Airports and Math

One of the joys and curses of being a mathematician (in training, anyway) is that one has the option of practicing one's craft nearly anywhere. This leads to some amount of guilt when one has the time but not the inclination to work. What is nice, though, is that when one does have the inclination, there are no barriers, save one's mental state, to reaching out to a world of ideas. 

I spent today in airports and airplanes and had a surprisingly productive day. It was surprising in that I normally require quiet and big chunks of time, but somehow the ambient noise and the small pieces of time worked for me. Whenever I travel I carry pencil and paper, and, waiting for my first flight, I opted to push on a very old idea. I had that rare experience where everything just fell into place. I was able to show that a certain alternate normalization for energy was equivalent to my normalization. It was like bowling four strikes in a row. Everything kept lining up perfectly. It makes me fearful of picking up the next bowling ball, so to speak, because I don't want my luck to end.