Toichiro Kinoshita makes a transatlantic phone call

 

to Kay, June & Ray Kinoshita, June 2023

 

I should have gone through my diaries and correspondence from 1963-1973 but many deaths and general decay of my generation seems to be getting me down, and I can see I will not get through this any time soon, so here is a tidbit I would have written about. You, being all amazing students, and me almost as good of a student, we have all had decades of recurrent nightmares that go something like this: You have suddenly received a letter from your high school, and they have found out that you had missed the exam in -let's say- biology -and your high school diploma (and the college diploma that followed) is null and void until you complete your biology requirement. This nightmare comes back and back again for years and decades, until the work takes over and you have no time for nightmares any longer.

So, you paid Velma to type it up and you have delivered your PhD thesis in July 1973, you have not as much as touched a computer keyboard for the next 4 years, so traumatic all the computer nonsense had been, once Tom lured you into this madness by giving you first a few easy Feynman integrals that you aced, there was no turning back. Way too much had been invested into the calculation. It was like 2 years in the trenches of Vietnam and that was not what you had gotten into grad school for.

You have totally changed what you work on, you have thrown away anything that might even vaguely smell of your PhD thesis, except for a tiny ring-book that contains the lists of the numerical values of some 1000 (?) Feynman integrals you had computed . It's 1995 (?) and your Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen office phone rings. It's Tom. It cannot be good - he had never called you, and a transatlantic call costs an arm and a leg. Tom wants to know whether I had computed the integral 63-B (let's say). I have no idea, I do not even have my PhD thesis (it's in my American brother's basement someplace in Michigan) but I have this little ring-binder on the bookshelf. I run for it, I find 63-B and wow! 

 

I tell Tom: "Sapirstein did 63-B."
Saved.

The thing is, Tom was not into making mistakes, and I caught all of mine by finding independent calculational methods to cross-check everything - in our 2 years of calculation we found only one, numerically small error in one of our counter-terms, due to a typing error in a Jacobian. We found it by recalculating everything in a new formulation, one which I believe I had invented (my memory is of the idea coming to me while babysitting for a graduate student friend's baby), and Tom believed he had invented (he must have had a different memory, you were too big and too wild for any babysitting).

 

I never found out what happened to Sapirstein.

I have this somewhere in the diaries and letters. But I did find a letter from Tom in the sole ring-binder leftover from my PhD calculations.

 

Toichiro Kinoshita: the theorist whose calculations of g-2 shed light on our understanding of nature - 29 May 2023 Robert P Crease 

Toichiro (“Tom”) Kinoshita (1925–2023): Pioneer of precision in tumultuous times - July 11, 2023 Robert P Crease

Masako Kinoshita - Me & Olivia go way back

Memorial for Toichiro & Masako Kinoshita

 

A regular pervert in the kingdom of Bohrdom

I am living as it were in the very kingdom of Bohrdom, but as the fate would have it, something actually happened here. 

Yesterday fru F. was exiting out onto my balcony, when she perceived a stark naked young man of muscular build and Nordic persuasion standing in the balcony doorway across. He's eyes were closed - bright sunny day - in rapt adoration - and he had the cock out, a rather impressive tool says G. Having been married 7 times, G. knows the available range. So she withdrew into the kitchen - what does she know the Danish customs? 5 minutes later UFO himself came into the kitchen to inspect the sight, and the man was still at it - it is apparently a laborious process. 

Ever since we have been busy - something as exciting has never happened in our little petty bourgeois building - seems we got a regular pervert. Catching up with New York, finally. I have installed locks on back-stair doors and so forth. This is it - the big news. 

Rolling back into abyss of time, backwards: I became a director of the CATS Center (Chaos and Turbulence Studies) I got the Danish Physical Society prize and delivered a major oration. My Wo was in tears with pride. There was 100.000 kroner to this, but it will all go to help rebuild a library of a Croatian University bombed silly by Serbs in one of their paroxysms of fraternal luuuuv. 

