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1 June (2026)
Good start of a new month is usually by testing one's implementation of one's own micro-blogging platform.
06:13 (CET).
Receding into words, and then receding into less than words...
08:07 (CET).
I should implement sub-threads, to be able to follow up the above one with:
"When there are no bugs, what is left is only philosophical angst."08:09 (CET).
So now I have something to do, threading... I have to give a talk at 11h30 too; the problem is never that one has nothing to do. The problem is, one has nothing to do which brings them closer to what they want to be.
08:11 (CET).
I give a seminar on our multiphoton physics at Sven Höfling's group in Würzburg.
Gave my talk, 1h15 or so, where I enticed people to resolve pending issues on frequency-resolved theory (e.g., Panyukov et al. vs us) and to try other things as well. Then I attended the colloquium by Peter Liljerot on 2D quantum materials probed by STM, although it's all single-tip physics (and mostly tunel voltage dI/dB), in stark contrast to my morning preach. Have an hour free to prepare the next talk on polariton superconductivity.
16:06 (CET).
2 June (2026)
My digital signature reads "LAUSS -- Y", almost Laus Y or Laus 𝕐. What an iron-y.
Two meetings today, with the QD group (mainly Moritz) and the Polariton group (much bigger, with at least two Simons); I now have to prepare the promised digest reports which are so cheap to offer on the go ("I'll send you the references") but are a real effort afterwards, especially as the social program is so generous, so that sleeping time is reduced to the darkest hours of the early morning, furthermore, in a place where they drink wine, not beer.
4 June (2026)
First time I could get some sleep; today is bank holiday in Mainz: Fronleichnam (Corpus Christi). We'll be visiting some areas of Würzburg. I realized yesterday I need 𝕐 on my phone! This will be more ambitious coding...
10:29 (CET).
Visited Veitshöchheim with Sven, its Schlöss and Rokokogarten, from a boat trip on the Main.
First 𝕐 post from my phone, although still on the local wiki... Details from a status in the park—Chronos clipping the wing of Cupid—taken earlier today (but posted only now).
(Didn't require that much coding after all)
20:03 (CET).
5 June (2026)
Catching up with deadlines in the middle of the night... Mainly Daniel's last TFM corrections & (digital) paperwork.
03:41 (CET).
Spent the day in Bad Kissingen with Sven.
6 June (2026)
First day of my visit at Sven's group fully on my own. I'll update 𝕐 so that I can use it from my phone, allowing me to μ-blog live and in real time... and if ready in time, I will use it for my visit downtown. I was thinking to walk through the vineyards but this might be too far. Some emails and code first.
10:46 (CET).
This is the first 𝕐 post I made directly from the live (online) wiki. I'll also need a separate mechanism to sync posts made locally and those made in real time, but this doesn't seem too difficult.
Breakfast at the hotel a couple of hours ago... This is posted from the phone and on the online wiki, though not capturing "the action" in real time as I'm testing this and have nothing nice to snapshot now, myself least of all. I took this picture earlier this morning for the tiny Weißwürste:
Okay, I now have everything ready to bring 𝕐 with me on my tour in Würzburg. This will be my first live-documented journey, a bit similar to what I was doing with Twitter's OuSommesNous account, many years ago. Pictures were not that well supported then by Twitter, so unfortunately they were stored on a platform which doesn't exist anymore and all the content was lost. Never trust anybody! Making 𝕐 even more compelling.
11:57 (CET).
So this is my first live post... The little path intersection of the Albert-Hoffa-Straße I walk around when I wait for the bus...
Trumpet at the Residenz.
12:31 (CET).
Below the greatest fresco in the world.
12:46 (CET).
In the Spiegelkabinett.
Out of Residenz and now in the Hofgarten.
Me paenitet Faber.
15:26 (CET).
The best Tilman Riemenschneider collection in the world.
Würzburg from its fortress.
17:31 (CET).
People on the old bridge.
18:12 (CET).
And back at Melchior park.
18:56 (CET).
Today's visit of Würzburg was a double success. On its own, but also as a full-fledged test of 𝕐. It worked great except the http error caused by cloudflare, which I should try to shunt for myself. I will now try to see how to merge online/offline versions of my μ-blogging in a robust way, visit the sauna and have dinner at the hotel, leaving real work for after dinner.
19:05 (CET).
Now I have a working script (syncy) that fetches both pages and merge them in a text file. I have to see how it handles conflicts, e.g., two identical entries that differ from their content, likely due to post-editing, but have the same timestamp (and in principle same content). This probably requires to track the last editing time, which might be desirable to also have anyway.
21:57 (CET).
7 June (2026)
I'm going to bed. Neither tea nor coffee, not even water, in the hotel room, make it difficult for me to look for python bugs. I also need to reflect in the solitude of the night on the exacerbated feelings captured in the Residenz pinakothek. I was particularly moved by Hercules and Omphale as the Goddess had a look and a grip on the poor hero which I found relatable.
00:14 (CET).
I've been having lots of nightmares for the past year, and otherwise barely remember my dreams. This night, I had one which I actually remembered, and it was not a nightmare, quite the opposite. Someone who can take on many different appearances but who, in this particular dream, had the playful look you’d find in a phone booth, with a huge smile, was waiting for another person to give her something on my behalf. She seemed pleased. So it was a pleasant dream. Maybe this comes from all the Pinakothek art that’s been brewing subconsciously in my mind. In those museums, the angst of all humanity, condensed into corridors, can put your own miseries, your own uncertainties, and your own despair into a broader universal perspective. I should go to museums more often.
10:50 (CET).
I mentioned Hercules and Omphale already. Omphale's pause reminded me of the phone booth character, but not from the phone booth, from other occasions when she brought her hand close to her face, without touching it, as if suspending everything to some imminent revelation, elevation or something that, however, never comes, as the hand slowly drifts down again. I have written a bit on limerence and also want to write on synesthesia, before I lose interest. I don't go enough to museums nowadays but I spend time looking at artistic video clips. I came back to Mano Negra's unique masterpieces, which have a lot of hidden messages. There's a scene in Mala Vida in particular which is killing me everytime... and that is also connected to my enduring synesthetic limerence.
Sven just called with the plans for the day... I should have more friends too.
11:04 (CET).
I wrote about this section from Mano Negra's Mala Vida that gets me every single time, when the bride marries the fugitive for the time of an encounter. The bride also has this particular "grammar" to her face which, with a nod of her head and a subconscious wink of her eye, can convey volumes of literature and all the space needed to host sculptures and painting that reflect the same untold sentiments. I've seen someone with the same look once, almost the same face. Not particularly pretty in itself, but, because it is everything, beautiful instead.
12:32 (CET).
Leaving for Würzburg now. This will be the occasion for a second round of tests as I have hacked quite a few things in the synchronization, which actually had crashed the live version minutes before leaving (js uploaded as wikitext).
13:32 (CET).
Wineland.
15:49 (CET).
Burgerbraus.
16:46 (CET).
Maxjoseph concert in the brewry.
17:11 (CET).
The artists.
17:32 (CET).
Entracte.
18:20 (CET).
Sven getting an autographed version of their first album.
18:38 (CET).
The encore.
8 June (2026)
Last day in Würzburg. Morning meeting with Simon Betzold (Krishna was on holiday) on implementations of liquid light: we discussed QDM, 3-level systems, topology, floquet, bi-exciton and will keep in touch.
11:18 (CET).
Second meeting, this time with Subhamoy on very strong coupling in hybrid structures, and possible quantum-optical versions of that.
13:20 (CET).
I've replaced my older template {{#expr:({{#time: U | now }}-{{#time: U | 1977-09-30 }})/(365*86400) round 1}} with something like {{since|30-September-1977}}.
13:48 (CET).
Things to look at for the VSC include [1] (experimental verification), [2] (departure of VSC from SC) and a couple of other papers that Subhamoy will send. For liquid light, [3] for non-reciprocal Floquet and [4] for topological approaches, as rough anchors from many other approaches.
14:03 (CET).
Testing my "since" template, writing this now, which is just now (or, less precise, ). Or if I specify the time myself, this is .
14:19 (CET).
End of my stay in Würzburg.
14:40 (CET).
Leaving Würzburg and its vineyards.
15:49 (CET).
The other VSC papers are [5] and [6].
16:24 (CET).
Testing my Since template from the ICE. I've written this .
How it feels like to travel with DB.
17:36 (CET).
La solitude éternelle de ces aéroports infinis m'effraie.
18:17 (CET).
Avec Peyrefitte et De Gaulle pour les cinq prochaines heures.
18:22 (CET).
Boarded...
20:54 (CET).
9 June (2026)
Back to Spain.
00:20 (CET).
