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...

A son of Cvitanović in Nice

Sometime in the mid 80's I was wondering around downtown Nice, and struck up a conversation with a man bit younger than myself. Turned out he was a physicist, working in Nice, so he told me his name (Jean-Marc Gambaudo) and I told him mine.

He looked at me, impressed and said "Are you a son of Cvitanovich??!".

"Yes," I said proudly, "I am a son of Cvitanović"

He'll probably be in the audience in Nice Dynamics Days - Europe 2020 :)

Makes sense. For him the work Feigenbaum and I did in 1976 was ancient prehistory, something there along with Cauchy and Faraday. Never told my father (engineer in dairy industry) about it. He had very low opinion of us in academia.

I have been Kepler many times over

Dr. B.B. Mandelbrot (lovingly referred to as "Fattie" by UFO) in NY Times science section: "I would be perfectly happy being Kepler" (to a coming fractals' Newton). Referring to the broad array of things now described by fractals, he added, "I have been Kepler many times over."

The dietary practices of Mr. Universal Function

I arrived to JFK  on December 19, in time for Mitchell's 40th birthday, accompanied by a nineteen year old Aupair Girl.

Mitchell, from now on referred to as UF (Mr. Universal Function, more formally Fessor Feigenbaum) awaits us with champagne and fois gras ready. Aupair Girl says: "Eeek! What is this? It smells like dog food!" and eats it between crackers, to avoid actually tasting it.

At Zabar's it is Christmas shopping madness; the number called at the smoked fish counter is 120 numbers ahead of us. UF buys: 2 boxes crackers, 4 loafs bread, 4 pounds of various fine cheeses, pound caviar and 20 pounds filet mignon for steak tartar. His cousin, who is in catering business and commensurately spherical in shape will provide us with small delicate sweets. Not a single vegetable or fruit... By a miracle an entire smoked salmon has arrived in mail from Trondheim (?!). 60 bottles of Veuve Clicqout Ponsardin are delivered, and put into the refrigerator. UF sits down to calculate the quantity of ice needed to cool them for the party. One needs to remember that the latent heat of 1 gram ice is 80 calories. A quick one page calculation yields 48 kg ice.

This is theoretical physics in action. There was one correction, though. What was not taken into account was the fact that we shopped at Zabars the afternoon before the party. Nothing else needed to be refrigerated, the Champagne bottles remained in the refrigerator arrayed into neat rows, shining like gold bars in the vaults of the Bank of England, and after this correction the amount of ice required was 0.00 kg.

Why 60 bottles of champagne and 100 crackers? That calculation is straighforward: there were to be 30 guests, so UF multiplied his own anticipated consumption by 30. He was somewhat disappointed that after the party there were still 30 bottles and 12 pounds of fillet mignon tartar left. He threw the tartar out: 13 days later there were only 2 bottles left, so I left for Chicago.

Our diet consists of following: one strong coffee in the morning, and red meat and absurdly good red wine in the evening, plus a pack of cigarettes for UF. Buying meat is the ritual of the day. UF picks up various packages of meat and pokes them with his index finger at length, declaring eventually that the piece A (to eye indiscernible from the piece B) is far superior piece of meat than the piece B. He has lived on coffee, wine, meat and cigarettes the last 22 years and is perfectly healthy. As far as I can see, he gets his vitamins from the cigarettes.

UF's home consists of practically nothing beyond a truly excellent record collection and a Hewlett-Packard computer, but UF sits on his world like a hen sits on its eggs. The records have to be turned and dusted this way, the wine glasses have to washed that way, his camera equipment is the best the money can buy but I may not touch it, and he doesn't want to give me a key to the apartment so I would not do God knows what to it, so I finally moved out. Not before I broke the next to the last of his fine crystal wine glasses and the only two european-tacky plates he got out of his marriage. He has not unpacked yet, so almost all of his books sit in boxes in closets, and the boxes get slowly permuted around as he fishes out mementos of the bygone ages. The fate has willed it so: a few years ago UF made one serious attempt to furnish his home by buying a  $1,000 marble table in Italy. This arrived in form of crate of pulverized marbles,  and he is still trying to retrieve the money from the Italian company.

UF has strong feelings about much that we tend to accept without much questioning. "Everything I learned in particle physics was wrong." "1/2 of Landau-Lifshitz is wrong. Classical mechanics is all wrong - he does not understand variational principle. Optics is all wrong. Continuous media."

"British are scum: a degenerate nation of bigots." This is sheer praise, compared to how he feels about Poles. Germans present a special problem, considering that we would sit here in silence, were the German music removed. "Firm announcement: I shall never go into Germany again."

UF is earning unreasonable amounts of money, which, he claims, his stockbroker promptly loses. The Quack money (a complicated linguistic transformation: MacArthur -> MacDonald -> Donald Duck -> Quack) is finally making some impact: UF has erected a dark foreboding monument in his living room, consisting of two black obelisks (world's best speakers?) and in between them a black cairn of amplifiers, preamplifiers, etc., all capable of putting out kilowatts of power. Now when Siegfried bangs his sword, he is right there, in the corner of the room - it is uncanny.

A brief dictionary of UF English: "I saw a nice person there" ( = an attractive woman).  "... it seemed hard to make a connection to this person" (= could not get laid).