Been engaged in much scientific procreation, hormones and doctors and whole schlemiel - does not work, and is sure not fun. But the Wo wants to make a miniP of her own, so we are in clutches of miniscience.

They made me official Windbag, member of the (Danish) Royal Society. Delivered oration explaining Quantum Chaos to archeologists and such. The nodded in awe, said that while usually they only understand the prepositions in physicist's popular talks, this time they understood some nouns and verbs as well. 

Been profoundly disgusted at this planet - fat assed Euro diplomats and such, watching on tely an ongoing genocide, hoping that Serbs just get this over with so all is quiet again. De-pressing. 

On the bright side, variety of local friends kids are also growing into very delightful people - so charming that one could even consider procreation as rational act, and not only the selfish gene in action. 

This grownup life has not much to recommended - everybody exerting civilizing pleasure until there is nothing left that makes life worth living. My strategy has been internalization: I just think Predrag thoughts internally, and I externally nod politely and eat correctly out of color coordinated plates. 

One of the things I miss is freedom to just take off for a week or a month, and wonder in Greenland or somewhere. But we suffer from the dreaded academic 2-body problem - getting 2 jobs in a same place. So I might have to leave all this behind, and head for god knows where. Might be fun...

A not so short history of Universal Function

Acceptance speech - 1993 NKT Research Prize in Physics
Dansk Fysisk Selskab Årsmøde, Lalandia, Rødby, Maj 18, 1993

                                                                           Excerpted and edited July 5, 2019

[For A very brief history of universality in period doubling click here]
[For hyperlinks to some of the literature,  click here]

Among my friends at Cornell were two called Feigenbaum.  The first one moved to a factory town to do union organizing, and reached brief national fame when the Mafia bombed his house.  The other one was amazingly fast in solving New York Times crossword puzzles, but he published nothing. Hans Bethe dispatched him to Blackhole, Virginia, where he languished publishing nothing until Peter Carruthers rescued him and took him to Los Alamos on the risky presumption that the man seemed very smart.  In contrast to these good-for-nothings, I was advertised as the best thing since Roman Jackiw and sent off to Stanford, Princeton and Oxford with a mission to solve the QCD quark confinement problem.

[...]

Mitchell told me about existence of period doubling universality at 10pm on December 19 1975, in a bar in New York City, over a glass of good red wine and in presence of my Black Irish Poetess.

In spring 1976 he came  from Los Alamos to visit Princeton, having published even less than before.  He gave a seminar, but nobody understood a word. Starting point was a parabola, then things got incredibly complicated, and at the end it turned out that the theory might be applicable to fluctuations in forest moth populations.

During his graduate school years at MIT, the strongest intellectual influence on Mitchell was not his adviser Francis Low (of Gell-Mann--Low beta function), who by that time had lost faith in quantum field theory, but charismatic cognitive scientist Jerry Lettvin. So Mitchell and I were driven by a secret agenda - the thing was robust, you could make it very imperfect, and a universal superstructure would survive the imperfections. In other words, just what you need to build a brain - all parts imperfect, and the thing functions anyway.

But my first task was to help my friend, make his lecture comprehensible. My friend Betty Boop worked on a Hewlett-Packard assembly line, so I was able to acquire a discounted programmable pocket calculator (with [multiply] and  [divide] buttons interchanged) for a mere one-fourth of my monthly salary.  Mitchell needed no such display of dedication, Los Alamos was floating in money.

I started thinking about functional equations on May 1, 1976. I calculated away with such gusto that I was calculating even laying on my belly on an operating table, with a surgeon lancing a large bicycle-caused sore. Eventually I reduced the whole complicated mess to one equation, wrote down the period doubling fixed point function equation on May 3, 1976,

and went off to the math library to look it up.  The Institute has an excellent math library, but I did not find it.  As a matter of fact, we never found it to this very day - it had never been written down before.
             For the record: universality in period doubling and the functional renormalization theory that explains it were         Mitchell's discovery, my contribution was to recast what was an infinite tower of renormalization equations into a more concise form.

