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

Driving near Harvard Square is…educational. The world’s most aggressive drivers are totally vanquished by the world’s most entitled pedestrians.

Today, as I struggled to drive my car through a short green light, Frank took me to a new level of enlightenment:

Betsy, to the pedestrians who couldn’t hear me: “I don’t suppose it means anything to you that I have a green light here.”

Frank, in the persona of a pedestrian: “It means we can walk but we can’t make eye contact.”

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I didn’t know that the Nobel Foundation had posted a bunch of our family photos in Frank’s Nobel biography.

Regular readers of this blog have seen Frank with devil horns, posing with that notorious imp Richard Feynman, but I also really love this angelic photo of him giving a very long-ago talk.

Also, I must confess, the way I looked playing guitar in my early twenties…

There are certain problems with having a wife who blogs. For example, if you say something funny to a bunch of your high school classmates, your wife is likely to scribble it down on a paper napkin so that she can blog it later.

Then, four months later, she re-finds the paper napkin. So today (ta da!) I’m blogging two fine Frank Wilczek quotes!

I went off to college planning to major in math or philosophy–
of course, both those ideas are really the same idea.

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In physics, your solution should convince a reasonable person.
In math, you have to convince a person who’s trying to make trouble.
Ultimately, in physics, you’re hoping to convince Nature.
And I’ve found Nature to be pretty reasonable.

Now I’m headed to the blogless backwoods of NH–while I’m gone, read the folks on my blogroll, assuming they don’t all decide to take time off now also.

At the American Academy for Achievement’s 2005 International Achievement Summit, prizewinners each give a short speech to student delegates–about 200 Rhodes Scholars, etc. from 50 countries. So we all heard some darn good speeches but of course the best was given by Frank Wilczek–short, pithy, informative, and very funny.

I especially like his illustration of how to choose problems wisely:

It’s easy to give vague advice, but I will break new ground, and give you an algorithm. Many of you are probably thinking about getting married, and naturally you would like to maximize your chance of finding the best possible mate. I’ll give you an algorithm for that….

Wait, I hope this doesn’t mean I’m a problem…

If you want Frank’s algorithm, and to understand why my new nickname is “N over e plus one”, here’s Frank’s 5-minute talk including as a bonus Einstein’s favorite joke.

At the American Academy for Achievement’s 2005 International Achievement Summit, prizewinners each give a short speech to the student delegates–about 200 Rhodes Scholars, etc. from 50 countries. So we all heard some darn good speeches but of course my favorite was given by Frank Wilczek–short, pithy, informative, and very funny. And I quote:

Dear students,

In preparing my advice for you I asked myself “What would Einstein say?” And it occurred to me that Einstein, being an intelligent fellow, would probably start with a joke. Fortunately I happen to know Einstein’s favorite joke. It turns out to be quite relevant. Here goes.

A man is having trouble with his car; it frequently stalls. So he goes to a garage, and asks them to fix it. They replace the transmission and put in new spark plugs. But his car still doesn’t run right, so he takes it to another garage. At this second garage, the mechanic pokes around for ten minutes, then pulls a screwdriver out of his belt and tightens a screw. And now the car runs perfectly.

But the man is irate when he gets a bill in the mail for $200. He storms back to the mechanic, and says, “This is outrageous! All you did was tighten a screw, and you ask for $200! I want an itemized bill!” So the mechanic takes out a pad and pencil, and writes down an itemized bill, as follows:

Labor: turning screw $5
Knowing which screw to turn: $195

My first piece of advice is to consider very carefully the possibilities for what you can do, before choosing. This principle works on several levels. You should consider many different possibilities for what general sort of work you want to do, before settling into one. And when you have finished one project, you should think about many different possibilities for what to do next. And when you encounter a problem, you should consider various possible approaches, before investing heavily in any one.

It’s easy to give vague advice, but I will break new ground, and give you an algorithm. Many of you are probably thinking about getting married, and naturally you would like to maximize your chance of finding the best possible mate. I’ll give you an algorithm for that.

You have to estimate the number N of suitors that you can expect to deal with over your career in courtship. We’ll assume that you evaluate them one at a time, and that once you’ve broken up with one, then that one is gone forever. Then what you should do is this. Evaluate, but do not accept, each of the first N/e suitors. Here e is a number, the base of natural logarithms, approximately 2.7. Then accept the first subsequent suitor who is better than all the earlier ones. That is how to maximize your chance of getting the best possible mate.

For example, if N is 10, then you should evaluate but reject each of the first 4 suitors, and accept to first one after that who is better than them. In my own case, I estimated N=3. I dutifully broke up with my first serious girlfriend, but the second was better, and I married her. It worked out fine.

Of course the precise assumptions that underlie this particular algorithm might not always be appropriate, but the underlying lesson is much more general. You should put considerable effort into gathering information before choosing what to invest in. The great mathematician Henri Poincare, when asked how he came up with such good creative ideas, responded, “I generate a lot of ideas, and discard most of them.” This is also Nature’s trick, in natural selection.

My second piece of advice is to learn about the history of your endeavor. This has many advantages. By reading masterworks you come in contact with great minds, and get to feel how they operate. Often the original works are well expressed, and you can learn valuable lessons about how to express yourself. Most important, you can begin to see yourself and your work as part of a continuing narrative, that started before you entered, and that will continue after you leave. That is a beautiful thing to realize.

