Massimo's photoblog

Today Mayli went to a conference on high energy physics, hosted at the Universidad Simon Bolivar in Caracas (this was one of the many reasons for this trip). I was still sick, so I stayed home (I actually took this photo the next day) resting, while Mayli gave her talk about her neutrino experiment. All the participants at the conference were venezuelan physicists, some of them living in the country, several of them (like Mayli) working abroad. From left to right, Nelson, Jota, Alejandra and Mayli. Nelson was the thesis advisor of Mayli while she was studying at the University in Merida. Jota and Alejandra were both in Trieste (in Italy) while I was doing my Ph.D. there (I actually shared my office with Alejandra, who has also been my spanish teacher for a while, and she was the person introducing Mayli to me). Jota now works in Paris and Stanford, while Alejandra is back to Merida working on beautiful theories on right-handed neutrinos.

All venezuelan physicists that are back to Venezuela, except one, are theoreticians (theory require less funding than experimental physics). So most of the talks were in fact very theoretical and abstract, and the next day, when I actually accompanied Mayli at the conference, I enjoyed a day of superstrings, supersymmetry, Feynman diagrams and Ising models, lots of elegant stuff I didn’t see since my quantum field theory course in the University (I had been trained as a physicist, and only later become an astronomer).

Go to the next installment of my Venezuela travel diary.