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.
‘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.’
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