I didn’t write anything here last week because I spent it in Las Vegas at the 2023 March Meeting of the American Physical Society. This is the largest physics meeting of the year, with well over 10,000 people attending in person, and is generally speaking a pretty overwhelming experience. This isn’t my “home” conference— that would be the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (DAMOP) meeting, which is about an order of magnitude smaller— but I was invited to speak in a session on historical anniversaries, and it’s always a fun experience to check in on the March Meeting. (DAMOP this year overlaps with my 30th reunion at Williams, which in turn ends on the day of Union’s commencement, so I won’t be going, alas…)
These conferences are as much social as scientific, so one of the highlights is getting to see and talk with people I don’t see anywhere else. I realized going into this year’s meeting that there were fewer of those than normal for me, as a lot of the people I would normally count on catching up with at a March Meeting are no longer on the staff at APS, and thus wouldn’t be there. I did still manage to get some socialization in, having a very nice dinner with Jim Kakalios at the MGM Grand, and meeting notable physics tweeters Brian Skinner and Steven Thomson in person for the first time. (The latter randomly sat down next to me in the back of a session on Thursday morning, which was amusing.) I crossed paths with Doug Natelson in the halls a few times, and recommend his daily recap posts from the meeting: 1, 2, 3, 4, if you want the perspective of someone who actually works in the field. There was also a Williams alumni get-together, because of course there was, and I ran into three former students, two who were at the March Meeting and a third who just happened to be in town for a completely different conference, of orthopedic surgeons.
The big science news of the meeting was a controversial claim of superconductivity at close to room temperature and pressures that are high but not completely outlandish. This has led to a lot of punny headlines about the claim facing resistance, because the group making the claim has been accused of misconduct regarding some past work, with one of their papers being formally retracted by the journal. The session where this was presented was in a too-small room, and fire marshals and deputy sheriffs were on hand to keep the crowd from getting too large. And then the presenter didn’t take any questions, which only made people madder.
I wasn’t aware of this ahead of time, so did not get into the room for the talk, but just walked past and gawked at the crowd. This is far enough from my own area of expertise that I can’t really evaluate the quality of the claims in either direction. The consensus of people I know who are in that field leans very skeptical, so I’m not going to get all that invested in this as a potential breakthrough.
I went to several interesting sessions at the meeting, largely about quantum computing schemes of one sort or another; I’ll try to do some posts later this week about some of the things that particularly caught my attention. I will say that after a few years away from the conference scene, I was a little more struck by flaws in the presentation style of a lot of the speakers, who were often using slides that had wayyy too much text in fonts that were considerably smaller than ideal. I have a bunch of photos on my phone that I took so I could blow up the image to read a citation of something or another. Part of this is that I was mostly going to invited talks, which were in giant cavernous rooms; the same slides might’ve worked better in the smaller rooms. But I think they were mostly just overly busy, because physicists.
My own talk went well, both in the sense that I felt good doing it and that people who were there said nice things to me afterwards. I was speaking about the 75th anniversary of the public unveiling of quantum electrodynamics, because as I said in the talk, we only really celebrate anniversaries that are integer multiples of a quarter-century, and that’s the only quantum topic that really fits that pattern. I may or may not write it up here; I was asked to contribute an essay on the topic to a magazine, and I’ll need to think a bit about how to make a blog post version that wouldn’t be pre-empting that too badly. Anyway, I noticed several people coming in at the start of my talk who had left before the end of the next one, so that’s very flattering. The room was still considerably bigger than it needed to be, particularly given how crowded some of the other rooms were.
The room size complaint is a perennial one, but did seem pretty acute, here. The hallways were also a bit on the narrow side, making it difficult to move between rooms at peak session-switching times. I spent Monday in transit, so missed the worst of the human traffic jams— by the time I got there, people were aware of the problem, and had adjusted their schedules accordingly. It was still noticeable, though, and a frequent topic of grumbling over meals and coffee.
