Archive for the ‘Physics’ Category

Obit watch: July 9, 2025.

Wednesday, July 9th, 2025

Dr. Ivar Giaever, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973.

I generally try to note Nobel Prize recipients, especially the physics ones. But Dr. Giaever’s obit stands out to me for two reasons:

It was 1956, and he was applying for a position at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y. The interviewer looked at his grades, from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim, where Dr. Giaever (pronounced JAY-ver) had studied mechanical engineering, and was impressed: The young applicant had scored 4.0 marks in math and physics. The recruiter congratulated him.
But what the recruiter didn’t know was that in Norway, the best grade was a 1.0, not a 4.0, the top grade in American schools. In fact, a 4.0 in Norway was barely passing — something like a D on American report cards. In reality, his academic record in Norway had been anything but impressive.
He did not want to be dishonest, Dr. Giaever would say in recounting the episode with some amusement over the years, but he also did not correct the interviewer. He got the job.

As a reformed “D” student, “D” students for the win, baby!

Dr. Giaever’s work was in quantum tunneling.

One of those weird things is the duality at the heart of quantum physics — namely, how particles, like electrons that orbit the nuclei of atoms, can also behave like waves. Based on this proposition, electrons can, in certain circumstances, “tunnel” through what otherwise is an impermeable barrier. Imagine a tennis ball bouncing off a wall a few times before it suddenly passes through the wall without leaving a trace.
The concept of tunneling had been predicted in the 1920s. In 1957, Leo Esaki, a scientist working at Sony in Japan, produced the first example of tunneling while experimenting with semiconductors, components that can conduct electricity with no resistance or loss of current. Dr. Esaki invented the tunnel diode, a type of semiconductor that is used in oscillators and amplifiers, among other devices.
Dr. Giaever later admitted that he had not been familiar with Dr. Esaki’s work and did not really understand it at first. But G.E.’s Research Lab employed more than 800 scientists, and it was at the suggestion of a colleague that he started working on tunneling experiments, using thin strips of metal separated by insulating layers.
In his classes at Rensselaer, he learned about a new theory of superconductors put forward by John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer — an idea named B.C.S. after the three scientists’ initials.
Back at the lab, he decided to create a tunneling experiment using superconductors. He created a sample of two strips of lead separated by a very thin strip of lead oxide. He then immersed the sample in liquid helium attached to an electric current detector and began doing the same type of tunneling experiments that he had done on the other strips of metal.
At first, he failed, because the lead oxide was too thick. Finally, on April 22, 1960, the experiment succeeded, and the results conformed to the predictions of the B.C.S. theory. (Dr. Bardeen, Dr. Cooper and Dr. Schrieffer shared the 1972 Nobel in Physics for their theory, helped by Dr. Giaever’s proof.)

His co-recipients of the 1973 Nobel Prize were Dr. Esaki and Dr. Brian D. Josephson.

The other thing that stood out to me:

Dr. Giaever prided himself on his common-sense approach to science, but not all his ideas were welcomed by his peers. He became a prominent denier of climate change, referring to the science around it as a “new religion.” (“I would say that, basically, global warming is a nonproblem,” he said in a 2015 speech.) He based his opposition, in part, on his belief that it is impossible to track changes in the Earth’s temperature and that, even if it could be done, the temperature changes would be insignificant.
When the American Physical Society announced in 2011 that the evidence for climate change and global warming was incontrovertible, he resigned from the society in disgust, saying: “‘Incontrovertible’ is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science.”

Posted in Obits, Physics | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 14, 2025.

Wednesday, May 14th, 2025

Robert Benton, noted screenwriter and director. NYT (archived). IMDB.

Richard L. Garwin, physicist.

