The evening of December 17th.
Professor Frank Wilczek was at the Shanghai International Airport.
Tomorrow was the start of the big conference. In order to not miss this grand event, he decided to arrive here one day earlier.
He ran into countless colleagues at the airport.
Some of them were his friends, some of them were not. Others were friends whom he hadn't talked to in many years.
The physics community was big, so big that even a Nobel Prize-winning scholar could go unrecognized.
If someone wasn't in the same research area as one another, even if they exchanged business cards, it was rare for them to meet a second time.
After all, not everyone was like Witten, who treated CERN as his second home. Most people would go to CERN once or twice for academic reasons, and some people might never get the chance to go.
Speak of the devil.