The most frequent topic of grumbling was Vegas itself, though, which as you probably won’t be surprised to learn is a weird place. The city has changed a lot since the last time the APS was there, back in the 1980’s, when it was still built around $4.99 buffets that were open 24/7. I got pizza at one of the casino food courts one day, and it was $10 for a slice of what was basically Sbarro pizza (I forget the actual branding). This is borderline criminal for a meeting attended largely by graduate students and postdocs, who are famous for not having money. Essentially all of the convenient restaurants were pricey, even by the standards of someone like me with a very comfortable income.
The other most prominent feature is the gambling, which is the source of the legend about APS being disinvited from Vegas after that long-ago meeting, because physicists know statistics and thus don’t lose money at the same rate as ordinary convention-goers. I didn’t see a lot of APS badges at the tables, to be sure, though I didn’t spend any time there myself. I had mentally set aside some money to play blackjack for an hour or two, which I enjoy, but ended up spending it on Japanese food at the Bellagio instead. The only gambling I did was at the bar in the Bellagio sports book, where I sat down to have one more beer and watch some college hoops. The bartender told me that if I put at least $20 in the video poker machine and consistently bet the maximum, they’d comp my drinks, so I did. The game I was watching went into overtime, and I hit a straight in video poker, so in the end they effectively paid me $25 to sit there for an hour and drink two beers.
The biggest drawback of the Vegas experience aside from the cost is probably the fact that Nevada still allows indoor smoking, so everything in the casinos smells kind of bad. This was the non-financial piece of why I didn’t hit the gaming tables, and also helped determine the location of my expensive solo dinner. There seemed to be a pretty clear correlation between the status of the casino and the amount of smoking going on. I was staying in a non-casino Hilton located next to the Flamingo, whose gaming area was pretty bad, smoke-wise. A step down from there, at the Harrah’s that was connected to the conference center, everything smelled appalling. A couple of steps up, on the other hand, the Bellagio (a block away) wasn’t too bad; it’s also a lot quieter inside. The Wynn didn’t have any smoke smell at all, though admittedly I was only in there to meet our alumnus the surgeon for breakfast, so it might be more aromatic at night. I’m not sure whether this reflects a tendency among the richer clientele to smoke less, or just that the swankier places have bigger budgets for air filtration, but if you’re looking to hang out in a sports book or gaming floor, my advice is to go for the high end.
Anyway, it was an enjoyable conference, on the whole, and I generally like being in other places, even ones as surreal as Las Vegas. Getting too and from them is less pleasant; air travel is really uncomfortable at my size, and the gate area Southwest uses in the Las Vegas airport is downright dystopian— limited food options, inadequate seating, cramped hallways. So I’m pretty tired even after a relatively quiet weekend, and will stop typing now, and maybe work on some topic-specific recaps in the next few days.
That’s the report from the road. If you’d like to read about some of the physics-y content of the meeting, assuming I actually manage to write about it in the next few days, here’s a button:
If you feel moved to respond to any of the above, the comments will be open:
March Meeting 2023 Wrap-Up
A fun read about one of my least favorite places that I have ever visited. Thanks!
>>> "... so in the end they effectively paid me $25 to sit there for an hour and drink two beers. "
Loved that part, especially. I have a couple of similar memories of my times in Vegas, both of which went like this: I don't gamble, but I do like to observe the whole atmosphere, in some sort of wannabe anthropological sense. I will, for example, accompany friends to a casino, hang out while they play blackjack or whatever, and generally enjoy people-watching. Trying to pick out the undercover employees is especially fun. (Except when they stare back a little too hard.)
The similar instances I have in mind: I noticed friends losing kind of heavily, and started encouraging them, "Eh, not your night. Let's go get some dinner or something." Whereupon a fetching server would magically appear with a drink on the house, for me, and a few minutes of nearly believable conversation, indicating possible romantic interest.
Also, one time when I wasn't set up to grab that little perq, because the friend was staying close to even, I drifted away, and won more than $5 at a nickel slot machine, after having invested less than a quarter. Big money, big money, ....