Spend some time in Aspen and you may well encounter the Aspen Center for Physics, nestled up against the Klein Music Tent and the Aspen Institute. In fact, I hope you’ll visit the center and attend some of its public lectures — events delivered by passionate experts from around the globe who’ll take you by the hand and share their joy as they guide you to the very edge of humankind’s understanding of the workings of the natural world. But what I want to do in these few lines is take you on a different guided tour and offer you a glimpse of what it’s really like to be one of the 500 or so theoretical physicists who spend a handful of weeks at the center in any given summer.
What is it that we actually do when we’re in Aspen? Why is it so invigorating to us as individuals who already have physics swirling through our thoughts and dreams all year round (even when we’re putting our children to bed or phoning our parents, I’ll confess)? Let’s begin a typical day. We’re walking or biking (or taking the shuttle bus) from our lodgings to the physics center, uplifted by the beautiful mountain views but also seeing — in our mind’s eye — galaxies and black holes or quarks and gluons at play in the universe. At the forefront of our minds there’s a tantalizing, inchoate picture that we’ve been grasping for, perhaps for some weeks — like a potter at the wheel beginning to shape their clay.
Perhaps we’re thinking about a liquid so cold that its atoms are ac.