Nice. The NYC public school chase is bizarre, but that's what you get in a world city. There's probably an ilx thread on it.
Frank Wilczek went to Martin Van Buren. So did an Economics Nobelist. So it's got that going for it.
― alimosina, Friday, 4 May 2018 15:23 (five years ago) link
Considered starting such a thread but thought better of it
― Nashville #9 Dream (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 4 May 2018 23:21 (five years ago) link
Reinders, The Life, Science and Times of Lev Vasilevich Shubnikov
In a few years Shubnikov discovered the Shubnikov-de Haas effect, type-II superconductors, and the Meissner effect. His work was in advance of theory until the 1950s. He probably would have won a Nobel prize eventually.
Rjabinin and Shubnikov’s discovery was actually earlier then Meissner and Ochsenfeld’s, and that this negative assessment by Landau, who is said to have called the results ‘bullshit’ (chush’ sobach’ja), was the main reason that it was sent to the journal later. It shows that having a theorist close at hand is not always an advantage.
Mezhlauk approved Shubnikov's arrest on July 24, 1937, and Yezhov signed Shubnikov's execution order on October 28. Yezhov had Mezhlauk arrested on December 1 and shot in 1938. Yezhov was shot in 1940.
In Soviet civilization everything was connected to everything else. A lot of this book is about other people.
As late as 1930, for example, (Frenkel) was a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota in that ‘most despicable’ of all countries, the United States of America. He had also played an important role in the discussion with the ‘philosophers’ about whether modern physics (relativity theory and quantum mechanics) could be reconciled with dialectical materialism. In this discussion the Czech-born ‘philosopher’ Ernest Kolman (21) had accused him in 1931 of Trotskyism and ‘rotten liberalism’.(21) Ernest Kolman (1892–1979), a loathsome character who was especially keen on ‘wrecking in science’ which he spotted everywhere, often with serious consequences for the persons he ‘exposed’; he initiated the Luzin affair with the publication of the anonymous article “On enemies with a Soviet mask” (O vragakh v sovetskoj maske) in Pravda of 3 July 1936 and also accused other scientists, such as Landau, Vernadsky, Tamm, and Vavilov, of ‘wrecking’.
(21) Ernest Kolman (1892–1979), a loathsome character who was especially keen on ‘wrecking in science’ which he spotted everywhere, often with serious consequences for the persons he ‘exposed’; he initiated the Luzin affair with the publication of the anonymous article “On enemies with a Soviet mask” (O vragakh v sovetskoj maske) in Pravda of 3 July 1936 and also accused other scientists, such as Landau, Vernadsky, Tamm, and Vavilov, of ‘wrecking’.
This Kolman attended a famous-at-the-time conference in London in 1931.
Why was Kolman even there? A clue lies in the disturbing fact that not only was Kolman the sole surviving member of the delegation to be interviewed about it by historian of science Loren Graham in the 1970s, he was practically the only member to survive to the end of World War II. Every other member (besides Ioffe) was executed in the purges or died in a prison camp. That they experienced that fate, and that Kolman did not, are related. On August 22, 1971 (before his defection) and on April 22, 1977 (afterward), Graham asked Kolman about the experience, and the philosopher related that he had been Communist Party secretary to the delegation, specifically tasked with keeping the others—many suspected of ideological deviations—in line. Party members were required to emphasize Marxism in their talks, and Kolman reported that Bukharin had fallen short of the mark, but Hessen (whom Kolman had previously attacked in print) had performed well. (This did not save Hessen; he was executed in December 1936.) Kolman had other duties, such as successfully helping to persuade physicist Peter Kapitza, then living in exile in Cambridge, to return to the Soviet Union.
-- Michael D. Gordin, "The Trials of Arnost K.: The Dark Angel of Dialectical Materialism"
Hessen, or Gessen, had earlier denounced relativity as un-Marxist and said there should be an ether. In 1931 Bronstein, Ivanenko, Gamow, and Landau sent him a postcard agreeing with him, calling Einstein a kook, and adding that they would study caloric fluid and phlogiston as well. They illustrated it with a cartoon of a cat (Hessen was supposed to have looked like a cat). It must have seemed funny at the time.
After being persuaded to return to the Soviet Union, Kapitza was duly barred from leaving, but not actually arrested.
Landau, Shubnikov and others could have seen it coming. They could have known from earlier experience (of Ivanenko, Bursian, Korets around 1935) that they were dealing with a criminal regime and that they were playing with a fire that would eventually consume them... They played a dangerous game and must have known it was a dangerous game.
