The Wonderful Curves

Responding to insistent knocking on my office door, I was dragged by Sincere to a freshly-printed poster: the Princeton condensed matter lunch seminar. “You’re famous!” he cried. But the title of my talk is wrongly printed: Yismuth-based insulators and semimetals with Cnv symmetry. It seems Bab wanted me to talk about Yismuth, while I wanted to talk about Cnv, and Mzh creatively combined both orthogonal themes into a misnomer.

I didn’t mind, rather, am on my way toward flying into the air. I unabashedly advertised to everybody I know. Handsome Bear told me that he would only come to my talk if I am proposing a new material; then I told him about pizza. These jaded experimentalists, they have lost their faith in a good talk, how do I wow them? Fake Russian commented that my excitement is overblown, but he doesn’t understand that I am trying to craft the best talk on topological insulators that people have ever heard. That I am trying to spark the minds of the entire spectrum of physicists.

I woke up to wonderful news on the day of my talk, that my Yismuth paper has been submitted to Nature Physics. AY has honored me with a joint first-authorship with Boxer on this paper, to reward the initial insight that birthed the project, and the intense collaboration with Boxer that defined our interpretation of Yismuth.

In the audience were good friends in high-energy: Black Hole and Tim. The experimentalists came in droves. I had the immense pleaure of giants in the audience, Ed and Phil, who have redefined their respective fields. Ed asked a few simple questions; I hope I’ve engaged him. Phil had a good laugh at one of my jokes. Soon he is turning ninety, and there will be celebrations of the kind I have never witnessed – a celebration among physicists to honor their idol.

At the end of the talk, Fake Russian cornered me to explain every single detail. Tim told me that I was secretly talking about orbifold fixed points, in the high-energy lingo. Blackhole and Shotgirl were suitably impressed with my graphics, and I showed them the wonders that one can achieve with a curve in Inkscape. Debbie revealed to me his great ambition: he is building a machine that traps atoms in a lattice of light, and that in principle he can fashion any Hamiltonian he desires from it. Big dreams.

An inkling of tragedy

Black Hole asked me if I was deathly allergic to cats. I am mildly irritated for a week, and then I develop immunity. This is my experience with Pots. My ex had two cats, Laxmi and Rilo, and a bunny. Both cats outlived her. What a strange concatenation of words. It is almost too big to hold in my head, it slips in and out languidly, never staying in one place for too long, but neither am I keen to pin it down.

I started reading the Birth of Tragedy, because I had not an inkling of what tragedy meant, and this is good enough reason for me to try. The art of pessimism, he says, whatever that means. However, I am beginning to understand the duality between Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. Individuation against primordial unity. In salsa I feel close to the primordial unity, this wild union of people in song and dance. The reckless intoxication, I miss it. In the German middle ages, singing an dancing crowds, ever growing in number, whirled themselves from place to place under the Dionysian impulse. In Babylonian festivals, the slave became a free man, all the rigid hostile barriers that lie fixed between man and man were broken down. Structure tells me I have changed since the salsa days, become less innocent, more introspective. These days I feel highly individuated, the sculptor endlessly carving with the restrained calm that is necessary to good work. There are moments when calm is not necessary, not wanted, is abandoned. When the veil is lifted, I embrace the second element of the primordial unity - the union of man with nature. Such moments are precious few and cannot by themselves sustain. Am I to learn life lessons from a dead man? Why not. Does he not write beautifully, piercingly? What is this marriage of Apollonian and Dionysian art that he speaks - the Attic tragedy?