36,000 ft: A Long Way Down

August 11, 2006

"The captain has turned off the seatbelt sign. You may now use electronic devic... Oh I guess you don't have any electronic devices."

I had intended to travel light from London to San Francisco for Science Foo Camp. Just hand luggage. Instead, I would have to check in everything, down to my copy of the Herald Tribune and New Scientist. The prospect of a transatlantic flight without literature was daunting. It appeared, for a while, that the terrorists would succeed in boring me to death.

At the last minute, at the gate, I did manage to buy a copy of Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down, which they let me take on board (though they practically disassembled my shoes before boarding). Despite the novel being about four people trying to commit suicide but not quite managing for the duration of the bookI'm sorry, did I give away the plot?, I finished it half-way through the flight. After that, it was slim pickings — a complimentary Daily Mail, and NorthWest Airlines' inflight magazine. It could have been worse. My neighbor was reading Paolo Coelho. She was rapturous about The Da Vinci Code. (I asked.)

As luck would have it, buying the cheapest ticket to San Francisco involved a flight out of Gatwick, which meant I was one of the few flights to make it from the UK to the US. Yes, it was delayed by five hours, yes I missed my connecting flight in Minneapolis (whence I now blog) but yes I will make it to San Francisco tomorrow, as long as I don't try to bring lipstick on board. My baby milk will be fine, though, if I drink some in front of the security agent so as to prove it is not an explosive gel. (I suspect that next time "they" will use edible explosives — or, seriously now, condoms with explosive gel that they swallow beforehand and then retrieve from their stool when they go to the toilet on the plane.)

About that New Scientist: It brought fantastic newsAlas, it's pay per read.: Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) looks increasingly to be onto something when it comes to defining subatomic particles as tangles in a node-like lattice (=space). I feel like an early groupie to a band that's gone big time. No time now to dig deeper, but for my reference's sake, here are the papers the New Scientist article references:

A topological model of composite preons
Quantum gravity and the standard model
Graviton propagator in loop quantum gravity

I hope to blog Science Foo Camp, and take pictures too, though there are rules. I also suspect that a few hours into the proceedings, it will dawn on everyone that I actually don't know anything, that I was invited as a result of mistaken assumptions, and that I will be shown to the Googleplex lobby by kind but insistent burly gentlemen.

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