I was quite happy to hear today that Stan Brodsky, a professor of particle physics and astrophysics at Stanford University, has received together with Victor Fadin the 2015 Pomeranchuk Prize from the Russian Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) of Moscow. Stan is a great guy and his contributions to QCD  are of wide range. 


The prize recognizes three distinct contributions to the theory of strong interactions. The latter one, light-front holography, is a bit too advanced a topic for this blog to be described in detail; yet it is the focus of Stan's most recent work, and in fact he gave a lecture on precisely that topic yesterday morning at 9AM here in Valparaiso (Chile), where he is attending the HEP 2016 conference together with some 120 other physicists from around the world - included me.


I cannot summarize Stan's talk here, but I can report a funny detail. He was the first speaker of the plenary session yesterday, while I was the second. We both had 30 minutes for our talks, plus five for questions. The session convener, whose name now escapes me, was apparently an old acquaintance of Stan. Just as Stan was getting ready to start his talk, the convener approached him and threatened him fists raised and all. "If you straggle I WILL stop you Stan - you have 30 minutes and I WILL NOT allow you to talk more. Believe me, YOU WILL BE STOPPED. Don't even try!"


The funny exchange had maybe roots in the fact that the convener had observed that Stan's presentation had something like 100 slides, or maybe that Stan is known for straggling during his presentations. And indeed, Stan did straggle a little - getting the session convener to approach him and exerting pressure until Stan got to the concluding slide.


After Stan's very interesting talk on light-front holography, I could finally give my own presentation. I will report on it later this week.