It's a small tangled world we live in.
I'm a graduate student at MIT, and I mildly enjoy Star Trek. One of my flatmates is a guy called Evan, whose mother is the editor and agent for author/physicist Dr. Lawrence Krauss, who wrote the very engaging book, The Physics of Star Trek. Krauss, as it happens, also got his degree from MIT. My reserach for MIT involves me working at Los Alamos National Laboratory with a man called John. John's wife is the director of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The WIPP doubles as a storage facility for nuclear waste and a low-background underground facility for scientific reserach. Most of the experiments planned for WIPP involve detecting neutrinos. Today was the first day of an astrophysics conference in Carlsbad for researchers wanting to do neutrino experiments at the WIPP. The banquet talk was given by Dr. Krauss, and was an elaborate multimedia persentation on the material from his book re: star trek science and science fiction.
Somehow the coincidence of me meeting someone who's good friends with my roommate while at an astrophysics conference on the other side of the country (and also happens to be one of my favorite authors) seems interesting to me.
Anyway, I think Krauss is going to be the next great "popularizer" of science. Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov were certainly two of the greatest, and both of them were idols of mine as I was growing up. I always wanted to meet them and shake their hand because of the enormous impact they had on me, but sadly they both died before I got the chance. While I was unaware of Krauss until recently, his work is clearly going to have a similar effect on the next generation and it was an honor to meet him.
"If the door is open," he says, "then I went back to Los Alamos. If it's closed, then I'm still asleep and we'll go to the conference together."
Well, I got up early early early and waited for that door to open for four hours. Missed the first half of today's talks before I gave up on him. Turns out he left but closed the door anyway. Frustratotron.