Back home with much to do after my Würzburg visit and my coming Russia visit. I left with a most minimal installment of 𝕐 and come back with something almost as mighty as Twitter itself, thanks to which I am still sileto there. Hopefully forever now. It would be difficult without 𝕐 as I seem to need such a not-altogether-private venue where to collapse my thoughts.
10:22 (CET).
Lots of things to do. For the week, flush our two papers, including the experimental one, and also keep up the momentum with the Würzburg teams. For today, all the pending administration, paperwork, emails, especially scientific emails, late referrals and travailler notre jardin which is becoming dangerously wild. I'll start with emails.
10:34 (CET).
Vitoria-Soto-Cantoblanco alignment. We're missing a general framework while we're able to handle all particular cases one by one.
13:14 (CET).
Support letter for Andreas Muller's chair. He could measure what everybody else was telling me was either hopeless or simply just impossible. He'll eventually be recognized as a pioneer of multiphotonics. The later this will happen, the greater will be his glory. I hope he at least gets professor as soon as possible.
20:22 (CET).
Oh so if you're born in 1996, you're from Generation Y! Of course...
22:12 (CET).
I tweaked my cite and onlinecite templates to display the references with wz upon hovering, along with my bibTeX key, e.g., Ref. [1].
22:44 (CET).
I also upgraded bib2wiki to write directly into the local database, as opposed to copy/pasting as before. This speeds up considerably the process for multiple references.
23:31 (CET).
Vámonos por la luna en el cielo,
Vámonos la luna se va,
Síguela,
Ta' buena la noche.23:57 (CET).
10 June (2026)
I rewrote extensively llw2lw (going v°2) to automatize the synchronization. The 𝕐 functionalities proved useful for many other timesaving services.
00:34 (CET).
38.42€ con descuento. They give higher discounts for 30L but this is difficult to reach as it's the maximum capacity of my car, so I need to bring it to the station running on fumes. On ne prête qu'aux riches.
10:47 (CET).
We might have completed my last-month objective of identifying the multiphoton phase-space where every event is one deterministic point from a quantum-state distribution in a weird canonical geometry. The geometries are beautiful (a tango-looking ℤ for three photons).
12:11 (CET).
11 June (2026)
Template to navigate 𝕐 days on each of its pages.
01:03 (CET).
Full glorious morning with paperwork...
13:35 (CET).
Our new understanding of $g^{(n)}$ as probabilities on canonical surfaces.
15:17 (CET).
The big dilemma of today... which color code to use now that we are working on restricted spaces? Blue for antibunching doesn't work anymore.
16:27 (CET).
The minimal unit that captures all three-photon distributions in space looks like a farfalle. The node is at $(\theta_1,\theta_2,\theta_3)=(-{\pi\over4},0,{\pi\over4})$ which defines the boundary of the hardcore photon-bowtie of aligned frames.
18:19 (CET).
The farfalle (black) on the ℤ.
19:18 (CET).
With the consecration of the Tower of Jesus by the pope, the Sagrada Família becomes the tallest church in the world!
23:32 (CET).
12 June (2026)
Nightmare of last night: bus ride on a rooftop whose female driver was trying to crush me at the terminus after witnessing my precarious situation the entire ride.
08:39 (CET).
Graduación de Pin Pin.
09:40 (CET).
Daniel en Soto.
14:50 (CET).
Quantum farfadelles. We'll call them "farfadelles", after all, not "farfalles"... No room for Italian cuisine in French-Colombiano pasta in Spain.
20:50 (CET).
13 June (2026)
In the Vat of Acid Episode S04E08, there is this interesting experience where Morty meets his soulmate only to be later placed in the situation where she is estranged from him, and there is nothing he can do or explain that will not freak her out, even though he can start fresh but from a point where he only has memories, while she only has prejudices. An interesting losing game in alternative realities, especially as the virtual betrothed is a strong-willed glass-wearing INTJ brunette with big eyes and a moody smile, who becomes forever out of reach after one singular grip to her inner world. The scene where Morty repeatedly resets into an impossible attempt at connecting with her, resulting in agony for him and escape in shock and fear for her, is devastating. I hear the episode made a lasting impression on many.
Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 [1]:
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
10:29 (CET).
Daniel just fixed the color code for multiphoton correlations: white for 0 (impossible; was blue before), blueish for 0<values<1, black for 1 (uncorrelated; was white before) and reddish for >1. Impossibility becomes a new color and we traded uncorrelation for its opposite. It makes more sense, is also beautiful, we'll have to revisit all the two-photon spectra in this way!
10:53 (CET).
I don't know what has been the most painful since November (2025). That it was the beginning of my ineluctable forever drifting away from my periapsis. Or that my focal point wrote "Reseracher" and is taking astronomical ages to realize that.
16:26 (CET).
I still refer to her a lot although I felt on a few occasions that the gravitational pull was now much gentler, with less acceleration (or deceleration, for that matter), that the point of no return has long been crossed, let alone that the escape velocity was orders of magnitude above what it should have been, anyway. But sometimes I glance back, and since light goes much farther and much faster, although it's mechanically completely gone for many months, now, I still have some dim halo of her mysterious light shining through the empty night to accompany me. Besides, you don't switch off a sun completely so easily when you're a speck of dust in the Halley trail that didn't tie its asteroid belt. The mechanics of orbiting bodies is unfair. One doesn't care and doesn't notice, the other is in free fall but away from its center of attraction. Death by inertia.
20:02 (CET).
Speaking about light and what it can carry or not, starlight is always beautiful, but often the star is dead, and always the star is too far anyway. That's a bit of an instant killer for any poet marvelling at the night sky, I would say. We're looking at an infinity of impossibilities, at an explosion of frustrations: it's all so beautiful, yet not for you, never for you.
‒ Cape caelum manu.
‒ Nimis altum.It should stop there. There's nothing beyond that.
20:17 (CET).
and we're only talking about a coffee anyway... I wish I could finish writing this paper, and stop feeling like a fish on a fisherman's stall, slit opened with no guts but only feelings of ache in their place, from sensing a terrible absence, and, worst of all, with a pathetic, desolate, laughable expression on a stupid face. I should go sileto here too... and then, what? ℤ? Funnily enough, this paper I should be writing instead of this, involves a ℤ. The irony is too cruel to be completely fortuitous, which brings me back to her, all those coincidences, all this awakening... to a dark sky full of dead stars. I see no exit out of it... Nunc siste, nunc desine...
20:35 (CET).
What a long, painful, lonely 13th of June... I feel I'll feel better when it strikes midnight.
23:12 (CET).
Might leave the paper for today at this stage:
This figure provides a comprehensive picture of multiphoton physics. It shows that each multiphoton event—once stripped of its confounding factors—can be described as a single point in a canonical space which exhausts the realm of possibilities, and that correlations result from the density with which each possible realization occurs. Some configurations become impossible for particular quantum states, e.g., three photons from a Fock state $\ket{1,2}$ can never ...We understood a lot of things today... quite beautiful. If only I was more obsessed by the Z than by the Y.
23:24 (CET).
14 June (2026)
Talking with Daniel over dinner, I got to formulate the following conjecture, which looks like a generalization of de Finetti's theorem: proposition A being that no configurations are impossible in a correlated way and B being that the observables result from conditionally independent sampling relative to some confounding variable, then A⇔B. I believe that A⟹B is easy to prove, but I'm not sure about the reciprocal.
01:32 (CET).
Main goal of today would be to understand in details de Finetti's theorem. And get the manuscript to a stage where it can be circulated with co-authors (in which case the main narrative should be quite advanced to receive a first honest brutal feedback).
10:12 (CET).
One of the central results; we obtained it yesterday but it only gets in the manuscript now:
Crucially, some configurations become impossible on this canonical space for particular quantum states, e.g., three photons from a Fock state $\ket{1,2}$ can never satisfy $(\theta_1,\theta_2,\theta_3)=(0, {\pi\over3},{2\pi\over3})+\vartheta$ for $0\le\vartheta\le{\pi\over6}$.10:59 (CET).
Un altar en la calle en el centro de Soto, con gente tomando refrescos al lado...
12:14 (CET).
