Boring Scientists

I am going to be a victim of my own success; with the debut of ‘Irresistible Ben’ (my grandson, not the Big Ben) on my blog, it might attract more people to the site.  And that will be all they want to read ignoring the ‘real stuff’ on the blog.  I am more of a self-effacing guy than of a self-aggrandizing one, but, when talking about Ben, I can not but talk like a bragging blogger.

I plan to move the ‘Irresistible Ben’ to the bottom of the page, and Jo already warned me that will change nothing, as one can always fast scroll down to it.

I am fully aware that few people will be intrigued by the likes of Dirac, Feynman, or Glauber. I always bought those yearly The Best American Science Writing books in the bargain books section. Janice, I got another one at Harvard Square when we last visited you.

In Political Scientist (a profile of Harold Varmus in the June 7, 1999 issue of The New Yorker), the author lamented how Harvard Crimson was full of mockery abut this nobody who had been invited to give the Commencement Address (1996), Dr. Varmus began the Address by repeating some of the responses reported on the Crimson: “Who is he?” “Wow, that’s boring.  Everyone got someone exciting.” and he said “Editorials criticized the process by which 'Dr. Who' was selected.  I was featured in entertaining cartoons, something that hasn’t happened during three years in Washington [He was appointed as the Director of NIH by then President Clinton in 1993.  He is now the president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.]  I may never be this famous again.”

Harold Varmus was actually on the list of my Cultivated Renaissance Men in Science list (more to come about this Nobel laureate).  And if this could happen in the intellectual Harvard, then it is no surprise that my writing of those ‘boring’ scientists will interest few, if any.  Recruiting Irresistible Ben is my desperate attempt to keep the traffic flowing. 

Intellectual Colognes

Cologne is nonessential in my life; never feel any need of it.  I was never attracted to it until now.

Inspired by New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter’s cologne, Driven, Steve Mirsky wrote a humor column in the November 2006 issue of Scientific American with a title of Uncommon Scents.  He makes up 18 colognes, each honoring or ‘exploiting’ a scientist.  I’ll mention a few here and say a few things to make it more educational; so you would have fun while learning something.  The aim of my blogging is to educate, enlighten and entertain, after all.

I wonder how Avon would market Driven in the Red Sox Nation? Big Poppi and Manny Ramirez, lovable though they may be, probably not fit to sell cologne.  I think the best answer from Boston to the New York Yankees' Jeter would be Patriots’ Tom Brady.

Alessandro Volta’s Charge   (Charge is the name of the cologne to be marketed)

Ingredients:  Cat hair, amber, balloons.

Slogan:  Make sparks fly.

Volt (unit of electric potential) and voltage derives from him.  If your name became a unit of scientific measurement or a constant, you are a scientific great or a Nobel laureate.  But, Volta (1745-1827) was in pre-Nobel era.  His Voltaic pile is the forerunner of modern battery.  He used copper (or silver) and zinc (this is what we learn in high school chemistry—electrochemical cell) to produce electrons (of course, we have to wait another 100 years or so to learn that it was electrons flowing that does the trick)

My slogan to sell Alessandro Volta’s Charge  would be “When 陰 (Yin) and  陽 (Yang) meet, let it spark!”

陰 (Yin) is female or negatively charged, and  陽 (Yang) is male or positively charged.

Antoine Lavoisier’s Chemistry

Ingredients: Hydrogen, oxygen.

Slogan:  When the elements come together, you may lose your head.

Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry (included in the Britannica Great Books) is very modern; no wonder he is touted as the Father of Modern Chemistry.  Many concepts are credited to him:  hydrogen combines with oxygen yields water, Laws of Conservation of Mass, diamond is the crystalline form of carbon, and role of oxygen plays in combustion.  Lavoisier (1743-1794) was beheaded during the French Revolution.  When he was sentenced to death, he requested time to complete some scientific work, the presiding judge was said to have answered “The Republic has no need of scientists.”  This judge symbolizes the collective French National Disgrace and Shame.

The slogan of ‘you may lose your head’ was twisted into somewhat different meaning that is fitting for selling cologne.

J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Cataclysm

Ingredients:  Desert sand, enriched geranium.

Slogan:  Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds, but with a delicate floral hint.

I read Oppei’s biography: American Prometheus this past summer.  On his reflection of seeing the mushroom clouds rising from the first test explosion of atomic bomb (code name Trinity), he wrote, quoting from the Hindu sacred Scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One." and “I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."

My campaign slogan for Cataclysm  would be: Let this American Prometheus steal fire and passion to stir your static mind, so when the moment is right, you will be ready!  (I must have watched too much Cialis TV commercial)

The following colognes are my own invention.

Kary Mullis’ Flamboyant Flame

Mullis’ polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is simplistically beautiful, matching that of DNA structure—the best tool we ever had in propelling the genetic science to the one as we come to know today.  I am still trying to understand this flamboyant ‘playboy’ Nobel laureate (1993, Chemistry)

My slogan to sell Flamboyant Flame:  Get out of Lab, play the game, not necessarily by the rule, be uninhibited and outrageous, explore the world, get a life, be all you can be.