Gamow saw what was coming and got away.
Zeldovich recalled the animosity of all Soviet physicists towards Gamow since he did not return to Moscow after the famous Solvay meeting of 1933... By this action Gamow hampered the possibility for all Soviet physicists to travel abroad after that date. He recalled how he was motivated by a matter of pure confrontation against Gamow for some time. As soon as Gamow presented the theory of a hot universe he himself presented an alternative theory of a cold universe, initially at zero temperature. The process of building up heavy elements was stopped in his theory by the presence of a degenerate sea neutrinos and only hydrogen would be born from an expanding Friedman universe. He stressed again, how building such a theory was motivated ideologically and politically. He recognized the crucial role of the Penzias and Wilson discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation which disproved his ‘political’ theory and proved instead the validity of Gamow’s theory. He finally concluded “Yes: although Gamow made many mistakes he is one of the greatest Soviet scientists!” And then recalling the fundamental contributions Gamow made to the understanding of the DNA structure he asked: “How many Nobel prizes did Gamow receive? Two?” I answered: “None.”
-- Remo Ruffini, "Moments with Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich"
― alimosina, Thursday, 5 July 2018 00:33 (five years ago) link
Amaldi, The Adventurous Life of Friedrich Georg Houtermans
Houtermans grew up in Vienna.
Fritz started to show such a difficult behaviour that his mother, through her friend Anna Freud, arranged for Fritz to be taken care of by Anna’s father, Sigmund Freud. The sessions, however, did not last long because when Fritz realized that he had to relate his dreams to Freud, he and his imaginative cousin Anni began to invent dreams, which Freud soon discovered and stopped the psychoanalytic treatment.
Later he studied at Göttingen.
Once Fritz, with the permission of Franck, announced at the Colloquium the presence of a Russian professor in Göttingen and then introduced into the lecture room two dancing bears, whose owner he had met in the street just before.
Houtermans moved to Kharkov against Pauli's advice, and was duly arrested as part of the same fake conspiracy as Shubnikov. It was a common method to implicate people who were dead or out of reach. After being tortured, Houtermans claimed that he had been following orders from Laszlo Tisza, who had managed to get out of the country. (For a while, Tisza and Twitter existed simultaneously.)
Houtermans was handed over to the Gestapo but released. He worked for von Ardenne's independent nuclear weapons project in where else but the research department of the postal ministry. In a bizarre episode, he visited Kharkov in uniform under German occupation.
Houtermans was a fictional character with his greatness, his weaknesses, his internal conflicts, all governed by his humanity, his generosity and his particular personal humor that could not be tolerated by any totalitarian regime. This is why I believe that only a novelist of great talent could describe his character...
― alimosina, Thursday, 5 July 2018 00:52 (five years ago) link
Dyson, Maker of Patterns
Freeman Dyson writes like an angel and is endlessly quotable. This book is an autobiography in the form of letters to his family, with commentary. There is surprisingly little overlap with Disturbing the Universe.
In my time as a professor I lost three young people whom I had invited as members, one by suicide and two who ended up in mental institutions. I do not know how many I saved. I only know that the institute is a dangerous place for young people, and as a professor, I bore a heavy responsibility for their mental health.
Dyson is not made of the same stuff as we are. Not only is he mathematically brilliant and ageless, he has more empathy than most people and is able to make friends with anyone.
Wolfgang Pauli, the great physicist from Zurich, was talking in German to a group of respectful listeners... Pauli told how Schwinger had come to Zurich and explained the new American physics clearly, not like the nonsense that Dyson had been writing. At that moment Fierz pushed me forward and said, "Professor Pauli, please allow me to introduce you to Professor Dyson." Pauli replied, "Oh, that does not matter, he does not understand German," and continued his discourse. Afterwards Pauli always treated me with great respect, and we became good friends.
These letters show superhuman forbearance when his wife runs away with his old college friend whom he'd helped to get a job (the blood-freezing Georg Kreisel). Luckily for the kids, they stay with Dyson, who soon finds lasting happiness. The reader can't help rooting for him.
