Glauber

I really should be getting ready for work today, but I'm catching up from all the amazing things from yesterday.  Most amazing, of course, was the award of the 2005 Nobel Prizes in Physics, which I heard about first on NPR at 8:30 am yesterday morning.  And I nearly fell down when I heard the main recipient was Roy Glauber, of Harvard University.

Glauber has a long-running connection with heavy ion physics, having convinced us in the late 50's that it was OK to treat the nasty, quantum mechanical system of nucleons that makes up a nucleus as, well, a bag of baseballs -- provided the energies were high enough.  This simple, but incredibly powerful, approach made possible all that my field has accomplished in the last 20 years.  Without it, we'd have no idea how to even start thinking of understanding the geometry of nuclear collisions (i.e. how much overlap).  We even have had workshops on these ideas at various points, in 2001 and even 2003 (check out the "Glauber Symposium").

Now the best part is that Glauber himself remained unaware that we invoked his name and ideas about 10 times a day, per person, for 20 years.  Only recently had people made efforts to include him in our more recent conversations, and I feel privileged to have gotten to know him in the last couple of year.  He attended, unannounced, a workshop I and some colleagues organized in 2004 (I only recognized him since I had included a photo of him in my 2001 talk!)  We even had dinner with him just two months ago, at Quark Matter in Budapest, where he gave the opening talk (which I slept through, due to extreme jet lag...I swear.)  A great guy, both as a physicist and as a person, and I'm incredibly happy to see him get the wide recognition he clearly deserves. 

(And I have a great email from him asking me questions about "Glauber Theory" [i.e. the stuff we derived from him, that he had nothing to do with]-- can you put emails on eBay?)

Comments

[Kyle]

That's a great story with a great picture! You should consider having him sign a paper copy of the email, just to have it!