There are, broadly speaking, two types of scientific meetings. On one hand, you have your smaller, more focused meetings -- take Gordons, for example -- in which a sub-community within the broader field comes together to hunker down and focus on a subset of key issues. My fiancée (who is a senior graduate student like me) and my P.I. (a full member at the institute) both have a penchant for this tighter format: the opinion is that they're less overwhelming and a little more intimate, allowing friends and frienemies to discover finer points of cross-talk, strike more specific collaborations, and think about experiments with more granularity (or: higher conceptual resolution). It also seems quite easy at these smaller gatherings to stumble into some good wine, spill some tea, maybe even go dancing when the alcohol finally hits. In contrast to these affairs, at the large-scale meetings -- take society meetings such as Biophysics 2023, for example -- the broader community first comes together like a breaker, before eventually dispersing and self-assembling into tinier eddies and currents to discuss those finer things in scientific life. I guess there could be dancing, too.

In the journey of a scientist, no doubt, there is a space for both-- and over the course of one's training, a scientist might plan to attend one or the other for different purposes, and with different goals in mind. At one such gigantic mega-meeting in 2017, my P.I. found himself completely overwhelmed, walking around in a daze, at a poster session that "felt like it was inside of an airplane hangar." In the scientific fever dream, a certain graphical abstract for a new biomechanical technique, painted in Matlab's greenmagenta color map, caught his eye. A fruitful, four-year collaboration later, this coincidental little collision has become the foundation of my entire PhD project. Whereas smaller get-togethers bring a scientific intensity, depth, and closeness that's hard to replicate in other formats, the larger meetings give attendees a sense of the tectonic movements underneath our scientific zeitgeist. Whereas the smaller meetings rapidly sharpen the cutting edge, the larger get-togethers bring an out-of-left-field-ness, a grand canonical ensemble filled with conceptual collisions that even the most curmudgeonly senior graduate student might find invigorating.

One of the consistent challenges to attending a larger meeting is figuring out what on earth to do. It's a paradigmatic case of analysis paralysis -- the menu is so large, the choices so numerous, that one doesn't even know how to begin the process of filtration and optimization. If my P.I. walked through a dizzying airplane hangar of a poster session in 2017, I am scrolling through just as dizzying an itinerary on the meeting app on my phone right now -- Starring and Unstarring events and figuring out what time I can wake up on each day and which of these two symposia I'd rather attend and whoa, I've always wanted to see this instrument at the exhibit hall, but there's also the poster sessions at the same time, and there are around twelve in that session that might be helpful for my project, and... where do I have lunch?

If I could indeed distill an essence of biophysics from the Program for this year's meeting, the analyst in me might describe our field as a kaleidoscopic delirium, the reduction of which into conceptual strands or particular themes is practically impossible. There is too much going on! I am reminded of the opening provocation by Manuel De Landa in Philosophical Chemistry (2015): "There is no such thing as Science... Avoiding badly posed problems requires that we replace Science with a population of individual scientific fields, each with its own concepts, statements, significant problems, taxonomic and explanatory schemas." De Landa's scientific view is one of variation and divergence, rather than of convergence toward a grand unified theory. Which of the two seems a better model for biophysics today? I suppose there's no other way to find out but to dive in. And so, wanting to catch these major discourses outside of my little sub-sub-sub-field (immune mechanobiology), and wishing to see where biophysics as a whole is headed, I find myself sitting in a lounge at O'Hare, midway to San Diego from New York City. In the morning, en route to LaGuardia Airport, a gentle rain and cloudy gray sky saw me and two lab members off. We come to San Diego fully prepared for some sunny rehabilitation, both scientific and spiritual.

It's always dangerous, except when done rhetorically (maybe especially when done rhetorically?), to take a binary opposition seriously. I suppose that in science-speak, it's to say that the options are not mutually exclusive -- there might be dancing at both, after all. I spoke of the small meeting, I spoke of the big meeting; but maybe there is a third kind of Scientific Meeting. More accurately, maybe there is a third kind of way to think about the Scientific Meeting: maybe there is simply the scientific meeting, which, should the scientist be open to it, is always inhered with a capacity to intellectually enrich, inspire, and rejuvenate us on every level.