There is Hearts, who teaches him anew what looove is, and looming in the future is Beheadings, a specialist on the connections between royal beheadings and changes of styles in Italian poetry. A revealing exchange:

UF: "These are Listz's 13 transcendental etudes..." as he is fondling sensuously the record, on the way to the record player.

Beheadings: "If the piano is tuned, this piece is OK".

UF has gotten himself unreasonably famous. Upon hearing that I live in Fairview heights, Susan, flower child from our era, says: "This very brilliant physicist lives there - I hear he is going to get Nobel Prize." Help. However, not everybody reads New York Times. Kate from Brookings, South Dakota says: "Your friend's name is Feigenbaum? I know that name. Feigenbaums had a funeral parlor in Pierre" (pronounced Peer, South Dakota).

Upon arrival to Ithaca, there are odd few hundred letters waiting for UF (not counting the two hundred Cornell faculty communications). UF breaks into laughter with almost every letter he opens. Examples, with UF's running commentary:

"As a follow up to my letter of August 29, 1984, inviting you to serve as an adjunct faculty member of the Roanoke City Governer's School of Science and Technology, ..." why me?

"How would you like to go to the Naval Surface Weapons Center? The meeting is called Perspectives in Nonlinear Dynamics... I guess I cannot say no to them. They represent all of the money. I can certainly assist in getting us undreamed of amounts of money. You could have a CRAY in your hand." UF lays the letter of invitation carefully to the side.

"Here is the Crapademic Press: I wonder what this means? ' ... please confirm the form of address used on the cover of the journal.' Reverend? His Majesty? M.D.?"

" 'The final notice: ...' ... forget this one..."

"A fan letter from Dr. Ben Braidy. Should I use tweezers to open the letter? 83 years old! That is a pretty advanced age to have AIDS..."

"'Dear Mitch,
... the status of your manuscript on chaos and turbulence... February 1 is the due date specified on the contract ... need to discuss immediately so I can readjust plans for promotion of the book, particularly the advance publicity..." (not one line of this manuscript exists. Besides, UF hates being addressed as "Mitch")

 "Re: Feigenbaum's Number, indispensably in conjunction with Pi."
(Could horse racing be the bridge between Quantum Mechanics and Chaos?)
          Dear Dr. Feigenbaum:
          Five years ago I copyrighted a theory of horse racing under the title "IONICS, THE MATH OF RACING". It consisted of reducing the past performances of race horses to mathematical entities interacting with each other, filtering to a destillate which contained only the winner and the placer as final products. This was possible since I had observed that discretion was exerted in the win-place linkages, and based on a belief that horses, celestial bodies, and electrons are all moving entities. Scientists have told me that I am employing, unknowingly, the principles of quantum mechanics.
         Several months ago, upon having read of your discovery, 4.66+ and its chaotic significance, I was immediately, mind blown! 'For, after all, what could be more chaotic than a horse race?' I thought. And so, I began thinking. I experimented at several tracks in America, Harness or Flats, made no difference. And last October and November at Vincennes Harness Track in Paris, France, and in England (hurdles, dogs, flats) Utoxeter, Wembley.
         The result were all the same -  FEIGENBAUM'S NUMBER CALLED THE SHOTS EVERY TIME!!!!
         In process, I had to discover Pi, also. I can now connect Pi with Feigenbaum's number in about half a dozen ways!!!! In fact, I am now making my living using the constant, Pi, in conjunction with Feigenbaum's number! (Pi won't work without the corroboration of Feigenbaum's number.)
         In certain cases, however, Pi isn't needed at all. In the most spectacular case of all, when Feigenbaum's number yields Pi, an atomic explosion occurs in the form of a longshot! (The full constant, 4.6692016 is used.) (I can't get the last two figures, 09, in my calculator.)
        I have written a 22 page thesis about it for which I have just received my copyright certificate from Washington in addition to having mailed a registered copy to myself and notarized [...] you will be the first. I have spoken of it to no one except my lady friend who understands nothing of it. [...]"

"Who is this Pi?"

The next letter is a form letter:
"'Dear friend,  like the magnificent tennis player, the legendary golfer and the unstoppable running back, Personal Computing is the leader in its field!...'"
UF's association is not the most obvious one. He puts the letter aside and says: "I wonder if there are any direct flights from Aspen to Buchurest?"

Going beyond Manhattan, and all the way to Aspen: a Florida Belgian friend calls me to the side one day and asks me whether I could be Nikki's escort (i.e. Stirling's beard) at Stirling's birthday. "Yes, sure." I have never seen her in my life, but one more time, we are connected through UF in so natural and comfortable manner that when Nikki shows up we immediately recognize each other and fall into a conversation as though it is a continuation of yesterday's conversation.

Nikki says:" I have never been so humiliated in my life. You know what Rosy did? She saw me sitting in the astrophysics seminar, and she publicly chased me out of the seminar: 'you get out, you bitch'. Then she scolded me for an hour, like a little girl. I do not want to hurt her, but what can I do - I love him"

And some crazy story unfolds, with Stirling disappearing one night, and flying out to meet Nikki in some motel, and she keeps repeating "He is so good, I love him."

"Niki, he cannot be that good. He makes bombs..."

"That was before. He is good, he is very good..."

Then there was Pete, totally obsessed by his love for C. and her cruelty, and I felt rather reasonable compared to him. And his crazy daughter, machine gun smuggler and god knows what else.

