Physics Today; Pizza Today
I have been a subscriber to Physics Today ever since I was in graduate school. I attended my first March Meeting in 1990 in Los Angeles, which was just down the road from from Santa Barbara where I was pursuing my PhD. With my registration came APS Membership, and with Membership came Physics Today.
A few years later, I ended up subscribing to Physics Today’s doppelganger. I was waiting at my local pizzeria for my order to be ready, and noticed the Pizza Today magazine. As I browsed their trade journal, it became clear to me that they are as passionate about pizza as physicists are about physics. Curious to learn more about this parallel dimension, I tore off the subscriber card embedded within the magazine, and started my own at-home pizza “business”. I have been an ironic subscriber for about fifteen years, not as long as my Physics Today subscription but still respectable. Nowadays both subscriptions are virtual, which of course is better for the environment. One of my “bucket list” items is to attend the International Pizza Expo, which is their March Meeting. Unfortunately, the location overlaps this year, but not the date.
I often wonder why people choose to become non-physicists. I’m also fascinated by the professional society meetings in other disciplines. During the 1998 APS March Meeting, I snuck into an adjacent Floor and Tile show. I was disheartened to see that their trade show was much more high-tech than ours, and I ended up writing a Letter to Physics Today about my experience. There I complained that we lacked wifi, used incoherent light pointers (long tubes with a bulb at one end and a stenciled arrow at the other), gave talks from overhead transparency projectors, and deployed egg timers to keep everyone on schedule. I noted the irony since physicists pioneered the internet, the laser, liquid crystals, and the atomic clock.
My letter gained the attention of a journalist at the New York Times who wrote an article about my letter, riffing on the word “shabby” which I meant in a technological sense, not based on attire. The article was published with an illustration showing (male) physicists sashaying down a runway, striking poses. Not the message I was intending, but all in good fun.
I have participated in annual Physics Society meetings in several other countries, including the Netherlands, Poland, and South Korea. The varied physics culture, manifested in these meetings, fascinates me. Bloated though it may be, the APS March Meeting is still my favorite physics meeting. For me and so many other senior physicists, it provides a unique opportunity to reconnect with friends and colleagues, and watch your own students squirm with nervousness and delight as they give their 12-minute talks. I still remember my first March Meeting talk, and the one question posed by my PhD Advisor’s PhD Advisor. It doesn’t help to tell these stories to my students. There is no substitute for giving one’s first scientific talk.
This year’s APS March Meeting takes place 25 years after the one that prompted me to write about my adventures with the Floor and Tile show. Of all of the positive memories I have regarding the March Meeting, I credit one fateful “viral” moment in 1995 for literally saving my career as a professional physicist. That story is the subject of an upcoming Letter that will be published in the March 2023 issue of Physics Today.