Late on December 17.
Professor Frank Wilczek was at Shanghai International Airport.
The conference was set to begin the next day, and not wanting to miss the grand event, he had deliberately arrived a day early.
On the way from security to the pickup area, he had already lost count of how many fellow scholars he had run into.
Some he knew, some he did not, and some he knew but had not been in contact with for many years.
The Physics community was an enormous circle, so enormous that even a Nobel Prize-level scholar could hardly form a concrete idea of just how vast it was.
Aside from the familiar names, unless their research directions overlapped or they communicated frequently on certain specific topics, even if they had exchanged business cards at a conference, they might never meet again.
After all, not everyone was like Witten, who practically treated CERN as his second home. Many people might go there once or twice because of work or study, but without a compelling reason, some might never return for the rest of their lives.
As it happened.
Just as he squeezed out of the crowd with difficulty and looked around at the signs overhead, he spotted an acquaintance he had not seen in a year.
"Witten? What a coincidence. You just got here too?" Frank Wilczek looked surprised as he watched the elderly man with the kindly smile.
"Statistically speaking, today should be the peak period. After all, there are only so many flights from North America each day." Witten looked around and said with feeling, "god... there are simply too many people here."
Wilczek complained, "Yes... I remember there not being this many people last time I came. At least, it wasn't this outrageous. Damn it, are they all here