While the most obvious answer to this question is “to ski”, it is, nonetheless, not the correct one. Yes, skiing is great here in the winter (and hiking is great in the summer), but most of the time physicists come here to work. The reason is Aspen Center for Physics. I write “here” because I’m currently participating in one of the programs organized by the Center (the program is called “Flavor Origins” — it brought together theorists working on the problems of neutrinos, heavy and light quarks, CP-violation, etc.). The Center, which exists here since 1961, organizes workshops and conferences. But the main reason that theorists (and occasional experimentalists) come here is to talk to other theorists. In short, it is as if you are visiting a huge theory group — you can work individually or with your colleagues, but you can always knock on an office door and bounce your ideas off someone else visiting the Center, etc. It is great to have such a concentration of theorists of different trades. And it leads to breakthroughs and simply good papers. As it is said on the Center’s website:
“Many seminal papers have been written in Aspen, which has grown to be the largest center for theoretical physics in the world during its summer sessions. Among many other subjects, the theories of superstrings, chaos, evolution of stars and galaxies, and high temperature superconductivity have all made large strides in recent Aspen seasons.”
There is almost always someone with an expertise in a subject that you have a question about. And that makes this Center great. And, of course, hiking and skiing is also good. The only “downside” (note the quotes) is that you can meet a real bear (even at the Center) or other wildlife. Today a snake came to check out a lecture on conformal field theories…
First a confession – this is my second post of this comment . . .
I have been an afficionado QD for some time and it is exciting to see the progress and the discussion on the increasing precision of available data.
But I am always struck by one thought that I never have seen explicitly raised in such discussion but must become salient at some point when dealing with these measurement deltas . . .
Put simply, there is general agreement that the universe is expanding – in addition, the further out you go, the faster this is happening.
Assume we are at the centre of this expansion [because it must be relative to a point].
Then any point more distant from the centre, say x away, is ‘separating’ from a point x+1, more slowly. An analogous effect must be uniform throughout the universe.
This means that two subsequent measures may/will measure different but we cannot [or can we?] know that as our tape will have similarly ‘expanded’ [in the same way/degree?].
So, what I am unable to discern from the general literature is
1. is the ‘scale’ of the expansion of the universe ‘true’ at the quantum level, or does it manifest at a ‘higher level of build of matter’ only?
2. how would we know ?
3. would it skew the results arising from using data accumulated over time?
4. does it matter?