As one would expect, nobody wanted to hear about it.  To be fair, I remember that a total of four people did:  Freeman Dyson, John Milnor, Bill Thurston, and Donna Lee.  Donna Lee is a wonderful San Franciscan whom I love even more dearly than Dyson; the rest you should know.

Blott, AKA Donna Lee above us to the right. In front: following our friend Stephen Wolfram, Nordita purchased the first Sun-1 in Scandinavia (though this desktop is not it). On the keyboard is one of Mitchell's calculators, on which he did most of his early period-doubling computations.

Six years passed and I was laboring away at Nordita, Copenhagen, when the word arrived from USA; there is chaos, and in August 1981 I could muster an audience for my first talk about the period doubling universality. It was an after-dinner talk in the Perturbative QCD Nordita summer school, Yngsjö, Sweden. In long run, quantum field theorists became dismayed by this theory. Being as intelligent as they were, they should have understood it with no effort, but they did not. But this first evening talk, to innocent, budding theory graduate student was a resounding success.

I went around spreading the news. In those days it was impossible for most to access the literature in a field so new, with foundational publications spread across so many specialties, so a put together a book of source materials:

This was the 3rd of my heavily illustrated home-production books, with hand drawn covers that I called 'Classics Illustrated'. Here we have Graf von Chaos himself as Faust (he loved Goethe) in der Periodenverdoppelnde Wald, cigarette aflame, desirous of Black Irish Poetess, soul aflame with turbulent longings, Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieht uns hinan, eying Die Gleichung. I had just returned from California where it was not unusual that a woman would ask you about your Sign. Plus? Minus? I resent all those violent and horned animals, so I would have to explain that mine was Helix Vulgaris, or the Gentle Garden Snail, the not well known 13th Sign of The Zodiac.

Passover seder with Bram

Professor Pro is convinced that I am Jewish, because I have that gleam in my eye (well, maybe, but that must have been before 1658).

One would find overdose of the alleged gleam in my eyes last Monday - fresh gefelte fish and matzo meal arrived from New York, and there I was, kneading the balls. We had the haggadah, Sigrun's David acted as the youngest child asking the appropriate question, and we had the bitter herbs and matzo and the charoset mortar with which "we" built the pyramids, and the menu that would warm up my Czech grandma's heart - the whole schlmeal.

        There were some irregularities; specially that injunction about circumcised males was not strictly observed - but the rest - the genuine thing. It was beautiful, in a totally unexpected way. I had invited Bram and Ida, which turned out to be something much more important than I had realized. Abraham Pais was musing those days about his survival during the war and about layers of his identity; Jew, Dutch, American, now even a little bit Danish. So for him this was an occasion to remember his orthodox father, and for the first time to sing songs in Hebrew in front of his Nordic beloved; he sang beautifully, with Ashkenazi pronunciation the songs his father liked, and with Sephardic the ones his mother liked. It was very touching, and moving.

        Then Bram told us how he lost his faith. One Shabbat his parents had left him alone in the kitchen, and he stood there with a match in his hand - what would happen if he did the did the forbidden? and - and - he lit the match. He stood there petrified, awaiting the heavens to open and lighting to strike him. Nothing. So there was no God after all.

        Next day I made the error of reading the Exodus and loudly commenting how I feel about that petty and vengeful God of the Jews - that was not wise, as it lead to a scene, with me accused of belittling God.

The Man who made Matzo Balls

PS June 7, 1996

Message from Bram: " I plan to be in Copenhagen for s stretch starting end of June. You are supposed to save a seat by your side for me in the frokoststue."

PS December 4, 1999

Bram Pais saw me in the cafeteria and immediately said:
"You look terrible - What are you doing with this Jewish beard?''
 I said: "How do you know it is a Jewish beard?''
"I know'' he said.

PS October 25, 2000 Apropos Bram

Tina, friskier at 80 than many are at 60, is the woman who hid Abraham Pais in Amsterdam during the war. She told me few months ago I look like Marcelo Mastroiani as we danced to kletzmer at Bram's memorial. It's not true, but it is a sensitive thing to say to a guy of uncertain countenance.