― alimosina, Sunday, 22 July 2018 22:17 (five years ago) link
Freeman Dyson, autumn 1948:
Oppenheimer is unreceptive to the new ideas in general and in particular to Feynman. Oppenheimer shocked me when he arrived by taking a semidefeatist attitude to the whole business... on Sunday I felt so irritable that I wrote the enclosed letter to Oppenheimer... On Sunday night I went for a walk into a field outside the town, where the sky was unobscured by lights, and sat down on the grass to make up my mind whether I should send the letter off. After some time I had decided to do it, and then suddenly the sky was filled with the most brilliant northern lights I have ever seen. They lasted only about five minutes, but were a rich bloodred and filled half the sky. Whether the show really was staged for my benefit I doubt, but certainly it produced the same psychological effect as if it had been.
Wallace Stevens, autumn 1948:
This is nothing until in a single man contained,Nothing until this named thing nameless isAnd is destroyed. He opens the door of his houseOn flames. The scholar of one candle seesAn arctic effulgence flaring on the frameOf everything he is. And he feels afraid.
On flames. The scholar of one candle seesAn arctic effulgence flaring on the frameOf everything he is. And he feels afraid.
― alimosina, Sunday, 22 July 2018 22:19 (five years ago) link
Ha, recently took that Dyson book out of the library, but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet (pvmic) whilst looking for another book written by a physicist- who is from Memphis!- that is not about physics.
― Isora Clubland (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 22 July 2018 22:42 (five years ago) link
More info here.
― alimosina, Monday, 23 July 2018 22:54 (five years ago) link
A colourful figure on this scene was Claud Lovelace. Austere in appearance, booming in voice, confident in attitude, he had been notorious while holding an appointment at CERN for his habit of sitting in the front row at other people's seminars reading the pile of preprints he had brought with him, but occasionally looking up to pose a pointed question. It is said that once, when Lovelace himself gave a seminar and the rest of Theory Division by arrangement turned up, each with his own pile of reading matter, he was not amused. Claud had gone into the resonance-hunting business in a big way. There was by now so much data to fit, and so many assumptions necessary to make the task tractable, that one could always indulge in a straight-faced application of statistics to 'prove' the total unreasonableness of a colleague's view, judged from one's own perspective. Lovelace pronounced the 'best-fit' results of his principal rival, Gordon Moorhouse from Glasgow, to have only a chance of one in 10^166 of being right. In reply, the milder Moorhouse conceded a chance of one in 10^24 of Lovelace's correctness.
-- Polkinghorne
That year I was fired by CERN for discovering too many nucleon resonances (all of which were subsequently confirmed)
-- Lovelace
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/400/1*jBHiPADEY2dq_vJA_5zDPQ.jpeg
― alimosina, Tuesday, 6 November 2018 18:59 (five years ago) link
Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
Bell Labs in all its majesty.
(John R. Pierce) was so thin and slight that even in late middle age he could fit into the slender office lockers that staffers used to stow their jackets or lab coats. "People think you can't fit into these, but you really can," Pierce said one day to Henry Landau, a Bell mathematician, who looked up from his desk to see Pierce walk unannounced into his office, squeeze himself into Landau's locker, close the locker door, open it, squeeze himself out, and then exit the room.
The building in Holmdel stood empty for a long time, a ruin from a vanished civilization, but they've adapted it to our ways.
― alimosina, Tuesday, 6 November 2018 19:02 (five years ago) link
Is that John Polkinghorne? I've enjoyed a couple of his books, should get more.
― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, 7 November 2018 02:13 (five years ago) link
Yeah, Rochester Roundabout. If you like that quotation you will like the book.
― alimosina, Wednesday, 7 November 2018 15:29 (five years ago) link
Thanks! I have ordered it.
― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, 7 November 2018 23:13 (five years ago) link
("Principles of Quantum Electrodynamics") was first translated into English and then into Russian. The Russian translation became a real bestseller with 50,000 copies sold. When I asked how this could be possible, I received the disillusioning reply, "Well, here all scientific books are cheap because the state subsidizes them. In the far corners of Siberia paper is expensive. That's why farmers buy these kinds of books and use them to roll their cigarettes."
Bruno Touschek once told me about a time when all of the civilian casualties of a military action were mentioned and that Heisenberg had replied, "but they were just Poles."
-- Thirring, The Joy of Discovery
― alimosina, Saturday, 29 December 2018 04:17 (five years ago) link
Bojowald, Once Before Time
A popular account of loop quantum cosmology. It is translated from German, with quotations from Goethe, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Wittgenstein.
One may view this quantum gravitational base as analogous to the matter vacuum, but it is much more ominous... The vacuum of loop quantum gravity is of an inconceivable emptiness: no sound, no light, no stuff, no space; only time as a faintly glimmering hope to leave behind this wasteland.
