Physicist Amok

New York has a rather desultory book culture. Thus the odds of running into a book mad friend in the Strand while he’s visiting New York are not as astronomical as they might seem.

But they’re still long. Imagine my surprise, then, when I rounded a corner searching for Ezra Pound’s ABCs of Reading (didn’t find it) and run into Paul Gazzoli, the great white hope of UVA’s classics department, now happily ensconced for his PhD at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge.

We paid for our books (I did get a copy of Chronicles of Tao, a book I read half of while visiting my friend Richard), and I dragged him off to lunch at Arium. We chattered about all kinds of things, including how he’s started dressing like a character out of P.G. Wodehouse. In fact, he’s looking more and more like our early music director Paul Walker every day.

How nice to have someone to talk to about obscure places in Europe and archaic languages with again! Maybe I’ll try to extend my stay in Europe and descend upon him for couple days in Cambridge.

Physics Musings points to a Physics Today article about common misconceptions of quantum mechanics students. This is a topic dear to my heart, as I hope someday to teach the subject myself.

I have a lot of ideas about what to include and how to present it, but I’ll save them for another time. My principal complaint is that there’s not enough relation to reality. Quantum mechanics is fundamentally about what happens when you go into a laboratory and start messing with stuff (said the theorist).

Most quantum mechanics books today are watered down versions of Schiff’s classic text. A few have departed from that path, notably Feynman (volume 3 of the Lectures), Schwinger (a fascinating, if idiosyncratic, book), and Sakurai (insert obligatory gripe over the scattering chapter he didn’t write here).

Let us remember the origin of Schiff. It was based on Oppenheimer’s lectures on quantum mechanics, which were given to graduate students who needed the theory in their work. The experimental motivation for the abstract mathematics was obvious: it was why they were bothering in the first place.

The situation has changed. Now this approach is being used for undergraduates with little experimental background, who have not already mastered the classical eigenfunction techniques in electromagnetism or the Hamiltonian formalism that motivated Schrodinger’s wave mechanics

In lab meeting this morning, I had another of those moments that remind me I’m not in physics anymore.

We apparently have a fairly new -80°C freezer in BL3 (Biosafety Level 3, for those with benign organisms). It doesn’t take the same rack size as the previous one. The old racks are too deep for it. My lab groaned about how many thousands of dollars it would cost to get new, properly sized racks.

I say, “Why don’t we just take a hacksaw to them? Or I know the high energy physics machine shop has a metal bandsaw.� You would have thought I had grown a second head.

It was almost as bad as when I recommended condoms to maintain a partial seal on flasks in the autoclave. They’re the sturdiest membrane for your money, and I’m sure some of the tougher materials will happily survive autoclaving even if straight latex won’t.