A Quantum Diaries Survivor

I stumbled today into two old booklets advertising a concert. One in Conegliano, on Friday, March 13th 1981; the other in Udine on Wednesday, May 28th, 1980. These were times when I toured north-eastern Italy with the orchestra of the Venice Conservatory, directed by m. Fabio Pirona. I was a teenager, but I could already play the recorder (straight flute) rather well.

I remember that already back then I did not really think that a career in music would suit my taste nor my talents -my interest was not focused on Physics yet but I had a pretty good idea I liked science already- but I nevertheless enjoyed playing the part of the musician. Probably this has been some sort of constant in my life: I have been an amateur musician, an amateur astronomer, an amateur chessplayer, an amateur reporter and photographer, but then I decided to become a professional physicist. In other words I seem to have applied to arts, sports, and intellectual activities what is commonplace to do with sentimental relationships: women and men flirt with the most attractive counterparts, but end up marrying the one which promises more stability.

So what were we playing back then, in Conegliano and Udine (but also in Venice, Mirano, and other places I can’t even recall) ? The offer was a trio of concerts by Johann Sebastian Bach: the Brandemburg Concerts number V, IV, and III. I was the second flutist in the fourth concert, as you can see in the scans I paste below.

Above, the front page of the booklet of Concert season in Conegliano, 1981

…and the page with the three concerts, and a few signatures from my colleagues.

The one above is instead the leaflet advertising the concert in Udine…

…and the back, with the program of the afternoon.

I have warm memories of those concerts. In the one in Conegliano, we performed excellently the fourth concert (I remember I was really pleased of the outcome and by my own performance) until -at the very end of the third movement- my instrument had become soaked with condensed breath, and it literally dripped. The condensed moisture flowed down the hole at the end and, what’s worse, down the hole on the back, which is closed by the left thumb to play bass tones and only closed halfways -by using the fingernail- to play high pitches. And one of those high pitches was needed towards the end of the Presto, when in the culmination of a forte I had to play a high mi. The thumb was unable to close the hole the way it should have, and my instrument let out a broken note which was probably heard even by the ticket seller outside the hall. That evening was spent on a pleasant restaurant on the hills of Conegliano, with the whole orchestra having fun of me -but it was cheerful and I did not resent it.

In the concert in Udine another incident happened. I was rather tense (I think it was the first time we performed the concert outside the walls of our Conservatory) and when the fifth concert was over, the solists came backstage, and I went on stage with my buddy Francesco and the first violin Andrea. As we were about to sit down, I realized I had left my scoresheet backstage! A better player would have acted nonchalantly and played by heart, but I was too nervous -so I rushed back and grabbed it, re-entering on stage with the eyes of the public on me but, what’s worse, those of my director following me like a missile approaches a plane to be taken down.

Ah, memories… I wish I had a recording of those concerts! I remember the one in Conegliano was indeed recorded, and I was promised a copy of the tape which never came.

Peter, over at Not Even Wrong, facetiously directs people willing to discuss the physical appearance of Lisa Randall to my blog. [A long thread and a followup discussion developed six months ago here after I included a description of Lisa in a writeup of a very interesting seminar she gave on black holes at the LHC].

He does it in a discreet manner, without a direct link - and I appreciate the subtlety. Funny how with the internet you directly experience how knowledge is power: from the stats page of my blog I get a “signal” of people looking for “Tommaso Dorigo Lisa Randall”, and with some investigation I am able to figure out it is coming from people reading the comment thread in Peter’s blog.

Anyway, Scarlett and Natalie. As I retorted in the thread at NEW, I am not good at gossip. My wife says I am not interested in the people who surround me: I loathe discussing their life - I find it a rather vacuous way to spend one’s time. But I have my own weaknesses - I am interested in young, attractive girls. I feel no shame in admitting it: at 42, I have not lost interest in young female bodies yet. Got sex in my mind. How’s that for a coming out, JoAnne ?

So, really, Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman. They are walking the walks of the Berlin festival, where is presented among others the movie they  acted in, “The Other Boleyn girl“. They are enemies in the movie, but close friends in real life. A rare instance in the world of acting, where beautiful women are accustomed to be prima donnas and the presence of a competitor wreaks havoc. Anyway, a picture with both smiling and looking gorgeous is too beautiful to resist the temptation of pasting it here…

Bobby Fischer died today. A deranged but brilliant, brilliant mind. Chess players around the world cannot but be sad for this loss. Many had continued to hope for a further comeback from Fischer, the chess giant, and a few continued to claim to have observed him playing blitz on the internet chess club under anonymous handles, nonchalantly defeating the strongest grandmasters with weird moves. We will never know.

“Mozart is free to create things others cannot imagine,
because he is bound by principles others cannot see.”

Margaret Boden

(and thanks to Tony for mentioning it.)

Somebody suggested I should write particle physics lessons in rhyme, and I do love a challenge, if it stimulates my highly nonlinear mind (somebody else suggested to do a video thereafter, but I’ll pass on that one; a third somebody commented in rhyme). Well, today is a Saturday, and since I did not feel too well, I felt entitled to some pastimes… Below you can find my production: a summary of the Higgs mechanism in five lines, for starters. 

