After lunch on the last day of the NNN17 Conference at Warwick, lead organiser Gary Barker shook my hand and said he was glad I'd been there! I told him about my previous experiences with conference organisers not generally being so great, and he replied, "Well, if you'd taken up a lot of question time I might have been concerned, but you didn't." So my one decent question (about Kaluza-Klein 5D formula being identical to Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism) and my one dire question (about neutrinos decaying into quarks, which they can't do) were ok - thank Heavens for that. The full write-up had to be edited a lot, because I took forty pages of notes and had a problem choosing the info to publish. But it's here, and up there on the Menu bar. Turning out to be written in what's become my traditional style but with links to major terminologies and principles, the record I hope reflects the light of the event, for the new information to come from it was, I feel, critically important.
Neutrinos never cease to amaze me, and the ground covered by the scientific community since Cryodet ll, in 2008, my first ever mission into physicist's territory (where a brush with Carlo Rubbia proved prickly with consequences), shows in the language becoming more enquiring, open-minded, and inviting of new ideas than it was then, when stuff like supersymmetry and CP violation were accepted as part of an unknown process with an unequivocal air of "we just don't know about that.". Now they are laid on the table along with the increasingly-shaky Standard Model as areas hungry for new interpretation, and everyone awaits the next breakthrough with bated breath, knowing that Dark Matter has heralded a new era of exploration and that whatever happens in the lepton sector, it's going to be exciting.
Conference days were full of Powerpoint but every minute was worth the attention given and every discussion worthwhile. Snatching moments when convenience nudged open a doorway in spacetime, I recorded interviews with a few of the speakers which I'll include in posts over the next few weeks - here for starters is Jacobo Lopez-Pavon (who presented on Theoretical Review of Neutrino Oscillations) talking to me before lunch on Saturday.
And here's Matt Wetstein, taking me under his wing after my dire question. Matt gave a brilliant summary of the Parallel ll sessions at the end of the event, when he enthusiastically took the floor to take up this hefty challenge in style.
Conference days were full of Powerpoint but every minute was worth the attention given and every discussion worthwhile. Snatching moments when convenience nudged open a doorway in spacetime, I recorded interviews with a few of the speakers which I'll include in posts over the next few weeks - here for starters is Jacobo Lopez-Pavon (who presented on Theoretical Review of Neutrino Oscillations) talking to me before lunch on Saturday.
And here's Matt Wetstein, taking me under his wing after my dire question. Matt gave a brilliant summary of the Parallel ll sessions at the end of the event, when he enthusiastically took the floor to take up this hefty challenge in style.
NNN17 content will doubtless feature in future Blogs as so much information came from that conference, and I intend to serve full credit where it's due. To summarise here, suffice to say an atmosphere of positive tension and the excitement of new gateways being just around the corner is almost palpable, and it is not without trepidation that we can await the fate of the Standard Model when oscillation and the true nature of neutrino interactions really starts to come to light.
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