Zaragoza, Spain
Physics studies, the doctorate, the early university web pages, BIFI and Kampal. This is a continuing thread rather than a single trip: a place from which much of the research, programming and online activity in this archive grew.
Places and journeys
Places I have been · places I would like to go
A geographical companion to my life online: places to live, learn, explore and return to. Documented stays and outings sit alongside possible future journeys suggested by the interests in these pages. This is a growing collection, not a complete travel history.
Places I have been
Home and longer chapters
Teruel, Spain
The setting of El último hovercraft, written while teaching at the engineering school. Its final July 2006 entry, partimos, leads into the Cambridge chapter.
Documented stays and schools
These dates come from the research-stay and school record. They describe the documented occasion, not necessarily every visit to each place.
Karpacz, Poland
XXVIII Karpacz Winter School of Theoretical Physics: an early destination in the doctoral years.
Marseille, France
An FPU fellowship stay at the Centre de Physique Théorique, CNRS.
Les Houches, France
The summer school on quantum symmetries, in the year of the doctorate.
Monsaraz, Portugal
Participant and tutor at the summer school on noncommutative geometry and applications.
Cambridge, United Kingdom
An invited stay for the programme on noncommutative geometry at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences.
Outings, experiments and remembered visits
El Poyo del Cid and the Jiloca railway, Spain
The first ciclorail journey: with Michel's help, transporting and assembling the rail-bike, inspecting stretches at Caminreal, Burbáguena and Luco, then finding a straight section at El Poyo del Cid. The account includes photographs, videos and a derailment caused by a bramble.
Villar del Salz to Peracense, Spain
A rail-bike test on the surviving Ojos Negros branch, documented in a sequence of photographs. Practical tinkering meets the possibility of another use for an old railway.
Peracense to Almohaja, Spain
Continuing along the traversable branch, leaving Peracense castle behind. The account mixes landscape photographs with the adjustments needed to keep the machine working.
Austin, United States
A memory in the tribute to Luis Joaquín Boya: sharing a whisky with Steven Weinberg and his wife while encouraging them to come to a congress in Salamanca. The publication date belongs to the recollection, not the journey.
Barcelona, Spain
In the same tribute, a museum visit with my sister: invoking Boya's name when asking Wagensberg to let us into a new section. The text does not give the museum's name, so it is left unidentified here.
Places I would like to go
An inferred wish list. These are suggestions assembled from the interests documented on this site, not destinations I have explicitly said I want to visit. Some may already be familiar places: absence from the travel record does not mean I have never been.
Kyoto: books, manga and their readers
The Kyoto International Manga Museum connects a large reading collection with the history and social context of manga. A natural continuation of the 1994 European manga-shop guides, this time with the medium's history around the shelves.
Florence: mathematics made into instruments
Museo Galileo brings telescopes, compasses and other scientific instruments into the same story as mathematical geography. A meeting point for the Ptolemy investigations, the Leonardo notes and the habit of asking how things work.
Alexandria: libraries, maps and the survival of knowledge
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina combines maps, manuscripts, antiquities and the history of science with digital preservation. A particularly close fit for the old Alexandria discussion and the very purpose of collecting this internet archive.
Athens: the material setting of ancient public life
The Ancient Agora and its museum offer a concrete setting for thinking about Greek intellectual and political history. The connection to the atomism essays is thematic; this is not a claim that the museum has a dedicated Democritus exhibition.
Bletchley: computing as working machinery
The National Museum of Computing preserves working historic computers, including a rebuilt Colossus. A physical counterpart to the devices, software and experiments in this archive. It is on the Bletchley Park estate but is independent of the Bletchley Park Trust.
Paris: a collection of ingenious machines
The Musée des Arts et Métiers links scientific instruments, mechanics, energy, communication and transport. A destination for the same curiosity that led to building and testing a ciclorail, rather than only for the academic side of this site.
Other geographical traces
These records help recover journeys, but are not yet personal trip accounts.
Places in the conference record
- Madrid, Spain — e-Science Grid Computing, 2007.
- Porto, Portugal — IBERGRID, 2008.
- Valencia, Spain — Spanish e-Science network meeting, 2010.
- Jaca, Spain — summer course on applied advanced computation, 2010.
- Havana, Cuba — WONP-NURT, 2011.
Source: the CV's conference-talk list. These are event locations in the record; travel details and recollections remain to be added.
A place in an essay is not necessarily a journey
The European manga-shop directory, the work on ancient geography, and the reading notes on Guam open other geographical paths through the archive. They are not used here as proof of visits or as a travel wish list.