A polymathic physicist and geopolitical thinker, Dr. Garwin was only 23 when he built the world’s first fusion bomb. He later became a science adviser to many presidents, designed Pentagon weapons and satellite reconnaissance systems, argued for a Soviet-American balance of nuclear terror as the best bet for surviving the Cold War, and championed verifiable nuclear arms control agreements.
While his mentor, the Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, called him “the only true genius I have ever met,” Dr. Garwin was not the father of the hydrogen bomb. The Hungarian-born physicist Edward Teller and the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, who developed theories for a bomb, may have greater claims to that sobriquet.
In 1951-52, however, Dr. Garwin, at the time an instructor at the University of Chicago and just a summer consultant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, designed the actual bomb, using the Teller-Ulam ideas. An experimental device code-named Ivy Mike, it was shipped to the Western Pacific and tested on an atoll in the Marshall Islands.

“The shot was fired almost precisely according to Garwin’s design,” Dr. Teller said in a 1981 statement that acknowledged the crucial role of the young prodigy. Still, that belated recognition got little notice, and Dr. Garwin long remained unknown publicly.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Physics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 11, 2024.

Thursday, April 11th, 2024

Akebono.

He was a native Hawaiian who moved to Japan and began training in sumo.

When he became Japan’s 64th yokozuna, or grand champion sumo wrestler, in 1993, he was the first foreign-born wrestler to achieve the sport’s highest title in its 300-year modern history. He went on to win a total of 11 grand championships, and his success set the stage for an era during which foreign-born wrestlers dominated the top levels of Japan’s national sport.

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Akebono’s rivalry with the Japanese brothers Takanohana and Wakanohana, both grand champions, was a major driver of sumo’s renewed popularity in the 1990s. During the opening ceremony for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, Akebono demonstrated the sumo ring entrance ritual for an international audience, commanding the arena with his hulking physique and captivating stare.

…

He later said in interviews that he rarely considered his nationality in the ring, thinking of himself as a sumo wrestler first and foremost. He became a naturalized Japanese citizen in 1996, and changed his name to Taro Akebono. His chosen sumo name, “Akebono,” means dawn in Japanese.

I’m a little late on this one, but everyone was on it: Peter Higgs, of Higgs boson fame.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Bruce Kessler, TV director. Before that, he raced cars:

In 1958, Kessler suffered serious injuries in a fiery crash in the middle of the night in the rain while driving a Ferrari in the 24 Hours of Le Mans (his co-driver was fellow American Dan Gurney). A year later, he spent days in a coma after a race accident in Pomona, California, then retired from the sport after yet another serious crash in 1962 in Riverside, California.

His credits as a director include “The Hat Squad”, “Renegade”, “Enos”, “The Misadventures Of Sheriff Lobo”, “Hardcastle and McCormick”…

…and the episode “Chopper” of “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, which is my own personal favorite episode. One of these days, I’m going to write that Top Five “Kolchak” episodes list. (“Chopper”, “Firefall”, “The Sentry”…)

Finally: O.J. Simpson. THR. LAT (archived). ESPN. (Edited to add: Lawrence.)

I don’t have a lot to say about this. Whatever he did or didn’t do, he’s facing judgement for it now, and I don’t feel like making jokes.

Posted in 1970s, California Über Alles, Law, Movies, NFL, Obits, Physics, Sports, Sumo, TV | Comments Closed

Like buttah.

Wednesday, September 6th, 2023

The American Dairy Association North East (ADANE) has announced that the 55th Annual Butter Sculpture at the New York State Fair will be converted into energy.

Let’s think about this for a few minutes.

The linked article says the butter sculpture weighs 800 pounds. That’s probably a approximate figure, and it may be somewhat lighter or heavier. But for our purposes, let’s use the 800 pound figure. As you’ll see shortly, we’re dealing with such large numbers, a few pounds either way won’t matter.

Now, as we all know, Bob, E=MC^2. Or, energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. So how much energy is there in 800 pounds of butter?

(more…)

Posted in Geek, Physics | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 28, 2020.

Friday, February 28th, 2020

Freeman J. Dyson, noted physicist.

As a young graduate student at Cornell in 1949, Dr. Dyson wrote a landmark paper — worthy, some colleagues thought, of a Nobel Prize — that deepened the understanding of how light interacts with matter to produce the palpable world. The theory the paper advanced, called quantum electrodynamics, or QED, ranks among the great achievements of modern science.
But it was as a writer and technological visionary that he gained public renown. He imagined exploring the solar system with spaceships propelled by nuclear explosions and establishing distant colonies nourished by genetically engineered plants.