Ashtekar is a mathematical physicist, an analyst equipped with technical brilliance and unparalleled mastery of the dark art of scientific power play. Senior to Rovelli and Smolin, he quite naturally saw the leadership role fall into his hands. And he seized it.
Especially Nietzsche. This book is for fans of hypothetical physics. It is non-technical but more demanding than others in this area (e.g. Ferriera).
― alimosina, Saturday, 29 December 2018 04:23 (five years ago) link
Gordon, The Brookhaven Connection
Most people know Brookhaven National Laboratory as an underfunded but legendary institution where excellent science is done, home of the last American particle accelerator and other research facilities. Crease wrote a good history of its first 25 years.
The Initial Program Report called for an electrostatic accelerator to be built for the low-energy region... Van de Graaff himself had founded the High Voltage Engineering Corporation (HVEC; the company claimed the trademark "Van de Graaff") with two colleagues, John Trump (uncle of Donald, future real estate tycoon) and Denis Robinson, to build the machines commercially.
But Crease left out the most amazing part: BNL's secret research into time travel and alien contact! (Likely inspired by the nearby Montauk Project.)
"It was a representative of the Galactic Federation, or for want of a better term, an EBE. An EBE gave us the plans but didn't tell us how to follow them. The plans were a mathematical formula with a primer at the top of the page."
The story is reminiscent of Dante's Inferno, as the narrator is led by a guide through subterranean caverns, where unseen higher authorities with effectively magical powers are monitoring humanity's moral progress.
Suddenly, I looked up for a second at Mr. J and saw a strange expression on his face as he shook his head to say, "NO!" At the same time, I felt a gentle pressure on my right shoulder. As I turned slowly to my left and just before I fainted, I glimpsed a two-legged being staring intently at me through two beady reptilian eyes.
Unfortunately the narrative breaks off there and we haven't heard anything more. Maybe humanity is still not ready for the whole story. But the editor's note is dated summer 2001, soon after which the EBEs really let us down. For once John Trump's nephew can't be blamed. Happy New Year.
― alimosina, Monday, 31 December 2018 01:55 (five years ago) link
Thanks for all your good work on this thread, alimosina.Just looked up that Bojowald book on a library app and the subject says Thriller, Thriller, Thriller.
― Spirit of the Voice of the Beehive (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 1 January 2019 23:30 (five years ago) link
Okay now it says Science, Physics, Nonfiction
― Spirit of the Voice of the Beehive (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 1 January 2019 23:31 (five years ago) link
More fiction than non, IMO.
― alimosina, Wednesday, 2 January 2019 16:24 (five years ago) link
RIP
http://www.heikegani.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Murray-Gell-Mann1.jpg
― alimosina, Saturday, 25 May 2019 21:29 (four years ago) link
Murray the G?
― TS The Students vs The Regents (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 25 May 2019 21:36 (four years ago) link
He looks like he is channeling Harlan Ellison in that picture.
― TS The Students vs The Regents (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 25 May 2019 21:40 (four years ago) link
At Caltech Gell-Mann was almost as famous for his erudition as for his physics; he was enormously learned in subjects most of us didn't know existed. A story is told about a physicist, much bothered by this, who decided to become expert in some obscure corner of human knowledge, so that, just once, he could trump Gell-Mann. Of course, for the plan to work the subject had to be one that could be introduced naturally into the conversation. He knew that the dining room of the Caltech faculty club was decorated near the ceiling line with the heraldic shields of universities; he decided to learn blazonry, the technical descriptive language of heraldry. When next he had lunch with Gell-Mann at the faculty club, he allowed his gaze to drift upward. "How interesting," he said (and here I must make up babble, for I know no blazonry myself), "gules rampant on sable argent." Gell-mann looked up. "No," he said. "No, it's sable rampant on gules argent."
-- Sidney Coleman
― alimosina, Sunday, 26 May 2019 00:14 (four years ago) link
Right. I believe he was known to be annoyed by Feyman’s clowning. Also think I heard about him hyper-pronouncing words of foreign origin such as “mayonnaise.”
― TS The Students vs The Regents (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 26 May 2019 00:24 (four years ago) link
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/08/magazine/the-man-who-knows-everything-murray-gell-mann.html
― TS The Students vs The Regents (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 26 May 2019 00:26 (four years ago) link
"Plectics" -- that one didn't catch on.
― alimosina, Sunday, 26 May 2019 18:48 (four years ago) link
Plectic Murrayland
― TS The Students vs. The Regents (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 27 May 2019 20:16 (four years ago) link
Wonder how this new Graham Farmelo book is.
