From the previous episode: Distant Drums 1
Somewhere in my third year at UCT I am majoring in Physics and Applied Maths, and I start to pick up the increasing sound of distant drums. There are universities in England and America where serious people go to do advanced physics. There are people I know who have picked themselves up and gone abroad to get a PhD in some of those places,
My first personal knowledge of overseas PhD-ers is my neighbor Jeffrey Bub, the elder brother of my classmate Julian. Jeffrey has gone to do a PhD in London with David Bohm on hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics, and eventually becomes a well known philosopher of quantum mechanics.
For South Africans, England is the natural place for post-graduate study. So, I have been applying to the DAMTP (Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics) to do a PhD in Cambridge England, corresponding with Prof. J. C. Polkinghorne, a theoretical physicist who years later becomes an Anglican priest.
Then, in 1965, while I am completing a one-year B.Sc. (Hons) in Applied Maths, I serendipitously stumble on a path that leads to studying in the U.S. It’s all the consequence of a bad case of acne that sends me to a dermatologist.
The said dermatologist is the uncle of David Dorfan, a Capetonian who is already doing a PhD in New York City at Columbia University in experimental particle physics under Leon Lederman, whose group soon becomes the first to find the antideuteron produced in high energy particle collisions. It’s not really a surprise to find that antideuterons can be produced, but nice, anyhow.
By coincidence, my sister Ruth, a clinical psychologist, had helped David’s younger brother Jonathan successfully overcome a junior-school diagnosis of “poor concentration” ten years earlier at the Child Guidance Clinic at UCT. The Dorfan family was very grateful to her, and they and the dermatologist uncle now take a benevolent interest in me, encouraging me, like David, to apply for fellowships to study physics in the U. S. In particular, they recommend the Institute for International Education that shepherds your application to several schools simultaneously. I write essays to submit about what I want out of life and academia, about how I want to discover scientific laws. I collect recommendations from university and high school teachers. I don’t have a clue about what I’m embarking on in terms of life abroad away from everyone I know.
As you can see from the Wikipedia article about Jonathan Dorfan, my sister was successful. Jonathan eventually becomes an experimental particle physicist and subsequent head of SLAC, where, years later as a postdoc, I spend several summers doing theoretical particle physics. (We physicists always spoke about “doing physics”.)
If not for the acne, I might have remained in South Africa or gone to study for a PhD in Cambridge, England.
O Younger People! In the 1960s it is virtually impossible to call from Cape Town to New York. There is no internet or email, only letter writing. The best you can do is to make a three-minute trunk call that has to be booked and scheduled in advance at great expense. When people travel by air, on arrival, they then send a telegram to say ARRIVED SAFELY.
So difficult was communication that David Dorfan’s father, who is a ham radio operator, gets David in New York City to seek out other amateur radio operators so that he can have brief audible radio contact with his family.
You cannot be as out-of-communication today with anyone anywhere in the world, no matter where either of you are, as Cape Town was from New York City 55 years ago.
At U.C.T. I like the rigorous approach of the Applied Maths department, and take tensor calculus and differential geometry and general relativity from Professor J.H.M. Whiteman, a grey haired serious elderly man with very small crab-like handwriting. For my winter project I do a literature survey of unquantized Unified Field Theories that try to unify gravitation with electromagnetic theory. The only way to get papers or books is to go the library and find them, or read through Mathematical Abstracts and track them down or order them from interlibrary loan. I read papers by Schrödinger, by Einstein, by Kaluza and Klein … all in their own different ways trying to extend general relativity and the metric tensor so that it can accommodate the antisymmetric electromagnetic tensor field F and have it satisfy Maxwell’s equations. I learn all this by myself, fortified by visits to Professor Whiteman’s home in Pinelands where we discuss what I have been reading. I am amazed at my temporary ability (and it is temporary) to work my way through many papers on things I have never been taught, and am able to get the essence out of them without fear.
Whiteman is writing a book on Quantum Mechanics, a draft of which he sends to Dirac and then tells me that Dirac approves of it. We never discuss anything except physics and applied mathematics. Many many years later I discover that Whiteman was a man of many interests and talents, from music to mathematics to mysticism, the latter of which seems to be his most fertile. He is a scientific mystic, a phenomenologist perhaps, a field he occasionally mentions to me in passing. I remember him citing the Vienna Circle and Husserl, but those areas were then beyond my ken.
Whiteman aimed to establish mysticism as scientific – a field capable of being incorporated into science. His emphasis was on unobstructed observation, not on theorizing about what he called ‘the inner constitution of nature’. His mysticism aimed to provide an ‘open-minded, rigorously tested, rationally coherent and illuminating’ treatment of non-physical states and happenings. (Excerpted from here)
I wish I had known that when we spoke those many years ago.