I have recently arrived in Aspen! While Clifford was flying back to California from Aspen, I was driving the route in the opposite direction. Took me 2 days to traverse the 1200 miles compared to Clifford's 2 hours of airtime. Bottom line for the reader: continual blogging from Aspen by the CosmicVariance team. I always find driving across America to be entertaining and enlightening and I never fail to learn new things about my country. (Well, there is Nebraska...but even that has the giant cattle pens and the Great Platte River Road Monument.) The route from California to Colorado through the Western desert is simply beautiful, if not slightly endless. We were treated to some rather wild (and rare) desert thunderstorms. There was the standard Americana, giant plastic statues of cowboys and the like, and the far-flung Western towns such as Ely, Nevada consisting of a hotel, a gun shop, and a railroad depot. My personal favorite was the Shoe Tree - a lonely cottonwood on the side of Highway 50 with hundreds of pairs of shoes dangling from its branches. There are, of course, scary bits as well. One 10-mile stretch in Nevada had large black spots on the highway. At first they looked like pieces of a blown tire - then we noticed they were moving! Closer inspection revealed the biggest, nastiest looking insects that I have ever seen. Insects large enough to be discerned from a car traveling at 90 mph! They were for sale, encased in glass, for $10 in the motel lobby in Utah and are known as Mormon Crickets.
The scariest bit was a letter to the editor in a local smalltown Utah newspaper. You guessed it, the author was promoting Intelligent Design. This line bothered me the most:
The atheistic scientists are ill-informed and are becoming the flat-worlders of the 21st century.
Flat-worlders! I felt personally insulted! It seems that since I have data on my side in my scientific belief in evolution, the ID folks have to resort to name calling as a counter argument. Name calling is a standard debate tactic, of course, and succeeds all too often in my view. This single line, however, demonstrates the complete breakdown of scientific education in this country. I wish this letter was just one more piece of harmless Americana....but I fear much worse. Anyway, I am here for the Collider Physics Workshop, of which I am a co-organizer. This is going to be great fun: 3 weeks of stimulating physics with 60-70 fellow collider folks in a beautiful atmosphere. Simultaneously a 2-week workshop on the physics, detectors, and accelerator for the International Linear Collider is being held at Snowmass, Colorado, which is only 10 miles down the road from Aspen. I will post more on this later.
