black physicists

I spent the last two days at the National Society of Black Physicists meeting in Providence RI. It was a great meeting, with a solid mix of traditional physics, strategizing about the state of the profession, and offline conversations about politics and the many communities of physicists. Many great things happened. Here are some random highlights: I learned from Bryen Irving (Stanford) that the harder neutron-star equations of state lead to larger tidal effects on binary inspiral. After all, harder state means larger radius, larger radius means more tidal distortion to the surface equipotential. Deep! I enjoyed very much a comment by Richard Anantua (Harvard) about “the importance of late-time effects on one's career”. He was talking about the point that there are combinatorially many ways to get from point A to point B in your career, and it is your current state that matters most. Beautiful! There was an excellent talk by Joseph Riboudo (Providence College) that was simultaneously about how to influence the community with a Decadal-survey white paper and about primarily undergraduate institutions and how we should be serving them as a community. He was filled with wisdom! And learning. Eileen Gonzalez (CUNY) showed her nice results understanding incredibly cool (and yes, I mean low-temperature) star binaries. She is finding that data-driven atmospheric retrieval methods plus clouds work better than grids of ab initio models. That's important for the JWST era. And I absolutely loved off-session chatting with Dara Norman (NOAO) and others. Norman is filled with conspiracy theories and I have to tell you something: They are all True. Norman also deserves my thanks for organizing much of the astrophysics content at the meeting. It was a great couple of days.