Y eso me recuerda su «¡pero no uses tu vale de refrigerio!» cuando estábamos en la cola y ella había extraviado el suyo, y se le dio el mío. Esa palabra que no conocía, "refrigerio", que me pareció fuera de lugar en el programa, desconsagrada, se convirtió en su boca en un altar plantado aquí dentro de la fila de la gente, como este que acabo de ver en el pueblo. Locum refrigerii, lucis et pacis. Es gracioso cómo cualquier nada era como un encuentro con el universo entero, todo focalizado en lo poco que se concentraba en un tono de voz, un acento raro pero suave, una expresión de ofuscación amigable, de reproche tierno, un "gracias" protegido por "¡pero qué absurdo!" Es graciosa esa capacidad de transformar todo, lo más común, en escenas sagradas... ¿Es ella? ¿O era yo? ¿O era ella conmigo? ¿O era yo con ella? Acabo de encontrar un artículo de Fuchs sobre el quantum de Finetti theorem.[7] Parece que estoy yendo desde entonces—desde el refrigerio—a un lugar donde algo me está esperando. Eso mismo que esperaba a Honda.
12:48 (CET).
Details for my talk at the ACTP have landed:
Next week on Wednesday, at the usual time, ACTP will host its weekly seminar. Our speaker is a friend of our center, Fabrice Laussy (ICMM). The seminar will take place on the 17th of June 2026 at 11 a.m., Moscow time.
In-person
Location: Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, radio-engineering building, first floor. Exact address: Institutskiy per., 9, Dolgoprudny, Moscow region. Exact coordinates: (55.9297153, 37.5164589)Online
Zoom meeting link: https://zoom.us/j/91219988510 Meeting ID: 912 1998 8510 Passcode: 201351Title
Correlations: the individual vs the ensemble.Abstract
Since at least the 18th century, there have been disputes over the meaning of probabilities. Bayesianism, in particular, has been quite successful in tormenting people's understanding of the nature of reality with concepts such as subjective priors and degrees of belief. In the quantum age, such a tension became the central component of the interpretation of the theory which describes, ultimately, statistical correlations. I will present our description of multiphoton spatial correlations of various quantum states—as can be realized in photonics or condensed-matter platforms, such as polaritons—including unexpected features such as bosons extremizing their distances or bunching being an artifact of a classical (so-called Simpson's) paradox; introduce a quantum-state ergodic hypothesis which separates single-collapse (quantum) averages from ensemble ones; and discuss how such a framework might offer new avenues into the otherwise largely philosophical problem of quantum foundations and interpretations of quantum mechanics.18:53 (CET).
15 June (2026)
What is true is what doesn't happen.
07:00 (CET).
I might be spending the rest of my life having to fully understand and explain this, my new credo, the reason for Laus Angelica's missed encounter: the zero support on the canonical surface of photon distributions is what makes them genuinely correlated. Everything that can happen, happens. Therefore what is meaningful is what cannot happen. God writes our story by subtractive impressions: he draws a face on the beach by removing pebbles, he makes a statue by removing the rock around it, he has photons correlated by making them never being in a particular configuration. Everything else is just random, chance, doomed to happen. You cannot control everything, only what will not be.
07:05 (CET).
booking.com doesn't work in Russia (since 2022) but https://ostrovok.ru/ does.
07:13 (CET).
Beginning of my trip to Russia. Starts at ICMM with an EIC audit, then a PRL DAE botched meeting which'll have to be extended into the taxi and then to airport.
08:51 (CET).
After EIC auditing and PRL DAE meeting, now some time to think...
17:09 (CET).
Let's see what post-Mishima Japan literature has to offer...
17:28 (CET).
Istanbul escale.
16 June (2026)
Breakfast at Alexey's datcha.
07:03 (CET).
The man and the legend.
12:15 (CET).
Found Ref. [8] which seems important for our spurious boson correlations story (also found a bug in my doi2bib as this got archived as bach85b when it should have been as bach85a, apparently because of the existence of fehrenbach85a. No time to address this now.)
14:48 (CET).
My cover slide for the talk tomorrow at the ACTP on our latest results regarding quantum-state ergodicity and removing confounding factors in collapsed measurements.
16:14 (CET).
And seven course home dinner at Alexey's...
18:45 (CET).
Very long dinner... 7 courses... a lot of wine, cognac, coffee... discussions about Malevich, Nikita Mikhalkov, Akunin, Napoleon (Alexey has a theory on the secret treasure stolen by the French army upon their retreat from Moscow... it is in a nearby pond built by a French engineer under the emperor's orders), politics, cheese and our common acquaintances from 20 years ago... and me still trapped, or hooked, to the same fixed point.
22:32 (CET).
17 June (2026)
The aesthetic of Russian university office.
09:47 (CET).
Post-seminar: lunch at a fish place (tuna tartar and fishcake) and some time on my own before being released for the day. This morning's seminar was recorded and should be available somewhere, at some point. It got into technical problems as all the talks I gave on this very topic to date! Next talk is tomorrow already, not quite on the same problem, but with strong overlap.
14:08 (CET).
My talk tomorrow at Skoltech:
Title: Quantum optics with vortices
Abstract: vortices are fantastic objects that combine nontrivial topological properties in space and the rich dynamics of coupled systems—opposite vorticities—in time (due to energy splitting, tunneling, interactions, etc.) A complete theory of their multiphoton spacetime correlations is still lacking, although it is an easy one to formulate based on previous theories dedicated on particular cases. It is also an important one to get through due to the wealth of experimental polaritonic platforms that trapped condensates in elliptical potentials, unleashing the vortex dynamics in a way amenable to a full characterization of their correlations in both space and time. In this talk, I will review the basic physics of polariton dynamics (e.g., Rabi vs Josephson coupling), discuss our recent formalism on multiphoton spatial correlations and bring all this together in a way fit to describe recent works by Cherbunin et al., Baryshev el al., Barrat et al., Dominici et al., among others.
14:34 (CET).
I couldn't visit the MIPT museum in the neighbouring building, which requires special credentials. Anton Nalitov had suggested it for artifacts like the list of people who passed the theoretical minimum exam handwritten by Landau, or, even more impressively, a leading position in international collaborations with MIPT of the University of Wolverhampton! Regarding restricted access, people told me it was mainly replicas there, to which I told them that in this case they should replicate those replicas and add others, so as to have an even bigger museum of their own.
15:19 (CET).
At the hotel working on tomorrow's seminar which should cover grounds for possible collaborations (timespace theory of multiphoton correlations) & progressing the ergodic manuscript.
16:38 (CET).
David wrote to me regarding our wavepacket propagation «oui bien sûr. La j'ai fait ça à la hussarde, en chargeant sabre au clair vers l'objectif final.» Funny how Napoléon surrounds me in my every moves for the last few days (since Würzburg, actually). Better him than her, I suppose.
18:02 (CET).
Yes, so this book I took randomly at the airport (I wanted to read papers in the plane and the Peyrefitte volume is too heavy for casual reading): it's about an INTJ japanese 30 year-old female with a huge aura but also trapped in great loneliness. She is called Eriko. She has a friend (could have been a sister) called Keiko. Eriko puts people off, and gets weirdly obsessed with them when they fail to connect at the extent or depth she expects. She cannot suffer rejection, and in her need for contact, at the first frustration, turns into a literal stalker. Keiko was her first "victim". Much of the story narrated in the book happens over the internet, involving the blog of some other (less interesting) character. Eriko complains fiercely about the public exposition, about broadcasting one's private life to the world. The book is not well written but the theme of obsession captivates me, and some passages are excellent. The one where she has sex with her coworker just to starve her loneliness is painful to read. The instant, physical punition she gets as a result, with the other one "squeezing her nipple", her complaining that "she gave him her body and the least he could do in return is to listen to her", her observation that the baby of the coworker's future wife "could be growing inside her instead", all this is painful to read. Their physical intimacy, when she contracts her pelvic muscle to "further squeeze him in" lands in her torments as opposed to sounding pornographic. I'm at the stage where the wife of the coworker bullied her in having sex with all the other male coworkers as a degradation for what she did, to which ultimate humiliation this sophisticated, refined woman submits to. She starts with her boss who is 20 years older than her, balding, refusing her although she notices he can't help but being excited, "her younger age being irresistible". I don't know where this is going, but what a random story to stumble into. I wished I had met Eriko, or someone like her. I'm sure I would have connected with her the way she can't in the book. But she's just a book character, she doesn't exist. What a way to be further humiliated by randomness. Today I gave my first public statement regarding my qbist description of multiphoton correlations, that "what is relevant is what is impossible". Maybe the best second thing to meeting Eriko is meeting someone almost like her, that would have kept everything impossible, never failing because never trying. Maybe. As I said... I'm going somewhere. As I'm receding into less than words, I'm immersing into a realization of some sort that has been waiting for me.
18 June (2026)
Coffee before the talk.
10:36 (CET).
Chacun sa Dulcinéa
Qu'il est seul à savoir
Qu'un soir de pleurs, il s'inventa
Pour se garder un peu d'espoir19:05 (CET).
