When Richard Feynman came back to Ojai’s Summer Science Program in 1960 for a second, unscheduled visit, his topic was what he called “smallness.” Today that field, in which he was a visionary, is called nanotechnology.
Having been mesmerized by Feynman’s brilliance and wit during his talk on Relativity a couple of weeks earlier, we 26 science/math nerds were energized when he began by asking us to… Continue reading “Smallness”
In 1960, I sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, my feet thrust out, listening to Caltech’s Richard Feynman explain Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Einstein, dead for only five years, was an icon and a Nobel Laureate. I was too young and unread then to know that Feynman, as well, would become both. Continue reading “At the Feet of Richard Feynman”
Several years ago my brothers (Lanny and Doug) and I were on Long Island where Doug, a well-known performer of modern Jewish music, had a concert scheduled. The show was set for 7:30 p.m., with a sound check an hour earlier, but it was just 4:45 and Doug was hungry. Because a full stomach does not make for a comfortable and melodious performance, Doug opted for a snack at a nearby Sunrise Highway diner.
Everything grew easily where I grew up. In the long Southern California seasons of sun and moderate warmth, there was no challenge.
I suspect, looking back, that such gardening ease actually produced a glory of flowering plants, but there are only two in my childhood memory: zinnias and nasturiums. When I was eight, I planted zinnias Continue reading “Flowers Bugged Me”
So here’s how the story goes, as told to me by my Uncle Max (long-deceased).
Somewhere in the late 1890s (I could be off by ten years), a man by the name of Tudrus Zlutchin (another branch of the family claims that the surname was Dudek) landed at Ellis Island from Russia with his wife and three (maybe two, maybe four) children. He came from a shtetl just outside of Nizhni Novgorod (now Russia’s third-largest city). Continue reading “Ellis Island Vignette”
Almost two months had passed by my Harvard freshman door. It was 1961, early November, and the air was crisp and blue-gray. I had moved into Pennypacker Hall from a smallish farm town 60 miles northwest of Los Angeles, the smartest of 900 kids graduating from a large public high school that had never sent a student to the Ivy League in its 64-year history. My admission, with headlines bolding its uniqueness, had blossomed on the front page of our daily newspaper the previous April. A month later there was a letter to the editor from a retiree in Arizona who peevishly and poignantly reset the record with his story of a 1933 admission to Yale that he had turned down due to lack of funds.
The first month at Harvard had been manageable, although I had previously read few things more dense than a textbook. The next couple of weeks crosscut my footing with assignments in Aristotle and Piaget, and I began to teeter. I anesthetized my anxiety about insufficient studying by playing contract bridge, and on this particular night I was trolling the halls, searching for a fourth. Continue reading “George W. S. Trow (1943-2006)”