A Day Off for Hiking

I very much enjoyed the article on the Aspen Center for Physics and would like to share a somewhat similar story on a less star-studded level. I attended the 2009 Semiconductor Detector Symposium in Wildbad Kreuth, in the foothills of the mountains south of Munich. Mostly physicists, but a few lowly engineers lacking Ph.D.s were tolerated. I even got to give a poster session.

For the traditional Wednesday day off from the academic program, Bavarians’ main idea of what to do for outdoor fun can be summarized as “see a mountain, climb it,” so a large group assembled to hike up to some beautiful sub-alpine meadows. One of the attendees was Emilio Gatti of Polytechnico Milano, who was legendary in my esoteric corner of detector electronics. At age 89, he went skipping up the trail like a mountain goat, leaving two overweight, under-exercised American engineers panting in his dust.