19 June (2026)
My type of scientists
Par elle, par sa Dulcinéa
Ou par l'idée d'icelle
L'homme rebelle devient un Dieu
Voilà qu'il vole et même mieux
Cueille des lunes du bout des doigts09:45 (CET).
Mais cependant si tu es de ceux
Qui vivent de chimères
Rappelle-toi qu'entre les doigts
Lune fond en poussière
Il n'y a pas de Dulcinéa09:46 (CET).
Spent the day discussing with Pavlos's teams. First with theorists (Minsko), then guided by Sergey Alyatkin, after a visit of the labs, also with Stepan on HOM of polaritons and photon statistics, with Igor on multiphoton spatial photon correlations, and with Anton on his single-shot filamentation. We agreed to have a closer look with Anton at data he didn't have at hand, during the week-end.
20 June (2026)
Today in Moscow city center with Pavlos, discussing the future. They got a Nature accepted two days ago. The news arrived right in the questions-session to my talk. This earned me effusive closing comments from Pavlos. I'm still having meetings with his guys during the week-end. Today with the boss.
10:02 (CET).
Much of my future life might have been decided in this building... between a good flogging and repeated frozen-water immersions. Diving into the extremes. One more time.
My hotel is in Славянский бульвар, where there is this океания, a huge fish tank planted in the center of a shopping mall, with sharks and all. It's so big, maybe there is even a whale in there. It's a fun walk around, looking at both fishes and people circle in the opposite direction. Sharks are more undecided, sometimes they change course. Me too. I tried to follow them, but they didn't look very interested. Maybe their jerky trajectories were to avoid me.
21 June (2026)
Last day in Moscow and last meetings with the Muscovites, before Saint-Petersburg, with the night train. I will likely go to the red square in the afternoon, Kazan's cathedral, I would love to enter Saint Basil again but I can't be bothered with anything touristic like queuing or paying for a ticket. So just a walk, probably. In the meantime, submitting reports, having meetings in fancy coffees (trying not to think of the coffee), discussing data and models, and keep looking for reasons to not let my sleepwalking bring a end to my solitude precisely on those terms. Nights are almost white here already in Moscow. It should be quite a sight in Saint-Petersburg.
06:40 (CET).
I am at the train station for the night shift to Saint-Petersburg, with five hours to kill without much to read, no internet and little inspiration for serious work, so I can document in a bit more details the unravelling of the day.
After completing my EU audit duties since the very early morning—four-ish in the morning or so—including figuring out double identification on EU portals from Russia, I checked out from the hotel at 10h47, for my meeting with Anton Putinsev at 11h00, also learning in this way the name of my hostess. Not O-Nami, but Natasha. We have been more than neighbours but of course less than acquaintances during these four days, or, should I say, four nights. She was in the room next to mine and was leaving the door of her room open during the night, I suppose to hear the phone and/or buzzer at the nearby desk counter, which was further down the corridor. Between this desk and her room was also the water dispenser, which I accessed several times to make tea, also at untimely hours of the night as I had to attend this or that urgent matter. I therefore passed a few times in front of this semi-opened door, like an indiscreet shadow cutting the light of her room in the corridor, and although I could not peek, of course, my peripheral vision could guess in the only light spot in this catacomb of darkness, that she was lying on the bed. Her door was too wide-open to bring her some intimacy but also sufficiently closed to signify that she was not available to requests. On the first meeting between me and her door, I thought she'd be embarrassed to have her cheap trick to get some retreat from the desk caught by a guest of the hotel, and would keep it close or much tighter-closed in the future, but from various visits to the water fountains over the course of four nights, I found the door in various degrees of beatitudes, often open wide enough that it'd be even possible to squeeze in the room without making it squeak, yet still in a configuration and context that made it literally impossible to have a direct look. I tried, but could not, even a side-look looked very rude and mortifying to me. I had to content with peripheral vision.
When I checked out this morning, I was bold enough to seize her hand as I gave her the key of my room. For some reason, I came to wonder what would happen if one would take someone by the hand uninvited. I thought that now that I have nothing to lose or expect, I'd give it a few tries when the occasion would arise, partly for the sake of scientific inquiry, partly to invite more problems in my life. This clearly was one such occasion. These nocturnal expeditions where she'd, for sure, see me not look at her, had built some untold tension between us. I could have stopped getting tea too, but at least I didn't go on many more occasions than I should have. If this was fiction, I could also have gone directly to her room, but I'm not yet at such a stage of despair or courage. I wondered, however, if I was rude, maybe, to not make such a move—to finish to open this door which she did not close—and now I wonder how she would have reacted to that too.
Natasha is my age or maybe a bit older. Interestingly enough, she was not bothered or confused by my detaining her hand, in a way which was not squeezing but also not as if to shake hands, actually seizing her fingers. So, finally, in a manner which turned out to be tender. I accompanied the move with a question, asking her her name, to which she replied, kindly, with a smile, and an air of "and so?"—although not one of "so what?" but one of "now what?"—so the confusion was mine and I'm the one who had to release the grip as I replied, losing all countenance, that it was a beautiful name. She said "yes" as if to say thank you, and we proceeded to complete the check-out. I then asked her if I could leave my luggage and come back for it later. She doesn't speak a word of English and in the confusion I had just created for myself, I was asking her not "again" or "another time" to invite her to repeat what she had said, but, as I later realized "also? also?" and in this way, I finally managed to confuse her too to the point of embarrassment, which our physical contact could not achieve. So we temporarily departed on an equal footing. I still don't know what really happens when you take the hand of someone, but I know her name. Natasha.
18:35 (CET).
I met Anton (Putinsev) at the "Beyond" café, the same place at which I had met with Pavlos the day before. I only arrived a few seconds early, having lost a bit of time with Natasha, and so did Anton who lost more time with, in his case, parking, so I still arrived first. We had a long and detailed talk on his filamentation, looking at his data and additional statistical treatments he had done during the night, while, on the other side of the city, I was walking down a corridor to make tea. I explained the link I could imagine between such things he was seeing, and their added phenomenology (correlations between frames, which we don't have), and how this could relate to Bayesianism, to prior information, to one's degree of belief, etc. He told me that he found it very interesting and that we should further the analysis, that he was, in fact, "hooked", at which point I took the book of the same name in my bag and gave it to him. I had finished it a few days ago. I told him that it wasn't a very good book but a nice example of how one could find correlations in random data, or meaning and intentions in things that don't happen or exist. I dedicated it to him and he helped me fix the grammar. I had conjugated it in the feminine gender! He also helped me refine the way I'd ask Natasha if I could leave my computer too in addition to my luggage while I would visit Moscow.
I came back to the hotel to leave the computer there, as I didn't want to walk through Moscow carrying a dead weight. Of course that meant another interaction with Natasha. I had my beautiful, grammar-polished request, telling her I'd be back at five for the whole thing. She slowly nodded, clearly seeing that I was making a simple request of dropping a bag suspiciously sound elaborate, and being amused or touched by that, at least entertained. It can't be the case, but I had the impression that she had put on make-up, or arranged her look, in fact to a point that I almost wondered if this was the same person, if it was my night neighbour, looking bored and tired, my old accomplice, my companion of corridor solitude and who, thanks to our shared nightly errands, accepted that I take her fingers just as I had accepted to take them, my Natasha, or instead if it was her daughter doing the day shift! How could she have turned so beautiful in the few hours of my meeting with Anton? But it was definitely her, the quiet control, the indolent charm, the big smile of knowing everything that had happen and all that would not, also this solitude in her green eyes, which you can't wipe out with make-up, it was her all right.
19:19 (CET).
There was the cleaning lady when I left my computer bag—an old babushka—who was even more captivated at my broken Russian than Natasha was embarrassed at having an audience to witness me turning a check-out into a courtship, so very little happened but agreement on the time, which also was no happenstance as she was fine with me coming back whenever. I thought to ask if she'd be here, and might have if the babushka was not eyeing us with a smile. Maybe they had talked? I was left with wondering when does she ever sleep at all... Maybe she does with the door open! How would I know? It's not the type of things you can see with peripheral vision. Unless you're a babushka.
19:52 (CET).