― TS The Students vs. The Regents (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 30 May 2019 00:49 (four years ago) link
Hoarding chalk.
― alimosina, Thursday, 27 June 2019 18:35 (four years ago) link
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2012/02/a_mile_or_two_off_yarmouth.html
― Jazz Telemachy (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 17 December 2019 13:16 (four years ago) link
Realizing that it will be difficult for a blind young man to find a girlfriend at the age of 18-19, Pontryagin's mother took into her family an orphan girl, Tasia (of his age), when her son was still a boy, and, when the time came, literally put her in bed with him. Tasia was an ordinary good-looking girl, and not stupid, completely undeservedly doomed to a bitter fate. She loved Lev Semyonovich from childhood. Having started studying at the Faculty of Mathematics at Moscow State University, Lev Semyononvich got into the intellectual elite and soon announced to Tasia that he would not live with her, because he would seek "true love", and she was too simple for him. Tasia studied biology at Moscow University; after graduating, she left for (Soviet) Georgia, where she did not marry, because she did not cease to love Lev Semyonovich. And Lev Semyonovich began to fall in love, I will not list the names of his "objects" -- the name to them is a legion -- I will only add one funny detail: they were all Jewish.
-- Rosa Berri
The detail is "funny", if that's the word, because Pontryagin was a notorious antisemite.
― alimosina, Thursday, 19 December 2019 16:46 (four years ago) link
After reading about hypothetical matter, or mathematics pretending to be matter, it's a relief to read about actual data about real matter.
Hazen, Symphony in C
The author is the director of the Deep Carbon Observatory, which studies carbon on earth in the widest sense. This book cuts across atomic physics, geophysics, chemistry, biology and the origins of life, and nanoscience (graphene, nanotubes etc). Unlike popular books which have to spend chapters reviewing familiar topics before getting to something new, here new or unfamiliar material is on every page.
As well as being a very good writer, Hazen is a musician in an orchestra. The persistent symphonic metaphor used for organizing the book can be taken or left.
Werner and Eisenhardt, More Things in the Heavens
Though she be but little, she is fierce.
One doesn't hear a lot about the Great Observatories as such, but everyone knows about the Hubble Space Telescope. The Chandra is still on mission, and the Compton was crash-landed and replaced. This book is about the Spitzer Space Telescope for observing in the infrared.
Even the most cynical reader has to be amazed at all the data. "Torrents" of new exoplanets, planetary disk formation, star formation, galactic evolution, and the cosmic web of galactic cluster filaments. Not to mention buckyballs in space, measurement of the Milky Way bar (not the candy bar, but the bar at the center of our galaxy where the arms start), a ring of Saturn so huge that it would be twice the size of the moon if we looked up at it face-on from Earth, and the infrared signal from a collision of two neutron stars that was detected by LIGO. All this from a telescope about a yard across. It ran out of liquid helium after six years and some of its infrared channels shut down. The whole telescope is scheduled to shut down next month.
Galaxies can walk and chew gum at the same time.
These two made several other books I read this year seem pretty thin gruel.
― alimosina, Thursday, 19 December 2019 21:11 (four years ago) link
RIP, Freeman Dyson. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/science/freeman-dyson-dead.html?referringSource=articleShare
― Something Super Stupid Cupid (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 28 February 2020 19:25 (four years ago) link
Just coming here to post that. His autobiography is fascinating and I’ve long appreciated his NYRB pieces. Seems like he kept writing them right up to the end.
― o. nate, Friday, 28 February 2020 20:23 (four years ago) link
RIP Philip Anderson.
When one understands everything, one has gone crazy.
-- PWA
I hope this thread doesn't turn into a roll call this year.
― alimosina, Sunday, 5 April 2020 17:02 (three years ago) link
RIPAnderson accuses researchers of "looking under the streetlight". I say this all the time, only in the variant "looking where the light is."
― Three Hundred Pounds of Almond Joy (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 5 April 2020 18:15 (three years ago) link
"looking under the streetlight"
A regrettable, but nearly universal, side effect of academic training and grant-funding dependence.
― A is for (Aimless), Sunday, 5 April 2020 18:23 (three years ago) link
It turns out, contrary to my expectations, that funding is by no means necessary for creativity, in fact the relationship may be inverse.
I think it is more like this -- everyone has an age at which he stops thinking originally, but that age is enormously variable. I know good physicists whose useful lifespan is in the forties or younger -- the name I have for them is "young fogies" -- but I know plenty of others who haven't reached it at 80 or more.
