The Friday Conference Hangover (APS Part 5)

Article Preface:

Three notes:

1. The acronym APS stands for the American Physical Society.

2. This article is really one in a series (see the “Part 5” aspect). So, there might be things in this article that make reference to previous articles. Be prepared! Specifically: 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 fourth is The Escalator to the Sky (APS Part 4), although the fourth really isn’t about APS.

3. The notions of the “liminal space” and the “Backrooms” are mentioned here. If these are unfamiliar, I recommend reading on to see if you get the ideas. There are also some attached pictures.

The Friday Hangover

When the conference officially ended, I knew it was time: Having spent the last four days in venues meant to hold thousands, I had to see how the vacant, gaping hallways held their ghosts now. Indulging my liminopathy, I traveled one last time from my AirB&B to the convention center and the Hyatt Regency with this singular goal in mind. I often wondered if I would find anybody else on these adventures—that’s what the movies would have you think happens more frequently. And surely in a crowd of 13,000 physicists, there must be at least one other so enamored with suspension in the liminal that they would recognize these Backrooms opening before them.

But I saw nobody else on my journey—not even the hotel staff. The escalators continued to circulate, supporting the silhouettes from the previous four days. The walls of the smaller conference rooms had been removed, revealing the small rooms to have only been a mere section of one large Ballroom, equipped with rows of perfectly-parallelized chairs, preparing to seat the crowd who no longer wandered the halls.

There remained, however, a magical place that I knew must still be occupied: the outlook of the convention center. Sure enough, the final parts of the conference took place here: there were no talks or slides, but rather a respectable amount of physicists admiring the wondrous, warm wind under the shade of the roof. The view was spectacular, though I was still charmed by yesterday’s molten sunset; though less than a day ago, its blaze was still wild within my mind.

The wind was soft. The high rises of downtown Denver glared at us, ricocheting the late morning sunbeams into our eyes. This naturally oriented us away from the sights of the urban jungle and towards the mountains in the West. In the distance, they remained steadfast and unperturbed—a stronghold of resilience in Nature’s tumult. The snowy peaks of the Rockies were glorious against the crystal blue sky of noon. It was a scene I could have stared at endlessly. I had asked a convention center staff member earlier when exactly they would initiate serious clean-up, making these post-conference escapades no longer possible. “They start with the top floor,” he said. “They’ll begin around noon. Sorry about that.” Meaning that yesterday really was the only time I could savor the Denver sunset from that balcony.

It was in these moments that my mind returned to last night’s befuddlement, to analyze it, to ruminate upon it, to solve it. What do you do in this situation when you have no intellectual reason for approaching someone? And, here, on this lookout platform, were over 100 other people that I was in principle connected to through the discipline of physics, yet I struggled to summon the courage to just speak to any single person about only the limbic aspect of this experience—a shared one, no doubt.

But let us not put myself at the center of this stage: I ask myself, in a similar manner as before, if anybody else was having these similar thoughts. If so, perhaps they also found themselves without grounds to approach somebody to share this moment. But, please! Come up to me, the only one standing alone around a small, circular table without a chair. There were only a few people sitting alone, oriented in the direction of the distant Rocky Mountain range, enraptured by the vista—I found myself thinking that I shouldn’t interrupt them. But what about the others already engaged in a conversation? What would it take to make a passing, “Wonderful view, isn’t it?”

I thought, over and over, how can I share this moment? I wished to have shared it with her last night. And I know she would have loved it. Who wouldn’t have? I believe that many people, especially many in the physics crowd, would find themselves bewitched by these suspended spaces and experiences. But they probably do not know how to look for them. But I know. And I can show you. Remember: the Backrooms are always there.

So, I sat up there for an hour watching the sun’s shadows caress the Denver plain and mountain range, letting the possibilities of yesterday and the currents of the present intertwine in my mind.

Notes/References:

1. What exactly are “liminal spaces” and the related idea of the Backrooms? I recommend reading the (brief, as of the writing of this article) Wikipedia article on liminal spaces for a primer.

Updates:

1. 2026-09-01: Fixed an egregious typo.