When I came back for the final checkout—after all the Moscow sightseeings, Kazan's cathedral, Saint Basil, the Gum...—I was a bit disheartened that, although the hotel had been completely empty the entire time, the four times, the four nights, that nobody was there but me transferring water to my room through skirmishes in the corridor and Natasha holding her grounds behind her open door, now, on the contrary, since I had taken her fingers with the tips of mine for the time of an exchanged look, I'd never have the occasion to be alone again with her. The babushkas seemed to have multiplied, and other guests were completing their check-in. After collecting my luggages, I sat down on the little sofa facing the desk to check emails with the hotel wifi, note some directions and things. Natasha was waiting from the other side of the high desk, not saying anything, back with her regular look, with no make-up, looking tired and sad. I stood up to write something on my train ticket on the desk table, which metro to take from Moskovsky Vokzal. I could see that she fluttered as if it was something I was writing for her, another impudent interaction that she would have to handle, but maybe one she wouldn't know how to, this time, one which she seemed to be expecting as some ineluctable further development from the nature of the situation, more than wanting it. Seeing the acute alertness I was causing her, I sat down again and she loosened again in her chair. I finished my most urgent correspondence and immediate planning for the trip. I stood up again. Looked at her. She jolted again. She tensed and locked her gaze to mine, her neck protruding as if a turtle in want of catching something with her mouth, her eyes green and alert. It was the denouement. It would be the last time that we'd be in each other's existence, or non-existence. I said "Ну Наташа, до свидания", to which she replied with a long, slow, almost whispered "До свидания", quiet as when she was behind the door, even though her presence was deafening. I couldn't make out if her sigh was of melancholy or relief that it finally came to an end.
Natasha, as I had quickly realized, on the second opened-door already, was Drogo in her fortress overlooking the Desert of the Tartars. Waiting for something to happen. Not waiting for me, of course, but anybody who read Buzzati knows that anything that happens, in one's Deserto dei Tartari, is everything. Of course I endorsed immediately the role of my character in her story. A tartar in her desert.
There is one more interaction, one detail, which is worth recounting as I still wait for the train in the waiting room. We enjoyed with Alexey and Stella a long evening in a nice Moscow restaurant, where we spent hours discussing the history and the stories of the old cities of Russia, from Yuriev-Polsky to Bogolyubovo, their memories, and our memories, time passing for them, time passing for us, time to come, everything.
At one point in the conversation, Alexey asked me about the hotel, it if was comfortable, if it was convenient, etc. Just like the food on the table, a conversation over even excellent dishes has its ups and downs, and I guess he was just polite as a silence between a story of a murdered prince and comments on crusty goose dish associations with the namesake Gus-Khrustalny got longer than the others. Being Alexey, I told him about the landlady keeping the door of her room opened all night, which I was finding unusual. Alexey's eyes immediately boomed wide open with this peculiar detail and he let out a candid laugh to open his sentence asking if she was there naked waiting for me to go in. This instantly earned him a rebuke from Stella who reprimanded such bad manners and improper jokes. Alexey, who had checked me in along with Stella and knew the hotel hostess, being also gifted with an immediate profiling of people, countered the rebuke that he obviously had perceived as an expression of jealousy since in his defence, he observed that she was old and ugly. It is true that she is old, being, as I said, probably my age or slightly more, and it is also true that passed an age somewhere in the mid-forties, men and women alike, but women especially, become ugly. Our skin wrinkles and bloats with cortisol, micro-expressions of pain accompany any muscle movement, veins start to surface, crevices start to sink in, males loose hairs, or the colour of their hairs, or their texture, or everything at the same time. People are no longer beautiful like children or flowers are beautiful, they get this ugliness of decadence, of roteness. This is what killed Mishima.
If you ask Asako Yuzuki, the Japanese author of feminine friendships and obsession, for females this even starts at 30, that's when she places the beginning of women's demise. In fact, her main Hooked character becomes fat and ugly in the course of a single line, when she realizes from a look at herself in the mirror, that she is no longer the slanted, elongated, thin and beautiful "girl" she used to be. Buzzati again! But this is where the artist and the poet differ. Poet can catch beauty even in decadence. I already observed that on one occasion, Natasha looked unexpectedly beautiful: fair skin, no wrinkles, colorful shades on her cheeks below her eyes, which she had green like malachite as opposed to the darker one of an evening pond, straight and smooth hairs, that is, more than combed, tightened together. By that, what I really meant is that she looked young. Not beautiful in the sense of a poet, but beautiful in the sense of being young. In this case, thanks to make-up. What Brel described as «Quand c'est avec toute leur science, Qu'elles trichent.»
I, however, also saw her beautiful in the sense of the poet. In this restaurant, they offered us a souvenir, some perfume of some sort, I didn't take much interest. It came in a little bag carefully wrapped as containing something valuable or at least interesting. I didn't know what I'd do with it, it'd be something I cannot check in in most if any of my multiple trips to come from the restaurant onward. I might not have been able to even bring it to Saint-Petersburg. So when I got out from the hotel on the next day, hurrying to catch my bus to Skolkovo, and that Natasha was there standing on the porch, maybe smoking, more alone there in the street than when she was in her room, I got struck with the obvious realization: that the perfume was for her. As I saw her, lonelier than a tree, I interrupted my course, hummed "oh!" as if to say "so here you are! no wonder then that your door was shut!", went back in the hotel, down the corridor, back in my room, and, unfortunately, she wasn't in hers already when I came back, because that'd had been a pretext to break through her fort.
She was at the desk. I was thinking she'd still be outside, but she had interrupted whatever immersion in loneliness she got disturbed from, and got back in. I handed her over the perfume with a simple "Для вас". And that's when she turned beautiful. Not beautiful from the makeup, not beautiful from stealing or faking or pretending youth. But beautiful from the sighting of a tartar in her desert. Something finally happening. Someone had not crossed the door but had let a horse escape and this caused enough surprise, and confirmation that all the waiting for something was not entirely vain, that if could happen once, it could happen again, something else, a real tartar on his horse, this time, not only the equide.
She let out a warm and proud and beautiful and accepting, almost surrendering, expression of gratitude. Her "спасибо!" resonated as "Finally!" to me. It was triumphant. And her face was triumphant, it illuminated from the certainty regained that she was the centre of this empty and desolate fortress, that somewhere, somehow, for someone, she was not a clerk registering an entry or an exit, handing over a key or a towel, but she was Lieutenant Drogo. Which means, she was everything. I was happy that she was happy. I was happy that I could still have made someone happy. It didn't matter that it was by doing nothing, by making happy someone whose life was so estranged already from herself that anything at all coming from anybody whatsoever would have had the same or even a much greater effect. What mattered is that I could see something that even Alexey who sees everything could not see: she was not ugly. She was beautiful.
21:29 (CET).
I almost told everything that happened between the two most strangers and distant people in the world, Natasha and me, which is, as always, nothing. So everything. That's my de Finetti version of events. One last thing is that when I got out of my room the next day—the day after the perfume—locking the door, and thus taking a split second to do so. I had seen right away that the door to her room was wide open, maybe a 30° angle, about as large as it gets. She'd sometime, in the darkest hours of the night—when it was dark outside in this time of year and location where it's never really dark and never for really long—she'd sometimes open it at a full 45° angle. Even then, if you picture the dark corridor, light from her room illuminating the rest of the world, her inside, and me passing by with my boiler which I had made draw water in a great display of noise splashing water which she could not have ignored, and coming back to my room, this time from the direction where the door is opened, towards the "into her room," almost having to warp round the door so much opened it was, and still with this hypnotic impossibility to cast a look, only being able to see that there she was, on the bed, maybe with a blanket, I don't know, it was too fast and it was too sideway. Anyway, on this occasion, after the perfume offering, when I got out of my room, her door that had always be open but immobile, had swung fully open. She got out, appeared on the threshold, holding the handle with one hand and resting her other hand on the rim. I had already passed her door by then but I heard her get out, and such activity warranted at least an automatic glance back, as if excused as a reflex. From the end of the corridor, from the water fountain, you don't see inside her room. So there wasn't nothing inappropriate in turning round. And so I did. I turned round and there she was, looking at me. Immobile. Like a greek statue adorning this corridor which had taken the proportions of a Napoleonian road between Moscow and Smolensk. Her head was slightly tilted up as if to look at me from above, even though she was at ground level, and also to taunt me with her chin, without which defiance her smile would have been too provocative and charming. It was, instead, beguiling, mysterious, noble. I nodded with a smile and a formality, probably "добрый день", and she replied something similar, as I continued on my way and abandoned her again to her desert.
Writing this, I realise that things are easier written than lived. Had I written it first, rather than living it and then having to remember, I'd have turned back to her and muttered something, anything... and maybe not only her door but also her heart would have opened slightly and we'd have stopped being strangers and fools and pathetic lone desolate abandoned people, but the two of us. Two, like some, sometimes are.
Because I saw it once, I saw it forever: she was beautiful. Her stance on the door, this nonchalance in her posture, this restrained expectation in her bold move which had conceded nothing, which had compromised nothing, this way she had to surmount this pinnacle between an abyss of unknown and a corridor of impossibilities, she really was the empress of this desert of tartars. Like in the Buzzati novel, I let the force of events be the master of me, and after this absurdly brief exchange of civilities, not even finding the space of a pause, carried on my way, already finding myself below the Kutuzovskii avenue.