I seem be sinking into a scientific depression. This is recurrent and more common than the common cold, but this time it is aggravated by a new twist: fear of charlatanism. UF must have given me good PR, or it all makes no sense - I seem to be booked for a good portion of 1986, all invitations but one being of chaotic nature, and what have I done to deserve all this?

Zadnji razgovor sa djedom Bogdanom

Bogdan Golmajer                                     17.3.1902 - 2.9.1984
sin Žarko Golmajer                                          1928 - 26.12.1998
kćer Đurđica (Đeka) Cvitanović                1.3.1924 - 12.5.2009

Popodne smo otišli posjetiti djedu Golmajera. Bio je lijep sunčani dan sredine kolovoza. Ušli smo u njegovu sobu (jedinu sobu u stanu) i ja sam se zaustavio, zaprepašten. On je izgledao kao da su ga tog dana prenijeli iz Jasenovca. Ležao je nepomičan, šlagiran i lagan kao pero - 35 kila, možda, sa divljim pramenom crne kose, i sa neobrijanom četkicom prosjede brade, i upaljenim crvenim ocima.

Ja sam se sjeo uz njega i počeli smo razgovarati. Bio je potpuno svjestan; očekivao me je. Njegove oči su ostale nepomične. Dugo me nije pogledao - možda je prošao cijeli sat prije nego sto je okrenuo oči na mene. Njegov glas, kao i snaga njegovog života, je bio slab, i treperio je u mraku, daleko od mene, kao plamenćic svijeće. Rijeci su dolazile polako, nejasne - tiše i tiše, dok se nisu sasvim zaustavile. Nakon nekog vremena bi se rijeci vratile, i mi smo nastavili. Iza nas su žene glasno govorile, i ja sam ih morao zamoliti da pređu u kuhinju, tako da bih ga mogao čuti. Ja sam mu neko vrijem pričao o Danskoj - o ljudima, o poljoprivredi, o povijesti zemlje. Bogdan me je dugo ozbiljno slušao, a zatim mi rekao da je treća knjiga na lijevo na stelaži od danskog pisca, da se zove "Seljaci". I zbilja, treća knjiga na lijevo se zvala "Seljaci", no pisac je bio poljak.

Ja sam ga zamolio da mi priča o svom životu. I tako mi je on polako počeo pričati o svojem djetinjstvu, o svojoj djeci i ženama, o svom radu kao komunist, o ratu, o logorima i deportacijima, o radu poslije rata:

"Nismo mogli duže razgovarati prošli puta, a htjeo sam... moja prva žena je bila Ljerka, kćerka general Filipovića - onoga koji je osvajao Bosnu. Prekrasno je igrala klavir. Umrla je od raka. Treća žena mi je bila ..."

(glas mu je nestao. Drugu ženu nije spomenuo.)

"u Jasenovcu su je ubili... četvrta je bila Katica... trebao sam ženu da djeci pomognem... rođen sam u Buzetu... fašisti došli, otjerali nas u Sloveniju... talijanski u školama... ja sam pobjegao... u Zagrebu me našao moj direktor,"

(Žarko kaže da je to bio Nazor, ali Bogdan ga nije ni jedanput spomenuo imenom.)

"doveo nas četri u novu učiteljsku školu u Karlovcu. Dobili smo banovinsku potporu za siromašne đake, kuhala nam upraviteljica, a građani nam skupljali odjeću. Tamo sam postao komunist. Proganjali su me. Bio sam učitelj u Banatu pred rat - Nijemcima i Rumunjima. Ne znam dali su me uopće razumjeli. Kad su Nijemci napali SSSR, znali smo da će biti rat, i skupljali smo oružje i medicinske zalihe. Ja sam bio potporučnik. Vida"

(Blagica? nisam siguran da sam ga čuo, jer mu se glas opet ugasio.)

"i ja smo prebacivali i partizane i ranjenike - ljekar je bio u sljedećem selu. Tu smo dugo bili uspješni - onda nas je neko izdao, uhapsili su nas, odveli u Bjelovar, a od tamo u Jasenovac... Vida je također bila zarobljenica. Partizani su napali Jasenovac - ustaše su bježali... sve su ih postrijeljali... a ti koji su jos bili za radnu snagu su poslani u Linz, i od tamo u Mauthausen... Djeku sam vidjeo na kolodvoru... rekao sam joj da ne dođe do vlaka, jer su ustaše trpali obitelji u konvoj... "

(Đeka: "Meni su poručili da će doči konvoj iz Jasenovca, i da im Crveni Kriz - međunarodni, onaj isti kao danas - može dati odjeću i medicinske zalihe - i da će moj otac biti u konvoju. I poručili su mi da je opasnost da će ustaše i obitelji stjerati na vlak. On je bio kao sad - trideset kila je bio - ali je bio jedan od jedinih pet šest koji su bili dovoljno snažni da prenose kufere do vlaka. Oci su mu bile velike i zarile su. Kazao mi je da je upravo prebolio tifus, ali da je to tajio, jer bi ga inače oni ubili. Da su mu rekli da samo jedanput dnevno jede i pije vodu, jer bi ga nakon gladovanja ubila hrana. 'Nemoj ici do vlaka, jer će ustaše utjerati na konvoj - stoj ovdje'. I tako sam ga ja vidjela zadnji
puta, vjerovala sam.")

