The Escalator to the Sky (APS Part 4)

Article Preface:

Some comments here:

1. Lots of names have been changed for privacy.

2. I omitted a major section that came before what survives below. It was a little too personal to include. It’s not too difficult to guess what occurred, perhaps.

3. This is a bit of an emotional piece, FYI. (That means it might be a bit sappy.)

4. As you’re probably used to by now, the acronym APS stands for the American Physical Society. Also, this article is the fourth in a (travel blog-ish) series: the first entry is Traveling to Denver, Colorado (APS Part 1); the second is I Got Into a Fight at APS: Science Communication (APS Part 2); the third is Statistical and Dynamical Physics of the Brain (APS Part 3).

The Convention Center’s Escalator to the Sky

I will never forget the shearing in my chest as I boarded the Escalator to Heaven in the Denver Convention Center on this Thursday evening; my mind and heart had been tugged, stretched, and self-intersected tonight. I will also never forget how I was wholly decimated once I arrived at the top of the escalator.

I tried to juggle all the concurrent social facts: Xiaohan was still talking to someone at the PRX Intelligence journal reception; Anna was with her Georgian friends, plopped down in the middle of the convention center; I was hanging out with two condensed matter physicists from King’s College London who volunteered to help me charge my phone. The information density was too high for me to process. I was frenzied. And there was another detail that added to my agitation: the sun was setting in the west. Over the mountains.

I was confident, as I had calculated earlier, that this was going to be the exact (and only) time that I could visit the convention center’s outlook to peer across the teeming city of Denver towards the Rocky Mountains during the evening fall of our sun. I could not miss this opportunity. I also estimated that, because the conference effectively peters out tomorrow, this opportunity must be taken tonight and cannot wait until tomorrow.

And… since I had been so struck by lightning earlier, the impulse, the agitation inside of me, the broiling irrationality, the inflamed nerve endings, the sloshing inside my head… I wanted to find Xiaohan and ask her to come see the sunset with me. But I just could not do this; this is not appropriate. But this opportunity… this one—and I know it—is one of a lifetime.

So when my phone charged to a respectable percentage I said goodbye to the two condensed matter physicists from King’s College London, David and Sam, the two saviors with the charger. I knew I couldn’t wait any longer to board the escalators to the top of the convention center, for I would start to miss the most radiant part of the evening sky. I had to sever the string. I had to cut the ribbon of possibility in my head, to suddenly extinguish the fantasy that my frenzied mind latched upon, to completely abandon all hope… Xiaohan was nowhere in sight.

And then she was.

I arrived at the base of the escalator, and with forward inertia, I caught the glimpse: she emerged from the crowd of reception attendees confined to the arbitrarily defined boundary of the PRX journal inauguration. She was leaving by herself, taking long strides in her fitted, floral maxi skirt. No, no… I thought. Not by yourself! She wasn’t glancing around the gaping space of the main floor, searching for activities in its niches; she was intent on her chosen escape trajectory, moving at escape velocity, unperturbed by any peripheral happening. There was no chance she would have seen me. I hoped, magically, through the subliminal mechanism of suggestion, that if the timing was better, she would concoct the same idea as I had. But as the escalator carried me higher and higher, farther and farther away from David and Sam’s table at its base, I had to let go, extinguish this flame.

And I froze at the top of the stairs. Never in my entire life have I been so enveloped by a sunset. It was whole… I was in the sky. I was in the city. And I was in the mountains.

To my right, the buildings of Downtown Denver, glistening and reflecting the golden glow of the sunset beams. To my left, the glorious, horizon-encompassing Guardians of the West stood in silhouette against the molten sky. Connecting the two views was a panoramic paint streak that oozed in the neon colors of sunset: the feverish yellow-white fluorescent emanating from the few office lights in the high-rises, the ambient, red rays of the taillights on every car zipping toward the north; the glisten of the residential apartments and houses sprawling across the plains, vanishing into the distance in the pink haze of the Eastern sky; the molten and curdled combination of neon emanation from the lights of 7-Eleven, Route 40, and the state university. I could almost hear The Midnight playing. I could feel all those years of Crackdown 2 bubbling up in my mind; I felt like I was at the top of Agency Tower.

Oh… I wanted to disintegrate into the air. I wanted to jump. Off that platform. I wanted to fly in this free air. I wanted to fly, if only for a few seconds. Oh… Save me, please. This is saving me. This is healing me. Tears began welling. This is the world. I could die. I could, and I would be at peace. Let me disintegrate. This mind I carry… let me release it. Let me become part of you. These thoughts I have… Let me now relinquish them to the world whence I came.

And there’s Jupiter gleaming over the mountains! Perry, do you see it, too? And that must be Venus! I thought of you, too, Cynthia, after seeing the glistening star Vega in the crystalline evening sky. I wish you could see this now. “I am the ocean. I am the sea. There is a world inside of me.”

Alas, my mind, my brain, the thing I had heard so much about earlier, cannot escape the walls of this skull. These thoughts, these… streams of words and sayings… Though I wanted to escape them, I surrendered to the truth: that they would be inside of me for as long as I continue to live within my body. I collected myself back inside my mind, taming the extent of my spiraled agitation. Yes, I am back here now, I thought. I am a person. I am this person. I am me. I am… these thoughts, these words, these feelings, this body, these tears, this tugging upon my heart, this messy and dangling hair… I must own myself now, as I have before.

