Quantum Diarists on Parade

So finally (in Part III of this series) I get to the actual conference itself.  The Gordon Conference in Nuclear Physics was held at Bates College in Lewiston, ME (about 30 minutes inland from Portland).  It covered a lot of ground (nucleon structure, RHIC physics, nuclear structure, astrophysics, fundamental interactions, etc.) with a wide sampling of the nuclear physics community, spread out over about 60 scientists, postdocs, and students.  Here we all are heading back from the conference photo on the way to a coffee break.

Among the participants was someone familiar to many of you: Sarah Phillips, fellow diarist and nuclear physicist.  Contrary to popular belief,  collisions of quantum diarists do *not* lead to any destructive side effects, even when nuclear physics is involved. 

Anyway, it was a nice conference overall, with wall-to-wall talks in the morning and evening and long periods of free time in the afternoons (which I used to keep up with a major PHOBOS meeting that I missed by being in Maine...)  It's really crucial to keep up with the other subfields in your line of work, and Gordon Conferences are usually focussed on precisely that, with lots of review talks.  Quite a few times I noticed issues that may be common between high energy nuclear physics and much lower-energy physics -- but too bad I won't have much time to think about it until after Quark Matter in August!