Friday, October 01, 2010

On living like kings

A colleague saw my recent post Living like kings and sent the following message.

Hi Steve,

I found your blog post about physics & scenery, with the nice picture of San Francisco Bay, funny and oddly appropriate to my day. A few hours ago I was sitting in a rocking chair in front of a giant window at Seattle airport watching a beautiful sunset and reading a popular science book on Quantum Mechanics, and thinking that it's a great way to be spending an evening working. Livin' like a king!

(To answer the obvious questions: no, I don't know why Seattle airport has rocking chairs. The book is for a course I'm developing for our new HHMI funded science literacy program, for which I am one of the guinea pigs. I was at the airport on my way to Walla Walla, where I'm giving a talk tomorrow at the NW section of the APS meeting, which I agreed to before realizing how hard it is to get to Walla Walla. It occurred to me, incidentally, that the seat was ideal, since it captures a chair's hard, particle-like nature together with the gentle oscillations of a wave.)

best wishes,

R

Robert Oppenheimer once wrote to his younger brother Frank about ...physics and the obvious excellences of the life it brings :-) Of course, things aren't quite what they were in the good old days.

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