Journeys for Knowledge

With my first year of PhD complete, the time came to finally decide what my thesis would focus on. To help with this, I decided to take my conference leave early and travel to the Italian island of Elba for a workshop on accelerators. Although I have never worked with accelerators, it was the one field of physics that always captivated me. Going into this workshop, I hoped to absorb as much as possible to decide what I could do in this field, and if it was feasible at OIST.

Amusingly, I left Okinawa on a Pokemon themed plane, which I had seen before from a distance. Now with Star Wars planes being flown by ANA, hopefully I can take one of those planes on my way home. It turned out to be a very long journey, with over 12 hours of flying and another 4 hours on buses and ferries. I will say admit though the secluded cove we ended up in was quite beautiful, which was only enhanced by the slow sunset. And all this before the actual conference began!

Each day was structured into two major blocks, with longer talks in the morning and shorter seminars in the afternoon. Lunch was set at almost 4 hours long, so participants would have time to explore the cove and just relax on the beach. Having just received a Kindle from my parents, I finally got back to reading books, finishing 4 by the week’s end. Each day ended with a large group dinner as well, set outside on the patio right next to the beach.

As for the conference itself, I quickly realized most developments in the accelerator community required connections with the larger community, and is very rarely done in a vacuum. Although I made friends with a group from Oxford, I only found a few topics I could foreseeably work on with the resources available at OIST. Focusing on those for the remainder of the week, I left with a good sense of where I could fit in the scope of accelerator research, but ultimately it would take months before I finally honed in on a thesis topic, which led me in very unexpected directions.

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