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Ten years ago right now, I was on a plane to Japan. It was my first trip to Japan to live there half time and do my doctoral research with the Super-Kamiokande experiment[*]. This trip almost did not happen. For one thing, there was the last minute Mystery of the Missing PassportTM. More importantly, though, I had nearly turned down the opportunity to live and work in Japan, because of the huge changes that it would bring to my life.
I am very glad that, in the end, I did not shy away from this experience. It was the birth of the Nomad, and a critical point in my life. Because I chose thusly, the past ten years have brought a host of adventures: Working (and SCUBA diving) in a giant cup of water lined with golden hemispheres in a mountain under the Japanese Alps, watching as a colleague won the 2002 Nobel Physics Prize (and basking in the reflected glory), building a solar powered laser facility in the Argentine pampas, driving a roving nitrogen laser to calibrate fluorescence cosmic ray telescopes in the dead of the night, working in a decommissioned underground nuclear bunker in Southern France, running a cryostat to look for dark matter in Italy, living in Oxford and producing temperatures far colder than the Universe. Life has certainly been interesting!
Looking at my flight log[**], I have flown 199 times in the past ten years. Actually, I am slightly miffed about this. I really would have liked to have broken two hundred in ten years of being a Nomad. Still, 2008 has been a particularly unusual year in many aspects... one of which is I have flown far less than in previous years. By the end of 2008, I will only have been on seven flights -- the fewest number since 1999[***]!
It seems appropriate that, as the decade mark hits, I am planning to return to Japan -- for the first time in over five years. My last trip to Japan was in August 2003, after which I received my doctorate and left the Super-Kamiokande collaboration. I do miss being there quite a bit. Coming full circle, I recently joined the T2K collaboration[****], so I shall be making my return to Japan next month for a collaboration meeting. Very much looking forward to that!
[*] To be fair, it was my second trip to Japan, as I had been there once before as a tourist. Still, going to Tokyo for sightseeing is quite different than living in Japan for two years.
[**] Yes, I have a flight log, chronicling every flight that I have taken since the start of 1990. I put it together last year as a memory exercise (see point five).
[***] And, possibly even more strangely, the only two countries that I have been in this year are my home countries of the US and the UK.
[****] Which uses Super-Kamiokande as one of its detectors.
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