Tuesday, April 21, 2009
High Blood Pressure in Moscow
I was recently at a conference in Moscow. There was some Russian guy there giving a talk about noncommutative field theory. I could tell he was a mathematician, since he became very tense about precisely answering my questions. I got confused, and at one point I asked about the relation between his version of noncommutative field theory and the one most us physicists are familiar with. He said he was using the Hamiltonian formalism and couldn't comment on its relation to the Lagrangian. When he saw that this answer left me unsatisfied, he became more upset and at one point had to sit down and stop talking. He then collapsed and started shaking, looked like a seizure. The conference organizers tried to help him out, but eventually he had to be taken to the hospital. He never finished giving his talk, and I felt upset and guilty. The end.
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Don´t worry, Tchovi! As I said before, I don´t think your questions could be a real reason for some one feeling bad. He must have had problems before and anything could have triggered them! The end (of the comment).
ReplyDeleteThank you, Sveti!
ReplyDeleteOh Tchovi! How traumatizing!! But I agree with Sveti. Furthermore, the point of these conferences is to have people challenge your theories to help you grow as an academic- you were doing what you were supposed to be doing. It is horrible for him that his health failed him at such a time- but the fact is, that somebody would have asked him questions and challenged him- because that is why you were all there!
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