that we have to do something about science education. I think you can try but there’s not much you can do. Most people are of such low intelligence that they are incapable of understanding much more than they do. How much people know or understand about basic science is really based on their intelligence, not their exposure to it, since the information is freely available. She gave an anecdote of how she was talking to a college student, a girl who was studying to be a teacher, who thought that water molecules were huge, about the size of tennis balls, and figured the reason you can’t see them is because they are transparent like jelly fish. The reason she thought this was because in textbooks, molecules are often drawn large, like there might be a drawing of a beaker, with three large molecules in it. You can imagine how the physicists in the room were astonished and horrified by this. I could give similar anecdotes. Once a guy said to me, “If you had an atom on your finger, could you see it?” because it’s easier to see, say, a grain of salt on the tip of your finger, so he thought small things could be seen if they are on the tip of your finger.
The next talk was about extrasolar planets, and was by Paul Butler from UC Berkeley. I’ve always been interested in this subject. Paul Butler was a bald man who had planned to much for his talk so he couldn’t give the whole thing. It’s very difficult to see planets because they are so faint, and next to bright stars. A successful technique is astrometry/interferometry. You can measure the wobble of the star. Another way to detect planets is transit, meaning seeing planets cross the star, which dims slightly. You can detect the dobbler shift due to stellar wobble. Three types of planets have been found. There are planets like 47 Ursae Majoris which is a Jupiter-like planet. There are eccentric planets with very eccentric orbits, like 70 Virginis. The 51 Peg planets are named after Peg 51, which was the first extrasolar planet confirmed. They have short orbital period and orbital distance. He talked about possible theories of the formation of those planets. When he ran out of time, an elderly man in the audience staggered to his feet and cackled, “I’ve been a member of the American Physical Society for 50 years, and I would like to invoke the clause in the charter that says a member can request a speaker be given more time, thank you”.
After that, I went to Session H8 which was about cosmic rays. It began at 11:00, and the first talk was titled “The Highest Energy Gamma Rays from Gamma Ray Bursts”, and was given by Brenda Dingus of the University of Washington-Madison. It was in a medium sized room. Brenda had a red silk scarf, and was talking about gamma rays. Gamma-ray bursts are equally likely to occur from any part of the sky, are detected by satellites about once per day, and emit most of their energy in a few seconds. Therefore, a detector with a large field of view and high duty factor is essential for observing gamma-ray bursts. They could be formed by two neutron stars colliding, or the hypernovic model. The spectrum has two humps. The TeV photons (gamma ray photons) have to be produced nearby since they can be destroyed on route. They talked about a new detector called Milagro which is a bunch of detectors in a pond of water.
The next talk, H8-2, was titled “Gamma Ray Observations of Supernova Remnants”, and was given by James Buckley of Washington University. James Buckley, a man with a red beard, discussed gamma rays from supernova remnants. Despite the growing evidence for shock acceleration of electrons in supernova remnants (SNR), there is still no direct evidence pointing unambiguously to SNR as sources of cosmic-ray nuclei. It’s hard to sum two spectral components, and get a convex spectrum which is what this is. The simplest model is the leaky box model, where the electrons bounce around in a magnetic field, and every so often, they escape. The escape rate is energy dependent.
After those two talks, I left H8, and went to another session, H14, which was about solar wind. I entered at 12:12, which was the beginning of H14-3. I chose it mainly because it had a neat title, which was “Winds that Sail on Starlight”. The talk was given in a small room by Stan Owacki, a hefty man with a mustache. Hot, massive, luminous stars have very strong stellar winds, with flow speeds of about one percent of the speed of light, and mass loss rates sometimes a billion times that of the solar wind. He talked about the nonlinear coupling between driving and acceleration of solar wind. There are many models. Stellar winds are the continuous outflowing of gas from a star. The Sun has a hot corona. It’s velocity is the speed of sound in the corona. The sun will lose only 1/1000 of one percent of its mass through solar wind in its lifetime. He talked about hot stars. Some of these stars lose up to four solar masses per year. These stars are a million times as bright as the Sun. They only live 10 million years, and lose half their mass from stellar wind. Solar sails catch light, not wind! It is the momentum of light, not solar wind, that could theoretically be used to propel spacecraft. Despite this, the Sun’s light doesn’t drive solar wind because only one photon in a million interacts with a molecule of solar wind. In hot stars, it does drive it. In hot stars, the hydrogen is ionized. When an electron is placed in an atom, it becomes 10^8 more efficient at scattering photons.
