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Quoth my office mate:
You know the movie Fifth Element? Humanity does horrible things, is violent, low minded, and hateful. In the end, love saves everything. That’s not quite right, what saves humanity is Landau and Lifshitz and The Sopranos.
If you talk to some physicists you might hear something like “Not a single word in the series is Landau’s, and not a single idea is Lifshitz’.” Mermin disagrees:
The great Russian physicist L. D. Landau was said to have hated writing. He coauthored an extraordinary series of textbooks in collaboration with E. M. Lifshitz, who did all the writing. From my perspective Lifshitz operated in a coauthor’s paradise. He was linked to nature through Landau, who was in deep nonverbal communion with her, but had no investment whatever in the process of articulating that communion.
It is also said that even Landau’s profound technical papers were actually written by Lifshitz. Many physicists look down on Lifshitz: Landau did the physics, Lifshitz wrote it up. I don’t believe that for a minute. If Evgenii Lifshitz really wrote the amazing papers of Landau, he was doing physics of the highest order. Landau was not so much a coauthor, as a natural phenomenon — an important component of the remarkable coherence of the physical world that Lifshitz wrote about so powerfully in the papers of Landau.
Comment [3]
To make sure that we don’t end up with two Molecule of the Month posts in a row (meaning no posts for a whole month!), I’ll take this opportunity to link to an interesting discussion at Female Science Professor’s blog about the academic’s insult “I’ve never of heard of you” and the related issues surrounding recognizing famous people at conferences. There are lots of great anecdotes in the comments, including my favourite:
When I was a grad student, I was once at a conference and met someone who I vaguely recognized, who obviously knew me. He wasn’t wearing a name tag. I was frantically trying to remember where I knew him from. After about 20 minutes I figured it out: He was famous Prof. W, who I had last met about 10 months prior when I interviewed with him for a postdoctoral position — and I got the position. In fact, my PhD had taken a bit longer to finish up, and I was about to start working with him in another month. Fortunately he didn’t ask me what I was working on, because I would have told him “I’m about to start a postdoc with Prof. W!”
While on the topic of humour, any physicist readers might appreciate this post at Cocktail Party Physics on Physical Theories as Men and the McSweeney’s essay that inspired it: Physical Theories as Women.
On Twitter, anyway. Twitter is a venue for “microblogging”, or posting, in 140 characters or less, some commentary. That Richard Dawkins signed up for an account at all is interesting, but last night his account was evidently hacked by a self-proclaimed Christian to try to reach some of Dawkins’ followers. Before it gets cleaned up, here’s a screenshot of the page as of this morning:
If that’s a bit too small to read, here it is reproduced (in non-140 character-limited form):
While I still have 1700 of you paying attention, I just wanted to say: Whatever you believe, respect others beliefs. It’s not wrong to be kind to people who don’t believe the same as you. You don’t have to be militant atheists. People who claim to be Christians can be hypocrites, but they’re just people, and all people make mistakes. Try to be good to one another. That is my message of peace to all of you. Love one another. It’s ok. Consider that being hostile towards others has never won any followers. Richard Dawkins is just an old man trying to leave behind a legacy. Just like I, a Chrisitan do not follow Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, don’t be mislead by someone just because they share your belief system. It’s easy to be against people who are different than you, but try not to be like that. Take the high road, unlike RD.
Very strange. I don’t find Richard Dawkins to be particularly hateful towards people who are religious, even in The God Delusion (despite the somewhat inflammatory title).
If you want to see what happens next, you can follow Dawkins’ on Twitter here.
Update — Nothing to see here afterall. Commenter Mark pointed out that this was a fake account to begin with. That makes the whole thing even stranger.
Comment [5]
If you find yourself in Toronto this Saturday, May 10, you should check out the wide variety of events going on under the Science Rendezvous umbrella, everything from science demos at universities or malls to lectures by one of Canada’s own Nobel laureates, John Polanyi.
I’ll be presenting optics demos with the Institute for Optical Sciences in the McLennan Physics building at the St. George campus of the University of Toronto, and there will be all kinds of other interesting things happening in the immediate vicinity of the physics and chemistry buildings — click here to see them all.
If you need any further convincing, you can see some of the neat experiments we’ll be demonstrating in this video – my Ph.D. advisor’s enthusiasm is catching.
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