Harry J. Lipkin: "Bram had spent the war in Amsterdam, hidden from the Germans. When he was finally caught and arrested and would have been shot, his teacher Kramers wrote a letter to Heisenberg asking him to help Bram. Heisenberg did nothing. But the heroic Dutch woman who had hidden Bram  during all these years risked her life to go to the Gestapo commander to plea for Bram's release and she took a copy of Kramers' letter to Heisenberg. This was enough to convince the commander to release Bram. His cell mate who had been arrested with him was shot."

Feigenbaum contemplating a cauliflower

It is true: Mitchell has gone live on the 7PM German TV news  contemplating a cauliflower (?)

Zeta function for diffusion on Lorenz lattice

It started by having some great time with Mitchell, theologians and semi-idiots.

Then I ran into a problem, a problem that turned out to be very pleasant, the problem of Eckmannia. That is to say, we actually solved a problem - Eckmann is still convinced that if we could solve it, it must be trivial; "everybody must know that???" - but we finally wrote down the zeta function for diffusion on Lorenz lattice.

I have been thinking about it for at least 3 years - and it finally came out, with a very pretty and sensible answer. So now we have done what I never have done; written a paper in 2 days flat, from first conversation about existence of the problem, to the first complete draft of the paper.

I was also screamed at by some Chinese physicist about importance of his solution of the percolation problem, but I am so happy it made no dent.

The worst meal of my life

Apropos nothing: 

Universität Greifswald has a special place in my heart, as the place where I had the absolutely worst meal of my life, in the University Mensa. I was given what smelled like a barely rinsed plastic plate with multiple indentations, and the mensa cook ladled in some orange-yellow fluid substance that I still do not know what it was.

I also remember fondly watching prisoners in white-black horizontal stripes suits walking in a circle, while talking to the Chair of the Physics Department (his window overlooked the prison yard). Greifswald was brown gray, everything about it and its air was colored by the coal soot.

Greifswald Nonlinear Dynamics Workshop, Trassenheide, GDR, 25 april 1990.

Hallur wins the 3rd world war, European theatre

Hallur wouldn't get of the phone a few minutes ago - had to tell me that he won the 3rd world war, European theatre. He was Warsaw pact - that is better, because Warsaw pact has so much more of everything. He dropped a gas bomb on Bruxelles; NATO retaliated by sending a huge atom bomb - he lost something, he thinks it was called Moscow - blew away most of the screen - but then he got West Germans surrounded, 5 armies encircling their 2; couldn't kill them all, but he won anyway.

Mitchell does prime time TV in Copenhagen

Mitchell has appeared in the leading Danish left-intellectual rag, (Mis)Information, holding a Wonder-bread-like blackboard sponge, pensively, to great merriment of our students who have the picture on our bulletin board, with a variety of captions emanating from his mouth, comic-strip style. It is a reasonable article, from Mitchell's angle the best thing about it is that it is in danish, so he is safe from understanding it, and I ask you only 3 brief stupid questions, so I'm also clean.

Mitchell is now a heartthrob of many a wo in this ducky kingdom. They aired him and Polyakov in prime time, and they re-aired him alone today. It is actually almost sensitively done, considering the foreign worker treatment I got on Danish DR televison.

Well, Mitchell does have his detractors. MargArethe says that he has a strange way of blinking into camera, and that neither he nor Polyakov are her man types. But many a less critical Valkyrie is wet to her knees just at one of those blinks.

Other than that, there is much ballooning around. The Eye's woman is supposed to burst any day or hour now, and Ulla and Natural Radiance bounce around like Venus of Milendorf fertility amulets.

How long is this seriousness going to continue (and this includes Mitchell)? It's deadening, the joy is gone if every act is supposed to be laden with meaning. I'll go home and bounce few balls on the HP - it's trivial childlike game, but it is making me euphoric. All the patriarchal and fessorial responsibility
is dry and dusty as old wood.