And, though I was reluctant, more than I had ever been to return to myself, I summoned myself back onto that grid of concrete squares that composed the floor of the outdoor terrace.

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It turned out a few fellow physicists also occupied this lookout point, bathing in the radiant colors of the evening. The group was small; I estimated there were about 14 people total.

I wondered why the group was so small. Surely, physicists would be aware that this opportunity was available to them. I wondered more seriously why the people attending the PRX journal inauguration were not running up the escalators at this point, because the reception took place right in view of the Denver sunset to the West. That is, one could easily out the windows on the ground floor that the sunset colors were ablaze in the sky. Now, remember that gigantic escalator that takes you all the way up to the top of the buildign? C’mon, guys: Just take everything down here and move it up there.

It dawned on me that not everybody at this conference might even be aware that such a place existed. Since the APS Global Physics Summit combines two conferences, the mainly-condensed matter one (in March) and the mainly-not-condensed matter one (in April), the conference actually takes place in two different buildings: the Hyatt Regency was the locus for not-condensed matter talks, and the convention center was primarily for the kind-of-condensed matter talks. Specifically, it was DBIO that had their talks in a hallway that was on the same floor as the lookout. So, people in the DBIO unit may be more likely to remember that there even is a lookout point in the convention center—because they actually encoded that it exists. Gravitational physics people may have found themselves relegated to the Hyatt, and so they may have never even considered that the convention center had a major lookout point. What a shame…

I met a group of four graduate students up there on that lookout. They were in different years of their Ph.D. programs and came from different institutions, but were connected through their study of condensed matter physic (specifically experimental materials science). I gleaned that one of them had not yet presented at the conference: His talk was scheduled for tomorrow in the late morning. Since condensed matter topics vastly outnumber non-condensed matter ones, the conference was technically still in full swing until Friday afternoon; all the fancy gravitational, nuclear, and high-energy physicists, as well as the education researchers get to treat Fridays at the APS Global Physics Summit as a day off.

He said his session the next day was called “ultra-wide band gap.” Ultra-wide band gap? Seriously? Man, they have everything at this APS conference… Is there a session called just “Wide Band Gap,” then? What I told Pikachu last year found itself bolstered once again: After the Sacramento conference, I said to her, “Just come [next year]. They have everything: physics of the immune system to beyond-GR physics.” She is, on paper, a microbiologist in the Department of Chemistry, but I learned that this categorization really ought not to prevent her from showing up at a physics conference and presenting her research on microfluidics in gut-on-a-chip systems.

We talked slowly. The sunset was magical. How is your Ph.D. going? Well, I’m a third-year. Just wait until you’re a fifth year! I told him I’d come to his talk the next day, when the sun reappears in the east and smiles at the Rocky range, reminiscing about their majestic dance the night before.

Notes:

1. “PRX (Intelligence)” is an acronym that stands for “Physical Review X Intelligence ,” which is a new, highly selective academic journal that accepts manuscripts on research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Pretty fancy stuff. And the reception had a gigantic cake with their journal cover on it. Super fancy!

2. “I could almost hear The Midnight playing.” The Midnight is a (life-changing) band that became renowned for their excellent synthwave music that splashes in nostalgia. Some of my favorite songs from them—although it really is so difficult to select any subset of their discography—are The Midnight - Jason, The Midnight - Sunset, The Midnight - Days of Thunder, The Midnight - Lost Boy, The Midnight - Wave, and, of course, perhaps their most iconic song (accompanied by a terrific, fan-made music video, featuring all the sappy scenes from La La Land (2016) ), The Midnight - Los Angeles. Oh, that song will forever hold a place in my heart. Another good example of this exotic genre (if you’ve never heard of it) is the extremely, ultra-popular, eternally relished Mr Kitty - After Dark, which also is accompanied by a fan-made music video taking clips from Career Opportunities (1991) : Mr.Kitty - After Dark 4K • Original 80 Million Views || Jennifer Connelly • Career Opportunities . (Seems like the original video got taken down… This video is a re-upload of it. Darn!)

3. “I felt like I was at the top of Agency Tower.” Agency Tower is the tallest, most prominent building in the Xbox games Crackdown and Crackdown 2 . I loved the Crackdown franchise. It’s a major sandbox-type game where you play as an “agent” with impressive physical skills that allow you to basically run as fast as light, leap tremendous distances, and climb several stories of a building with one throw, all taking place on the backdrop of a vibrant and buzzing metropolis (along with a whole host of other problems, but I’ll leave out those details for now!).

4. “I am the ocean. I am the sea. There is a world inside of me.” These are lyrics in Bring Me The Horizon - Crucify Me.

5. “Just take everything down here and move it up there.” You don’t know this joke? It’s Push It Somewhere Else Patrick .

6. “…my brain, the thing I had heard so much about earlier.” This is a reference to the earlier post, Statistical and Dynamical Physics of the Brain (APS Part 3).

7. “DBIO” is an APS “unit” that stands for the Division of Biological Physics.

Updates:

1. 2026-09-23: Added links to the referenced songs.