Friday, July 21, 2023

where have I heard that story before?

From The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes:

Out of curiosity in 1940, while visiting Berkeley to deliver a lecture, Enrico Fermi attended a seminar one of Oppenheimer’s protégés led in the master’s style. “Emilio,” Fermi joked afterward with Segrè, “I am getting rusty and old. I cannot follow the highbrow theory developed by Oppenheimer’s pupils anymore. I went to their seminar and was depressed by my inability to understand them. Only the last sentence cheered me up; it was: ‘and this is Fermi’s theory of beta decay.’ ” 

Menachos 29:

  אמר לפניו רבש"ע הראהו לי אמר לו חזור לאחורך הלך וישב בסוף שמונה שורות ולא היה יודע מה הן אומרים תשש כחו כיון שהגיע לדבר אחד אמרו לו תלמידיו רבי מנין לך אמר להן הלכה למשה מסיני נתיישבה דעתו

He [Moshe] went and sat at the end of eight rows [of students in Rabbi Akiva's Beit Midrash], and he did not know what they were talking [about]. He got upset. As soon as he got to one [other] thing, his students said to him, "Our teacher, from where do you learn this?" He said to them, "It is a law [that was taught] to Moshe at Sinai." He [Moshe] calmed down. 



1 comment:

  1. This is a quote from Isidor Rabi who won The Nobel Prize in Physics 1944. Clear a genius of a philosopher :( "After reading about Copernican heliocentrism, he became an atheist. "It's all very simple", he told his parents, adding, "Who needs God?"[4] As a compromise with his parents, for his Bar Mitzvah, which was held at home, he gave a speech in Yiddish about how an electric light works."

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