Abstract
At some point or other, we all have been admiring the tremendous number of books in the bookshelves of Manuel Cardona’s office. Needless to say, we could not help but being deeply impressed. But more so, we admired the broad knowledge that Manuel was able to display through his constant and voluminous reading. Manuel’s bookshelves covered the wall which had not been fully finished in the early days of the Institute on the Heisenbergstrasse. There used to be a big hole which allowed for a glance into Heinz Bill’s office, Manuel’s neighbor on the seventh floor in those days. Manuel’s bookshelves could easily be taken as the second Institute’s library, as he had filled them with his comprehensive collection.
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Notes
- 1.
Only a novice may have assumed that there was no order in the book shelves. Within seconds Manuel was able to pick out a book, open it at a particular page and discuss an equation or a figure or even spot a reference. Very often he had met and even recalled a little anecdote of the referenced authors.
- 2.
I am aware that Germany’s first post‐war Federal President, Theodor Heuss, uses this phrase as a title for his book Skizzen zu Dichtern und Dichtung (transl. Sketches on Poets and Poetry (Tübingen 1961), still nowadays an enjoyable reading. Interestingly, one of the early essays in Heuss’ book deals with the importance of the Spanish poet Miguel de Cervantes for the European literature. I am sure Manuel would have liked that.
- 3.
Manuel once showed me his notes taken in the lectures of Julian Schwinger at Harvard. He recalled that Schwinger’s lectures were like a theatre performance. Following his inner voice Schwinger lectured elegantly and continuously without any break or interruption, which he also did not allow from the students. In the latter respect, Manuel was certainly the opposite.
- 4.
F. Emde the second author, like Manuel, has been a Professor at the TH Stuttgart from where he retired in 1938.
- 5.
In Germany published by B.G. Teubner in Leipzig and Berlin.
- 6.
It would certainly be worth investigating to what extent university physics textbooks were available at all at that time in Spain.
- 7.
I.e. ‘signing and initialing’. I am sure Manuel would have known everything about how much Arabian calligraphic heritage influenced the Spanish handwritten ‘firma’ and the origin and highlights of ‘la rúbrica’.
- 8.
See Rohn Truell’s CV published by Brown University at http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/Databases/Encyclopedia/search.php?serial=T0150. Since 1968 Brown University awards members of the graduation class who have achieved special distinction with the Rohn Truell Premium Prize. Cf. http://www.dam.brown.edu/graduation/graduation2013.htm.
- 9.
Graphology is commonly considered a pseudoscience, a judgment I fully share.
Acknowledgement
I gratefully acknowledge valuable discussions with and suggestion by Reiner Ramlau and Éléonore Reinéry. I am especially thankful for Éléonore’s careful reading of the manuscript. Thanks go also to Daniela Kabinova who brought Manuel’s early Physics textbook to my attention and Carmen Müller for the excellent computer scans.
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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Kremer, R.K. (2016). Firma y Rúbrica. In: Ensslin, K., Viña, L. (eds) Manuel Cardona. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20343-0_16
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