I know, I know, it’s been far too long — almost three weeks, now — since I went to the APS April meeting in Savannah, without any update on the blog. And I did say I was going to report on interesting results that I saw there. Uh… oops!

The honest truth, though, is that not a whole lot of new stuff gets presented at the April meeting. So don’t worry that I’ve been withholding all the awesome new science I learned; I just didn’t think there was anything particularly urgent to post about.

Future of the April meeting

This is actually kind of a problem for the future of the April meeting itself. It’s a relatively small meeting, with only a few hundred attendees, and that number isn’t getting any bigger. After all, if people know not to expect groundbreaking or exciting new results to be presented at the April meeting, what’s their motivation to come?

The people in charge of the meeting know this, and they’re trying to determine what needs to be done to keep attendance up in the future. If it’s going to continue to be useful, the meeting …