Dyson, Tomonaga, Feynman, Schwinger

Sam Taylor, a nuclear engineering undergraduate in my intro nonlinear dynamics class alerted me to a wonderful (Web of Stories) video series of Sam Schweber interviewing Freeman Dyson. 

While I was at the Institute in 1975-1978, I was Freeman's very young friend. What brought us together was that at that time I had been a rather bad dancer in a very charming performance of Blake's "Songs of Innocence and of Experience".

Here Freeman is recorded in 1998, looking even more youthful then when I knew him. He was the only physicist who would hear about my 1976 work on universality in chaos. It was the most important thing I accomplished as IAS Fellow, but -fore example- Tullio Regge would not hear of it. Dyson was and remained the only physicist I knew who wanted to learn things regardless of whatever he had done them himself. So he became and remained my only hero and role model in this profession.

Shin'ichirō Tomonaga (and, for me, Tom Kinoshita's war years) enters, unexpected, out of the ashes:

And meanwhile, of course, we'd heard about Tomonaga's work which was, I think, also in the spring of '48, when Tomonaga sent his first two papers from Japan, and these came as an absolute total surprise, that somebody in the rubble of Tokyo was actually able to do physics. I hadn't heard of Tomonaga previously and he wrote to Oppenheimer from Tokyo and Oppenheimer sent a copy of the papers to Hans Bethe in Cornell, and so we saw them there. And these two papers of Tomonaga, it was called, I don't remember... on the many... This was the new Japanese journal "The Progress of Theoretical Physics" which was published in English. It was published on brown paper which was all they had in Tokyo at the time, and it was just like a voice from the deep.

I mean we thought of Japan as being a total ruin and there was this man who had somehow or other kept physics alive all through the war, and there it was. And he'd in fact done all this long before Schwinger and essentially arrived at the same results as Schwinger three or four years earlier, with more or less the same techniques.

About Cornell:

[Schweber] You stay in Cornell for two years and then you go to the Institute. Do you want to say a few words [...] about life at the university there, and what made you decide to [...] accept an invitation to the Institute in '53?

This was a hard choice, because I was spiritually much more at home at Cornell. Cornell is a much warmer place. It's a real community, partly because of Hans. I mean Hans made it like that, but even without Hans - it's a place which commands enormous loyalty. I mean the friends that we made at Cornell 40 years ago, a lot of them are still there. These people just never leave, including Hans himself, who's now been there for 60 years. And so I felt very much at home there and sort of spiritually I still feel more at home in Ithaca than I do in Princeton. So there were these strong forces keeping me at Cornell. Cornell had always been my vision of America, whereas Princeton is not. Princeton is definitely an alien growth in America. Ithaca is the real thing. So from that point of view I would have preferred to stay in Ithaca, and also I love the people there.

About PhDs:

But I hated the PhD system, and that was what - I felt basically out of tune with the main job I had at Cornell, which was to train PhD students. The whole PhD system to me is an abomination. I don't have a PhD myself, I feel myself very lucky I didn't have to go through it. I think it's a gross distortion of the educational process. What happens when I'm responsible for a PhD student, the student is condemned to work on a single problem in order to write a thesis, for maybe two or three years. But my attention span is much shorter than that. I like to work on something intensively for maybe one year or less, get it done with and then go on to something else. So my style just doesn't fit this PhD cycle. What would happen, a PhD student would want to go on working on a problem for two or three years, but I would lose interest before he was finished. And so there was a basic mismatch between the way I like to do physics and this straitjacket which was imposed on the students. And so I found it was very frustrating [...]; all the PhD students had these same constraints imposed on them, which I basically disapprove of. I just don't like the system. I think it is an evil system and it has ruined many lives.

