Ok, here's Cosmic Variance's first Society Wedding coverage - but several Celebrity Physicists (at least in my field) replace the usual Hollywood set, or British Royals. (I managed to get in, depite being in none of the above groupings, by virtue of being a friend of the groom.) Well of course I still managed to leave Los Angeles much later than I'd planned, in order to make it in time for the 3:00pm wedding ceremony in Santa Barbara. (I'm really really going off linen suits, ok? You waste tons of time ironing them, and they still make you look like you're wearing an old potato sack, after ten minutes of wearing them.... sigh.) So it was less of a slow, relaxed drive and more of a focused, determined, fun -but careful- sprint! This resulted in me setting a new personal daytime record for getting up there (successfully road-testing some ealier modifications I'd made to the car). There were a number of microbursts of torrential rain along the way and so I was
concerned that the outdoor ceremony would be moved (as part of the hosts' backup plan) but they went ahead with it, and so I turned up at the park in good time. The setting was quite lovely, actually. There was a huge amount of rain in the region, but somehow it stopped 15 minutes before the ceremony, the clouds all went away and a perfect blue sky appeared (with a lovely rainbow over downtown Santa Barbara in the distance). (Not long after the ceremony, new clouds appeared and the rain started up again, but we were by then indoors at the reception venue. Impressive timing.) Here's the blushing physicist pairing: the bride (UCSB Astrophysicist Crystal Martin) and the groom (UCSB Relativist Don Marolf):
That is Princeton astrophysicist Alice Shapley, doing crucial things with flowers and the train of the wedding dress. Don's brother David is on the left. The ceremony was very nicely done. It was presided over by Syracuse University condensed matter physicist Eric Schiff, his first ceremony since qualifying to do them (he's just behind Don). The group of guests was rather rich with representatives of the great and the good of theoretical physics. Well, there was Cosmic Variance's very own Mark Trodden (of Syracuse), sitting here with his wife Sara, and just in front of me was UCSB's Jim Hartle:
And in my row was Perimeter Institute's Rob Myers (front) and UCSB's Gary Horowitz, sitting either side of Gary's wife Corrine:
After the wedding ceremony, people stood around chatting for a while before heading off to the reception. Here's another well-known pair, Gary Horowitz and Joe Polchinski (KITP-UCSB):
Inspired by some of the pairings I'd made earlier (matching various author pairings on papers famous in my field), I thought I'd carry on with this at the reception. So I got UCSB's Steve Giddings and Joe Polchinski, and of course, Marolf (the groom) and Trodden:
And here is a grouping of potential co-authors of a paper that you could be reading one day:
Yep, I'm dying to know what will be the subject of a paper written by Myers, Polchinski, UCSB's David Berenstien and USC's Johnson! And we have UCSB's Mark Srednicki and David Berenstein (another promising co-author pair for a paper I'd love to read; in between them is David's wife, Angela). Finally, there's the co-authors Henriette Elvang (MIT) and Joe Polchinski.
Well, a good time was had by all. I got back into my car at 10:30 and made it back to LA in not much over an hour, keeping alert by singing along at the top of my voice to those amazingly modern Louis Armstrong trumpet solos from some of the excellent "hot fives" and "hot sevens" groupings of the 1920s. -cvj
