Medusa, knots, flavour and intelligence

For many the sounds of August equates the tingling of ice in a cold Piña colada cocktail glass, the one adorned with a hot pink umbrella. For others they equate a different type of resonance, for instance the deafening echo of a cocktail Molotov. These groups are not necessarily disjoint sets. I for one belong in their intersection.

Last week, I gave three lectures on flavour physics at CERN (videos and slides available here). These series of lectures is one of the highlights of my summer. The students are very focused, very fun, sharp, curious, they ask many questions and give constructive feedback. This year it was the third time giving this lectures and each year felt better taking into account their feedback and carving more time to draw more illustrations, I truly loved every minutes of it. Plus for some reason, some students decided to ask the lecturers to sign their notebooks and what a way to feel like a rockstar for a whole 30 seconds. I really recommend it.

When I try to visualise the weavings of my life, the knots and the threads, despite my best efforts some parts stubbornly remain obscure. Others are bright as the evening star. 2005 was a decisive turning point in my life. It’s the year where I fell in love with flavour physics and it is also the year where I met the person who turned out to be a center of gravity in my heart.

Three hours is rather short for the topic, I tell them about the fundamentals of flavour physics, I often share with bits of my own experience as a student, physicist and human being. There are no exams, no evaluations at the end of these lectures, the mood is such I don’t shy away from embracing light tone and fun anecdotes. I am not sure how I would describe my sense of humour, but I can guarantee with certainty that its not based on word games.

This year though I accidentally made a pun, I was telling the students that each generation faces a different set of challenges. In my time, finding documentation on how to do things sometimes felt like climbing mount Everest. With AI, this is not the case today, their favourite agent will generate all the bits of code that ones need to make the nicest looking distributions. The trap is though, this generation is in my humble opinion flooded with information, notably garbage generated by AI. So I decided that the the theme of my lecture was to invite them to use their critical thinking and that together we would analyse the distributions or equations I was showing them. I emphasised a lot how crucial and important maybe even vital it was for them to be sharp as Japanese blades and critical. Here comes my unintended pun, I told them you should :

“Train your eye, not an AI”

For someone who does not fiddle with word games I was quite proud, but I diverge. I was under the impression that they were receptive to my message, and I may have stored in a special folder some of the kind emails some of them sent me afterwards to share that they loved the lecture. I keep this precious folder for the rainy days.

Speaking of rain and lack as it were. I was a lucky duck as a child and teenager and I was able to enjoy the sea side with my parents, weather close to home or further away, August was a month where I was more a fish than a human. The ache for the sea and the endless days building sand castle and following the reflection of the sun or moon on the water that we were meant to follow as part of whatever game we were inventing was later tied to a different sort of ache. The one that distorts your guts and forbids you from enjoying life for reasons you can’t grasp just yet. It took me some time to understand where these anxious emotions were coming from, they had a pattern, ticking in August like clock work. I was told it was probably the idea of going back to school, but that had nothing to do with it, the feeling persisted way into my university days and adulthood. Also going back to school meant new supplies, pens and notebooks and this is always a cause for celebration, at least in my case no knots in the stomach. I was randomly texting a dear friend of mine, he is a person who would debate with equal passion why Algeria should have won against Austria in 1982 and the most random and equally specific facts about the cold war (you know who you are), but I diverge again.

I can’t recall what we were talking about but it was August and asked him, do you feel it too? the knot in the stomach. Obviously I do, he said. And it hit me then. It’s called Trauma. A thread was finally illuminated. In the late nighties we were in high school and in August it was the year where the “massacres”, the hundreds of beheadings, took place in Algeria during what was called the civil war, the “décénnie noire”. I would need way more than a short post to explain what that meant for me, my family, my friends, for a whole nation. Maybe one day, as of today I wish to share something else.

It has happened that this trauma snuck up on me in moments I didn’t expect. During my PhD I visited with friends a few towns in Italy, we ended up in Florence and as we were heading to a museum we stopped by the statue of Perseus with the head of Medusa. I knew of the broad lines of the myth. Bad, bad Medusa the monster who turns people into stone, but nothing beyond this. It was only years later when I was I fortunate to read Medusa from Isabelle Sorente, or Natalie Haynes and others, where their re-telling of the myth cast a light like no other on the “monster”. I have unlimited love for the act of restoring a voice. But this too is a story for an other day. Back in Florence, back in a spring of 2008. I stood there for a moment, maybe seconds, maybe minutes I don’t recall. The statue stoned me into silence. I remember touching my neck, like a reflex, glad to find it (still) attached to the rest of my body. For a few hours though, my voice was no where to be found. If you read any fantasy books you know that names hold power and at that I didn’t have a name of it then.

In hindsight this too was called Trauma and I have to admit that it’s probably also called Art. Another set intersected. I don’t love this statue, I can’t stand it’s violence, but I admit through clenched teeth that it had the ability that great art does to make you see way beyond the object. I grew to love this thought, hundreds of people walk in museums, admire the same art but what is it that they each see? I wonder. Later that day, after the encounter with the statue I did find my voice again as well as other voices.

It would be foolish of me to wrap this up by telling you that all will be well, for I do not have the gift of foresight. All I am left with is small tokens of my humanity and curiosity. So let me tie a knot to this piece and take a moment to thank the people in my life, the ones who accept and love all the flavours, all the facets of my being, the traumatised ones, the moody ones, the solar ones, the hungry ones, and the ones who need to disappear briefly from the world but eventually crawl back.