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‘The Universe Speaks in Numbers’ – Interview 2
MICHAEL ATIYAH
In an interview with Graham last November, Sir Michael Atiyah described how he became a ‘quasi-physicist. Ten weeks later, Atiyah was dead. He was one of the most accomplished mathematicians of the past century: no one had done more in the past decades to discover close links between pure mathematics and fundamental physics. Undoubtedly a great mind, he was also an indomitable spirit.
‘The Universe Speaks in Numbers’ – Interview
NIMA ARKANI-HAMED
Leading theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed gave Graham an inspiring interview about the mysterious harmony between pure mathematics and fundamental physics.
The life and career of Lise Meitner, a pioneer of nuclear physics, was celebrated in a day of events at Churchill College Cambridge on 28 January. The symposium comprised three sessions – including one chaired by Graham – and, after dinner, a performance of the play ‘Curie_Meitner_Lamarr_Indivisible’.
painting of Lise Meitner by Sir Roy Calne
‘The Universe Speaks in Numbers’ to be published in May 2019
Graham’s publishers in the UK, Faber, announced last Friday that they will be publishing his next book in early May 2019. Basic Books will publish it a few weeks later in the U.S. and Canada. Graham said: ‘It will be good to see the book in the stores, five years after I conceived it.’
Dirac performed onstage last week at the Orkney Science Festival, played by the actor and former physicist David Sumner.
Photo courtesy of Andrea Blackie
Stephen Hawking was one of the greatest experts on gravity and cosmology of the twentieth century. Graham met him (over lunch) three times but never spoke to him – the awe was too great. But in the 1970s Graham did once come close to putting him in hospital ……
Hawking taking a zero-gravity flight in a reduced-gravity aircraft, 2007
Photograph: AP
Finn Aaserud, former Director of the Neils Bohr Archive
Finn Aaserud has done more than anyone in the past fifty years to illuminate the memory of the most revered Danish theoretical physicist of the twentieth century. Following Finn’s recent retirement, dozens of colleagues and peers gathered on Monday afternoon last week to thank him for his great service and to wish him well for the future.
RIP a great Diracian‘He was probably the most influential person of my life’, Graham said during his remarks at the funeral of the quantum mechanic John Bendall this week (Order of Service (PDF)). Bendall was the mathematical physicist who first introduced the fourteen-year-old Graham to the work of Paul Dirac, as Graham described in The Strangest Man (page 420).
‘If I had to pick one event that changed the course of my life’, Graham said, ‘it was when John opened the door of his house and we began to talk.’
Pauli’s ‘loveless sex’ on Radio 4
Graham’s praise of Wolfgang Pauli’s ‘lovely sex’ in the brothels of Hamburg has recently drawn criticism from on-line commentators. This followed the live broadcast of Radio 4’s In Our Time about Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, a programme that also featured the physicist Frank Close and the historian of science Michela Massimi.
Wolfgang Pauli (RHS) with Werner Heisenberg (centre) and Niels Bohr (LHS) c. 1938
The recent global news story about Winston Churchill’s allegedly ‘lost’ text about alien life forms is the subject of a prominent article in the Cambridge Independent.
Graham Farmelo, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, Storey’s Way, Cambridge. Picture: Keith Heppell