Theory Seminar
ROGER glanced at his watch. He had been talking for about forty five minutes now. The seminars of the SSC Particle Theory Group were supposed to last an hour, but that rule was frequently breached by longwinded speakers. At the rate he was going, however, he would finish easily with some time for questions. That was fine, because his headache was intensifying again. “So,” he said, “last night I set up the problem on my workstation to do a preliminary evaluation of the perturbation series, using the formalism outlined on the previous transparencies. Here’s what Mathematica gave me. It’s a standard 3D plot of generalized isospin against flavor, treating both as continuous variables for the purposes of the minimization, with mass as the altitude on the vertical axis” He placed the color transparency on the stage of the overhead projector. It was a brightly hued two dimensional surface that showed the gentle rolling hills of the surface, punctuated here and there by deep depressions.
Roger ran the red spot of the laser pointer over the numbers near the depressions. “As you can see, the minimization gets the masses of each of the ground-state mesons to better than 1%. I think that can be improved, but it’s fairly good as it stands. I haven’t had time to investigate the baryons, but I see no reason why it should not do as well for them.” He paused and massaged his temples. His forehead was pounding. The bright colors of the slide seemed to bring with them peculiar individual odors. He turned toward his seated colleagues. “Well, that’s about all. This formulation is only one day old, but it shows, as they say, initial promise. In fact, I think it looks quite lovely! Thank you.” He nodded to the group to indicate he was through and switched off the projector.
The applause from his theoretical colleagues, usually somewhat perfunctory and reserved at the end of an informal theory seminar like this one, was thunderous. Roger smiled. He knew that he had done well. They had understood the complicated ideas that he’d presented, and they were delighted with his new approach.
“Questions?” he said quietly, and a dozen hands shot up. As he turned to point to a postdoc in the front row, he was surprised by a sharp, peculiar odor. He stared in bewilderment at his audience. Each person seemed to have a bright, coruscating aura around his head. Roger could feel the points of each aura like sharp individual pinpricks. Their faces were weirdly distorted, and they were attempting to speak to him in sibilant, glottal languages that he could not comprehend.
The sharp smell intensified, and his ears filled with a high-pitched warbling susurrus that seemed to whisper hints of forbidden knowledge. A vast enveloping darkness closed in about him, and he could feel himself falling out of the world ...