[The usual Limerick's AABBA scheme applies, while the division in syllables is much sketchier... Syllables in English are a real nightmare, at least for non-natives. I recollect learning a long time ago from Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column on SciAm that the language owns a 10-letter syllable: scraunched, but later found out that there are even 11-letter ones actually: broughammed, squirrelled.]

Anyway, here’s my bid at a concise, to the point SM lesson in rhyme:

Boson masses break L-gauge invariance,
And the model just can not keep its stance.
So just pawn the four Goldstones,
Open three W-mass loans,
While a fourth, called the Higgs, keeps the balance.

Of course, you are welcome to contribute to the project by explaining your favourite piece of physics likewise, if you feel in the right vein. Just follow the AABBA quintuplet template, with (if possible) the usual rythm: da-da-dum da-da-dum da-da-dum for the 1st, 2nd, and 5th verse, and da-da-dum da-da-dum for the 3rd and 4th.

Minutes after writing a limerick in a comment to a post on Bee’s and Stefan’s blog, I got envious. “What the hell, I have my own blog… That creation of mine, although not anything to be proud of, should live in mine, not theirs”. Yes, the misery of a blogger’s soul. Anyway, I decided to steal it from there and paste it in my own. The rationale being that if blogspot fries their data bank, I’ll still have this post backed up. And copying it also allows to fix the last verse, which was missing one syllable (added “please”). Oh well. Here it is.

If you think you’ve got something to say,
Just open your own blog today.
Your voice will be heard,
And you will get referred,
But please don’t let that bring you astray.

Not much, but considering I am not an English native and I spent finding rhymes 90% of the fifteen minutes it took me to write it, I am reasonably satisfied.

For a change (or is it) let me write about personal issues, i.e., about what I have been doing this week. I have been in the US for four days only, but it looks like a long time already… And I need a post of the kind “dear diary” to sort things out.

I arrived to O’Hare last Thursday at noon after a uneventful flight - the same route through Munich I’ve flown three dozen times in the last few years. This time I found some company in a colleague who was going to attend the workshop Peter mentioned the other day - we met on the lounge in Venice and traveled together.

Thursday was spent cursing myself for missing a toll on I-88 while driving out of the airport towards Fermilab. It so upsets me to have to lose time for silly things! I soon learned I could pay over the internet the .80$ toll charge, but once I went through the instructions I realized the procedure only works for US residents. I then proceeded to pretend I lived here, but got stuck at the last page of the web interface because my credit cards have an italian billing address and got refused. I then tried my american VISA debit card, and that one got refused too. At that point, after almost 40 minutes wrestling with the site and at the peak of frustration, I found out that my US account was blocked for inactivity - and 6 dollars a month had been charged by the kind people at CHASE because of that. I then proceeded to call the tollway office, but they told me I could not pay with a card, and I would have to send in the credit card information. However, sending a simple letter may become a difficult task if you have no stamps and you work day shifts from 8AM to 4PM every day.

On Friday I took service as a Scientific Coordinator in the CDF control room. The accelerator works 24/7 and each experiment has to provide three shift crews a day to attend data taking and care for our detector. I arrived impeccably on time, at 7.55, only to find frowned people staring at me, and I soon realized that on the first day of shift the incoming SciCo has to be there one hour earlier, to overlap with the one that did the owl shift and refresh his or her training.

Disappointing people is not an activity I particularly enjoy, but I soon forgot the incident as I started to sort out what I did not remember about the procedures I had to refresh. However, my attention was distracted by repeated attempts at finding out whether Mia, who had taken the written test for admission to PhD courses in Padova that same day, had done a good exam or not. I would only hear from her on Monday (! students have lost all their respect to their mentors, apparently), and fortunately she did pass the exam! So if all goes well at the oral test, I will enjoy her company doing research together in CMS for the next three years!

Friday evening was spent in a very uncommon way. I visited a person I had never met before, and with whom I had only played a game or two in an internet Bridge site. This lady was the late Riqie Arneberg’s best friend, and I intended to meet her to hear Riqie’s story from her. We spent a lovely evening together, and we remembered Riqie. I think Riqie would be jealous if she knew - I know our mail and blog comment exchanges and our bridge games made her very happy, and I had promised her I would visit her next time I’d come to the US. Sadly, I could only fulfil virtually that promise, by spending the evening with the last person who saw her alive.

Oh, and I finally saw a few pictures of Riqie. What an interesting person she must have been. She had a tragic life, and she died quite young, but you could see the wit in her eyes from afar. I will collect in another post a few things she wrote in my blog, and if I find it in the wayback machine I will dig out her own blog, which she discontinued about a year ago due to a hacker attack.

