Thursday and Friday, some of the brightest minds in the world converged on Stony Brook in honor of the new Simons Center, and to honor the achievements of C.N. Yang and Jim Simons. Among the speakers were Yang and Simons themselves, Ed Witten, Juan Maldecena, Cumrun Vafa, John Morgan, Shing-Tung Yau, and others.

All of the talks were remarkably accessible to anyone with a background in physics or mathematics, and I thoroughly enjoyed all the ones that I attended. John Morgan’s talk outlining Perelman’s proof of Thurston’s geometrization conjecture was the most interesting I can think of aside from C.N. Yang’s discussion of his development of gauge field theories.

An amusing anecdote before I get serious: I was well aware that Yang is a rock star in China, but until that symposium I didn’t know to what extent this was totally true. Right before he was scheduled to give his talk, it seemed like every Chinese student at Stony Brook packed into the room, disrupting Jim Simons’ talk (which I found really rude and irritating). Then, when Yang walked by, these two Chinese girls started giggling and bouncing in their seat. It was seriously like the Beatles had just walked into the room in 1962, it was amazing.

Sitting through the talks made me realize two very important things. One is that I love the region where math and physics intersect, and I strayed far away from that when I entered grad school. The second is that I don’t think I would be happy unless I was up near the front edge of this research, and I’m so far behind right now that it is not practical to get where I would want to be, and I think I’d be happier talking physics with Melvin and keeping abreast of leading developments but without the ratrace of academia and spending the next two years catching up with where I should be right now.

So after that reflection, I really think I’ll be happier making money and doing my Aikido and reading physics books and keeping track with what others are doing just as a hobby. It all comes back to becoming a professional physicist versus doing physics, and they are just so different that I would be doing physics maybe 5% of the time as a professional physicist, and I can do it that much as a hobby on weekends.  I really am happy with the idea of leaving, and I don’t think I’ll look back and wish I hadn’t.