In the last couple of weeks, I have suddenly acquired a rather full travel schedule for the coming months. The odd thing is that none of these trips are book-publicity junkets– they’re all basically professional-type appearances, several of them taking place before How to Teach Physics to Your Dog hits stores on December 22. My schedule so far:
- October 24, Waterloo, Ontario: I’m a late addition the Quantum to Cosmos Festival, as a panelist for a discussion on “Communicating Science in the 21st Century.” This will also be webcast and recorded for television (my itinerary includes a “Speaker Call” 45 minutes before the panel, and the note “Speaker call includes make-up,” which ought to be interesting…).
- November 12-15, Houston, Texas (actually, “The Woodlands,” which is somewhere sort of near Houston): I’ll be the Union delegate to the annual meeting of Sigma Xi. This does not involve giving any presentations, just going to meetings and hanging out. I don’t know anybody else who will be at this, so if you’re in the Houston area, and would like to get together for a beer or something, drop me an email.
- December 4, Lewiston, Maine: I’m giving a seminar talk at Bates College. Title is “Counting Atoms for Astrophysics: Atom Traps, Neutrino Detectors, and Radioactive Background Measurements.” If any of the other Maine schools (Bowdoin, Colby, whatever) would like a seminar speaker around that time, drop me an email.
- February 12-14, Boston, Massachusetts: Kate and I will both be going to Boskone as usual, and will almost certainly be on programming there.
- March 15-19, Portland, Oregon: I’m giving an invited talk on the educational use of lasers at the APS March Meeting. Title is something like “Lasers in the Undergraduate Laboratory: Precision Measurement for the Masses.” I’ve never been to a March Meeting before, though I was at the 1999 Centennial Meeting in Atlanta, which was probably about the same size.
- April 9-10, Albany, New York: I’ll be appearing at the Empire State Book Festival. OK, this isn’t really travel, but it is a public event that I’ll be at, so I include it for completeness.
- May 25-29, Houston, Texas: Yes, that’s right, I’m going to Houston twice. This trip is for DAMOP, the research conference I go to every May. My current thesis student is exceptionally good, and I’ll have him apply for the undergraduate research session, and if he doesn’t get that, we’ll submit a poster.
Not listed are a personal trip to New York City in mid-November (Kate has a court appearance, and we’re going to make a weekend of it), and most likely a quick trip to Maryland for a meeting with people at the APS (yet to be scheduled, but soon). There’s another thing I’m involved with that will probably generate another 1-2 trips in the next year, but I don’t have any details yet.
So it’s going to be a busy year. I’ll get to color in some big blank spaces on the map of states I’ve visited (I’ve never been to the West Coast north of San Francisco before, and I’ve only changed planes in Texas). And again, this does not include anything that’s solely book publicity (though I will probably look into the possibility of doing some during the March Meeting and DAMOP).