About understanding Schwinger:

That was another of the Columbian experiments done by Kusch and Foley, where they measured the magnetic moment of the electron very precisely, and they found that it was not the Dirac value, but differed from the Dirac value by a certain finite amount, which then Schwinger was able to calculate. [...] It involved things that Schwinger called Green's Functions, which again I found rather incomprehensible, but Schwinger was very obscure when he described the things he was doing. He loved to make the - as Oppenheimer said, most people when they explain something, they're telling you how to do it; but when Schwinger explains something he's telling you that only he can do it! That was roughly the way it was, I mean, so from Schwinger one only had the impression that this was so difficult and so elaborate a way of calculating, only Schwinger could possibly do it. [...] in Ann Arbor in June of '48 I learned the stuff from Schwinger himself. I listened to his lectures in the morning and I spent the afternoons working very hard, just simply going through the Schwinger lectures step by step and really understanding what he'd been saying, which was very hard work because he just had this wonderfully baroque style of lecturing in which everything was dressed up to be as complicated as possible, and the answer somehow came out miraculously at the end.

About Feynman, understanding:

There were two problems which Cécile and I took along for Feynman to deal with... [...], and the scattering of light by light; especially the scattering of light by light had been a sort of a notoriously difficult problem.[...] It was a formidable calculation and it wasn't at all clear that we could do it by the new methods of Feynman. And it was something we had to get straightened out before this whole theory was really complete. So we asked Feynman about this, and he said, 'Let's see about that.' And he sat down and he just worked through it; in about three quarters of an hour he'd done the whole thing and it was the most amazing performance. He just - with his lightning calculations, it all came out very beautifully. It turned out that the third order effect was zero and the fourth order effect was finite and everything worked exactly the way we wanted.

When I entered graduate school, theoretical particle physics was the 1965 Bjorken-Drell "Relativistic Quantum Fields", i.e. Feynman diagrams. Feynman diagrams and Feynman diagrams only. But my academic grandfathers were Feynman and Tomonaga (via Tom Kinoshita), Schwinger (via Tung-Mow Yan), with Freeman my academic godfather. I wrote a book about it. Feynman reviewed it. Were it not for Tung-Mow, I would have never understood the Schwinger tale.

 

Ballur the Dog in love

19 July 1988

We live alone on the farm. Ballur the Dog has developed a strong master craving and follows me everywhere.

Predrag is a bore
Predrag is a boring bore
Predrag is the boringest boring bore

But Ballur the Dog is charming and very doggy in temperament - he is an Icelandic sheepdog, and he a very happy dog who seeks my company irrespective of how boring I might be. We are a very active couple, sharing passion for swimming, running, and avoidance of other human company.

Paris! Par rires, as Rablais claims the etymology is. It is very enchanting, and still, I feel like a mouse there. New York, one feels like a rat. Here, on the farm, I feel content. The truth is, I am very happy to spend weeks and months without human contacts, but it is almost impossible - they stream in, the humans, even on the farm.

Here life is as always - it seems impossible to do 1/10 of the things one expects oneself to be able to do. Even with Ballur there is psychology - he objects to sleeping outside, so he woke me up at 3 am, rotating in a strangest of dog hysteria ways. We had a talk and a little walk, and I was allowed to sleep again.

29 July 1988

I still do not what he wanted. I got up this morning - Ballur says woof! and then sits in front of me, looking me right into the eyes, expectantly, as though I have a large cut of beef between my eyeballs. Usually he wants to run out into the court, but not today - I open the door, but he just follows me again. Watches me brush my teeth.

What is it? Did I forget to feed him yesterday? I rattle his dog food bucket, but he just keeps looking intently into my eyes.

Piss? Shit? Brushing my teeth, we walk into the seeping rain and out of the farmhouse onto the track across the wheat fields. He just dogs me - no crap, nothing. We go back again, an he will not let up; just sits in front of me, expectantly, totally focused on me, with that swooning look of the woman from Midsummer Night Dream who got love potion rubbed over her eyelids.

Could it be? Could it be? oh, no! the dog is in looove. Ballur, you know we cannot go steady - I will have to move back to the city....

Prussian determination

Max-Planck Institute fur Mathematik, Bonn

I have been swimming with Prussian determination every morning for last 5 days. It is like swimming among sharks - there are all these young women out of Leni Riffenstahl's Olympiad zooming by in white spray on their way to Seoul Olympics. I do not know yet whether it helps, but it does give me certain chlorinated radiance.

