Physicist Amok

In the first issue of my undergraduate physics department’s newsletter, I saw a notice of Julian Noble’s death.

My first thought was, “Now I can’t buy him lunch.” Late in my first year at the University of Virginia, when I was digesting quantum mechanics and relativity, I appeared on his doorstep with a general relativity question. He was about to leave for lunch, invited me along, gave me a wonderfully clear explanation, and bought me lunch over my protests, which he dismissed with, “Just buy me lunch when you get your PhD.”

I first met Noble when I was a prospective undergraduate visiting the department. I had been doing a lot of programming in Forth at the time, a language in which he was a well known expert, so I naturally sought him out. At his urging, I took his graduate computational physics course when I arrived in the fall. I have never met someone with such disregard for the background knowledge a student might lack. He demanded mathematical ability, but did it so casually that I did crazy things, such as constructing an operational knowledge of linear algebra in forty-eight hours. He taught me how fast I could drive myself, which has served me well ever since.

Noble’s humor was of a sadistic and irreverent variety. He could tell rabbi, minister, and priest jokes by the hour, and sought groans and cringes from his audience rather than laughter. He reveled in off-color jokes and bad puns, and insisted that I should take up the saxophone (I was already a serious violinist) so that I would have “sax and violins.”

Everyone who knew him late in his life would agree he was scatter-brained. His attention hopped like a flea among subjects as disparate as integral equations, public policy, and the Swiss. I suspect he wasn’t always like this. One day, in the middle of a discussion of random processes, he said to me, “No one should have to watch his own child die.” The way he said it told me a lot–watching his own son die of cancer had broken him.

Julian Noble was the strongest influence on my first years in physics. I really wish I could have bought him lunch.