Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

It’s wonderful to see so many friends here tonight — not that I can recognize any of you, all dressed up for a black tie affair! That’s a shocker — as we celebrate work done by two guys wearing blue jeans, in 1973.

So I’d like to take us all back to that magical year, when Princeton was still very new to me. I’d rolled into town in my beat-up VW camper, after a lifetime spent in New England girls’ schools — where our architectural model is a white-shingled Main-Street house.

So I walked into Princeton’s beautiful Graduate College — and the opulent Princeton campus — and what I saw there simply blew me away. And I thought, “All this gorgeous architecture, the statues, these gardens of flowers, were put there by people who really cared about learning. And they wanted to inspire people like me — well, okay, maybe not really people exactly like me — because Princeton had only just started admitting woman graduate students — okay, maybe I’m not the person they were imagining, but this is my opportunity too, and I’m going to grab it.”

Still, I have to admit that the opportunity I was to grab with the most enthusiasm was a cute third-year grad student whose name was Frank Wilczek — a very young third-year grad student, because when I met Frank in June of 1972 he was only about a month past his 21st birthday.

Now, fortunately for my genetic material, 1972 was the summer of the Fisher-Spassky chess matches. And the grad college had only one television — and its position between New York and Philadelphia meant that the antenna could pull in some very large number of channels, it may have been 7 or 8 different channels! — so all the grad students would watch Fisher-Spassky together. And I couldn’t help noticing, as we sat there heckling the chess players, whenever Frank Wilczek would shout out a suggestion –“Pawn to king six!” — Boris Spassky or Bobby Fisher would do what he said. And even if Frank disagreed with the rest of the room — if we were all hollering “Take the bishop!” but Frank hollered “Take the knight!” — the real chessplayers did what Frank said and not what we said. So I said to myself, “This is a very smart person and I would like to get to know him better.”

I had, in fact, already been introduced to Frank. I blush to say, I was introduced to him by my boyfriend at that time. But it wasn’t long before Frank and I were an item, and soon our record players — remember those? — were in one apartment.

Perhaps it was fate that somehow brought us together — he with his trusty slide rule and I with my separate but equal slide rule. He with his copy of the CRC Handbook and I with my own copy of the CRC Handbook. For you young folks who don’t know why we had CRC handbooks, I’ll just say that looking up logarithms was something we often felt obliged to do in 1973.

One of the things I learned when I met Frank Wilczek was that somewhere in Princeton there lived a mighty genius named David Gross. And I also learned that Frank did not want to hear me make jokes about David’s last name. Eventually I got to meet this mighty genius and was duly impressed. But David reminded me he gets to speak last and I don’t, so perhaps I should say no more.

Jumping ahead, for a minute, I was thrilled today when the portraits of Frank and David were added to the gallery of Princeton’s Nobel Prize winners in Jadwin Hall. Frank and I used to admire those pictures together, on our many long late-night strolls through the bowels of Princeton, when we would often end up eating bagels and lox in the old Colonial Diner and doing the next day’s New York Times crossword puzzle, which arrived at the newsstand by 4 a.m.

Jadwin Hall basement had that wonderful gallery, and it also had the blackboards full of wonderful gnomic writings by our fellow-midnight-wanderer John Nash. And if I think back to the younger self I was then, I would have been very pleased but not too surprised to know Frank would end up with his picture in Jadwin Hall. But I would have been darn surprised that John Nash got a Nobel Prize before Frank did!

I can remember, in 1972 and 1973, how much it meant to us both to be welcomed into the Princeton physics community. I was so excited the first time David and Shula Gross invited us over to visit them at their house! But that was just the first of many happy times spent together. In fact, if our daughter Amity could be said to have a third parent, that third parent would be Elisheva Gross. Elisheva was just a baby when Frank and I married, but she was such a beautiful and smart and charming baby that she got us both thinking that we’d like our own Elisheva.

Sam and Joan Treiman were also a very important part of bringing young physicists into the physics community. I remember so many physics parties at their house — we would all gather in the living room for food and chat — then all the men would disappear down cellar where Sam would whup them one and all at ping pong. Joan made her part of this all look so effortless that it would be easy to forget to say “Thank you, Joan,” but I don’t ever want to forget to say it. Thank you, Joan! I wish Sam were also here to be part of this moment.

What a year 2005 has turned out to be! The World Year of Physics, some say, or the International Year of Physics according to other groups. In England, they’re calling it the Year of Einstein. Yes, physics is really in the news these days.

Why even our government is talking now about “The Nuclear Option.” Or, in the case of our president, “the nucular option.” So, what a great time to be a physicist!

I guess my talk hasn’t really been much of a roast — I’d have to say it’s really more of a toast. A toast to physics. A toast to the physics community. And here’s to Frank and David — congratulations.