TO: American Institute of Physics (AIP), Editor-in-chief, Physics Today,
1 Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740
FM: Bruce E. Camber
RE: What a fascinating history; i.e., that AIP began in 1931 as a direct response to the Great Depression. Wikipedia has the history. Now, within AIP, we have sent emails to Jonathan Bagger, Charles Day, Robert Garisto, Urs Heller, Scott Montgomery, Robert Wimmer (and others).
Third email: 8 October 2019 at 12:12 PM
This letter went to Charles Day, the seventh Editor-in-Chief of Physics Today.
Second email: April 24, 2017
Thanks again. Quite heartwarming.
I am becoming somewhat of a Planck groupie.
Before discovering Einstein, he did his first rendition
of the Planck numbers (1899). Frank Wilczek (MIT)
takes credit (I wish I had a recording of our one-on-one)
that prior to his series of articles in 2001 in Physics Today,
(Climbing Mt. Planck), the Planck units were essentially
numerology (like Dirac’s large numbers).
As a brain teaser, you might look at our horizontally-scrolled
chart of the Planck units extended with our base-2
(See line 8 in our chart) such that Planck Time goes right up to the current
Age of the Universe in just over 202 notations or notations. http://81018.com/chart
It all started in a high school geometry class back in December 2011:
http://81018.com/home
Properly interpreting those numbers is my primary challenge these days.
I would be glad to accept the logic that they are meaningless, but I have
found too much within them to ignore them based on my own skepticism!
Best wishes,
Bruce
First email: April 24, 2017
Robert G. W. Brown, Chief Executive Officer
Re: Thank you
First person interviews are so valuable. What a find!
Thank you, thank you.
-Bruce
Foster Cary Nix interviewed by Lillian Hoddeson
Foster Cary Nix on Max Planck:
Hoddeson: Did you get to hear him at all?
Nix: Oh yes, I took lectures from Schrödinger and Planck, I took his lectures — the last semester Planck lectured was my first year in Berlin.
Hoddeson: On what subject?
Nix: Mechanics. To give you some idea of how popular he was in Germany, he lectured to a class, I should think, with 150 or 200 pupils. In mechanics — imagine this!
Hoddeson: What did mechanics mean at that time?
Nix: Oh, just classical mechanics. Planck was a man revered in Germany as I suppose that no other physicist ever experienced at all. He commanded the greatest respect in Germany; was an elegant lecturer. He was a really superb lecturer. He spoke beautiful German, and he had his lectures well organized. Now, Von Laue was also there, I took Von Laue’s lectures on X-rays — but he was a terrible lecturer. He chewed his words up. He was so bad; they wouldn’t let him be my examiner when I took my Ph.D. because they didn’t think I could understand him. My German’s much better than that, but anyway they were scared of it. So — the two you know of today, the three rather would be Schrödinger, Planck and Von Laue. Von Laue, I got to know him a lot better later. I got to know him over here. He’s of course dead, was killed in an automobile accident in about 1951 or somewhere along in that period, ‘52.