Mind you, if it weren't for this daring move she made, this apparition by the door, I wouldn't have, I would never have taken her fingers in mine when giving her back the key. Oh, by the way, this handing over of the keys, I didn't tell you, but it happened by the door. By her door. There, for the first, and last, for the unique time, I turned round and faced her room. I even got in, and as she got out, we opposed each other at fingers' touching distance. I showed her the keys, not shoving them in her face but holding them at eye level, between her stare and mine, and when I extended my hand, not letting them drop in her open hand as you do in such circumstances, but passing them to her in a way that she had to take them from me, when she got grip of the keys, I got grip of her fingers. She looked at me with this same smile and with this always different tilt of her head, leaving her fingers in mine, not pulling back, not taking the keys, but giving me her hand, not doing anything, which, again, in such circumstances, means doing everything. I asked her what her name was, she told me. I was waiting for her to rebuke, remonstrate, or mumble something in angry Russian, or push me, or slam the door in my face, maybe scream, but no, she was presenting herself—Natasha—and it's both a rare and beautiful thing to learn the name of a woman whose fingers are clasping yours, which is maybe why people came to shake hands as they introduce each other. So I didn't know what to do. I was facing both her and me and centuries of presentation etiquette. I told her—not quite that it was a beautiful name—but that "it" was beautiful (как красивая); she didn't say "thank you" then, which would have acknowledged the compliment on her name, but we both knew we were beyond context and structure, outside of grammar and conjugation, and so she uttered a long, plaintive "да", which is also something you wouldn't say of your own name. Instead she was saying "I know", "I know what you feel", "I know how I feel now", "I know how you feel what I feel, and how it makes me feel, and how I look—I don't know what this is or where this is going, but I know that this is beautiful." All this in one confirmation, one word which was sealing our meeting point even more intimately than our fingers, still locked into one another. But because things are easier written than lived, after literally dropping her hand, having extinguished all my courage, all my uncertainties, all my doubts, all my attempts at being more than me, I moved towards the desk. Far from the door. Far from her.
21:55 (CET).
The train is still waiting, I am still waiting, Natasha is doubtlessly still waiting. We're all waiting for different things. I'm waiting for the train, the train is waiting for its departure time, we'll never know what Natasha is waiting for. Maybe she doesn't know herself. Tomorrow, we'll have all forgotten about this. Her, me, even the train... But not today. Probably she's thinking about me as I write this, as the train gets prepared, she's thinking about this old guest, who was her age, or maybe a bit older than she is, who got to first surprise her at untimely hours of the night when he should have been sleeping, while she should have been by her desk, leaving the door open in case some late call would be made, someone would have forgotten their key or would have liked to check-in... and then the surprise turned maybe in a sort of uncertainty, of curiosity... I don't think it either transited by fear or anguish. The door wouldn't have been so alive, that temerous. Instead I believe she was burning with the desire to turn her corridor into the steppes of the tartars.
"Would he dare to look? He'd see nothing anyway, I'm just lying down here as I would on the sofa of the desk, or on the very chair, which is so stiff and boring that I look little else than laying over as sitting on it anyway. But he doesn't look. I can see him all right. Not only he didn't stop, or slowed down, he didn't even give a side look! He is grossed out, or scared maybe? Of course he'd never close the door, let alone open it to ask if everything is fine. How okay is it to have your door opened the entire night? Won't he have the decency to worry? How difficult would that be? Maybe he's a sleepwalker! But such a mess he's making with the water... Am I so revulsing, so abandoned as to not even attract a peek?"
"But then comes, again out of nowhere, that this weird guest offered me some perfume! The audacity of some people! How cheap! But at least sleepwalker he's not! Maybe he is dangerous!! He's probably a pervert. Maybe he'll get into the room with a cushion and jump on me! All things considered, it wouldn't be the worst way to finally bring an end to all this... I'll open the door a bit wider tonight. Although he's such a rude ass, who thinks that he can shower me with a gift and for what? To keep doing nothing... what does he expect? That I'm the one who is going to go and open his door? In my hotel? Let him walk, all the way down, back and forth, the entire night if he wants. He can walk till he reaches the end of the Oblast if he wants to. I'll even stop looking at him pass by. He could get into the room at this point, I wouldn't even notice. I should have been scandalised about this perfume, I should have scoffed at him. He lost the right to be treated as a guest, what he's not anymore, I should have treated him as a lame seductor. But I felt so happy, I couldn't let his lack of imagination and manhood ruin this modest token of reciprocal affection."
And this she did. Open the door. Maybe she hesitated, it took her a bit more time to reach the door than it did me to reach the end of the corridor, and we only exchanged greetings. But this led to our holding, not even hands, but fingers, which is even more extreme, more distant, more awkward and more intense, than holding hands. What else could hold so much by the tip of so little? I don't even remember the details of how she gripped my fingers back, if she pressured or squeezed or clasped or just passively abandoned her hand in mine. I only remember she had soft, warm fingers. I also remember not knowing what to do, a flat datum, maximal in what it's made to mean but still with zero neat consequence or meaning, leaving us both completely disarmed as to what the other actually wanted or was thinking in the first place.
To me, she seemed to have raised so quickly at the apex of a situation which I thought I had created, but of which she was in total control and command, that I had ceased to be a significant part of the unfolding of events. Not only would I have probably folded back if she had initiated the contact, and would have found such a move so bold and so spontaneous, so unexpected, that I would have escaped it, but I actually did, I literally did. I fled. I gave up. I released the grip and moved away. But she didn't. And now, I'm pretty sure, she's thinking: "what did I do wrong or not enough, that his fingers should have become a hand, and his hand a pair of arms, and his arms the full of him? Did he think I was ugly, because we were so close? I am so old now. I used to be beautiful. I used to be the most beautiful. And here I am now, in this bed, lying down all dressed-up and all dejected, waiting for something to happen through this door. But nothing never happens. Not even with this old man. The one I checked in today is even older. He'll probably not even notice the door, he'll probably be sleeping. And the younger ones don't even look at me. I'm there waiting for the rest of my life."
22:25 (CET).
Now that I had the opportunity to write this down, I'll never forget her completely, Natasha. Very little happened but look how much can be written about it! And this time, I've really written it. Not an attempt, not a draft, not a concealed or private or incomplete piece. The full of it. With a bit more time, one could also write it better, and even write a novel about it, or at least a novella. Title of this novel: "The door in the corridor." But there's only time for a few paragraphs. and I'm no writer.
I worried that I was too much into my stories and not enough into the schedule, so I went to check how the trains were getting prepared. I wondered if maybe I should already be in bed, I mean, in a booth, somewhere. But two more trains are in the queue before mine—the красная стрела. Although it is set to glide through a night full of light to connect the meek darkness of Moscow to the blueish radiance of Saint-Petersburg, I still feel it incarnates a retreat and a defeat. I probably should have kissed her fingers. At least this. At least this would have left no room for either of us to doubt that one, or the other, or both, were dragged into something they didn't want; I don't even know what I would have wanted. For sure, not to take her hand to then let it drop. Also for sure, not to kiss her, on her face, on her lips. Maybe because this is where this was going, I found myself unable to do the right thing, the beautiful thing, which was to kiss her hand. Things are easier written than lived.
The Ленинградский Вокзал is a fantastic station: it faces a giant mosaic mural of Moscow on one side of the gigantic hallway to that of Saint-Petersburg. I marvelled at every detail of both sides, as if in a museum, and came back to conclude this story which needs a conclusion, atlthough it has none. It only has a botched ending, an interruption, another missed encounter, although one that produced a closed orbit for the time of the handing over of a key.
Ironically, while I'll never forget Natasha, not only will I not remember her, but she'll also help me forget a similar quiproquo, another perceived open channel of communication that had been similarly construed as a bridge between two souls... when it was nothing or little else than an affabulation, a prior gone wild, inflated with purpose and possibilities when it was maximally stochastic, noise posing as data. Whence the need of holding hands, I thought. When a hand is in yours and not in your face, you know something. But my demonstration failed. Even this only brings you that much farther into uncertainty. And the hand calls for its kiss, and the kissed-hand probably calls for a declaration, and the declaration for a reciprocation, and a dialogue, but this I can already see will only bring more confusion, and estrangement, and solitude. Nobody understands anybody else.
