Abstract
When I had just started to write this book, I told one of my French colleagues about my project. I listed its different future parts: Hors d’Oeuvres, Entrées, Dessert, ..., and he interrupted me, “What about the Trou Normand?” I immediately realized that that was a good idea. The preceding chapters were full of rather nontrivial, high-calory scientific information. The reader needs a rest.
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Notes
- 1.
As I’ve already mentioned in the Introduction, it is a restive digestive pause between the main dish and the dessert.
- 2.
A rubber joint which became less resilient due to unusually low temperatures in the morning of the launch. As a result, the joint failed.
- 3.
In his book Feynman explained how he did it, but frankly I did not understand much. Anyway, there is not much practical point — I guess that the particular safes that Feynman learned to crack are not in use any more.
- 4.
His former student who followed Feynman’s course in Caltech, made notes and is a co-author of the Feynman lectures together with Feynman and Matthew Sands.
- 5.
Feynman also writes that it originally came from the French expression “au fait” suggested by one of his friends. But then he writes that “au fait” means “it is done” in English, whereas it is rather “in fact” or “by the way”. Actually, neither “it is done”, nor “by the way” seems to be a sensible choice for a pseudonym, and this part of the story is still not completely clear to me.
- 6.
Some of these names may be new for the reader. Sathyendranath Bose established simultaneously with Einstein the Bose–Einstein statistics for the photon and other particles with integer spin, see p. 143. Louis de Broglie was the first to understand that not only the photon, but also the electron and other elementary particles have both particle and wave nature; see p. 10. Eugene Wigner was the first to understand the role of symmetry in atomic spectra and introduced the methods of group theory into physics.
- 7.
The physics of \(^3\)He is richer and more tricky. In contrast to the atoms of \(^4\)He, \(^3\)He atoms carry a half-integer spin and are fermions. They cannot form a Bose condensate bringing about superfluidity right away. It is the pairs of \(^3\)He atoms that condense, much as the Cooper pairs of electrons condense in a superconductor.
- 8.
Of course, Landau did not call it supersymmetry — the word did not exist yet. Landau can be compared in this respect to Mr. Jourdain, the bourgeois gentilhomme, who spoke prose without knowing what prose is.
- 9.
That was not a fortunate choice for him. He was arrested during the Great Purge in 1937 and spent a couple of years in the jail of the NKVD. Then, after the Soviet-German pact of 1939, he was turned over to Germany and was immediately arrested by the Gestapo there... But I am afraid that we are now losing our own narrative thread.
- 10.
That was how his disciples called him.
- 11.
Of course, the scope of Landau’s responsibilities was much larger than Feynman’s — after all, Landau was 10 years older.
- 12.
This section represents an adaptation of my notes written for the memoirs volume Under the Spell of Landau, edited by Mikhail Shifman.
- 13.
One must say that many of his disciples became brilliant theorists, indeed. The most known of them are Gribov and three Alexanders: Alexander Migdal, Alexander Polyakov and Alexander Zamolodchikov.
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Smilga, A. (2017). The Human Dimension. In: Digestible Quantum Field Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59922-9_13
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