I’m at the Aspen Center for Physics this week, for a workshop on Scattering Amplitudes and the Conformal Bootstrap.

Aspen is part of a long and illustrious tradition of physics conference sites located next to ski resorts. It’s ten years younger than its closest European counterpart Les Houches School of Physics, but if anything its traditions are stricter: all blackboard talks, and a minimum two-week visit. Instead of the summer schools of Les Houches, Aspen’s goal is to inspire collaboration: to get physicists to spend time working and hiking around each other until inspiration strikes.

This workshop is a meeting between two communities: people who study the Conformal Bootstrap (nice popular description here) and my own field of Scattering Amplitudes. The Conformal Boostrap is one of our closest sister-fields, so there may be a lot of potential for collaboration. This week’s talks have been amplitudes-focused, I’m looking forward to the talks next week that will highlight connections between the two fields.