After the hefty guy’s talk, someone asked a question “Isn’t the acceleration of the solar wind a mystery?”, and an old guy said “No, we understand that”. The host of the session said, “What is the magnetic carpet?” and the old guy said, “It’s just a new name”. The host then said, “In my field, we re-invent the black hole every three years.” Everyone laughed.
The next talk, H14-4, was titled “Comparative Magnetospheric Physics: Earth and Other Planets”, and was given by Barry Mauk from The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Barry, a man in a brown suit, talked about solar system plasmas, such as the auroa borealis. Solar system plasmas can be viewed as laboratories for the study of astrophysical plasma system because they can be with a wide variety of techniques which include spacecraft. We have explored with Voyager 2, Pioneer 10, and Galileo some of these different but similar environments. We can compare the interaction of the magnetosphere with the solar wind for different planets. The auroa borealis is large scale. It’s highly structured in space and time. The electric current travels along magnetic field lines, interacts with local plasma, and sends electrons down which cause the optical emission. The solar wind is the energizing source. Solar particles do not interact with the atmosphere to cause the auroa borealis. The particles causing the emissions come from the ionosphere. They are accelerated back and forth. The solar wind powers this dynamo. It’s unfortunate that if you pick up any encyclopedia, it’ll say that particles from the Sun cause the optical emissions, which is not true. Voyager and Galileo saw electron beams near Io. The Jovian auroa is a signature of Jupiter trying to speed up its near space environments. Earth has a solar wind driven magnetosphere. Jupiter has a rotational driven magnetosphere. Like other people, his planned talk was to long. People should time their talks before they give them.
I went down to the first floor. They had what they called exhibits, which were booths set up for APS, NASA, various companies etc. They were either hoping you’d come to work for them, hoping you’d join their organization, or were trying to sell things to you. I looked through them.
On Sunday, 2:00 - 2:25, there was a special session titled, “A New NRC Study: From Quarks to the Cosmos”. They had several signs advertising it around. Due to the exciting title, I decided to go to it but it was disappointing. It was basically about the government doing a study of physics and astronomy, and setting goals for the physicists to strive towards. The purpose of the talk was to encourage physicists to get involved. In a big room, Michael Turner talks about physics and astronomy. He showed a picture of a distant quasar. The NRC study is a study about the intersection of physics and astronomy. This is a national committee funded by NSF, NASA, and DOE, and will meet eight times. They write a report. They have Phase I, and Phase II. The whole thing is silly. How does physics benefit from this sort of government beaucracy? You can’t have the government set a goal like “determine what is the dark matter?” and then order physicists to answer it. Our view of the Universe changes and develops however it does, and you can’t control or predict it. You can’t predict what our view of the Universe will be in the future. Chapter 5 of their planned report is titled, “What are the limits of known physical laws?” What kind of mumbo jumbo is that? From the point of view of the government, if they’re funding physics projects, they should at least have committees, meetings, etc.
On Sunday 2:30, I went to Session J9 which was about the state of the Standard Model. The first talk was titled “The W mass and other electroweak results from LEP”. It was given by a man with a goatee named Eric Torrence. That’s the name of the man. I don’t know if the goatee had a separate name. He was from the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. It was in a big room that was almost completely empty. There was about 300 seats, only about a dozen of which had people in them. He began by saying, “I’m glad at least some people are interested”. The LEP collider at CERN has been running above the W pair production since 1996, delivering an integrated luminosity of nearly 500 pb-1 to each of four LEP experiments. At the LEP collider at CERN, they are running at 204 GeV. He talked about two fermion physics. They try to get up above the W production. The most common event at LEP is quark pair production. Basically, he was just saying what the data is. Physics is trying to explain what you observe. He was just stating what you observe. That’s what he deals with. You try to make your explanations not contradict this data. If you get two W’s, it could be the result of many things. You don’t get to observe the W’s directly. After hadronization, you see the particles in the detector. You extract the W mass from that. It's possible that we made mistakes extracting it.