The Nobel Prize

Just a few seconds ago I found myself with a group of Caltech Ricketts undergraduates having a discussion with a professor about biology. We were speaking briefly about evolution...

"At any given moment there's a lot of shit going on, and there seems to be very little progress in a specific direction. What most people don't seem to realize is that there is a lot more progress in one direction that is imagined... If you're going to study biology, you need to be interested in weird stories. You study some anomaly, some weird guy in a system, and devote your research to that."

This was after our dress dinner, which happens once a term. We get to dress up, have a four course meal in our dining hall, and invite TA's, professors, or anyone else we would like to come have dinner with us.

So I found myself outside after dinner, wearing a three piece plaid suit right out of the twenties, enjoying some peach flavored hookah tobacco with some other skurves, commenting on another group of people standing around another (apple flavored) hookah.

I probably said something like... "This school is fucking crazy. Over there, there's a bunch of students, everyone's ridiculously dressed up, drinking wine, some puffing on cigars, some passing the hookah around, and that might not seem so strange. But they're talking to some professor, and he's probably some prof that's won the Nobel prize."

It turns out that this professor was none other than David Politzer, Caltech's most recent Nobel laureate. In 1973, as a grad student, he came up with "asymptotic freedom" in collaboration with two other physicists. Asymptotic freedom, as far as I understand, has something to do with how Quarks bind more tightly to each other the farther apart they become.

I was just hypothesizing... and turned out to be right by some strange coincidence. This was the gentleman we were just discussing evolution with, for no apparent reason.

It's just me, reporting from a not-so-untypical day at Caltech.