"... Jasenovac... Njemačka... natrag Dunavom... u Beč... rusi nam dali propusnice... sa vlaka uzeli švercere i trgovce i na mjestu ih strijeljali... nama dali njihova mjesta... mi ukrali tri teleće koze na granici... u Đurđevcu sve uništeno, sve odneseno... seljaku koji je nas vozio su tamo oduzeli auto... ja uspjeo donijesti cijelu kozu do Budrovca. I tako prošla epopeja: kroz strah i lukavštinu i krađu... Došao sam u Zagreb... nakon deset dana su me pozvali da idem u kupke - bile su u Daruvaru - i odmah su me zaposlili... bolje sam se osjećao i tako je i to prošlo... iz ministarstva rada - otvarao nove škole, ustaške zatvarao. Đeka i Žarko su bili kod doktora... Živana sam vidjeo samo jedan puta u mom životu, kad sam radio u Daruvaru... on je autom prošao - nisam htjeo da me vozi - bio je direktor tvornice cipela... Onda kad je tebe rodila - imali smo u tim toplicama školu za zanemarenu djecu... ja nju stavio za upraviteljicu škole, uzela je lječnicku stranu..."

Bilo mu je teško govoriti, sa pola lica paraliziranim.

"...to blato koga se ti sjećaš - to je bilo u Mikleušu, kod Cinkati. Ti si vidjeo ovcu, i onda ozbiljno primijetio 'Nisam znao da su krave tako velike'..."

(Zapravo, već nisam siguran dali mi je to rekao Bogdan, ili Katica.) Ja sam ga pitao sto se s njim desilo '48, kod Informbiroa:

"... imali smo sastanak. Ja sam rekao: 'Kuda Tito kreće, tud mi.' ... prosli smo rat... rekli su mi da će me staviti za direktora/povjerenika tvornice bombona u Slavenskoj Požegi. Ja sam to odbio: 'Ima mladih stručnjaka, neka to oni vode.' Otuda sam premješten u Zagreb u ministarstvo rada. Zadaci su bila otvaranja svih vrsti poljoprivrednih imanja..."

(to je kraj mojih zabilješka o našem razgovoru.)

Mi smo se na koncu pozdravili, ja sam mu obećao uskoro pisati iz Svedske. Na izlazu se Katica rasplakala: njoj je teško vidjeti Bogdana tako slabog, i ona je sama bila na granici ljudskih snaga. Ja sam je zagrlio, poljubio, i tako smo otišli do Zarka i Slavice.

Bogdan je izdahnuo 2. rujna dok ga je Đeka čuvala. On nije bio svjestan, i umro je brzo i jednostavno. Đeka je tužna, mnogo vise sada kada se vise ne brine o njemu, i bacila se opet na svoj rad: putuje mnogo na teren.



Notes:
 
Ponosimo se školom u Budrovcu
            (ovo je škola)

"...  u školi su se izmjenjivali brojni učitelji kojih se i danas mnogi stariji mještani rado sjećaju: učiteljice Justina Rasinec, Dragica Benkek, Ljubica Kolar i Marija Puškaš, učitelj Ivan Litvić, učitelji Vida i Bogdan Golmajer. Oni su poučavali do kraja drugog svjetskog rata. Nastava je održavana na hrvatskom jeziku, a trajala je 4 do 5 godina. Prema žigu u spomenici zvala se „Državna narodna osnovna škola u Budrovcu“.
Učitelji i bračni par, Vida i Bogdan Golmajer, su na žalost, pred kraj drugog svjetskog rata doživjeli tragičnu sudbinu. 18. 3. 1944. uhićeni su u svojoj školi i otpremljeni u ustaški logor Stara Gradiška, a zatim u logor Jasenovac. Učitelj Bogdan transportiran je na prisilan rad u Njemačku, odakle s vratio 1945., dok se učiteljica Vida nije vratila iz Jasenovca."

Mauthausen was liberated 2. May 1945 by Americans. There were approximately 60,000 survivors. One of the camp's survivors was Simon Wiesenthal. Mauthausen was classified as a so-called "category three camp". This was the fiercest category, and for the prisoners it meant "Rûckkehr unerwünscht" (return not desired) and "Vernichtung durch arbeit" (extermination by work).

Night at Bolshoi

                                                         Moscow
Thursday,                                    24 may 1984 
   Kostya, having been told that I am moving to Whattabore, wants to know whether I am married. I told him I got divorced six days ago. Kostya lights up: "It is good to be free in Sweden, yes?"

Friday
   Wolfgang and I are subsisting on a diet of black caviar and Georgian champagne. Wolfgang keeps saying ecstatically "You know what this lunch would cost in the Russian Tea Room? It would cost a hundred and forty dollars, that's what it would cost!"
   Wolfgang is dreaming of getting a joint appointment: half year Moscow State University, half year Livermore. It would keep his CIA men busy. We are also supposed to buy a bust of Lenin for his office. I have taken him to a special department store, where one can buy medals, decoration ribbons and similar gear. For a few ruh-bles one could start looking a little bit like Marshal Ustinov. Our contacts say that a Hero of Socialist Labor medal could be gotten on the black market. Order of Lenin, however, would be difficult to acquire; there are fewer of them, and they are solid gold.