Night Fishing in Blackhole

January  25, 1988

 Once UFO and I considered moving to his Blackhole to run a megainstitute of Nonscience
- to be filled in from my diary

A letter to Il Coruptore AKA Peter Carruthers

Carissimo Il Coruptore,

I write with moody forebodings of impossibility of attaining anything, the mood reinforced by the cheerfulness of danish December: I do not see how I am going to visit you in the foreseeable future, to the extent that there is future. Maybe next winter? Where did the time go? I thought I would be basking in Arizonian sun right now... But in a few days I am escaping to New York - UF will cheer me up with Wagner and Kindertotten Lieder.

Then I am supposed to be back and do what? Repair rotten doors on my edifice, harangue students? Is that it? All those years of crazy self-reliance? and looove, where did loooove go?

Pagarlo delle Lire, pagarlo delle dollare... Why did I ever turn bourgeois?

di notte nordice
Amleto il Danesco

Hamlet, Feigenbaum constant and the fine structure constant

There is a Procaccian chapter in our Hénon epic that makes me go to Hamlet to cheer up - "... is it better to suffer the outrageous ..." etc etc  soliloquy.

The whole idea was building my Ruinofficio was to have a place big enough to absorb my friends with their nasty habits and still sustain life as we know it. Empty it is as insane as any Latin American deserted oversized hacienda from Marquez.

The madness persists - I am getting visa papers to fly in November to Bezerkley and deliver a single review lecture of profound wisdom to nuclear physicists at LBL. The man in charge is the selfsame person (Switezky) who has related Feigenbaum constant to the fine structure constant, a paper that baffles me even more upon rereading now.

Not sweet paprika, but cayenne

I have been through some rough times. First Fessor Pro has been threatening me with this fat manuscript of uneven quality. It all climaxed one Thursday, with me surrounded with many steaming and burning pots and pans and spices, pushed into a corner by certain Paladin, who insists on teaching me the correct multifractal formalism. Everything in sight is boiling and burning and he is shoving at me pieces of paper covered with old computer code, between lines of which he scribbles integrals over tangent spaces (ie Lyapunovs), with q meaning Chicago tau, s(mu) meaning P(lambda), and everything Bowen-Ruelle-Sinai and indescribably rigorous. As I am nodding in exasperation I note that the spice which I am copiously pouring over the
brew is not sweet paprika, but cayenne, and so on and so forth.

So I fed them cous-cous and they loooooved it and so we proceeded to the Royal Ballet where all was all very cultured and deadly boring. And I am as good as dead. But Romeo and Juliet ballet was a good preview for what followed: we had a 5 (yes, five!) days of a superstrings symposium here, and I went to the lectures in the same spirit as to Romeo and Juliet; I wanted to see strings dead, I wanted to see them all die. But no, it is like Mercutio. He gets stabbed, he falls down and you think it is over. He gets up; dances and falls down. Over? No - here he hops up again, piruets and keels and falls over. And so it goes - on, and on, since Regge poles through duality through extended supergravities to this. When is the s#!t going to die? It is frightning - a whole bunch of bright kids seem set onto making this a life career; oh, die, please die gentle death! The world around us is asking us infinity of fascinating questions - do we have to lobotomize all this young talent?

Feynman's review of my "Field Theory" book

22 May 1985

My program expires today. Vinnie of the Italian Kitchen makes a special dinner for us. UF kidnaps Feynman on Eddy Avenue.

Feynman likes to talk about reception of his book: how steel workers ("I liked that chapter where you say women like to get fucked") and topless dancers invite him to their work places and shows; how somebody's grandmother liked the book. UF veers out of control, and first they compete about who summed which kind of Bessel functions series at age twelve, and then UF keeps discussing details of Little Stevie Wonder's predicament, while Feynman tries to shut him up and absolutely does not want to hear about it. Finally I remember I once drew a portrait of him, and sent him the book with him on the cover, so I ask him what he thought of it. He says,

"What book? I remember somebody once sent me a book with jokes and drawings, it was very bad, I did not like it at all. It made Field Theory look easy when it is not, and it didn't explain it.

