I don't remember whether it was the question
or the answer, but Jeopardy had something about Nobel laureate in physics,
Enrico Fermi the other night.
"Did you ever meet him?" Walt asked.
I said I had not (I found out later I was in
grammar school when Fermi died)
But if anybody else had been in the room,
they might have thought this an odd exchange between the two of us.
But to us, it was perfectly logical.
My high school had been primarily a business
school and had only recently become a college prep school, so it didn't have
the variety of classes that you find in larger schools. I took
chemistry and biology, but physics was not offered (and I wasn't very good
at chemistry or biology either).
When I got to UC Berkeley, someone suggested
I take Physics 10, a basic physics course taught by Nobel Laureate Owen
Chamberlain. (They told me it was an "easy A") I had actually heard of him, but knew zero about him.
Mostly I remember that he reminded me of actor Rene Aubergenois.
I hated Physics 10 and couldn't understand
anything. The only thing I remember from that class is the Doppler
Effect ("The Doppler effect can be described as the effect produced by a
moving source of waves in which there is an apparent upward shift in
frequency for observers towards whom the source is approaching and an
apparent downward shift in frequency for observers from whom the source is
receding.") The only reason I know that was because I was
dating a guy, whose name I have forgotten (I think we broke up over
Physics), who drummed it into my head. To this day I can't hear an
approaching train without thinking of him. It may be the reason I
didn't fail that class but I can't believe I got higher than a D.
I was relieved when the class finished. I
never, ever wanted to hear of physics again.
The next year, when I decided to quit the
university, I went to the employment office to see about getting a job on
campus. I was sent to three departments. I don't remember the
first, but the second was the English department and the third was the
physics department.
Well, I knew immediately that there was no
way I was going to work in the physics department.
But the job came with my own private office
and I would mostly be working for the billing department and on the side
doing some typing for three professors. It was interesting looking
them up today. I just knew them as names.
Arthur Kip, one of the great
experimental solid-state physicists, died of a heart attack at the age of
85. Starting in 1951, and with small means, he built up the first research
group in the field in the Western United States. He trained many graduate
students who have filled distinguished positions in American physics.
Alan Portis was the first Director of
the Lawrence Hall of Science which overlooks the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and
the first cyclotron ever built where EO Lawrence and Glenn Seaborg did their
work. Alan was also one of the founders of the Search for Excellence in
Science and Mathematics (SESAME) Group at UC Berkeley. He was both a
scientist and a science educator.
Frederick Reif is an Austrian-born
American physicist noted for his 1965 "Fundamentals of Statistical and
Thermal Physics," which has helped at least two physicists, namely Vladimir
Pokrovskii (1999) and Reiner Kummel (2011), come to understand entropy and
to understand how it can be applied in economics in economic thermodynamics
formulation. (I should note that the above named "Fundamentals of
Statistical and Thermal Physics" was a book I typed...three times...on a
non-correcting IBM selectric. I also typed the accompanying answer
book which might have had a few words in it, but was mostly a couple
of hundred pages of equations)
These guys were big deals and reading about
them tonight brought back a whole bunch of memories of the history of
programs now established, which were just getting started when during the
three years I worked there (I left just before Jeri was born).
Of the three, Fred was the guy everyone
warned me against as a very gruff, very difficult to get along with
professor. All the secretaries were afraid of him, but he and I became
very good friends (and today, more than 50 years later, we still are).
Kip retired a year or so after I went to work for him, and Portis started
spending more and more time at the Rad Lab "on the hill," so ultimately, I
became Fred's private secretary. It was a job I loved and still my
favorite job. He even got me reading books like "The Strange Story of
the Quantum," to help me understand, at least a little bit, the work he was
doing.
But during my period of time working for the
Physics Department, it happened that Owen Chamberlain needed some typing
done and so I worked for him for awhile (I didn't remind him what a terrible
student I was and how much I hated his class!)
Sometime later, I also did some typing for another Nobel laureate, Emilio
Segre. I have no memory of him, other than that I typed things for
him.
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