Famous People

Even though I was bummed out and blog-less last week (sorry!), I didn’t stay home the entire time. So now I have to catch up on all my stories. Plus it’s a way to procrastinate my TASI application and the calculation I promised I’d do.

Last week Professor David Gross was in town visiting us. David Gross won the Nobel Prize last year in Physics for the work he did with Frank Wiczek(who is Ari's advisor at MIT and whose daughter was in my ceramics class) and David Politzer on Asymptotic Freedom and Quantum Field Theory. This is not something that I would get too excited about—I meet professors frequently and Nobel Prize winners, although brilliant, are often just as brilliant as other professors and somehow got lucky on their projects. Also, it is rare for someone in High Energy Theoretical Physics to win a Nobel Prize so there are a lot of phenomenal people who are, sadly, prize-less.

But the Chinese love teachers, especially professors, and especially ones with Nobel Prizes.

On Tuesday morning of last week, David Gross gave the first lecture of the String Theory course we will be teaching here in the next eight weeks. Photographers and journalists crowded in front of his podium, walking around searching for the perfect shot while he, no longer visible to the audience, tried (with difficulty due to the distractions) to give a lecture on why we need String Theory.

We grabbed the last seats that were available, which were in the front row.

Notice how we’re wearing our coats. Its cold. Even though we are indoors it is cold.

As a Teaching Fellow at Harvard, where I am required to attend lectures on material I already know very well. To stay awake I’ve developed a habit of knitting. I knit during class. I knit during movies. I knit during seminars. I knit during Nobel Prize winners’ lectures. Because I do this, my loved ones receive warm, colorful, misshapen birthday and Christmas presents that I’m sure they cherish. (They’d better!)

Anyhow, after the lecture we all met up in Andy’s office to go out for lunch. When Andy introduced me to David Gross, he said “Oh. You’re the knitter!” Did I just throw away an opportunity for a post-doc at sunny, warm, rock-happy UCSB? I blushed. I asked if it bothered him. “No,” he said, “ I don’t mind.”

Walking over to lunch, I asked David how he likes being famous. He sucked on his cigar and replied, “I’m still the same person. But people treat me differently, even people I’ve known for a long time.”

We all went to lunch and I ended up a professor sandwich, between Andy and David. We talked about the thing that String Theorists usually talk about when they eat together—they gossip about other String Theorist. (Unless they are all grad students, in which case they also talk about sex.) I learned such wonderfully useless (yet delicious) information such as how Ed Witten got into grad school.

And no, I did not try the squid, because I didn’t know what it was (a strange fruit perhaps?) and was too shy to ask anyone or risk it not being fruit while sitting in that professor sandwich. (A week earlier, I had caused an entire table to roar in laughter at lunch watching me try jellyfish for the first time. No, I do not like jellyfish. It is both too chewy and too crunchy for my tastes.)

On Wednesday night (which was the Lantern festival, which we missed, which marked the end of the New Years Holidays and the almost-end of the morning fireworks), we gathered at Andy’s house for a party in honor of some linear combination of David Gross's visit and Andy’s daughter’s birthday. We brought a cake but we also found out what kind of cake David like.

Andy’s driver, Lou Ing, spent the day hanging out with Aaron and cooking up a storm. (She’s on the right.)

This is only about half of what she made.

We ate a lot, drank a lot, and then people set off fireworks. Josh and David (Shih) took all of these photos. I was hiding behind a large tree. (Katy—remember that time in high school when we set off fireworks on Bear Skin Neck in Rockport and it exploded in my hand and we ran from the police [or at least though we did] and repaired my hand in the ice cream shop? Well, between that and the recent sparkler induced hair-fire I wasn’t going to go anywhere near those things!)

See the large firework on the bottom of Lisa’s stack? That cost about $10.

And here is a nice portrait of David Gross:




I went in the house when people started doing this:

After the fireworks, Lou Ing brought out hot glutonous rice balls with sesame filling. These things are tasty.

My concentration in the photo is due to (1) inebriation and (2) I’m still learning to use chopsticks. (I’ve stained all my clothes with dropped food. Chinese food tends to be slippery. And my hands like to cramp up at critical moments.)

There were essentially two camps at the party—the grown-ups (professors, their families, etc) and the grad students. Among the grad students were the Harvard folks and the Chinese math kids. In China, students, even grad students, are treated like second class citizens--and in a very different way than they are in America. For example—they sleep 4-8 students per dorm room with no heat. The professors seem to ignore them. And so they keep to themselves. I talked to them a bit but the conversations kept degenerating into Chinese (why, oh why, did I drop Chinese Ba?!?) so I challenged Xi to an arm wrestling match. (Did I mention that I was drunk? In case you don’t know him, Xi is 21 years old and works out. A lot.) My challenge attracted the attention of Andy who, with a large crowd of people, followed us into the kitchen. An arm wrestling tournament ensues. (Its too bad that David Gross went home. It would’ve been fun to challenge him. With his cigar smoking I might’ve had a chance.)


“You cannot graduate until you beat me.”





(Yeah, I am using two hands. I am drunk. And weak—its been a month since I’ve climbed or lifted anything heavier than Polchinki. And, even with two hands, I lost.)
A line-up of about twenty people finally managed to tire Xi out

and we went through a half-dozen “Champions” who would arm wrestle a line of people until they got worn out and lost.



Andy and David were busy with lectures and reporters so, for the rest of the week, we (the grad students) were pretty much left to our own devices.

Coming soon: Temples, physics, novels and PIZZA