Saturday
   A gaggle of physicists discusses women. S.P. Strinck: "I like them all, regardless of legs." S.P. has an interesting hair style; the hair grows up from sides and is pasted to the top of the skull.
   Scott is in a quandary. He has two tickets to the Bolshoi Ballet, and he wants to fuck. The problem is Professor Porcogrande. "Me, I know culture." Here he comes. "We are going to the circus tomorrow" he says, concupiscently pleased with himself. Scott heaves a sigh of relief.

Sunday
   The curtain goes up, and up in the mists Maya Plisetskaya flaps her hands in a manner of seagull's wings. Scott and I glance worriedly at each other: "This is a ballet fit for Professor Porcogrande." I glance to my left, and I see Ludmila. Scott, too, has spotted her, and has forgotten both the seagull and Porcogrande. Phosphorescent with desire, he is scanning backwards through his memory banks. Nothing remotely like Ludmila all the way back to Stillwater, Oklahoma. Ludmila has a beautiful elongated face, with Slavic cheekbones, long thin nose, large blue eyes, fine lips. Could be the star of War and Peace, or Love and Death. At the intermission she walks away from us, tall, thin (yes, thin! The Sphericity Conjecture refuted), a perfect Checkov heroine. We are hot on her tail - I lose Scott in a miasma of spherical thighs - only to find him chatting up the mother in German. "Das ewig weiblische sieht uns hinan, etc., etc.". "Ludmila seems to breathe nothing but Russian" he whispers to me, thwarted. Ha! I am rolling out my best Russian, Ludmila is all smiles, and it's all wrapped up. I cannot believe my good stars - the most beautiful wo. since Kansas City, and all mine. I already see us speeding in a black Volga to her parents' dacha, for a champagne and caviar weekend together.
   Porcogrande, eat your heart out!
   The curtain goes up again, and I wait impatiently for the intromission. On the stage - no, that is impossible! - Wolfgang is shuffling Plisetskaya around, trying to fit her in with the other furniture. (Ludmila's mother noted with pride that Plisetskaya is fifty-nine). It is unmistakably Wolfgang: that flowing hair, that wild look, that overbearing emotion, that unmistakable grace. That's how he spends his evenings, claiming all the while that he is having interesting discussions with Khorbatovs, Lifshitzes and the like!
   Wolfgang drags a dead seagull around the stage (ah! that's why the ballet is called "Seagull"!"), and it is the end. Ludmila is smiling at me over her shoulder. She is being dragged away! The lights have not gone on yet, but the mother has a firm hold on Ludmila's biceps, and is navigating her toward the exit. There is no moment to lose. While they are still throwing flowers at Plisetskaya, Scott and I are jumping over the chairs, and we intercept them in the lobby. Mother takes a firmer grip, looks me straight into the eye, says very clearly "Do-svi-danya!" and - and they are gone! Vanished into Biblioteka Imena Lenina subway station! I am crushed. Scott, you laggard, what did you do? You were supposed to work on the mother!
   We look in a daze at a Membermobile (a Politbureau member chauffered black Volga) pulling away, with a blonde outstretched diagonally across the back seat, and an officer cap in the rear window.

Monday
Wolfgang has established a reliable method for gauging the relative importance of Russian scientists. Zheldovich, a hero of socialist labor, can get a paper xeroxed in five minutes. Lihshitz - half an hour. Sinai - several days. Kostya - forget it.
   Today, I am omitting caviar from my dinner - I dine champagne, only. The television is full of Marshall Ustinov's bemedaled chest, and endless rows of smiling komsomolets in military uniforms. At nine o'clock a rocket launcher arrives at the square in front of the hotel, and fireworks celebrating the trillionth congress of the Komsomol start. With split second precision they go up and explode simultaneously over some twenty different Moscow squares. It is as cheerful as the third world war. I go to bed and sink into nightmares.

Tuesday
   Professor Porcogrande makes no bones about it: "I do not like public transportation, and I won't take it." Kolya has finally dredged up a yellow Volga station wagon, commensurate to Professor Porcogrande's rank. Upon arrival of the vehicle, Professor Porcogrande is overcome with childlike joy, and he, his wife and Professor von Weissecker are whisked off to the Institute of Crystalography, where they wait the next half hour for us pawns to join them.
   Today is the Polyakov day. Any conceivable two dimensional conformal model is being solved exactly. A brazen Armenian in the first row asks a stupid question: "To what physical systems do these exact solutions apply?" Loud laughter.
   Wolfgang keeps bedazzling babushkas. This is the second babushka who wants Wolfgang to marry a nice Russian girl. "I have worked for 53 years, and now your president wants to kill me. Why? This is a beautiful city, this is a good country. Don't you listen to radio? He is threatening us with atom bombs!"
   We wished we knew why Wolfgang's president wants to bomb her off the face of this earth.
   Wolfgang remembers a nice restaurant on the Kalininsky Prospekt. We are immediately seated, and black caviar, red caviar, sturgeon and assorted meats appear magically on the table. I am starting to feel uneasy: "Excuse me, would it be possible to have a look at the menu?" Oh, the menu? Of course. I have a look: this will put us back some thirty thousand ruh-bles. The procession starts. First the waiter - would we like to change some dollars? No, thanks. Two for one? No, no thanks. Next is a young man who can get us caviar at half price. Then somebody unintelligible who purports to be Israeli, wants ?. The bill comes to the forty two thousand ruh-bles: both caviars are counted twice. (Soviet physicists earn some 250 ruh-bles a month). I object - we get twice as much caviar for less ruh-bles at the Acadamy Hotel (oh, yes, we know our caviar). The waiter explains that this is the top class restaurant.
   However, Wolfgang has a way with Soviet waiters. He lays forty two ruh-bles on the table, looks at the waiter firmly and says: "Well, if that is the case, we will have to take the bill with us." The waiter wavers for a moment, then answers "We do not want any trouble", returns ten ruh-bles, and crumples the bill in his hand.