Hwang Woo Suk's Blind Ambition or Cheating Heart

When the South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk announced his creation of many new lines of embryonic stem cells last year, critics claimed the American counterparts had fallen behind because of President George Bush's stem cell policy.  Then the superstar scientist fell like a rock after his fraudulent scheme was exposed.

Shortly after the Blind Ambition or Cheating Heart was launched, it was discovered all the ingredients are fake, so the product was quickly pulled out of shelf and its marketing slogan was deleted from this page

Cultivated Renaissance Men in Science: Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer's greatest gift is his intellect, quick mind, and capacity to understand things esoteric; he spreaded the 'gospel' of quantum mechanics in the States after he returned from Europe.  Oppie was a “cultivated scholar, a linguist of eight tongues.”  He read Marcel Proust in French, Dante in Italian, and Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in German.  He studied Greek and Latin before going to Harvard in 1922, and where he read the entire 3000 pages of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon.  (The New York Times wrote in his obituary that he read it on a train trip from California to the East Coast.)  He gave a lecture in Dutch six weeks after arriving Netherlands to study with Ehrenfest.

On his reflection of seeing the mushroom clouds rising from the first test explosion of atomic bomb, he wrote, quoting from the Hindu sacred Scripture, "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One." and “I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."

Cultivated Renaissance Men in Science: Roy Glauber

Richard Feynman, the ‘Genius’ (the title of his biography by James Gleick) was thrilled when he learned that the Descriptive Astronomy can be considered a required humanity course at MIT.  He couldn’t enjoy reading anything other than math or sciences.  “He tried to read Goethe’s Faust and felt he could make no sense of it.”

Not all scientists are alike; the following is from the Banquet Speech by Roy Glauber (see photo – one of the three Nobel laureates in Physics in 2005, still teaching at Harvard at age of 81) If there are two or three recipients, the Banquet Speech is usually presented by the elder, the more seasoned one.  He also mentioned A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“These dark days in emphasize the importance of light in our lives. It is equally important in our literature. The word, 'light', has vastly many meanings. Shakespeare, in Love's Labours Lost, has one of his cleverer characters make fun of that by speaking the line, 'Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile ...'  Loosely translated, that means: Intellect, seeking understanding, easily fools reason. - Or perhaps it's the other way around.”

The following is how he ended his Nobel Lecture:

Einstein at Princeton in 1951--by Roy Glauber

“I’d like, as a final note, to share with you an experience I had in 1951, while I was a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Possessed by the habit of working late at night – in fact on photon statistics13 at the time – I didn’t often appear at my Institute desk early in the day. Occasionally I walked out to the Institute around noon, and that was closer to the end of the work day for Professor Einstein. Our paths thus crossed quite a few times, and on one of those occasions I had ventured to bring my camera.  He seemed more than willing to let me take his picture as if acknowledging his role as a local landmark, and he stood for me just as rigidly still. Here, [Left Figure], is the hitherto unpublished result. I shall always treasure that image, and harbor the enduring wish I had been able to ask him just a few questions about that remarkable year, 1905.”

Glauber’s Nobel Lecture gives a good summary of the birth of quantum mechanics—during 1924-26 when Louis de Broglie, Heisenberg and Schrodinger were working on the atoms. But, Glauber makes it clear that it was Dec. 14, 1900 when Max Planck announced his revolutionary idea that energy emitted by a resonator could only take a discrete value (quanta, hence quantum mechanics) that separates the classical physics and quantum mechanics.  Based on Planck’s concept, Einstein proposed in 1905 that light is also quantized—his photoelectric effect earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 (his more famous E = mc² never got him a Nobel), and Planck was so honored in 1918.

Sweden's Crown Princess Victoria seated between the Nobel Laureates in Physics

While watching Glauber’s Nobel Lecture video, I lost him when he came to his work; my limited math (calculus) background deprives me of so much joy.  In summer reading_6/2004, I wrote I struggled for many years trying to better understand quantum mechanics and eventually gave it up when I couldn’t fully understand Schrodinger’s wave function equation.  I have come to realize that without higher level calculus, I can’t ever grasp the concept.  And Dirac’s equation of electrodynamics is the extension of Schrodinger’s and Feynman’s Dirac’s.  The point I try to make is that without a good foundation of math (calculus), one can not do physics.

 

Writing about Glauber’s Nobel Prize in fall reflection_10/8/2005, I wrote, “Let there be light: and there was light.”  I am pleased to note that on Dec. 8, 2005 when he gave the Nobel Lecture, he also began with something like this:  Our good Lord said, “Let there be quantum electrodynamics.” . . . that was the modern translation of the Hebrew.  We quote the same Scripture, but he said it in a more poetic, aesthetic, subtle and dynamic way, no doubt.
(photo comes from nobelprize.org site)