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."