From Ferris wheels to fermions, Pradeep Niroula highlights the highs and lows of the annual physicist pilgrimage that is the APS March Meeting
Thousands of physicists from around the world descended on Las Vegas earlier this month, not for a raunchy weekend, but for an annual pilgrimage: the March Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS). Ancient lore, likely untrue, has it that the last time the meeting took place in Vegas – back in in 1986 – physicists were so stingy with money and so single-minded about science that they avoided gambling, with the result that the Vegas casinos had their worst weekend in history. Rumours that the city had banned the APS from ever hosting any future events there were clearly unfounded because the March meeting returned to Nevada almost 40 years later.
I therefore arrived in Vegas a proud, card-carrying member of the APS, mustering the gravitas of a monk who has conquered all earthly temptations, ready to give Vegas another memorable week. Memorable it would be, but not quite in the way I expected.
I arrived in Vegas mustering the gravitas of a monk who has conquered all earthly temptations
At first, Vegas feels like an odd place for an academic conference. It is a city designed to pamper the senses and loosen the spirit. Inside the stupendous expanses of the super-casinos, you lose all track of direction and time. With glitzy water-and-fire shows, simulated volcanoes and drinks that start flowing as soon as you sit at the roulette table, the seemingly generous hospitality obscures the sinister reality that the city’s fortune is all based on the tiny yet predatory mathematical advantage the casinos have over their customers.
It’s an edge that is militantly enforced using surveillance cameras peppered all over ceilings. Everything about the city – the colours, the sounds, the smells – somehow feel engineered to get you to gamble. I walked into one flamingo exhibit where even the birds were pointing towards the poker room.
Yet the sheer number of megahotels and cavernous ballrooms makes Vegas a favourite destination for professional conventions, whether it’s gaming events or agriculture expos. The city’s slogan might as well be: “Give them any excuse to come here. We will take care of the rest.”
During the day, conference lanyards and badges are a common sight on the Vegas strip. As night takes over, the neon lights get brighter and the conference accoutrements fade away. Inner streets, like the LINQ promenade, turn into a large open-air carnival, accommodating everything from bachelorette parties to divorce celebrations. The same streets get eerily empty at 7 a.m., when the hotel staff finally hose away the lingering smell of mai tais and daiquiris from the night before.
Earlier this month, though, they were joined by a sea of roughly 10,000 people all heading towards the Caesars Forum conference centre, perhaps the only standing structure in central Vegas without a slot machine in it. The daily proceedings of the March Meeting would begin at 8 a.m. sharp.
To call the March Meeting the biggest event in the physics social calendar is no exaggeration
To call the March Meeting the biggest event in the physics social calendar is no exaggeration. It brings together a large portion of the world’s physics researchers, from undergraduates to Nobel-prize winners. It’s not cheap either, with air fares and registration rates costing hundreds of dollars, even for students. For the jet-lagged, there is a rush to the coffee samovars at the conference venue before they run out. Thankfully, the perennially bright lobbies filled with slot-machines and roulette tables offer far stronger cognitive stimulation than any dark roast.
The March Meeting is known for its signature 12-minute talk format. Over the week there were thousands of them, sometimes more than 75 running in parallel. Searching through the programme and creating a personal schedule is so cumbersome that APS has made a handy app just for that. One wonders how this event was even possible before smartphones.
In my first couple of years of attending the March Meeting, I had naively made a point of attending everything I could, seeking to absorb as much information as I could. I would try to take notes and then, falling behind on notes, snap pictures of talk slides. Just a couple of days in, I would give up, utterly exhausted. I have learned my lesson since.
For seasoned delegates, the conference instead serves a larger social purpose – an occasion when you get to see, in the flesh, the people whose papers you read, collaborators and old friends. Here, you are supposed to discover new research projects, exchange gossip and even network to get your next job. But good luck trying to find a place to chat in a city where the only quiet spots are the high-stakes poker tables. Crammed into the small stretch of space outside the conference centre, almost beneath the world’s largest Ferris wheel (the aptly named “High Roller”), were dozens of round tables. At any given time, each of them hosted as many as four separate conversations.
At times, it felt like the March Meeting was just relearning how to host so many people after being hit by the pandemic. In 2020 the onset of COVID-19 forced the APS to make the difficult decision to cancel that year’s meeting even after many attendees had already flown into Denver. The following year, everything was remote and forgettable. In 2022 the meeting took place in Chicago in a hybrid format but many scheduled to present didn’t show up, while those who had travelled all the way to Chicago had to watch pre-recorded talks if a recorded version was available. The venue was so large I remember wishing for a golf cart to transport me from one end to another.
Las Vegas was supposed to be the comeback, and what a comeback it was!
Las Vegas was supposed to be the comeback, and what a comeback it was! The conference centre – its ballrooms, hallways and bathrooms – was overcrowded every day. The sheer density of people in the venue would have been alarming even before the pandemic. But the APS certainly must have been happy to see just how well attendees were able to resist the wiles and charms of Las Vegas: the buffets at the Bellagio, risqué shows at Caesars Palace and endless pampering at the Palazzo.
On Thursday evening, just as the Vegas strip was getting ready for yet another wild night, the APS got the final proof it needed of its comeback. Thousands of physicists had chosen to ignore Vegas’s temptations and instead pack the casino-free ballroom to hear 2022 Nobel laureate John Clauser beat the local hidden-variable theory to death using the Star Trek meme “He’s dead, Jim”. That night, the faithful were rewarded with a spread of artichoke and asparagus.
In fact, this year’s March Meeting was educational in ways I hadn’t foreseen. A week of living on the Vegas strip is a sensory experience not easily replicable elsewhere in the world. I have walked across pastiches of French streets, Roman forums and Venetian canals, all within half an hour. I have seen a stroller-strapped infant’s wide-eyed face under the pink neon glow of the sign of a burlesque show. I have seen so many posters of Gordon Ramsey that he makes regular cameos in my nightmares. Plus, I now understand why he is always angry at the staff at Hell’s Kitchen. I even know precisely what a Baked Alaska is.
Show us your metal
This year’s March Meeting will probably be best remembered, however, for a seemingly extraordinary announcement by a group of physicists who claimed that they had discovered room-temperature superconductivity and it was going to change the world. There was even meant to be a surprise 12-minute talk, made to coincide with an unexpected Nature publication. Apparently, security had forced people out of the room so the talk could proceed. The authors had previously made controversial claims that were met with resistance, making the whole announcement a very Vegas affair.
I myself wasn’t at the announcement, having just polished off my third plate of a buffet when I heard about the news, and I stayed for dessert without giving the news a second thought. These days, breakthroughs happen too frequently. Vegas trips, not quite as often.
The controversy later moved on to Twitter. I saw that one lab even tried to reproduce the discovery (they couldn’t) and many others were still trying. Maybe they didn’t get the memo: what you hear in Vegas should stay in Vegas.