For good or ill, we have heroes. Over the years, three have been an influence in my life.
Richard Feynman, the late physicist, was a kid from New York who taught at Cal Tech. When a stranger asked him why he had Feynman diagrams, a well-known physics construct, painted on the sides of his camper van, he replied, “I’m Feynman.”
Besides being a genius, he was equally at ease chinning with the king of Sweden or chatting with hookers at the bars of Las Vegas. To value people not for what they own but by how well they treat each other — that’s heroic.
Albert Abraham Michelson was a local boy who went to school in San Francisco and in Angel’s Camp. He’s credited with being the first to accurately measure the speed of light, and he defined length in terms of light waves instead of on platinum bars. This changed our lives. I had the humbling experience of doing work on a super-precise machine he’d built years before I was born. I often told my students of a classical experiment he performed: to measure the movement of the Earth through what was then believed to be the “luminiferous ether.”
After many careful tries — and he was a master of precision — he announced failure. He told the truth, which makes him a hero for me.
This brings us to the third hero, who read of Michelson’s report of “failure,” melding it with other facts and experiments to come up with a radical theory. But he did so much more: the photoelectric effect, which governs many of the devices we enjoy; atomic energy; and, almost half a century before it became a reality, the equation predicting the laser.
When told what his salary would be at Princeton, he asked, “Could I live on less?” Meshugah, eh?
He said of his lineage, “The pursuit of knowledge is for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice, and the desire for personal independence, these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I belong to it.”
When I was in my 20s, I received an invitation to meet him and hear him lecture at Princeton. The night of the lecture I had “something important” to do. It’s been many decades since I forgot what that “something important” was, but I’ll never forget passing up the chance to meet my No. 1 hero. You guessed it — the man of the century, Albert Einstein.
Rabbi Marty Ballonoff, of blessed memory, once said that scientific research is analogous to prayer. I think of it as attempting to reveal G-d’s subtle laws.
It turns out that my three top heroes all happen to be Nobel laureates. They also happen to be of Jewish stock. Quite a remarkable coincidence…or is it?