Having spent an extremely relaxing Thanksgiving break with a huge party of my in-laws, I have now returned refreshed and replete and ready to tackle the traditionally crazy couple of weeks at the end of the semester.

This year things are particularly hectic, as the next few days see two very exciting physics events. First, on Friday, my condensed matter colleagues are holding the inaugural New York Complex Matter Workshop. If I have time I may try to attend some of the talks, which cover a broad range of topics, mostly in soft condensed matter, which involves physical situations in which the dynamics is driven predominantly by the entropy term in the free energy, as opposed to the energy term.

Second, and most importantly for me, Monday sees the fifth installment of the Syracuse-Cornell Joint Theory Meeting. This time, we also have people attending from SUNY Buffalo and from Case Western Reserve University. We’ll be discussing cosmology, particle physics phenomenology, string theory, modifications to gravity, and all manner of other topics and, if our previous meetings are any guide, it should be a great success.

These types of meeting are tremendous for so many reasons. It is great for one’s own research program to see such a wide spread of interests and approaches; they provide a valuable opportunity for graduate students in particular to speak in front of a friendly audience; and they are wonderfully collegial events.

If readers of this blog could be flies on the wall during these meetings (let me know if you’d like to drop by), I think they would be struck by the stunning breadth of research interests in today’s physics departments. Take a look at the talk titles on the web pages I mentioned above, ranging from all types of biophysics topics, through nanophysics to cosmology and string theory. And our experimental particle physicists, astrophysicists and gravitational physicists won’t even be at the Monday meeting.

I’ll report again after the Monday meeting and let you know how it went.