Wednesday
   Wolfgang dazes still another bevy of Russian speaking Russian mathematicians with his compact way of expressing himself in English. Every fifteen minutes or so Sinai gets up and translates into Russian: "He is still talking." We leave them stunned, and Kostya speeds us off in what should have been Professor Porcogrande's Volga (eat your heart out, Professor Porcogrande) to the Kremlin's Palace of Congresses. Madam Butterfly is seventy and perfectly spherical, but sings beautifully. Pinkerton, the putz, drops her for an Aeroflot stewardes. The Aeroflotess is of the exemplary Soviet build: granite shoulders, and cylindrical the rest of the way to the ground. Seeing this, Madame Babushka hari-kiris herself, and rolls forward, though retaining the same height - her face is now in front, at about waistline level.
   Wolfgang and I are overtaken and separately whizzed off to distant parts of Moscow by two Muscovite maidens: 1.) Eighteen year old Natasha; 2.) Nineteen year old Kira. The age factor has now reached two. We do not count each other's gray hairs any longer.

Thursday
   Wolfgang does it again. Answering the question starting with "Your determinant...", he forgets to answer "The beautiful exact determinant of Sonoffvitch...". So much for contracts with doctor Faust.
   Doctor Faust is now a center of boundless adulation.
  We proceed to a party with thirty seven physicists, Sasha Polyakov, and one beautiful woman, hitherto referred to as Lena. Wolfgang very much taken by her. Wolfgang: "She has beautiful eyes." I: "Yes, she has two eyes." and so on. We promptly kidnap her ("She doesn't speak English" observes Wolfgang, thwarted), and drag her through subways across entire Moscow to Kostya's apartment. There Wolfgang turns his back to her and spends the evening explaining DOE and Army contracts in great detail to puzzled Russian intellectuals. Lena bites her nails while Wolfgang makes statements like "University is business. US is a bad country. My president is a prick." At two we taxi her across Moscow again.
  Few fast impressions:
  This subway, too, has girls with Walkman. The city has ravens instead of pigeons. There are many men with identical black business briefcases, even Kostya has one of those. Vastly fewer books are being read in subways than only two years ago. All apartments are in total chaos. My maiden subjects me to acrobatic dancing to mindless disco, this circumventing intromission. She is made out of rubber, but my bones are creaking. God, have we become old!... Wants me to make five children with her. Has a wonderful movie-making mother who seems to be my age. What am I doing here? Everybody is paranoid about telephone taps, especially our maidens. Every day we walk by a semicircle of horrendous Stalin period buildings, which turn out to be the setting for Solzhenitsin's "First Circle". Lena has told Wolfgang about her Volga factory job; the diet is only vodka and bread, many children born deformed. The country is covered with places like that, where nobody is allowed to come.
   At the airport, Professor Porcogrande is the first in the passport control queue, and I am last. This will be set straight at the heaven's doors. The plane takes off, and the professor claps in still another attack of childish joy. Is there a chauffeured black Volga waiting for him at the Acron airport?

Trains

It is unfair to talk of buses and forget the trains. The truth is that the most wonderful experience of the whole trip was an Amtrak experience. I left Princeton, and, as one would expect from american railroads, I found myself, together with another girl who boarded at Princeton, stranded in Trenton. Hour and a half in the Trenton train station. The girl said: "What are we going to do? You'll be very bored... I have an Ebony, do you want to see it?" (no she was not black - actually she was off-blonde). She had this issue of Ebony because it contained an article about Charlotte McCoo's diet. I have no idea who Charlotte McCoo is - she is a television personality. The article said she put great emphasis on regular bowel motion.

I read it and then I said to the girl "You must be bored, too. I just happen to have two Superman comics books with me, and a Classics Illustrated from 50's - is that something for you?" She said that that might be worth load of money; she had just received a comic books catalogue she had ordered in the mail, and did I know that some of the first issues can fetch a few thousands of dollars? For example, the first issue of Batman in mint condition is worth $6000. I had no idea, I had to admit. I thought six dollars for a Classics Illustrated was outrageous enough. One thing seemed clear - Princeton freshmen have gotten more brainless. Television stars, and comic book catalogues? Next thing you know, we were sitting in a train and I was confessing to my dislike of Wagner. How I went all the way from Oxford to London to the Covent Garden to sit through four hours of Sigfried for love of my Wagner freak friends Francois and UF. A long story - for another time.

Hundred' mus med haler på

Lysistrata's lille Karen and Martin er så søde. Om morgenen kommer de til mammas seng, med morgens bedste wienerbrød. Og så lærte de mig denne sang:

Hundred' mus med haler på

Forfatter: Halfdan Rasmussen - Komponist: Henning Hansen

Hundred' mus med haler på
og bittesmå sandaler på
gik morgentur med smedens hest
mens solen selv gik ned i vest.