Saturday was uneventful, but yesterday I had another very nice evening. I drove to north Chicago, picked up Vincent and Jadwiga - two dear friends of mine, an elderly couple who lives in a very nice apartment overlooking the lake on the north lakefront. I’ve talked about them elsewhere. We had a dinner in Evanston and then attended a chamber music concert by the Chicago Chamber Musicians. Here is the program:

• Richard Strauss, Till Eulenspiegel, Op. 28 (arr. Hasenohrl):
  • Larry Combs, clarinet
  • Gail Williams, horn
  • Jasmine Lin, violin
  • Peter Lloyd, double bass
• Franz Schubert, Fantasy for Violin and Piano in C major, Op. 159 (D.934):
  • Joseph Genualdi, violin
  • Alan Chow, piano
• Dana Wilson, Shallow Streams, Deep Rivers - world premiere
  • Gail Williams, horn
  • Joseph Genualdi, violin
  • Alan Chow, piano
• Ludwig van Beethoven, String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, n.1 (Razumovsky):
  • Jasmine Lin, violin
  • Joseph Genualdi, violin
  • Rami Solomonow, viola
  • Katinka Kleijn, cello

I especially enjoyed the new piece by Dana Wilson (who presented the piece himself). What a great composition! The three instruments fought at the beginning, retaining their own personality, to later merge perfectly into a single deeper stream of music. A very melodic piece, surprisingly balanced despite the presence of the horn.

And today was a really positive day for me. Because of the news about Mia which I already mentioned, and because I got good news about a friend of mine who is being treated with liver cancer and who feared his liver was not going to allow more radiation therapy. Instead, his doctor confirmed his bilirubin is within limits, which allows him to be treated with a third injection of radioactive microspheres in the liver artery, and there are good chances that the tumor will recede.

Life goes on. When one touches with one’s hand the fragility of human life, things get back in their place and the view is restored to a more meaningful perspective - we do not care too much any longer about the insolence of office or other silly incidents. I myself have recently been diagnosed with a relapsing carcinoma, but it does not seem a life-threatening condition - I hope. As soon as I get back to Italy I will be summoned to remove it surgically. After which, I will shrug my shoulders again and pretend to forget about my own vulnerability - something human beings have learned to do a bit too well. 

Villa Pisani (above, in a google earth image, and right, as seen from the river) is one of the best examples of eighteenth century baroque architecture. It is located in in the pictoresque riviera del Brenta, 15 kilometers from Venice. The more than hundred rooms of the villa host frescoes from many masters of the period, including Gian Battista Tiepolo. The villa was owned by Napoleon, and then hosted other famous historical events such as a meeting of Mussolini and Hitler in 1934.

The villa itself is majestic and quite spectacular, but no less so is its huge park, which hosts among many other attractions a fancy labyrinth. We visited it at long last today - Filippo had been eager to try solving the maze for a year, but regrettably the labyrinth is often closed and the opening hours change unpredictably, and our past attempts had been unsuccessful.

The labyrinth has a trapezoidal shape of about 60 meters on each side. You enter from a side and have to work your way to the center, where a tower allows you a view of the entire maze. Despite its relatively small dimensions, it is not entirely trivial to find your way, especially if you do not take it too seriously. But we did solve it rather quickly, and getting back out was easier after having checked the correct path from above.

I attach below a few pictures taken today. First, the entrance to the labyrinth:

Then a part of the paths in the labyrinth: 

Below, Filippo is contemplating the lily pads on the pond.

One of the many statues embellishing the gardens:

Finally, a view of the central pond in front of the villa:

Funny how we live our lives accumulating all sorts of documents and then forget about them, while they wait patiently in a drawer or at the bottom of a box for the moment when they will be drawn out, undusted, and then either discarded for ever or brought back to life. The typical lifetime of stuff stored in a storage box is, I think, 20 years, although it strongly depends on the life of the owner - how frequently one moves, how tidy one is, how much space one has to store stuff forever. It also depends of course on more extemporaneous events, as in the case one dies, leaving the burden of sorting out his or her belongings to his relatives.

Today is a Sunday, and my wife and I decided we needed to reorder the drawers of the living room. So I started to check a couple of them containing old audio cassettes - which we mostly have not listened to for years. My job was to make five piles: tapes to be discarded, good tapes with label and proper box, tapes without box but carrying a good label, boxes with no tape, and unknown tapes with no label. The latter category was of course going to be the one which would give me the most trouble: finding out what a tape contains may be a quite time-consuming job, so I left it for the bitter end.As I started to sort through the unlabeled tapes, and placed the first in the player, I heard two people discussing in English, and I did not understood straight away what they were talking about. I did not even recognize their voices, nor could I hear much given the low quality of the sound and the contemporaneous sounds from the TV, which was showing some cartoon for my kids nearby. All I heard was that the two people were discussing “players”.

In a talk recently given by prof. Robin Erbacher at Lepton-Photon 2007 I found today a picture which I am glad to steal. It shows the Tevatron Hirise (also known as “Wilson Hall” to commemorate Robert Rathbun Wilson), the building symbolizing the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in a way I had never seen it before, which summarizes the monumental achievements in top quark physics produced by the lab:

My compliments to Robin (or whoever did this), I really appreciated the composition.