by Lawrence Bush on February 14, 2012
Richard Feynman, who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1965 and was one of the world’s great popularizers of science, died on this date in 1988. Born in Far Rockaway, New York, he did not speak until he was three but proved to be a math prodigy. He attended MIT as an undergraduate and Princeton for graduate studies, where his first seminar was attended by Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann. “Feynman seemed to possess a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations,” writes James Gleick, his biographer, “like Albert Einstein at the same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau — but few others.” Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project and then became an influential teacher at Cornell and Caltech, with many of his lectures collected into books, including The Feynman Lectures on Physics, of which more than 3 million copies have been sold in various languages. His many other books include Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think? A lifelong atheist, Feynman preferred not to identity as Jewish, even ethnically: “To select for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory,” he wrote in declining to be included in a book on Jewish Nobel laureates. (He probably would not have approved of his inclusion in JEWDAYO, either.)
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” —Richard Feynman
by Lawrence Bush on February 8, 2012
Two international teams of astronomers announced on this date in 1998 that the observable galaxies in our universe are flying apart at accelerating speeds, implying the existence of an unknown, self-propelling property of space that Albert Einstein had predicted and named the “cosmological constant.” Two of the three team leaders, Saul Perlmutter at the Berkeley National Laboratory, and Adam Reiss of the High-z Supernova Search Team in Australia, are Jews, and they along with Brian P. Schmidt were awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics for their work. Astronomers from Chile, England, France, Germany, and Sweden were also involved in the research, which found evidence in the traces of ancient, exploding stars. Also on this date, in 1848, Caroline Lucretia Herschel died at age 98 in Germany. She was the daughter of a Jewish oboist father, and was the sister of the famed astronomer William Herschel. Together they discovered and named Uranus; on her own, Caroline found three nebulae and eight comets. A crater on the moon is named for her.
“she whom the moon ruled/ like us/ levitating into the night sky/riding the polished lenses
“Galaxies of women, there/ doing penance for impetuousness/ ribs chilled/ in those spaces of the mind” —Adrienne Rich, “Planetarium”
by Lawrence Bush on February 7, 2012
The inventor of holography (a form of three-dimensional imaging), Dennis Gabor (Günzberg), died on this date in 1979. The Hungarian-born scientist fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and did his research — for which he won the 1971 Nobel Prize in physics — in Great Britain. In his autobiography for the Nobel Committee, Gabor noted that “a serious mismatch has developed between technology and our social institutions,” and that “inventive minds ought to consider social inventions as their first priority.” This conviction was expressed in three books, Inventing the Future, 1963, Innovations, 1970, and The Mature Society, 1972. Holography is widely used in data storage, security, modern art, DVD recorders, and other technical applications.
“The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of evils and damages by technology of yesterday.” —Dennis Gabor
by Lawrence Bush on October 18, 2011
Leon M. Lederman, Melvin Schwartz, and Jack Steinberger shared the 1988 Nobel Prize for physics on this date in 1988 for their research at Columbia University during the 1960s into what the Nobel Committee called “the innermost structure and dynamics of matter.” Lederman is director emeritus of the Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Illinois; Schwartz, who died in 2006, was associate director at Brookhaven National Lab; Steinberger, a child refugee from Nazi Germany, is now a department director at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland. Their achievement was in “transforming the ghostly neutrino . . . into an active tool of research” by sufficiently concentrating neutrino beams to “reveal the hard inner parts of a proton in a way not dissimilar to that in which X-rays reveal a person’s skeleton.” Their neutrino beam techniques have become a critical element of subatomic particles research.
“Our sun is a source of neutrinos . . . Every square centimeter on Earth is bombarded by many billion solar neutrinos every second and they pass straight through the Earth without leaving a noticeable mark. The neutrinos are — if I may say so — ‘lazy,’ they do almost nothing but steal energy, which they carry away. . . . The great achievement of the Nobel prize winners was to put the ‘lazy’ neutrinos to work.” —Professor Gösta Ekspong, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Richard Feynman, who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1965 and was one of the world’s great popularizers of science, died on this date in 1988. Born in Far Rockaway, New York, he did not speak until he was three but proved to be a math prodigy. He attended MIT as an undergraduate and Princeton for graduate studies, where his first seminar was attended by Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann. “Feynman seemed to possess a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations,” writes James Gleick, his biographer, “like Albert Einstein at the same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau — but few others.” Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project and then became an influential teacher at Cornell and Caltech, with many of his lectures collected into books, including The Feynman Lectures on Physics, of which more than 3 million copies have been sold in various languages. His many other books include Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think? A lifelong atheist, Feynman preferred not to identity as Jewish, even ethnically: “To select for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory,” he wrote in declining to be included in a book on Jewish Nobel laureates. (He probably would not have approved of his inclusion in JEWDAYO, either.)
