Julian Schwinger Being Funny
That 2-part series will have to wait for a time when I’m less preoccupied.
For now, I’d like to write an amusing passage from “The Second Creation” by Robert P. Crease and Charles C. Mann:
“…at the beginning of his third year, Glashow asked Schwinger to be his thesis adviser. So did eleven other students. To Schwinger’s consternation, he found all of them waiting in his office one day. Thinking to test their abilities and avoid dealing with them as a pack, he devised an enormously complicated problem and instructed the multitude to work on it and return, one by one, with their solutions.
“‘So of course we collaborated,’ Glashow recalled. ‘The twelve of us came back a few days later, all at the same time, having solved the problem. He was happy with the solution – it was very elegant – but not so happy with the complete failure of his scheme to sort out the masses. So he then came up with a problem for each of us to work on individually, and in that way, against his will, got us all started on our theses.”