― alimosina, Sunday, 5 April 2020 18:55 (three years ago) link
RIP, JHC.
― Three Hundred Pounds of Almond Joy (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 12 April 2020 13:13 (three years ago) link
Ting is, by most accounts, a driven personality who cannot easily be deterred from his goals, once telling the U.S. Department of Energy (after one of his proposals had been turned down): "I reject your rejection."
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07D7NFQQY/ref=atv_dp_watch_trailer?autoplay=trailer
― alimosina, Monday, 14 September 2020 20:13 (three years ago) link
I. M. Khalatnikov is 101!
― alimosina, Sunday, 18 October 2020 22:50 (three years ago) link
Oh hi, I wrote a quiz that some of you might be interested in looking at. Guess I will post a link upon request.
― A Stop at Quilloughby (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 7 May 2021 19:52 (two years ago) link
???
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Wednesday, 12 May 2021 10:48 (two years ago) link
^^^
― I was born anxious, here's how to do it. (ledge), Thursday, 13 May 2021 08:15 (two years ago) link
I posted it on ILB as well but will repost here as well https://www.learnedleague.com/oneday.php?isaacnewton
― Working in the POLL Mine (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 15 May 2021 17:39 (two years ago) link
I meant to say elsewhere on ILB.
― Working in the POLL Mine (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 15 May 2021 17:40 (two years ago) link
ledge already took it
― Working in the POLL Mine (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 15 May 2021 17:58 (two years ago) link
In one of those unfunny coincidences, Steven Weinberg and Toshihide Masukawa died on the same day.
― alimosina, Wednesday, 4 August 2021 03:10 (two years ago) link
And Miguel Virasoro, the same ****ing day.
― alimosina, Friday, 6 August 2021 04:07 (two years ago) link
Deser, Forks in the Road
A brief, informal memoir by the co-author of ADM and co-inventor of supergravity and superstrings. Deser provided early theoretical support for what became LIGO. The discrepancy between an amazing life and the casual matter-of-factness of the memoirs is striking. It's written as though anyone could have done as well. One funny part is the author's claim that he is not good at mathematics and tries to avoid it (he uses Chern-Simons forms in some of his later papers).
... my committee consisted of Julian plus Bob Karplus and Abe Klein, both of whom were under great stress: they had families and knew that they couldn't get tenure at Harvard; assistant professors almost never did. To land desirable positions elsewhere, their job at this point was to convince Schwinger how smart they were. There is no easier way to do that than via an unwitting graduate student. They had just made some nasty calculations in Electrodynamics. In the process they had discovered all sorts of esoteric mathematical functions, in particular, something called dilogarithms, which were still not in the textbooks. They knew about dilogarithms, I did not know about dilogarithms, so this was the moment they could really impress Schwinger, who could appreciate the finer points. During the first hour of that debacle, indeed after 15 minutes, it was clear that I could not contribute anything to that conversation, let alone answer questions. So they proceeded to entertain Julian with their Talmudic knowledge of these new aspects... I was totally destroyed. I was sent out of the room. After a very few minutes, Schwinger came out and said, "You realize that you failed this exam," a very rare occurrence in those days. "Yes," I replied. He smiled and I nearly fainted when he added "Don't worry about it."
It's always surprising to hear about how unfashionable research in gravity was in the 1950s.
That same year I got the chance to hear one of Einstein's last seminars. Oppenheimer (of Oppenheimer-Snyder black hole fame, ironically his one claim to Nobel glory) had gathered us new recruits to warn against having anything to do with the "old fool down the hall" or with Relativity in any form. There was little danger at that point, since none of us even knew what GR was.
On Andre Petermann:
Andre Petermann who stayed on at CERN for life, though mainly invisibly, showing up only in the wee hours. His accomplishments were many, if mostly unsung: only one, the renormalization group creation in his thesis is well-known. His advisor was the aristocratic Baron Stueckelberg, always accompanied by his large dog at (later) CERN seminars; both were tragically under-rated. They were antipodal: Andre came from the slums of Geneva (yes, even it used to have some -- albeit higher class) with an accent to fit. He also invented quarks independently of Gell-Mann and of Zweig, did still-not-widely-known important calculations including in QCD... and raced cars.
The author is a devoted reader of Proust, but a less Proustian memoir can hardly be imagined.
― alimosina, Sunday, 17 October 2021 21:17 (two years ago) link