Day 5

Yesterday I skied at Santa Fe Ski Basin. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to ski while I was in the Pacific northwest: they didn’t have any snow and I didn’t have nearly enough time. The Ski Basin has quite a lot of snow now, over half of their upper mountain is open. It started snowing a few minutes after I showed up and snowed lightly all day, putting about two inches of snow on the ground while I was there (and making the drive home interesting: the truck in front of me slid off the road, and I saw one big long truck that had clearly done a bunch of circles before ending up in a ditch.) The highlight of the trip was when I got to start fullfilling a New Years resolution: “Learn to talk about my work and physics in terms which are understandable and exciting to the layperson and don’t make me sound like an elitist.” The subject of my first such rant was a yoga instructor who wanted me to explain to him quantum gravity. I gave him this nice beautiful spiel, and just as we were about to get off the lift, he told me about how he was trying to use the concept of a graviton in his yoga: he figured that if you set your body up in the right position you could send out gravitons which were well balanced with the gravitational field of the earth.