Taos, Santa Fe, NM

I have been in Santa Fe, New Mexico for the whole last week to attend the 'Phononics and Metamaterials 2011' conference. Professor Nemat-Nasser was giving the principal lecture of the conference and he asked Ali and me to attend it in order to learn what the other groups have been up to. It has been a fascinating experience to listen to some of the most ingenious minds in the field and to see how much they have been able to achieve on the experimental fronts of the field of acoustic metamaterials. I realized, for the first time here, that interesting physics like negative refraction can be achieved by at least two independent paths. While our group has been working on achieving that by the use of doubly negative materials (negative density and compliance tensors), several other groups have made substantial progress by following the route of Bragg diffraction. It remains to be seen if there are advantages to following one over the other and I'm excited about the possibilities which seem to be in the offing in the next few months. Since we have the essential theoretical understanding, I expect experimental demonstrations of the doubly negative materials soon by our group.

It's not that I have been spending all my time here just going to technical talks, although doing that and thinking about the talks has occupied a much larger percentage of my time than it ever used to be the case. During the last week, I also had wide ranging discussions with Ali and came to the conclusion that he knows more about everything under the Sun than I'll ever be able to know and that he has the extremely rare talent of combining his encyclopedic knowledge with an acutely analytical mind.

I also came across a lot of interesting characters who seem to inhabit this world, which I have come to associate with a certain logic, with a rationale completely at odds with mine. But I like to listen to them with genuine curiosity, trying to find in the scales and notes of their lives, the missing song which is my own world view. I try to find in the colors of their palette, the antithesis of my own colorless (largely logical) existence. I am absolutely fascinated by the stories and experiences of such people and the cities of Santa Fe and Taos seem to throw them up with more regularity than any other place that I have visited. It's not that I necessarily want their lives for my own, but I appreciate that they have interesting stories to recount and that they lack the skepticism to believe in a fantastic, beautiful, and imaginative reality. I can listen to such people in rapt attention for hours whereas I almost instantly shut down whenever someone starts teaching me how to invest my money and hedge my bets so that I can have a comfortable retirement. Therefore, I am thankful for all those individuals who made this little trip interesting. While I don't necessarily agree with them, I am very appreciative of the fact that they exist and make life more colorful and more non-utilitarian. There was Ryan, the barista of the Santa Fe cafe 'Father sky and Mother Earth' who narrated to me his journey across the US, his experiences with meditation and the mystical traditions of the native Indian people of New Mexico, and his belief in the apocalypse of 2012. Then there was Bobby, the guitarist of the band HN88 who gifted me a CD consisting of a collection of his songs. Marianne was the barista of the great 'World Cup' cafe in Taos and told me about her transition from DC to SF to Taos and I ended up adding to the cafe's collection of foreign currencies by donating a 100 rupee note. There was a German (I forget the name) who has spent the last 20 years of his life in the little town of Taos and described himself as a starving artist. He was trying to convey to me his vision of the world as a conceptual artist but I guess my brain has ossified under the influence of logic to an extent where it's not flexible enough to appreciate orthogonal logic. Annamelia was the singer and Matt was the forest officer and finally Johnny was the ex-physicist from Los Alamos who has been collecting obscure memorabilia relating to the automobile and the transportation industry for the last 20 years.