What a pleasure it was to witness Sylvester Gates' gentlemanly afro today. Check out his 53 page CV here [pdf]. The famed physicist and Elegant Universe TV star gave a talk to the students of Notre Dame and to think I never even got my copy of Elegant Universe signed! I guess that will have to wait until next week?

Preceding the lecture was a room with multiple fruit, cracker, donut, and cookie platters giving physics majors ample opportunity to anti-socialize. Obviously the room was packed. Upon escaping several dead-end conversations and a laborious explanation of where Toronto was in respect to its closest state I found an engaging group of students. They explained that they received extra credit for attending this talk. America is corrupt like that!

There's no doubt it was the most enjoyable credits these students have ever earned because Dr. Gates knew exactly how to entertain. It was interesting to hear that his PhD thesis on supersymmetry was a topic unfamiliar to his adviser or anyone at MIT at the time. He likened his defense, in choosing a topic no one was familiar with, to James T. Kirk's reprogramming of the Kobayashi-Maru combat simulation to beat the system! Well put.

The talk was uncomfortably compressed from 1 hour and 45 minutes to just an hour, but thanks to many futuristic 3D animations of feynman diagrams, that had been developed for the Superstring Theory: DNA of Reality teaching company series, a lot of information was conveyed.

In typical theorist fashion, Gates gave the prediction of the positron by the Dirac equation as an example where the math came before the experimental result. Analogous to this in his own field would be the predicted Higgs Boson which will be tested next month thanks to a certain 7 billion dollar experiment.

I was especially happy to hear Gates promoting the LHC rap which proves that normal people other than bloggers really do use the internet. To wrap things up, he closed by praising the physicists working on LHC as 'Lords of the Ring'. Someone in the front immediately asked who Frodo was but I couldn't catch the name he replied! To be honest, I'm a little more concerned about the possibility of ring wraiths...