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

Long ago, in a galaxy far away…that is, on April 30, 2005, in Princeton…

portraits of Frank Wilczek and David Gross were added to the gallery of Princeton’s Nobel Prize winners in Jadwin Hall.

I just posted my whole “roast” dinner speech; here’s some of it…

In 1973, when this work was being done, Frank and I used to admire those portraits of Nobel laureates, on our many long late-night strolls through the bowels of Princeton…

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!

Anyway, the rest of it is here…

Here’s my email-to-Kiruna version of the story:

Calling all Rymdgymnasiet aliens and their mentors!

The MIT news office wrote up the story of the DNA auction and posted it this morning. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/wilczek.html

Now somebody else has already picked up the story: http://www.physorg.com/news3595.html

I’m sending you this email from Boston’s airport (I love wifi!) where we’re en route to the annual meeting of the Dutch Physical Society. They say it’s springtime there–I can hardly wait. Our own garden’s snow covering just barely melted and not even one crocus or daffodil has replaced it.

Best regards to all, and I hope you enjoy this story as much as I did,
Betsy

You can’t see it in this photo–I have to leave a few surprises for Penn and Teller’s TV show–but Frank has been showing the camera some very, very spooky levitation effects. Here you see two actual physics demo ninjas–Markos Hankin and Patrick Ragsdale (the same Patrick Ragsdale who does scriptalias.com)–who set up these effects in MIT’s Junior Physics Lab. If something flies off the table or catches on fire, these are the folks who step in to make everything right.

Right now they’re just watching the show. I’ll keep you blog-posted on when you can do the same. Penn and Teller’s third season, with the segment on ghosts, starts later this spring.

Inside Frank’s office, the interview filming has started.

I’m not sure if I’m happy or sad that the giant, big-gestured Penn and the fast-fingered Teller aren’t here in person to ask Frank their emailed questions. (They’re in Las Vegas somewhere, appearing nightly in “an edgy mix of comedy and magic involving knives, guns, fire, a gorilla and a showgirl.” The MIT physics group could absorb all those elements with easy savoir faire–except for the fire, which would set off our overhead sprinklers.

Meanwhile, I noticed on the Penn and Teller Showtime webpage for “Talking to the Dead” that the “experts” are shown all together with links to their homepages. That is, the “Your mother is speaking with my voice” medium (Penn called her, if I remember this right, a “pigdog”) is on just the same basis as the respectfully photographed debunking psychologist…

Meanwhile, I am so tempted to stand outside Frank’s closed door and make a very soft and ghostly “Whoooooooooo”….

We just arrived at Frank’s office–there before us were MIT’s physics demo guru Markos Hankin and Penn and Teller’s director Scott Firestone. I’m hoping this is the same Scott Firestone who directed The Panda Adventure in IMAX, but I can’t ask him because he went downstairs to buy some bottled water.

I also can’t show you what he looks like yet, because he pointed out it would look more interesting once the cameras arrive. And he is the director….

Years ago, when our now-grown-up daughters were smaller, Frank and I moved into Einstein’s house, where we would live for the next 8 or so years, surrounded by Einstein’s furniture.

Of course, we two planned to sleep in Einstein’s bedroom, a tiny room that was dwarfed by Einstein’s study right next to it. Einstein’s big Biedermeier bed was not really big enough to hold two people, we later decided, but on our first night there we didn’t know that yet.

Now, I don’t believe in ghosts, not even in Einstein’s. But it was very strange, in the middle of that first night, to wake up and hear the sound of slow, heavy breathing that was not Frank’s breathing or my breathing or the breathing of one of our daughters.

Whish–pause–whoosh. Whish–pause–whoosh.

It’s one thing not to believe in ghosts, and it’s another thing not to be spooked by strange midnight noises!

One of the good (and bad) things about a small bed is that if you are awake in the middle of the night, you don’t have to do something active to wake up your partner. Your partner will automatically wake up anyway. Here’s how it played out, at least in my recollections:

Mysterious noise: Whish–pause–whoosh. Whish–pause–whoosh.
Frank: (Sleepily) Betsy, is something wrong?
Mysterious noise: Whish–pause–whoosh. Whish–pause–whoosh.
Betsy: (very tiny voice) What is that noise?
Mysterious noise: Whish–pause–whoosh. Whish–pause–whoosh.
Frank: It’s the steam radiator.
Radiator noise: Whish–pause–whoosh. Whish–pause–whoosh.
Betsy: Oh.

So Penn and Teller may not realize it, but when they got Frank, they got a real ghostbuster!