Hundred' mus fik ømme tæer
og købte sig en tømme hver
og red af sted i vældig fart
til landet, hvor man har det rart.

Hundred' mus fik musemad
og flødeskum og brusebad
og ost og spæk og meget mer'
som ikke skal beskrives her.

Hundred' mus gik hjem en nat
og traf en gammel, gnaven kat
der åd dem alle, hver og en
med hud og hår og museben. 

 

Jeg værdsatte ikke dengang hvilken udvalgte, velopdragne børn lærte mig sangen.

(fortsat October 10, 2020)

First Greenland, than a famous physicist in Poland

  The best thing that has happened to me since the february 1983 Amtrak conversation about Superman comics, Wagner and quantum mechanics with a 16 year old wonder was Greenland. A combination of scientific frustrations caused by the chaos workshop and emotional frustrations caused by unfulfilled cravings for looooooooove drove me to pure misanthropy. The issuing claustrophobia could be cured only by a continent of ice.

Chris Pethick and I flew into Narssassuak (an abandoned US military hospital complex where uncountable Korean war GI's gave up the remnants of their mangled bodies), walked out the terminal and into the hills and saw no humans the next eleven days. We soon understood why. Greenland is in no danger of being overrun by tourists and becoming another Costa Brava. Unlike Normandy, the best weather prediction rule is: tomorrow the weather will be different. If one day it didn't rain, it would certainly rain for uninterrupted 24 hours the next day. Or snow. August temperatures are -6 to +10 degrees Celsius. It was sunny the first and the last day, just so we would come back.

In Greenland everything is out of scale. The trees are horizontal and two-dimensional. The boulders are table-sized, when they are not chair-sized. The streams are roaring rapids. The flowers are brilliant in color and pinhead sized. The icebergs are any color, from blinding white to blue to green to red to pitch black. The horizon is inverted, bright below and dark above: the clouds are lit from below, by the sunlight reflected on the ice. And the ice, there is more than enough ice to cover entire Europe.

There were three distinct moments, each etched into my memory, and each one by itself worth the entire trip. Each one was a suddenly revealed vista, surpassing in grandeur and drama anything I have seen in Alps, Rockies, or Andes.

The first revelation occurred after a day long slow climb up a canyon. We reached a snow balcony at the water divide, and for the first time saw inland Greenland. Few thousand feet below us was a strange volcanic-like black boulder pocked plateau, with a chain of small black lakes; further on, a canyon and a chain of dark hills followed by a bluish gray lake filled with enormous icebergs; more mountains, glaciers, and then the sea of ice, merging into the dark skies above.

The second moment occurred a few days latter, further inland. We spent the day walking along a chain of high-altitude (here it means 1000 meters) iced-over lakes, and were descending toward something called "The Hole" when the wind momentarily swept away the clouds bellow us, and we saw it. It is the largest strip mining operation we have ever seen. It is huge bowl of scree into which three dying glaciers mouth. Something like a sand hole dug out by a child on a beach, only scaled up to ten kilometers. At the bottom, a gray colored lake filled with armies of majestic (I should start writing tourist pamphlets for Greenland Tourist Association) icebergs, progressing imperceptibly, and every morning greeting us with new formations.

The third moment was the one that we have labored toward the entire week; we reached the highest peak on the edge of inland ice that we could reach without crossing the glaciers. It was only 1800 m, but this far north this is high altitude, snow and ice the entire year. The mountain was a finger stuck into the inland ice, with glaciers pouring by on both sides, and the view was indescribable. On one side chain after chain of dark mountains and ice filled lakes. On the other side, the inland ice at sunset - brilliant white, shifting into burgundy reds and deep violets. Clouds, clouds and clouds, ripping across the skies in most violent formations and colors. And the sensation that the ice never ends - the continent of it, continuing into the arctic and across, down into Canada... And here I am, the microscopic bundle of microscopic frustrations...

If I come back, it will have to be with ice axes, crampons and ropes - the expenses of ice beckon us irresistibly onward. I would love to come back, but I do not know whether I will be able to. Two things brought me eventually to snail-crawl, and I do not know what to do about them. One was the water - the incessant rain, and the water surging up everywhere from the ground. My boots were drenched for two continuous weeks (when they were not frozen), my feet swollen, soles burning. The other nuisance was a bleeding hemorrhoid - scrambling over slippery sharp edged boulders menstruating freely, with blood running down ones thighs.

There is no fleeing from oneself, though. I discovered that I suffered from insomnia every other night, just like in Copenhagen. And every night awake was a night back into my civilized present. I took along nothing to read, determined to do nothing but sink into the nature around me. But having to lie in tent 24 hours every second day, waiting for the rain to stop, eventually broke my determination down.

I started to think. The last day in Copenhagen Boris Shraiman told me that Farey numbers can be rewritten as self-similar continued fractions, and that they have a binary labeling. I worked out a self-similar continued fraction formula, and a binary labeling. Actually, I have no idea whether they are the ones Boris meant - but they work beautifully. They yield several different scaling laws for the stability intervals for the circle maps. The most amazing one is totally analogous to the scaling function sigma for period doublings, except that instead of organizing the trajectory splittings in the iteration space, it organizes the stability intervals in the parameter space. That the same bifurcation tree structure organizes both one-dimensional period doublings and the circle-map phase lockings I find astounding (as long as I cannot convince myself that is trivial). In any case, it is the best thing that happened to the universality in chaos since the invention of smoked eel, or at least since Feigenbaum's scaling function for period doubling. It remains to be seen who publishes it first - many people know by now that there must be such a scaling function.