If you gave somebody with infinite intelligence and infinite time this book, and told him to learn Field Theory - he could not do it!"

UFO's neuroscience and E&M provocateur

During my visiting professor stint at Cornell, I subbed for Mitchell for one lecture - I told him that I could teach E&M without any formulas, only using birdtracks.eu notation, and I was lucky - got to teach kiddies Green's theorem. There might be someone out there who still wanders what happened that day.

I my clouds video I mentioned some brain related projects that didn't pan out. "Universality in chaos" AKA "period-doubling" does not care what particular system one starts with, and we were wondering how neurons - each one noisy and imperfect in every way - never-the-less build up a pretty robust brain. Could it be that the renormalized (?) composite neuronal system is more robust than all of its imperfect components? It was all very naive and totally wrong. That's not how computational neuroscience has developed since.

I actually spent that semester secretly (in an attic of the Math Department) coding my idea of how a passive observer (a frog on a rock) visually observes and then develops abstract concepts, i.e. learns. That bombed out in an spectacular way. I was using Barbie Burke's husband, John Hamal Hubbard's IBM workstation, and it 1) one day lost all the programs in its memory, and then 2) literally chewed up my back-up diskette when I tried to restore them, thus destroying without any trace (there were no printouts) months of work. That was the end of my secret foray into computational neuroscience. Looking today at ChatGTP billions of parameters, I was way too optimistic about how this would have worked.

In other words, you do not want to get any neuroscience advice from Predrag .

The realm of limbo, limbo and catholicism

My life in Ithaca is very quiet: some evenings I go over to Mitchell and submit to hours of Wagner, some evenings I read children's stories to my friend's real children, still others I watch from my office window beautiful sunsets over Ithaca hills.

Mitchell lives in a Corbusiesque atrocity. It has a curious advertisement in the phone book: "A new environment for living - designed by Marcel Breuer - walk to campus and shopping - modern, beautiful, fireproof."

Ithaca is the same as it ever was - dogs run across the Arts Quad, we wander through the gorges, and check the buds on the trees for signs of the impending spring. At night the bars are full of little women and little but beefy men. Five Burns sisters are singing good rock-n-roll, radiating sex like five demented stars - one is pregnant and due in 10 days - as we dance, just like we always did.

Shipwrecked

Immanuel Kant: "All human knowledge begins with intuitions, then passes to concepts, and ends with ideas."

I have gone into seclusion: I have temporarily lost faith in adults, and I mostly want to quietly work on my physics projects, listen to my friend Mitchell's classical records, and read children stories to my friends children. Of course, I am not terribly good at being a recluse - old friends and lovers keep popping up and treating me with much tenderness.

"all bonds have broken down,
oooo, love is gone
looove is gone..."

Why am I being so melodramatic? It is because of love shipwrecked. Guardian Angel, the woman that I have lived with the last five years has abandoned me at the same time I took a new (permanent?) position in Sweden. I find myself without a family, a home and a country.

"And if my night thoughts could be seen,
they would put my head in the guillotine.
But it's all right ma, I'm only dyyyyying"

Mother Jackie is the same bundle of energy and good cheer as she had always been. She is very busy traveling and writing as art historian - complains that she is overweight (does not stop her from eating
as much as I do) and that a joint in her little finger has become stiff.

Hermann Minkowski in a letter to David Hilbert: "It seems sometimes that through a preoccupation with science, we acquire a firmer hold over the vicissitudes of life and meet them with greater calm, but in reality we have done no more than to find a way to escape from our sorrows."

Sadder is the story of my grandparents. Mother's father died last summer - I visited him almost at the last moment, he could barely talk. He talked to me slowly for a few hours about his life: being persecuted as communist before the war, surviving the concentration camp, life after the end of the war. It was like watching a wavering candle flame... The other grandfather weighs about 120 lb and can barely move - I'll visit them in July.

God, how boring all this petty self-pity is! It all just adds up one and the same thing - the destruction of my world...