Attending virtual conference on CEPC

Attending the virtual conference on the Chinese Electron Position Collider. Now that I'm 50, a lot of the conversations that I have are with me when I was 20, and I remember when I was 20 and that I was trying to teach myself particle physics and wondering what it felt once I learned it.

A lot of it feels like learning a language. When you first learn a language you are learning the words one by one. Right now, I've got the CEPC virtual conference in the background, and I'm tuning in and out as people mention cool things about the Higgs particle. One thing about the stuff that I'm listening to is that I don't have a deep knowledge of some of the equations, but I understand the basic grammar so that I can skim through talks, and focus in on the main points.

Speaking of language, one of the more interesting things is that the theory talks are in English, but the talks on manufacturing and hardware tend to be in Chinese. A lot of the talks in manufacturing involve the details of designing and building magnets, klystrons, and sensors and those are in Chinese.

It turns out that Higgs particles have a lot of cool physics. One way I describe what is going on is impact you are on the phone and you see a truck hit a wall. Imagine describing that you saw on a way that the person on the other end can create a movie of what happened. Basically in the background I'm listening to someone on the other end of the phone telling me what happened when you crash protons with each other.

The other image that I have is that of diving in the ocean. While I'm swimming I found a rock or a shiny jewel which I'm interested in, but in attending these conferences, I'm swimming in a sea of information and I see how the tiny rock that I'm interested fits into the grand scheme.

One interesting thing about these conferences is because of COVID, they are now online. As a result, I can attend meetings that I weren't able to go to before..