Charles Hard Townes died a week ago, aged 99. He was a physicist at Berkeley who came up with the principle of the laser; at age 98, he’d stopped coming into the office every day. His obituaries are thorough and their praise is justified. I’d met him for reasons the obituaries don’t mention. He helped […]
Jason
Part 1 is here. While Murph was still at Princeton, in his first years there, he was spending summers consulting, sometimes for defense contractors, sometimes for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. (A lot of physicists did this: academic scientists’ salaries run for nine months; they needed summer money.) Then a little later, during the post-Sputnik years, […]
What an odd-looking person this Freeman Dyson is. His nose is long, his ears stick out, his smile is tentatively friendly, but what to make of those eyes? Dyson is hard to describe: he’s not like anyone you’ve met before and whatever he says is not what you’ll expect him to say. He’s spent his […]