More Danish stuff

Actually, I'm going to include some conference stuff too.

Egalitarianism: I neglected to point out this before, but take a look at the front page of the conference website. Notice that it places me on equal footing with people like Sir Michael Berry and Sir Roger Penrose and (far more important) when it came to all of us sitting around in the lecture all, all of us essentially were on equal footing. While far from every scientist does this, nearly all of them treat me as their equal (and this includes people with arbirtrary ranks in bigshot). This is one of the main things I love about being a scientist---being able to go to a conference with such a distinguished group of people and be treated as their equal is simply incredible. (I know the grad student-advisor relationship and similar stuff does involve some hierarchical structure, but that notwithstanding, for the most part things are so much different in science than in most walks of life and the corporate world comes particularly to mind.) During the main part of the conference, this was also highlighted by the fact that everybody gave a 30 minute talk (i.e., no longer invited talks) There were four public lectures given by four of the lumanaries, and that was the only part of the conference where certain credentials were used.

On a similar note: A nice vignette was Michael Berry introducing himself to a small child (of maybe seven years) as Michael and asking him for help in demonstrating something during his public lecture and having a conversation with the kid to convince him that his role wouldn't be hard (the child asked about this and was dubious about the difficulty involved). The child had no idea who he was talking to (which puts him ahead of the game of adults, in many respects!), and Berry gave absolutely no indication of it either. This, along with the corset comment, demonstrated once again how awesome he is. (It's very healthy to see scientists acting like humans...)

Intimidation of the room: On the other hand, two of the group pictures hung on the wall were quite intimidating. They were taken in the same room we were using and showed that the seats in which we were sitting were occupied at the same time by people like Bohr (obviously), Landau, etc. etc.---the list goes on and on; it was basically a who's who without a dud in the list. And then I was thinking about the fact that I was one of the people sitting there now (back when then was now).

Public lecture: Saturday, after three days of technical talks, we had four public lectures. They were given by Roger Penrose, Michael Berry, Mitchell Feigenbaum, and Theo Geisel. Berry's talk was awesome. I don't like Penrose's speaking style very much, though I know he's popular on the circuit. Geisel and Feigenbaum had occasional difficulties with the concept of "public" lecture for lay (i.e., non-scientific) audiences. I somehow doubt that any of them were familiar with the term "symplectic" that Feigenbaum used (Hamiltonian systems have symplectic structures).

Cultural program: After the public lectures, there was a private celebration of my collaborator's 60th birthday (the conference was in honor of this), and I was invited to this because I am part of the inner circle in this case. This started with a cultural program (well, that was technically after the champagne that I didn't drink and some really awesome homemade cake in which I did partake) that included short presentations from a documentary film-maker he knows as well as a theatre person, a designer, another documentarian (the wife of a scientist; we never saw her stuff because of computer problems), and a performance by a jazz band that included the son of a former Georgia Tech secretary (she's from Denmark; was brought along to Atlanta with my collaborator, and then moved back to Copenhagen after I had been at GT for about a year). The more upbeat songs sounded pretty cool, although I couldn't understand the lyrics. (Apparently, the lyrics were funny because the people who know Danish were laughing a lot. Anyway, at least I will forevermore be able to say that I've seen a Danish jazz band perform live.)

Then was dinner, which included many of the expected toasts (in addition to some of the quick roasting that occurred at the conference dinner two nights before). Dessert was tiramisu, which is always appreciated. There was a children's table chosen non-randomly and the main table was also presumably non-random. Every other table was chosen randomly, as far as I can tell. The three of us who were young basically sat in the same spot. The people around me were mostly non-scientists, and ended up mainly talking to the girlfriend/wife/fiance (I'm not sure which, because she used both the terms 'boyfriend' and 'mother-in-law') of the jazz band's drummer. Couples were mostly split at different tables, which was a bit odd. I left after dinner/toasting because it was past 11pm, I had a 30 minute walk to get to the hotel, and I had to get up early the next morning for my flight. Disco and dancing were scheduled for after dinner and I wanted to see certain people show their moves, but I was exhausted and really needed to get back to avoid turning into a pumpkin (and I did indeed make it back before midnight). The first set of pictures that have been sent didn't have anything showing any particular moves (and only a couple pictures of the dancing), but maybe others will show more interesting stuff.

I will have more Danish stuff in a later entry, but this is more than enough text for now.