doomreed gradschool AU hc-conference
Of course these two gets selected to give talsks at symposiums in big physics field conferences, and are always highly anticipated. When they first started giving talks these were hosted in smaller seminar rooms, but the room always ended up fully packed with people sitting on the floor and more trying to get in, so the conferences ended up scheduling their talks in big auditoriums or even schedule them for keynotes (highly unusual for phd students).
Whenever Reed was giving talks Victor will always sit at the front row right in front of the podium. When it's Q&A Victor will always start making comments and challenge Reed's hypothesis and methods without being prompted to speak and Reed will answer in earnest. Sometimes they will just start to have an intellectual discussion and the whole room was like WHAt the Heck aRe they Talking AbT? and the poor moderator was sitting there face-palmed and let them argue.
When the talks are moved to the big-ass rooms (been to keynote conference talks that can sit literally thousands in one go...) it became harder for Victor to just spontaneously ask questions without raising his hands so he started to hack into the sound system to speak so he cannot be stopped. Like imaging a concert setting where Victor's voice was just suddenly boomed out to challenge Reed on a technical aspect of the experiments. People were amazed alright but eventually he's talked out of doing it by Reed and the conference organisers who were sooo upset by this.
Of course Reed was always at Victor's equally impressive seminars and keynotes but will politely raise hands for questions. And of course Victor always ignores the moderator who is supposed to pick the questions and he picks Reed to talk first. Reed always have comments for Victor. But one time, after giving a talk that Victor thought was both a brilliant talk and a brilliant study, Reed didn't raise his hands during Q&A. Victor was like what's going on? And called out Richards for comments? Questions? Any thoughts? And Reed sincerely said "Victor, it was a meticulously executed study, with well-thought hypothesis and carefully designed methods and robust results, and ingeniously articulated discussion, I am truly impressed and really doesn't have any more to say at the moment." And Victor internally was like WhAt ConsPiraCy was This?! Richards thinks my work is impressive and doesn't have anything negative to say about it? What is he planning? Steal my work? Sabotage? He is not going to fool me! Victor then ended his session refused to answer any other questions and was fuming. While Reed was looking at Victor starry eyed and was thinking wow what a brilliant mind what an amazing study! (Victor dragged Reed to a corner in the conference centre and confronted him about his and no one knows what happened after that)
(I think Victor would choose to give talks over doing poster sessions. Reed would looovvee doing poster sessions where he could talk to anyone coming up to share his findings)