After Greenland I went to lecture on chaos in a place called Szczszczszscyrk and was told that I am a famous physicist in Poland. It was a step into the time machine - the peasants toil behind horse-drawn ploughs, maidens turn into spherical little bundles as soon as they get married, people are dressed into socialist drab, and prices make no sense; physicists get the same salary in zlotys that I get in kroner, but on black market 1 krone = 100 zloty. Our colleagues run underground radio stations and papers. Still, they despair - they are defeated and believe that no change is possible as long as there is no change in Soviet Union.

Actually, a small comedy of potential import form my future is taking place here. The government has announced a series of 5-year (non-tenured) "super"-professorships. The stated goal is to prevent loss of the top research talent to emigration to other countries, and one would think it was designed just for me. The stupid thing is that it is called (and salaried as) professorship, so instead of uniting themselves behind one youthful hopeful, 10 of Niels Bohr Institutes middle-aged lecturers have applied for the position. The result will be that physics will not get a single professorship. My colleagues disappoint me, because it looks like they are just going to let me float; particle physicists do not consider me theirs, because I have been doing chaos the last year, etc..

It would clearly be a great loss for Denmark if they let me go, especially in the light of the fact that I have started taking a university course on the late 19th century danish literature. I know everything that Georg Brandes has to say about romantics of the first half of the 19th century; how many born-in-Denmark Danes can say as much?

What else do I do? Instead of fucking a lizard of my choice, I spend nights coaxing Olivia into printing out graphics on Oki - but she's so slow, so excruciatingly slow...

Predrag gets Nobel Prize

27 june 1976
A cottage on Inari lake, 300 km north of the polar circle.

I dreamt I had just received the Nobel prize. It was vaguely connected to my work on the Yang-Mills infrared problem. The experimental evidence supporting my work was an ancient fish somebody had fished out. The fish was big, black and ugly - looked like the fish we had caught and fried the previous night. I touched it, and a chunk of meat flaked off.

I was very happy - happy because from now on I was free to think as I liked, work hard on whatever I liked; my future as physicist had been secured. Just after the announcement I experienced a surge of anxiety; nobody mentioned it to me, except a young graduate student who came to congratulate me. Finally I asked Bill Bardeen who got the prize. "You, of course" he said offhandedly.

I still remained worried that someone might ask me what I got the prize for; I really did not understand that too well myself. It was hard to see how an ancient fish related to anything I had done.

Everything was very informal; I was a boyish 30 year old, in jeans and a T-shirt, and I did not bother to come to the Stockholm ceremony. Bill agreed with me (we were sitting somewhere on a log in a Finnish forest). "Ever since I got the prize, I have been free to work."

I looked at him. His father got two Nobel prizes, but I could not remember that Bill got one, too.

Instead of me coming to Stockholm, the prize committee came to me, to Inari lake. I talked to them, again sitting on rough hewn tree trunks in the forest. I wondered why they gave the prize to me - was it not so that they always gave them to very old, famous men? They said yes, always old men, but not necessarily famous for their work ("ho, ho" they chuckled as they said that), however, they have changed their policy. They are giving them to young, unknown physicists with promise, and I was the first.  

People v. Pitts

My Ithaca roommate Herbet Lee Pitts was convicted for bank robbery which occurred in December, 1968 in Tuskegee, Alabama, when he was a student at Tuskegee Institute. [...] Dr. Price characterized Pitts as a paranoid schizophrenic who had periods of exacerbation and remission. [...] Pitts' paranoic tendencies displayed themselves most clearly in his delusion that he would be the savior of his race.

Here is  www.supremecourt.gov/pdfs/journals/scannedjournals/1970_journal.pdf ,  November 9, 1970 p.99; Certiorari Denied No. 5654. Herbert Lee Pitts, petitioner, v. United States. Petition for writ of certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit denied.

In 1971 he is listed as imprisoned in Petersburg, Va, apparently as a conscientious objector. He had a number of his poems published in 1970's.

Here is Black View  November 29, 1973 editorial by Herbet Lee Pitt.

In 1973 he returned to his pre-Cornell ways, with a loaded rifle and a bandolier of ammunition: casetext.com/case/people-v-pitts-54 .

Babysitting infrared renormalization for perturbative QED

From the time immemorial rumor has it or better still the notion is abroad there exists a way out.
Samuel Beckett, "The Lost Ones"

Last night I babysat for the first time - and while babysitting I formulated a counter-term prescription for the I.R. problem. The last three weeks have been amazing: I solved a whole series of graph-theoretic problems, formalized the K intermediate counter-term renormalization, and invented the I counter-term renormalization. The last might turn out to be extremely important for QFT, because it is much simpler than the other schemes, and unifies the infrared and ultraviolet treatments.

After one whole week of solid work 73 pages of the paper are written. Many important concepts were formulated this week. Other than writing, I have not been living.

Cvitanović and Kinoshita, New approach to the separation of ultraviolet and infrared divergences of Feynman-parametric integrals, Phys. Rev. D 10, 3991-4006 (1974)

            Rashômon