This post should have appeared a month or so ago. But the last month was a bit hectic: first with a trip to Stony Brook, second with jetlag upon return to Bengaluru and then with seasonal allergy infliction shutting down my brain for a good 4 days.
I will focus mostly on the first bit of information mentioned above. I visited Stony Brook last month from 1-7 June to attend the conference celebrating 50 years of the discovery of Supergravity by the well-known triumvirate: Sergio Ferrara, Daniel Z. Freedman, and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen.
This was a third conference of this type at Stony Brook with the first one held in 1979 (@ 3 years) and second one in 2001 (@ 25 years). I was glad to be a part of this historic event and being at my alma mater after nearly a decade. Though, it was sad that neither Ferrara nor Freedman could attend this conference due to health issues.
The three days of the conference were jam-packed with 7 talks each. You can find them on the conference page (linked via the poster above) along with the dinner speeches (worth a listen too, even for non-physicists!). Some of the talks were review/overview talks, some were expository talks, some were who-knows-what talks. I liked Moore’s and Kallosh’s talks from the first day, and Van Proeyen’s talk and Martin’s “homage” to Warren on the second day. The third day was quite interesting and I liked (and “understood”) Maldacena’s, Roiban’s and Gauntlett’s talks.
Another highlight of the conference was a beach trip to West Meadow Beach. I
walked for about an hour along the shore. I
collected photographed some stones, shells & seaweeds and
birds like seagulls, egrets, ospreys, plovers & terns. I also saw
horseshoe crabs
for the first time and they look like toy tanks with tails!
More photos from this trip are shared in the following album. Till next time!
