The past three month were a strange time for everyone. As everyone else who can, I have been working from home. Sometimes I found it hard to focus without the usual daily and weekly structures of going to the office, doing sports and so on and so forth. I don’t think I have ever spent such a long time in a row in Berlin since I started my PhD. Luckily I just moved into a new flat at the beginning of the pandemic, so setting up everything provided some welcome distraction. Having four awesome flatmates made the lockdown time less isolating than it would have been otherwise. Academically the lack of alternative things to do proved quite productive and I finally got a whole bunch of projects finished, and others that have started to gather dust restarted. In particular we finally finished the Causal Fermion Systems website providing an accessible introduction to the theory and serving as a hub for the community.
Virtual seminars are a great thing I believe, as they allow people across the world to access events that would otherwise take place in a closed room at a particular location. I hope that they will become the norm and more open to interested outsiders. However I truly miss the face to face interactions and the opportunity to visit people for discussions. There are aspects to the direct exchange that just don’t transfer to the digital setting all that well. (Read here about our attempt at replacing our annual Challenge reunion with a social distancing compatible alternative.) We will have to restrict ourselves for quite some time into the future however I am really glad that things begin to normalize now.