Border Control and Security

When I go through border control, the agents behind the desk typically ask a few questions, not because they care, or because it matters what the answer is, but just because they want to see if you trip up at all, which might signal a person who is nervous or making stuff up. I usually respond with minimal answers just to avoid anything that might make the process take longer than usual. A conversation with a passport control agent coming into the US usually goes like this:

Agent: You live in the UK?
Me: Yes
Agent: What do you do there?
Me: I teach
Agent: What do you teach?
Me: Physics
Agent: How long have you lived there?
Me: 15 months
Agent: Are you carrying any tobacco, alcohol, or food?
Me: No
Agent: OK, you may go.


Once, being very tired, going into the Netherlands, at Schiphol airport, I tripped up, and then was pulled out of line for everything but the strip-search. The conversation went something like this

Agent: What brings you to the Netherlands
Me: A conference
Agent: What kind of conference
Me: Physics
Agent: Where is it being held
Me: Ugh… actually I can’t remember

I had flown in very early in the morning, and I was jetlagged, and I had been travelling a lot and simply couldn’t remember where I was supposed to be going.

Agent: You can’t remember?
Me: Ugh… Sorry, I travel a lot. I have it written down somewhere.

At that point they took me out of line, and made me produce all my documentation, and searched my bags just for good measure.

So this week I flew into the US from England and went through passport control at the Minneapolis airport. The conversation took a slightly unusual turn:

Agent: You live in the UK?
Me: Yes
Agent: What do you do there?
Me: I teach
Agent: What do you teach?
Me: Physics
Agent: How long have you lived there?
Me: 15 months
Agent: Are you carrying any tobacco, alcohol, or food?
Me: No
Agent: Are you carrying any macroscopically quantum coherent superfluid Helium?
Me: Uh… (long pause) … well, no… but good question, I suppose.
Agent: OK, you may go.

Well, turns out the passport control agent was a bit of a physics buff. In fact this is not the first time I have heard of this sort of thing happening. My thesis advisor Bert Halperin, tells a story about going through security at Tel-Aviv. My recollection is that the story goes something like this

Agent: You are giving a talk in Isreal?
Bert: Yes
Agent: What is the title of your talk?
Bert: “The composite fermion Fermi liquid”
Agent: Are there gauge field fluctuations
Bert: Ummm.. Yes.
Agent: Did you go beyond mean field theory?
Bert: Yes, we studied it at RPA level.
Agent: Why not Hartree-Fock?
Bert: Well, there are some divergences in the propagator that we haven’t been able to regularize yet.
Agent: And is that really a problem?
Bert: Probably not. In fact there is some recent work suggesting that the divergences don’t matter in physical observables.. but it is not in my talk this time.
Agent: OK, you may go.

Apparently starving physics grad students sometimes work border security as a night job.