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Dr. Dyson called himself a scientific heretic and warned against the temptation of confusing mathematical abstractions with ultimate truth. Although his own early work on QED helped bring photons and electrons into a consistent framework, Dr. Dyson doubted that superstrings, or anything else, would lead to a Theory of Everything, unifying all of physics with a succinct formulation inscribable on a T-shirt. In a speech in 2000 when he accepted the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, Dr. Dyson quoted Francis Bacon: “God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.”
Relishing the role of iconoclast, he confounded the scientific establishment by dismissing the consensus about the perils of man-made climate change as “tribal group-thinking.” He doubted the veracity of the climate models, and he exasperated experts with sanguine predictions they found rooted less in science than in wishfulness: Excess carbon in the air is good for plants, and global warming might forestall another ice age.
In a profile of Dr. Dyson in 2009 in The New York Times Magazine, his colleague Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate, observed, “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”

He was also skeptical of the “nuclear winter” theory.

He considered himself an environmentalist. “I am a tree-hugger, in love with frogs and forests,” he wrote in 2015 in The Boston Globe. “More urgent and more real problems, such as the overfishing of the oceans and the destruction of wildlife habitat on land, are neglected, while the environmental activists waste their time and energy ranting about climate change.” That was, to say the least, a minority position.
He was religious but in an unorthodox way, believing good works to be more important than theology. “Science is exciting because it is full of unsolved mysteries, and religion is exciting for the same reason,” he said in his Templeton Prize acceptance speech. “The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe.”

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Any advanced civilization, he observed in a paper published in 1960, would ultimately expand to the point where it needed all the energy its solar system could provide. The ultimate solution would be to build a shell around the sun — a Dyson sphere — to capture its output. Earthlings, he speculated in a thought experiment, might conceivably do this by dismantling Jupiter and reassembling the pieces.

He was also one of the folks behind Project Orion.

In the late 1970s Dr. Dyson turned full force to writing. Anyone with an interest in science and an appreciation for good prose is likely to have some Dysons on the shelf: “Disturbing the Universe,” “Weapons and Hope,” “Infinite in All Directions,” “The Sun, the Genome and the Internet.”
He also entered literature in a different way. He appeared in John McPhee’s book “The Curve of Binding Energy” (1974), a portrait of Ted Taylor, the nuclear scientist who led the Orion effort, and in Kenneth Brower’s “The Starship and the Canoe” (1978). In a memorable scene, Mr. Brower wrote of Dr. Dyson’s reunion with his son, George, who had turned his back on high technology to live in a treehouse in British Columbia and build a seafaring canoe. George Dyson later returned to civilization and became a historian of technology and an author. Dr. Dyson’s daughter Esther Dyson is a well-known Silicon Valley consultant.

Statement from the Institute for Advanced Study. This is a great line:

In 1956, Dyson began a three-year association with General Atomic, where he worked to design a nuclear reactor that would be inherently safe, or, as colleague Edward Teller put it, “not only idiot-proof, but PhD proof.”

I’m going to have to start using “PhD proof” more often in conversation.

This is eloquently stated, and seems like a good note to end on:

“No life is more entangled with the Institute and impossible to capture—architect of modern particle physics, free-range mathematician, advocate of space travel, astrobiology and disarmament, futurist, eternal graduate student, rebel to many preconceived ideas including his own, thoughtful essayist, all the time a wise observer of the human scene,” stated Robbert Dijkgraaf, IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor. “His secret was simply saying “yes” to everything in life, till the very end. We are blessed and honored that Freeman, Imme, and their family made the Institute their home. It will be so forever.”

Posted in Books, Law, Obits, Physics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 20, 2019.

Saturday, July 20th, 2019

NYT obit for Dr. Mitchell Feigenbaum. (Previously.)

L. Bruce Laingen. He was the senior diplomat in Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis, and was taken hostage.