But at least the loneliness got passed from one missed encounter to another. I found that a corridor with an open door in its centre is a good way to distract one's mind away from other but similar torments that result from not knowing, never knowing, only having one's degree of belief to assess whether an infinity is actually, not even a fallen angel, but a fallen number. This is my take from Remedia Amoris then. Ovid knew of this trick, and advised in its favour. Verse 441: «Hortor et, ut pariter binas habeatis amicas» and «Alterius vires subtrahit alter amor.» Limerence makes it useless. Or so I thought. Or maybe Natasha was special too, by what I mean, not that she was unique—she sure was the paradigm of the Russian woman, whose hair color is this untranslatable native, unglamorous-yet-burning adjective for this mixture between blond and light-brown with a hint of red-head, that is called Русый, after the people themselves. Not unique in this way, but unique relatively to me and her corridor, that she was part of my Karass, as Vonnegut would put it. Then what?
Logic implies that I'll have to go and hold hands of everybody in a Ponzi scheme of broken hearts to attenuate the torment of the "What if?" that one story erases from the precedent but then carries of its own? I'll sure go to jail in no time in this way, especially if I have to keep escalating from a contact to a hand-kiss, and from a hand-kiss to a kiss, and from a kiss to an embrace, in a colimaçon which has no ending, only a point where the ascension abruptly turns into a free fall.
And I so despise people in general that it wouldn't work anyway. I seem to require at the very least someone who is introverted, yet strong-willed, who is shy, yet daring, who is defeated, yet creative, or curious, or spirited, who is alone, yet for a moment—if only for a moment only—with me. This happened. And this helped me clear my obsession of the past nine months and wait for a train for the past five hours. Natasha might have been my most successful and constructive relationship, after all!
23:36 (CET).
22 June (2026)
I arrived earlier today in Saint-Petersburg. The night train was a welcome break from complicated travels, as it solved many problems at once. We were two in the cabin, and I fell asleep almost immediately after devouring the plate of fruits waiting for me on the berth. My roommate was already sleeping. He hadn't touched his plate. There was no internet in the train, though, although there should have been. That didn't help for the follow up. I had sent an email to Anton from the hotel (that's part of what I was doing on the sofa) and he made the life-saving decision to pick me up directly at the station, bringing me directly here, from where I have this view on the 16th floor. So everything was simple and efficient. The conference is delocalized between floors 1 and 3.
Three plenary talks in the morning, all interesting but particularly the first two on photonics/brain connectivity. The one by Francesco Saverio Pavone touched upon spirituality, art, neuroaesthetic and, besides Shamatha and Vipassana, on Metta, "the cultivating of unconditional love and compassion toward oneself and others." Physics is really going there! It was all classical, though. Bring in the quantum formalism, and then it becomes all Wigner-friendly again. My talk is tomorrow at 14:45, opening the 2nd session of "R03. Semiconductor Lasers, Materials & Applications." And also my Chaired Session, broken in two long sessions, one running until late. As today is the Equinox, I hope I'll be able to sight-see the bridge openings. It seems to be within walking distance (metro will be closed by then).
16:50 (CET).
23 June (2026)
White nights are red.
Yesterday was the longest day of the year by daylight. Today was the longest one by numbers of talks. I chaired about 16 and gave one, and listen to all those following my session. Now I'll go to see the bridges but not by myself. I will go with Nina and Anton, possibly more people.
19:43 (CET).
At the Hermitage, Nina told me (as Anton, of course, knew) about the Alexander Gorodnitsk's song on the Atlantes, which goes:
(en)
Когда на сердце тяжесть
И холодно в груди,
К ступеням Эрмитажа
Ты в сумерки приди,
Где без питья и хлеба,
Забытые в веках,
Атланты держат небо
На каменных руках.
(en)
Из них ослабни кто-то —
И небо упадет. [...]
А небо год от года
Все давит тяжелей.
24 June (2026)
White nights are black.
01:02 (CET).
White nights are blue.
Leaving for Ioffe.
09:59 (CET).
Talk at Ioffe, on Multiphotonics, visit of the Toropov/Shubina labs, as well as Sokolovskii ones by Xenia and Vlad on quantum cascade lasers. Attended some sessions of ICLO on the way back although I also had to attend the admin situation caused by Guimbao throwing a tantrum and not signing his worksheets. This cost me the best part of Mohamed Hafezi's talk.
25 June (2026)
Walk with Sergey Alyatkin in Saint-Petersburg, discussing the physics of rainbows, among other things.
26 June (2026)
I'm in Pulknovo airport with a couple of hours before boarding, so also with a chance to record the events of the day.
23:08 (CET).
When I was with Elena—I confied to Anton—I used to recap the course of a particularly intense day by remembering the highlights, slightly inflating them with a sense of grandiosity or poetic charge which they always did not carry, but that could have been read out of them, and conclude with this half-genuine, fully-candid observation: «Could this have been the best day of my life?» The point of such a remark was, of course, its recurrence, to turn it into a joke by repetition but with the always renewed occasion of embracing what had taken place and how very special was, always, everything. I hadn't done this for a long time, for maybe obvious reasons, but today as I shared with a friend this detail of a long-gone complicity with someone who once had agreed to be everything, I justified this intimate confidence by executing the exercise.
23:13 (CET).
We started with a session on polariton qubits (this topic also being a recurrent joke), looking into the guts of a 25-qubit polariton CPU, then we had the last pie and the last bortsch at our favourite restaurant for the week, then let the streets of Saint-Petersburg accompany us to the doors of the Russkie-Museum, where we enjoyed the temporal exhibition on females as seen by the artist, and the permanent one with Repin and Kuindzhi, then we had coffee with ice-cream and cakes at the Abrikosov café where we discussed the renewed supremacy of Russian science, then we had a long attempt at seducing Saint-Peter and Paul, which we couldn't quite kiss but did successfully embrace in a long loop through the rain around its island, finding refuge with two twin sisters in a small grote where they served a strong espresso at the point where the drizzle almost became a shower. We crossed all the bridges back to the mainland, had a steak in a steak grill cast in the house of Dostoevskii with a bottle of Russian red, and were now—as I was completing this list—walking a bit drunk against the crowd of Saint-Petersburg rushing towards the white nights, along the Nevsky Prospekt. Could this have been, I concluded, the best day of my life?
The expedition at the Русский музей was on women images in Russian art, specifically, "great women" ("Великая. Образ женщины в русском искусстве"; note the singular on "великая").
It started with the famous painting by Kramskoi of "an unknown woman." This is also one of the most famous Russian paintings, otherwise found at the Tretyakov gallery which it rarely moves from, so it was lucky to have it nearby the Nevsky prospekt, from where we were ourselves coming, since this is where the model actually stands.
She has this arrogant look of the woman who knows nothing except how she looks when she displays her ignorance in a bouquet of sweet grace and bitter sumptuosity. It's impossible to read this woman. I can't read women, but this one is a documented and recognized illustration that this is universal. The author himself commented: «Is she decent, or does she sell herself?» Muse or prostitute? The eternal unresolved tension.
I told Anton and Sergey (who also accompanied us): «That's it, everything has been said here, no need to carry on..." Sergey said "let's carry on, one always spend too much time on the first paintings and rush at the end, let's go!"
In the following rooms, we quickly caught up a repeating motif: the "unknown" or "unidentified woman" vs the "wife of the artist", the former always exuding an allure of mystery and inaccessibility, of distance and forbiddenness, with her gaze escaping in the infinite or casting a side look hidden by bitten lips or blooming cheeks, while the latter was on the opposite systematically offering a direct stare, deformed with a rictus, expressing annoyance, boredom or sheer fury. Anton started to laugh nervously as he would read the legend of a painting which would confirm what the picture would convey: this was a wife of some artist.
Commenting on a peasant girl by Repin, Anton said "Even when a woman is not beautiful, there are some artists who can find what it is that is needed to make her beautiful". I found it uncanny he should say that as I was just internally stricken from the sight of this painting, thinking for myself, before he would share his observation, that the subject depicted by the master was reminding me someone, behind her door, who had the same inquisitive gaze and the same repressed smile and the same contained beauty, hiding behind a superficial look that it was easy to overlook as mundane or plain. My real-life subject was older, had a slimmer face, longer hairs and different clothes, of course, but was otherwise strikingly similar to the painting of Repin. Anton would have seen the beauty of Natasha too.
He might, however, also have seen—unlike me—if her expression was conveying dismay or acceptance, resolution or incredulity, fear or complicity, discomfort or jubilation, if this was the face of a woman who will take nothing or who will give everything. She looked exactly like the painting when I had her fingers tangled in mine. She was silent. Observant. Radiating something but primarily uncertainty, maybe contempt, transfigured by loving or by loathing. Imagine her, though, having just exhaled a long and resigned "Daaa..." Maybe it's clear now, looking at this girl looking at Repin, why I had to release her fingers and go away.
23:59 (CET).
