Once upon a time, I received my diploma from the hands of the Gods. That particular God, David Baltimore just joined the others in the Heavens on Sept 6. He was the president of Caltech at the time of my graduation. The picture shows him handing my diploma.
Baltimore’s 1975 Nobel was for his research on the viral nature of cancer. He was only 37 when he received the award. The PAP-smears almost every woman has in the Western World are a consequence of his research as well as of earlier work of the Romanian Aurel Babeş and Greek-born American Georgios Papanikolaou.
David Baltimore was the only Nobel Prize winner I worked for who had already received the award before I met him. Of the 5 Nobel Prize winners I worked with two lost their lives in the past few weeks. The other was Rai Weiss. He died on August 25 this year. Rai was 92. He had shared the 2018 Nobel Prize for LIGO with two of my PhD advisors: Kip S. Thorne and Barry Barish. Rai was born in Berlin and moved to America to escape the Nazis. I also started Physics in Berlin and was emboldened to move to America by the German government giving me a deportation order due to visa issues. Sure, it was far less threatening than Rai’s. He almost made it to the 10 year anniversary of gravitational wave detection.
My two PhD advisors are still fighting for gravitational wave astronomy today, each in their own way. They both give seminars and rally the press to get the momentum to allow current gravitational wave detectors to continue and be upgraded. Barry C. Barish was my formal PhD advisor. If I count my thesis as a joint publication, I was one of his very, very few students.
Kip was my God as a child, and among us, PhD students at Caltech, at times, we used to call him God. A dozen or so years later, the Nobel Committed agreed. Kip was my main reason for going to Caltech. A meeting with Kip at a LISA meeting at AEI, where I was a German diploma student was the decisive factor in my admission to Caltech. He took the time to speak for hours to a student who had read his books and was brave enough to suggest corrections, and even discuss some of his own theories. Today my paper with Kip (and only me and Kip!) is part of my contribution to gravitational waves astronomy.
Later, I wrote a second paper on the mirrors aiming LIGO's main laser, which was the first cornerstone in Andrew Lundgren’s career in gravitational waves — his first LIGO paper. I was finishing graduate school at the time, and the paper was under my supervision. It built on the mirror research I had done earlier with Kip. Andy went on to be the first senior scientist to see the first event with LIGO, which is the most important in the history of the machine and which was honored with the 2018 Nobel.
Another contribution is a set of gravitational waves lectures. They are still the World’s most famous course on gravitational waves online (https://astro-gr.org/online-course-gravitational-waves/). This set of movies I initiated, and built together with Kip and Yanbei Chen was a turning point in Kip’s career. We used to talk about what he would do in his old age when his mind will no longer be so sharp. After these movies, he decided against waiting, and moved to work at Holywood. With me and with his many other students, he did reality. We played with black holes, gravitational wave detectors — the exciting bits of the reality that bend space and slow down time, in their full mathematical beauty.
After me, came Chris Nolan who did fiction in Interstellar and history in Oppenheimer. Kip served as executive producer for Interstellar and advisor on Oppenheimer, both heavy Hollywood hits to the tune of half a billion each. Oppenheimer was Nolan’s most nominated film, with 7 Oscars won. Interstellar didn’t do bad either.
The time I did the movies with Kip was my only break in my employment with David Politzer, another nobel prize winner. I quit working for a Nobel Prize winner only to take a job with another, where I could make an original contribution to the work underlying the prize. H. David Politzer shared the 2004 Nobel Prize with David Gross and Frank Wilczek for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics.
Of all my employers, he has the longest tenure. I was his assistant (TA) for Physis 1 for half a decade. In my whole life, I never worked for anyone else for a longer time. The work that led to his Nobel Prize was completed before my birth. I will never forget the countless office hours we spent together, often just me and David, as the students had better things to do, and perhaps more important people to learn from.