Rebecca Mackinnon is promoting Valentine sonnets. I’m not posting my efforts–Joho’s will beat everyone for humor if not for love–but, speaking of Valentines and love, I love this 1983 picture of Frank Wilczek with legendary physics bad boy R.P. Feynman.

Yes, that’s the Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman Feynman, the Challenger disaster frozen O-Rings Feynman, safe-cracking, bongo-playing, Tuva-loving, 1965-Nobel-Prize-winning, 1918-1988 Richard P. Feynman.

About this photograph–first, roll your mental cameras back even farther, to 1972, the year I met Frank Wilczek. When I think back to those intense happy days, I can remember earnestly playing Bob Dylan records and moving the needle to tracks I thought Frank “should” hear. And I’ll never forget his introducing me to Feynman, by which he meant the tattered red three-volume Lectures in Physics he’d read by himself in high school to learn about physics. He sat me down next to him on some seedy Grad College sofa, put the first volume into my hands, and waited to enjoy the delight I would surely feel as soon as I started reading. These books were an intellectual treasure that he couldn’t wait to share–only later did I find out they were also a part of his personal odyssey–if I hadn’t been in love with him before, I would surely have fallen in love with him right then.

Now–ten-plus years, lots of physics, and two great kids later–we get to 1983. Murph Goldberger sent us this photo of Frank with Feynman at his (Murph’s) 60th birthday bash. No wonder Frank looks happy–even if Feynman is teasing him and our friend Sam Treiman is giving him “devil horn” fingers…

I’ve been hard at work collecting Frank Wilczek photos, which have to go out to a whole bunch of publications. So that and some chocolate will have to make up for my Valentine failure to come up with the really perfect love sonnet….

To AMITY AND MIRA:

“In vain does the God of War growl, snarl, roar, and try to interrupt
with bombards, trumpets, and his whole tarantaran. . . . Let us despise
the barbaric neighings which echo through these noble lands and awaken
our understanding and longing for the harmonies.” — Johannes Kepler
(1571 – 1630)

Introduction    xi
    
Acknowledgments     xv
    
i. Uniformity of Parts     
Prelude i: Reply to Keats (on the Rainbow)     3
1. The Nature of Color: We Are All Color-blind     6
2. Spectra: Music of the Spheres     12
3. Earth-stuff and Star-stuff     16
Rhapsody on N (The World Between)    20
    
ii. Uniformity of Structure    
Prelude ii: Radical Conservatism     25
4. The Cosmic Order of Galaxies     29
Doppler Shift     34
5. Expansion and Uniformity     38
6. Inferno and Afterglow     41
Three Ages    49
    
iii. Transformations    
Prelude iii: Treiman’s Theorem     55
7. New Star     58
8. The Weak Interaction     62
Ego and Survival     71

iv. lnevitability     
Prelude iv: Levels of Equilibrium     55
9. Universal Chemistry     58
10. Cooking with Gobar     62
11. Explosions and Fluorescence    71
    
v. Quantal Reality     
Prelude v: In the First Circle     99
12. Light as Waves     102
13. Light as Lumps     109
14. Laves     113
15. Branching Worlds     119
Frustration and Uncertainty     130
A Quantum Lottery    133
    
vi. Radical Uniformity in Microcosm     
Prelude vi: Back to Pythagoras     137
16. The Indistinguishable     143
17. Fields     155
Maxwell Redux     165
Virtual Particles    170
    
vii. Transforming Principles     
Prelude vii: The Search for Depth     173
18. Antimatter     177
19. Quarks: A Peculiar Chemistry     189
20. Colour     196
21. Gluons     200
How Asymptotic Freedom Discovered Me     207
22. Asymptotic Freedom     218
In Praise of QCD    226
    
viii. Symmetry Lost and Symmetry Found     
Prelude viii: Relative and Absolute     231
23. Interchangeable Worlds     235
24. More Perfect Worlds     240
25. A Suggested Unity     247
Coda: About the Table     259
26. Salt Mine     261
27. A Little Matter    265
    
ix. Radical Uniformity in Macrocosm     
Prelude ix: Genesis Machines     279
28. Horizons     285
29. Inflation    290
    
x. Quest     
Prelude x: No Firm Foundation     303
30. Families     306
31. Dark Matter     315
32. Hidden Harmonies     335
    
Notes    343
    
Index    349

vs.

I’m not complaining–I’m enjoying my real life one heck of a lot. And WW Norton just re-published the paperback version of Longing for the Harmonies, a book Frank and I wrote together that a whole generation of kids (maybe you?) used to learn about fun non-math physics.

Norton mailed us some paperbacks–the cover is new, but the text is an old friend. I love re-seeing the graphics I did with MacPaint and my dot matrix printer. I’ll post some another day.

Meantime, I even got an Amazon Associate link to help me track its statistics:

Anyway, if you buy a book by clicking on a link in my blog, I might ultimately get 50 cents.

Messing with html and hoping to get 50 cents does somehow feel more like the real me than dressing up in an evening gown every night–but the real me enjoyed that too, a month ago!