James Burleigh
Well-known member
Excerpt from an email sent today to my son, the physics graduate student:
Well, I’m sorry to report that Barbara and I walked out on the physics lecture yesterday by an esteemed visiting professor and Nobel laureate. It was held at 5PM in the Pauley Ballroom. We had made our way up through light rain and got there just at five; already there were probably about 300 people sitting shoulder to shoulder in rows of small, uncomfortable metal chairs. Personal space was at a premium; and according to olfactory evidence, I’m not positive everyone had a shower that morning (but this is academia after all, and there are more important things than cleansing the body). Barbara leaned against the wall with other late-comers; I spotted a lone vacant chair deep in the back row and muscled my way down the row to it.
Surveying the room from my seat way in the back, I could tell right away that it would be hard to see the presentation over everyone’s heads on the small screen way up at the front and off to the left (wrong) side of the room from where I was. And with this being California and my having worked in disaster planning for so long, not to mention having the Chile earthquake fresh in mind, my eyes were drawn to the hundreds of ceiling panels 40 feet above us that opened downward at crazy angles. I was pretty sure that if the 8.0 hit while we were in that room, those panels were going to fall like huge dull knife blades. Dull knife blades are the most dangerous type as the Boy Scouts taught us, so 30-pound dull knife blades falling from 40 feet up could only mean that everyone in the room was going to be crushed or chopped to pieces in a grotesque, hideous massacre. I resolved that when the shaking started I would be smarter than everyone else and not rush the exits, but drop to the floor and let the chairs and bodies crushed by the stampede save me. So I had that going for me as I worked to consolidate my arms and legs as far inward as bone and sinew would allow so as to not to have to bump up against any more than absolutely necessary the two weirdsmobiles on either side of me.
But all the physical discomfort and fear of sudden and violent death would have been okay if the presentation had delivered what was promised--namely, that “in a multimedia presentation including rap video, spectacular images, some amazing ideas, and a few jokes, [the speaker would] demonstrate why this is an especially exciting time to be a physicist--or a curious person.” Naturally this brought to my mind the kind of presentation I was accustomed to seeing in the private sector, where a brightly lit, highly animated and compelling person on a center stage is flanked by two huge, high-definition screens perfectly synchronized to his every word, and the quality of the audio is outmatched only by the spectacular colors of the spotlights illuminating the stage. (Sometimes I suspect I may still not be completely acclimated to academia….)
So apart from the thin, raised classroom lectern at front center and the sewn-together bed sheets substituting for a screen, the first hint that my mental image of what we could expect may have been overly ambitious was when the physicist introducing the guest speaker began his introduction. Here was clearly a fellow accustomed to giving many lectures but few speeches. Admittedly, the HVAC buzzing behind me made him all the harder to hear. But my straining to hear him yielded few rewards, because I’m afraid he was about as lively and compelling as a mortician describing interment options to the bereaved.
But he further upped the ante for the main speaker by explaining what a quirky and funny fellow we were about to be entertained by, even managing a chuckle as he recounted a particularly funny anecdote, albeit one that everyone forgot to laugh at. But my anticipation increased nevertheless, not just by the assertions about what an entertaining guy we were about to be amazed by, but by simple contrast—compared to this fellow, our speaker would surely make Steve Jobs look like Sergeant Joe Friday.
Well, once the visiting professor got up to speak, I’m afraid it was pretty clear within moments that if the first fellow is the scientist from the joke who, when in an elevator, stares at his shoes, then the visiting prof must be the guy who is viewed by his peers as so outgoing that he stares at his neighbor’s shoes. And that was a shame, because anyone who takes even the most meager interest in the world around him- or herself knows that the LHC is the coolest thing on the planet since the invention of the motorcycle.
If the LHC can’t get a physicist to stand up in front of 300 people at a top research university and, with large hand gestures and dance moves, exclaim at the top of his lungs “Wow! Wow! Wow!” for 90 minutes, then it must not be that cool. Either that or else physicists are just too complacent about cool stuff in general, which I’m guessing is pretty much all the stuff they get to play with. So maybe if you flirt every day with stuff like black holes and supernovae, then finite, three-dimensional machines however big-around are just an ugly sister.
But for me the problem wasn’t just a personality issue. I suspect he missed the mark on knowing his audience. The material seemed too basic for the scientists in the room, and too esoteric (read “dull”) for the merely curious—a case of displeasing all of the people some of the time. So why weren’t more people getting up and leaving?
I don’t know. But what I did know was that my back was hurting, someone around me hadn’t showered that morning, and death was hanging from the ceiling. So it was time to go. But how was I going to do that without 299 people thinking I was an ***** who didn’t belong on the campus much less in the room? What if the speaker stopped in mid-sentence, pointed toward the back of the room, and shouted “J’accuse!”, with 299 heads turning in unison?
Well, I had actually learned during my MBA night classes that if the professor was deadly dull, or I already knew the information, or I just plain needed to get out, then it didn’t matter what the professor or the other eight people in the classroom thought—this was my life and I wasn’t going to let decorum or someone’s embarrassment (whether mine or the prof’s) keep me from losing precious time when I could be out living my life or, more likely, home having a glass of wine. So I would just stand up and walk out as bold as brass. Surely that was harder than sneaking out of a room under the anonymous cover of hundreds of people.
And so that’s what I did. In mid sentence by the speaker I suddenly jumped straight up, turned, and excused myself on out of my row, bumping knees all the way. I approached Barbara leaning against the near wall and whispered in her ear, “This is not the presentation I was promised. So I’m ready to leave. You?” Her response was, “The three lines didn’t intersect, so I’m ready to go too.”
And with that we stood tall and marched toward the closest exit feeling as if all eyes were on us and the door a thousand miles away. As we were about to go through the door someone informed us that that was a utility closet. Unphased, we headed toward the other door, approximately two thousand miles away, with our heads held high and looks of haughty determination calculated to convince 298 people that this event was not worth our valuable time.
Stepping outside into the cool air, we saw that the late-afternoon rain had cleared, the clouds were moving away toward the east, and the sky was just preserving the last hint of blue as the sun set over the Golden Gate Bridge. We exclaimed how beautiful it was outside, our sensitivity no doubt heightened by our recent experience inside. And although there was a lot of stuff going on up in the sky that we were pretty sure had everything to do with physics, at that moment we were content to just be a part of it. Thrusting our hands in our jacket pockets for warmth, we headed on back to Cal Hall and, perhaps later, a glass of wine.
Last edited by a moderator:
