[FRIAM] The theory of everything

[David Eric Smith]

Thank you Jon,

Yes, I had forgotten that Purcell did the original of this, and I may not have seen this particular lecture.  (I don’t have recall of the hand pictures.)

What a remarkable guy he was.  In almost any topic where he wrote teaching materials, his are the best version on the subject.

Little fun note:  When I was first trying to learn some biochemistry, way back in the earliest days at Los Alamos, I went to Hans Frauenfelder at CNLS to ask for advice.  All the biochem books available looked to me like books of case law, just scrolls and scrolls of details, and descriptions of patterns, but nothing I could recognize as a principle that could be used in any kind of constructive analysis.  It seemed like just a vast memorization exercise, with no objective but to be able to repeat what one had been told to remember.  Frauenfelder pointed me to Lubert Stryer’s biochem book, and told me it was really the only one that was well matched to a physicist’s style of learning. To convince me?  Stryer has an explicit note of thanks to Purcell in the acknowledgment.  The man did get around.

Best,

Eric


> On Jul 7, 2020, at 12:02 AM, Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The version of "Life at low Reynolds number" that I am familiar with is this
> one:
> http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/purcell.pdf
> 
> A wonderful lecture.
> 
> 
> 
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