March Meeting in Minneapolis

When I hit the Twin Cities, I didn't know that much about it...

Every now and then, the meme/game comes around where people post maps of the US with states they’ve visited colored in. Mine has included Minnesota for several years now, but it’s always felt like a cheat: I gave a talk at Macalester College some years back, but was in St. Paul for less than 24 hours all told. Technically I spent a night in the state (my usual threshold for that game), but just barely.

I’ve comprehensively cleaned up that issue now, since I spent most of the past week in Minneapolis, at the APS March Meeting. This is the largest physics conference in the world, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-15,000 attendees, and quite the production. I generally only go to this when I’m invited to speak, so it’s a little unusual for me to be there two years in a row, but it worked out that way, and I got to check the Twin Cities off my places visited list for real.

As a Hold Steady fan, it was amusing to see a lot of things I’ve heard referenced in Craig Finn lyrics— the walk through the skyway from the convention center to my hotel included signs for both City Center (it’s over, no-one really goes there) and the Crystal Court (a fine place to make a scene by the revolving doors), and there were a bunch of streets I’ve heard name-checked. I was mostly in a smallish region of downtown, though— the walk from the hotel to the Convention Center was long enough that I didn’t feel much need for additional exploration— and didn’t make any attempt to check out the drug and party scene, so that’s about it.

I will say, though, that particularly on Sunday afternoon when I got in, the city did have a bit of the bleak vibe of some of Finn’s darker lines. There was basically nothing open on Sunday— even the Chipotle was closed— so I ended up with a late lunch of overpriced trail mix from the stand in the hotel lobby. (The pizza place I went for dinner later that night was good, though…) And there were a lot of urban decay signifiers generally— the Starbucks I went to on my way to the conference in the mornings was in a mall whose central court was full of dozing homeless people, and the skyway path went by a lot of closed or just vacant storefronts. It’s possible it would’ve looked more vibrant in the middle of the day—the weather was nice, so I was mostly happy to walk outdoors when I went for lunch— but at least when I went through, it was a bit of a bummer.

As you would expect given the scale of the conference, the scientific program was a bit overwhelming, especially the number of 12-minute contributed talks. These generally involve very little information transfer, so I mostly avoid them in favor of invited sessions; the one contributed session I went to was to see a former student who’s now in grad school happily fabricating and characterizing qubits.

Hey to the class of 2022

The main focus of the meeting is on condensed matter physics, which is very much not my field, so it’s a bit of scientific tourism. If you follow me on ex-Twitter, you probably saw a bunch of live-tweeting of various talks and sessions; this is one of the ways I keep engaged with the material, which otherwise tends to wash over me a bit. I don’t do this as much with the more directly work-related sessions, like the several educational talks I went to, because there I know more about the subject and don’t need as much effort to digest it.

My talk was in a session honoring folks who had recently been named Fellows of the APS through the Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public. I’m very uncomfortable doing the level of overt self-promotion this kind of thing sort of demands, so instead did a talk about why I’ve tended to take a very historical slant on the things I write for public consumption. It was pretty similar in some respects to a talk I gave at an AAPT meeting a few years back, which made it a lot easier to throw together the slides in the hotel room on Sunday night (time management skills, I has them). I may or may not turn it into a blog post at some point.

I got to spend a bit of time catching up with people I know, though not as much as at some past conferences— some of the APS people I knew have moved on to other jobs, and don’t come to March Meeting any more. There was a Williams get-together, because of course there was, and one lunch that was planned as a time to brainstorm ideas for another project, but mostly I was solo, and the whole thing was pretty low-key. I was the weird guy reading Dune Messiah in paperback in several restaurants, and that was good with me.

I did have one fun social encounter, when the guy next to me at the hotel bar leaned over and said “Are you Chad Orzel?” I was slightly apprehensive, but he turned out to be a long-time reader of the blog, and also an academic physicist, so we had a good time venting about college and university policies over beers. (They had a pretty good dark lager on draft from a Minnesota brewery.)

All in all a good trip, and while it has made my Winter term very hectic, it was important for resetting my general mood so I can end it in a good place. Next year they’re in Anaheim, land of a thousand chain restaurants, so I’m not super fired up, but if somebody invites me to give a talk, it’s always fun to go to these…

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We’re coming to the end of the term, which will free up a bunch of time in my schedule, so you may get more blogging. Or maybe not. Who can say? If you want to find out, here’s a button:

And if you want to tell me what I missed out on in Minneapolis or at the conference, the comments will be open: