My First Full Day in China

I have just returned to my hotel room from a wonderful banquet capping a great first full day in Hangzhou. We thought we'd take a 30-minute walk back to the hotel, but in fact it turned out to take 75 minutes. However, after the 25 or so different dishes we ate this evening, a long walk was not entirely a bad thing. I arrived in Hangzhou at 10:15 last night, at the end of a long trip. There were two very helpful and pleasant graduate students waiting for me and they dealt with getting us a cab, and took my luggage and me to my hotel and checked me in. Two nice things conspired to make the trip somewhat easier than it might have been. First, I had requested to use air miles to upgrade to business class on the fifteen and a half hour flight from Chicago to Hong Kong. Such requests are never guaranteed to work, since there are a limited number of seats open and often people with more miles than me who are on the upgrade list ahead of me. Nevertheless, I was fortunate enough to make the cut, which made this absurdly long flight much more bearable. Second, the United Airlines Red Carpet Club at Hong Kong airport is incredible compared to those in the US. In the US I have to pay an exorbitant amount to get on the Internet and, while soft drinks, coffee and tea are free, a glass of wine or a beer will cost you 6 dollars. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, there is a full bar (Carlsberg on tap, several bottles of wine, and a row of optics) to which one can just help oneself for free! Which I most certainly did. Plus the wireless web is complimentary! Given that I arrived so late, getting to my hotel at 11:20pm and to bed at around 12:30am, our kind hosts took pity on me and moved my talks to later in the week, allowing me a little recovery time before speaking. So today I mostly got to sit and listen to other people speak, eat great food, try to stay cool and hydrated, tweak my talks and spend some time composing part of this post. First up today was Joe Silk, from Oxford University. Joe is one of the best-known and respected cosmologists in the world, and gave the first of his two lectures on structure formation and dark matter. It is nice to see Joe here, but it makes me a little nervous, since the last time I met him in Asia, we spent 6 late night/early morning hours stranded at Mumbai airport. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed that he isn't bad luck for me - we'll see. Second was Ned Wright, from UCLA. Ned is an observer who has been an important member of many of the cosmologically important experiments in microwave, infrared and optical astronomy (e.g. COBE and WMAP). Ned is also extremely well known for his tremendous and award-winning web site, Ned Wright's Cosmology Tutorial, which, if you haven't done so before, I strongly encourage you to visit. Ned's first talk this morning was on the Cosmic InfraRed Background. Third was Henry Tye, from Cornell University. Henry is a particle-stringy-cosmology powerhouse, whose first lecture here is about brane inflation, which is a particular way in which inflation may be realized in string theory. I actually used part of Henry's talk to type this, because I heard him give the same talk when we both (along with Cosmic Variance's very own Clifford Johnson) lectured at the Perimeter Institute Summer School on Strings, Gravity and Cosmology earlier in the summer. Henry is also an important participant in our Syracuse-Cornell Fundamental Theory meetings, which alternate each semester between our two universities in upstate New York. In the afternoon the first speaker was Bing-Lin Young, from Iowa State University, lecturing about neutrino physics. He was followed by Qing-Guo Gong, who spoke on some issues in de Sitter space. The only international participant yet to arrive is Ira Wasserman, another of my upstate New York neighbors from Cornell University. Next week, for the Symposium in Beijing, we'll be joined by quite a few other people, including Arlin Crotts from Columbia, Alan Guth from MIT, Andrei Linde and Renata Kallosh from Stanford, Bruce Winstein from Chicago, Yun Wang from Oklahoma, and Peter Garnavich from Notre Dame. I know most of these people (although some much better than others) and so it should make for a nice time. The Summer Institute itself promises to be very interesting. There are graduate students here from all across China, with varying levels of physics preparation and of proficiency in English. Lecturing to such a broad audience, and trying to speak in such a way as to remain relatively coherent to most of them, is going to be a challenge. Joe, Ned, Henry, Bing-Lin and Qing-Guo did admirable jobs today and I hope I can follow their leads. Other than our long walk this evening, I haven't had any time to really see Hangzhou yet. It's a pretty large city (although perhaps not by Chinese standards), with about six million inhabitants, including the surrounding area. It is said to be remarkably beautiful, with the famous West Lake, on which we had dinner, its best-known feature. I took a few photos this evening and will include some in a future post. However, since I'm flagging now, I'm off to bed.