Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2004

Some of those who apparently don't are the ones who find it difficult to
get up on their back legs and present their work to others. I found this at
university and, particularly, in IBM when there was quite a transfer of
technically-oriented (and clever) systems engineers to sales just before
System/370 was announced back in 1970. Some of the most technically bright
people I knew simply became speechless when asked to talk about their
research at university, even just in front of colleagues and the tutor.
Sales school in IBM (based on the XEROX sales training methodology) was a
nightmare for some of them, particularly the mock sales calls, objection
handling and closing techniques. I passed, but found that it tested skills
that did not come naturally to me at the time. I personally found it far
more difficult than getting a PhD.

I never met Feynman, but his work was part of my physics degree course. I
thought that his explanation of why a single electron can show diffraction
patterns in the classic "double slit" experiment, by summing up the
probabilities over all of its infinite pathways, was pure genius.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar did his fantastic work on white dwarfs during
the boat trip when he emigrated from India to America in the 1930s. Genius
too, IMHO.

http://chandra.harvard.edu/about/chandra.html

Can't argue with either of these final paragraphs. I'd say that it applies
to graduates anywhere, and seminars in business as well as academia.

Indeed.

I imagine it would have been clear at Feynman's thesis defense that he
knew what he was talking about.

Hm.  I went to a junior high in which students had to go out for a
sport, which meant changing and showering in the locker room every day
or more often, and I remember exactly one mention of somebody's penis
size.  And I spent overly long in grad school and remember one or two
admiring comments about people who were really smart, but no
comparisons and very little on the topic at all.

Now that I've seen.  Mostly from certain professors.

That's what the session is for.

That's the romantic myth.

The degeneration of academic life hadn't progressed that far
in the days of Pauli and Feynman.

Posturing by itself won't do it,
not even when you are Feynman,

Jan

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(The link is long and you'll have to join it if it gets split.)

Sure, but even so...

   The freezing process is an interesting one. The dissolved sugar,
   by getting in the way of water molecules that must bond together
   to form ice crystals, lowers the freezing point of the solution
   from 32° to about 27°F (0° to -3°C).  At this temperaturethe
   watermolecules have slowed down enough that their mutual
   attraction becomes stronger than the disruptive influence of the
   sugar.  As they crystallize, the water molecules are removed from
   the solution, which means that the *remaining* solution gets more
   concentrated with sugar: and so its freezing point is lowered even
   further.   (The same concentration effect increases the boiling
   point in sugar solutions during candy making...)  It is clear from
   this trend that the liquid phase of ice cream will *never* freeze
   completely, though the lower the temperature gets, the less liquid
   remains.  Ice cream is noticeably softer at 22°F (-6°C)--the
   typical temperature of soft ice cream--than at 0°F (-18°C) because
   half of the water is still liquid at the first temperature, but
   only 20% of it is liquid at the second.  At 10°F (-12°C), the
   recommended serving temperature of regular ice cream, a half
   gallon will contain about a cup of liquid: a proportion that
   provides the right yielding, semisolid consistency.

            Harold McGee, _On Food and Cooking_, pp. 27-8, emphasis
            his.