Mr. Laingen and two aides who had been with him at the ministry remained separated from the other hostages during the long ordeal, Mr. Laingen having the odd role of continuing to act as a diplomat while being a hostage. He was a point of contact to the outside world, sometimes meeting with diplomats from other countries and even occasionally being allowed a phone call with the West.
But if he had a somewhat easier time than the hostages at the embassy, he in no way soft-pedaled his experience. In 2001, when a conservative faction in Iran set up an anti-American exhibition on the grounds of the former embassy, Mr. Laingen, in a letter to the editor printed in The Times, suggested that the site needed a plaque. He proposed this wording:
“Here is the former American Embassy in Tehran, where occurred the most egregious violation in recorded history of all standards and precepts of diplomacy: the seizure of an embassy and its staff by student terrorists, an act endorsed by their government, the hostages used as pawns for 444 days to further the political purposes of the Islamic Republic.”

…

“We are there to find out how people are thinking and why they are thinking that way and behaving that way,” he said in the oral history. “And if we get too comfortable in believing something that sort of fits our purposes, well, we are in hellish trouble.”

Posted in History, Obits, Physics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 6, 2019.

Saturday, July 6th, 2019

Dr. Mitchell Feigenbaum, theoretical physicist.

When Feigenbaum began his career in the early 1970s, the term “chaos theory” did not exist. Generations of scientists dating back to Isaac Newton had worked on problems related to the predictability of complex systems, such as the orbits of the planets in the solar system. By the middle of the 20th century, physicists and mathematicians—inspired by the pioneering work of the French physicist and mathematician Henri Poincaré—had succeeded in characterizing chaotic states, often enabled by computers, by framing such questions as geometric problems. But the boundary between regular and chaotic behavior remained fuzzy, particularly as it applied to real physical systems.
Feigenbaum stepped into this foggy arena, developing methods capable of computationally modelling the period-doubling transition to chaos, which proceeds in a series of geometrically focused steps that remain similar when scaled across orders of magnitude, an example of so-called fractal geometry. He first studied a simple iterated algebraic equation known as the logistic map, and was later able to demonstrate that these steps are “universal:” all physical systems that become chaotic via this period-doubling route to chaos exhibit the same behavior. Feigenbaum also found that this behavior is determined by two universal constants, now known as the Feigenbaum constants.

Gene Pingatore, Illinois high school basketball coach. He holds the state record for most wins, but is perhaps more famous as the coach in “Hoop Dreams”.

Mickey Kapp. No, I hadn’t heard of him before, either, but the story is interesting: he was the provider of mixtapes to the astronauts through the Gemini and Apollo programs.

And it all started with José Jiménez.

At Mr. Kapp’s urging, Mr. Dana booked an appearance at the Kings Inn in Cocoa Beach, Fla., near where the astronauts trained. He usually did the astronaut bit with a straight man acting as interviewer, but for Cocoa Beach he was working alone.
“A few minutes into the routine, a guy in the front row began yelling out the straight man’s lines,” Mr. Thompson wrote. It was Mr. Shepard, who joined Mr. Dana onstage but was laughing so hard that another Mercury astronaut, Wally Schirra, who was there, took over, followed by another, Deke Slayton.

Paul Benjamin, actor. He knocked around quite a bit from the 1970s through to 2016: never did a “Mannix”, but he was in various other 70s cop shows, “Escape From Alcatraz” and was one of the guys on the corner in “Do the Right Thing”.

Sid Ramin.

Mr. Ramin (pronounced RAY-min) was one of two orchestrators — three, if you count the contributions of the composer, Leonard Bernstein, a lifelong friend — on the original Broadway production of “West Side Story,” which opened in 1957. According to “The Sound of Broadway Music” (2009), by Steven Suskin, Mr. Ramin worked on the haunting ballad “Somewhere,” the evocative “Something’s Coming,” the sweetly comic “I Feel Pretty,” the bravado-of-youth anthem “Here Come the Jets” and the irreverent “Gee, Officer Krupke.”

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Shows whose orchestrations he worked on, in addition to “West Side Story,” included “Gypsy” (1959), “I Can Get It for You Wholesale” (1962), “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1962), Bette Midler’s “Clams on the Half Shell Revue” (1975), “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” (1989) and “Crazy for You” (1992).

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Physics, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed