Journey to the Foundation of Reality

In the late afternoon on Thursday, I made my way out to the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport to catch a 75 minute flight to Fayetteville, Arkansas for the University of Arkansas Physics Centennial. The new Northwest Arkansas Airport in nearby Bentonville was a revelation, a neat little airport run with the style of a more urban place. I drove past little Arkansas towns with names like Cave Springs, amazingly green grass, and fruit trees in bloom.

Within an hour and a half after landing, I was walking into a packed auditorium in the university's flagship Old Main building, to hear a lecture by Dr. Wolfgang Ketterle,
the German physicist and MIT professor who won the Nobel Prize for his work in chilling atoms to unimaginably cold temperatures edging near to absolute zero and observing their new properties at these numbing temperatures.

( Physics )