27 June (2026)
Anton doesn't always see everything, though, because in the next room, after I managed to detach myself from this uncanny apparition on the canvas, I found him glued to another famous painting, the princess Yusupova by Serov. I stayed by his side for a little while, trying to feel the fascination he was obviously experiencing for this character, but only finding for myself the satisfaction of facing a familiar work, and familiar because famous, and famous because important. The shallowness of my feelings was shattered by Anton asking a surprising question: "Do you think that the painter was in love with her?" I replied "It depends if he painted what he was seeing, or if he painted what he wanted to see." I also told him that this woman was the one who had convinced her husband to kill Rasputin (it was actually her son, Felix, not her husband). Anton replied "I'm not surprised." Going back and forth between the different rooms, Sergey who appeared from the end of the gallery and finally found us but so much behind, urged us to proceed: "let's go!"
In another room, I found Anton again pinned at another, entirely different painting, although by the same painter, of a naked woman, although exposing nothing. Her skin was the same color as the wall, and thus devoid of any substance, of any flesh, being reduced to empty volumeness. She also appeared bony, contorted like a tree, each member of her body like a tangled branch. Anton asked "Do you feel like the presence of a snake?" Upon the suggestion, I sort of did and sort of mumbled that I did. He added «I think this is on purpose». He was then speaking to himself but I could hear his soliloquy: «The danger!»
We then visited the permanent exhibition, which had even more Repin of even more importance. A woman was kneeling, engrossed by the naked feet of his barefoot Tolstoy. I took a picture of her taking a picture of the feet. I hope someone took a picture of me doing this.
In the dedicated Hall 54, a guide was detailing the composition of the assembly of the State Council headed by the Tsar, who took his gaze off his papers to look at her when she pointed at him.
We also spent a lot of time in front of the monumental Christ and the Adulteress, by Polenov, which has all the conditions and torments and sins of humanity in one gigantic picture whose size is such as to absorb the viewer as part of the scene. Every sentiment is distributed and articulated around one idea: redemption. The one that is needed in the face of the hideous cruelty of some people, as well as the one that is necessary for the timid and guilty look of the innocence bitten by the weight of guilt.
We left the museum, though not after I requested the authorisation to return to the mysterious woman of Kramskoi, to see if I could come to decide if she is one thing or the other or, as now happens to me all the time, everything and nothing, inscrutable, forever unknown.
In the yard, now outside the museum, Anton proclaimed: "Now I understand that women are chaos, while men represent order." He elaborated on this, with more adjectives and several examples. At some point I interjected "this might well be, and I like this vision of things, but where is beauty in all this?" He had the answer to that too in his model, he replied at once: "At the intersection."
It will soon be the time for me to go boarding for Istanbul, so I will not have time to recount in details the rest of the day, which was spent mainly with Anton, as Sergey left us after the coffee at the Abrikosov café on Nevskii Prospekt. Anton asked what I wanted to do and I told him that I'd probably walk by Peter and Paul, which he said was a good idea, "so let's go!" A few times I told him that it wasn't needed for him to keep me company, to give me so much of his time, to which he eventually replied "of course if the sight of me is no longer sufferable, I will promptly relieve you from my presence, but if it is somehow bearable, I would be happy to keep enjoying our conversation." Such a refined man.
I didn't mind walking in the light rain that came to shower us, but he did, so he offered to go back while I suggested to have a coffee and wait so that we could complete our loop encircling the fortress. He brought us to a small grotto which he said was his favourite place in this area. We spoke of many things. Because we had so much time, we actually talked about everything. Science, art, politics, history, women, children, people, us. Not something you can do so easily, nowadays, speak with someone, even if you have time. By what I mean, open yourself and open them too, bring everything and everybody on the table, and mix, and churn. People not only are not used to that anymore but also dislike it. Having or hearing an opinion. Most of my discussions are met with "let's go!" before I get the chance to start developing them, and this is not even due to the content itself, but merely because the coffee is finished, because half-an-hour passed, because people are already thinking of the next thing they should be going away from.
Anton is not the type of being constantly engrossed by his phone or interrupted by the outside world's messages and notifications. So we also had time for silence, for our own thoughts, for considerations of what to discuss and what not. In the grotto someone appeared for a coffee who immediately reminded me of the character that Natasha made me forget. A mixture of continents and expressions moulded by the universe to my precise tastes to mock me. This one of the grotto didn't even look at me but neither did the other vision of utmost contrasts and too-concentrated substances. It's funny that Natasha has a first name and that the other hasn't. I was happy to see her pass—this replica from the grotto—without having to wonder, to try to understand, I was happy that although everything could be or already had been discussed with Anton, this would not, this would never be, because it belonged to a universe to which I didn't myself belong, having tried to play with amplitudes of probabilities so small that their interferences only produced noise.
I looked at this coincidence—the same coincidence as Repin painting my hotel clerk for a temporary exposition on the greatness of woman—now disappear from the small door into the greater world, and was relieved that she was taking more than herself away from existence, she was taking the occasion I had to remember, to come back to what I had just started to let go, she was taking away from me the line "And you know what?" or "This makes me remember..." which I had never used before and now also clearly never will. Only here in this very text, and now at this very moment, as I relate the popping of a bubble.
Anton accompanied me till the very end, till the door of the taxi. On the sofa of the hotel lobby, I told him about Natasha, about the hotel clerk who had her door opened in the corridor. This is a story that can be told.
In the taxi, I had a last look at Anton leaving the hotel, now on his own, now freed from his politeness binding him to my company. But it was little time in his own solitude, as I also saw him raise his two arms to the sky as he stopped short in recognition of someone. He had just met with Sergey, who was also concluding the rest of his journey by returning to the hotel.
Here back to the airport, people are queuing to embark. I am in the last call. I'll probably sleep or watch a movie, I don't have anything to read and don't want to write anymore. I will sleep with, I hope, dreams not too much distorted and bothered by the characters whom I have myself previously disturbed through my subconscious interactions with museum interpretations of them. I feel I'm getting less tortured by real people than by their artistic extension, which is good. What I will dream might tell me.
Back to Spain.
First coffee at home, in the cup that Женя and Антон offered me knowing the love that I have for both Gogol, Saint-Petersburg and them. An instant prized item of my collection.
I didn't have Internet on my own web in Russia, probably because many US servers are blocked (one way or another, probably from within US). Google did work, in particular gmail, but not other services, which was inconvenient. I'll need a VPN, which used to be for people navigating in murky waters but is now indispensable for anybody who travels a bit beyond the restricted frontiers of the "occidental world". As a result, most of my 𝕐 posts have been queued locally but will be llw2lw-ed shortly (when I recover from the most urgent traumatic things that happen when you leave this country for more than a week).
13:25 (CET).
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Experimental Verification of the Very Strong Coupling Regime in a GaAs Quantum Well Microcavity. S. Brodbeck, S. De Liberato, M. Amthor, M. Klaas, M. Kamp, L. Worschech, C. Schneider and S. Höfling in Phys. Rev. Lett. 119:027401 (2017).
- ↑ Tunable Room‐Temperature Polaritons in the Very Strong Coupling Regime in Quasi‐2D Ruddlesden–Popper Perovskites. H. Adl, C. Bennenhei, M. Struve, P. Peksa, M. Dyksik, M. Baranowski, K. Song, M. Gittinger, C. Lienau, J. König, J. Fitzgerald, N. Jasti, F. Eilenberger, P. Plochocka, E. Malic, O. Kyriienko, M. Esmann and C. Schneider in Adv. Opt. Mater. 13: (2025).
- ↑ Non-reciprocal photonics based on time modulation. D. Sounas and A. Alù in Nature Photon. 11:774 (2017).
- ↑ Room temperature strong coupling in a semiconductor microcavity with embedded AlGaAs quantum wells designed for polariton lasing. H. Suchomel, S. Kreutzer, M. Jörg, S. Brodbeck, M. Pieczarka, S. Betzold, C. Dietrich, G. Sęk, C. Schneider and S. Höfling in Opt. Express 25:24816 (2017).
- ↑ Excitonic radius in the cavity polariton in the regime of very strong coupling. J. Khurgin in Solid State Commun. 117:307 (2001).
- ↑ Very strong coupling in GaAs-based optical microcavities. H. Zhang, N. Kim, Y. Yamamoto and N. Na in Phys. Rev. B 87:115303 (2013).
- ↑ Unknown quantum states: The quantum de Finetti representation. C. Caves, C. Fuchs and R. Schack in J. Math. Phys. 43:4537 (2002).
- ↑ Bose-Einstein statistics derived from the statistics of classical particles. A. Bach, H. Blank and H. Francke in Lett. Nuovo Cimento 43:195 (1985).