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).
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
