A Passion for Physical Realms, Minute and Massive

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

Physicist often show A Passion for Physical Realms, Minute and Massive — abstract and concrete:

At almost any physics workshop or conference there is likely to be a cluster of alpine adventurers whose passion for exploring the wilderness of abstractions also sends them off to ascend granite cliffs or scramble up fields of boulders at 14,000 feet.

“Climbing and physics both bring an intimacy with nature,” said Dr. Steven B. Giddings, a physicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who studies the peculiarities of black holes. “In physics this comes through unraveling the deepest secrets of how nature works, and in climbing by facing the unfolding challenges of an ascent through unknown territory.”
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“When I was a student in Cambridge, about half the University Mountaineering Club was either mathematicians or physicists,” said Dr. John Cardy, a theoretical physicist at Oxford who recently joined a trek in the Himalayas. “In the present local club of which I am part, there is still a preponderance of people with a training in physics.”
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“One of the difficulties of theoretical physics is the intangibility of the subject,” Dr. Giddings said. “In climbing, the challenges are tangible to the point that small decisions can dictate your survival.”
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Over the years physicists have given their names not only to the phenomena of physics but also to routes up obstacles of rock. Theorists at CERN, the leading European particle physics laboratory, refer to the Sacherer frequency and the Sacherer method for computing something called “bunched-beam instabilities” in a particle accelerator. And climbers in Yosemite tackle the Sacherer Cracker, part of a route up the treacherous El Capitan. All these landmarks were named for Dr. Frank J. Sacherer, a theoretical physicist at CERN, who was a world-class expert on the behavior of particle accelerators.

Climbers in the Shawangunk Mountains north of New York City might find themselves trying to negotiate Shockley’s Ceiling, named for Dr. William B. Shockley, the Bell Laboratories researcher who shared a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956 for the development of the transistor. Another enthusiastic Shawangunk climber, also at the laboratories, was Dr. Lester Germer, who collaborated with Dr. Clinton J. Davisson in 1927 to show that electrons can act like waves, as quantum theory predicted.

In his memoir “Mountain Passages,” Dr. Jeremy Bernstein, a physicist, remembered a close call when he was negotiating the Cosmic Spur, a challenging route up the south face of the Aiguille du Midi in the French Alps. It is named in honor of an old laboratory where, earlier in the century, experimenters — some of the first physicist-mountaineers — snatched cosmic rays falling from the sky to study the nature of particles.

With the help of his guide, Dr. Bernstein avoided a fall. But some physicists have lost their lives in the mountains. Dr. Sacherer and a young theorist, Dr. Joseph H. Weis, died in 1978 when a storm struck while they were descending a hanging ice field called the Shroud on the Grandes Jorasses near Chamonix.

In 1988 the Rockefeller University theorist Dr. Heinz R. Pagels fell to his death while hiking down 14,000- foot Pyramid Peak, near Aspen. Dr. David N. Schramm, a cosmologist/ physicist whose climbing exploits earned him the nickname Schrambo, did not die on a mountain; he was killed when the Cessna he was flying to Aspen in 1997 crashed into a Colorado wheat field. But he had survived close calls in treacherous ascents on four continents.

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