Sidney Coleman (1937-2007)

[mmcirvin]

It's a sign of how far out of the physics loop I am these days that I only now found out that Sidney Coleman died on November 19.

Prof. Coleman was one of the most brilliant people I've ever met in any field of endeavor, and an entertaining, idiosyncratic lecturer whose quantum field theory course at Harvard was legendary. Mostly through that course, he had a huge influence on my thinking about various topics in physics, though of course he's not responsible for any stupid opinions I may have or my eventual washing out of the subject. He was also a sometimes active science-fiction fan.

What makes his passing more painful is that I've often wondered in recent days what his take would be on various recent controversies. First there was the dust-up over Garrett Lisi's fragmentary sketch of a putative Theory of Everything (and its ridiculous hyping in the mass media, largely on the basis of Lisi's unusual personal story and semi-outsider status); part of that controversy revolves around the applicability of the Coleman-Mandula theorem, though it seems to just be turning into yet another pissing match between the string-theory and anti-string-theory camps in theoretical physics (you have no idea how glad this makes me that I'm neither in the community any more, nor moderating sci.physics.research).

Then there was the smaller media frenzy over Krauss and Dent's paper on vacuum decay and long-time deviations from exponential decay and the relationship, if any, to the quantum theory of observation, all three of which were subjects Sidney Coleman talked about a lot (I recall he thought most of the existing papers on long-time deviations from exponential decay were conceptually flawed, but I was too naive at the time to really get the gist of his argument). I think Coleman was one of the small minority of physicists who could talk about interpretational issues in quantum mechanics without saying anything blatantly dumb or erroneous--this is very difficult to accomplish.

Comments

[pnh.livejournal.com]

Sid Coleman figured in our lives as the subject of innumerable anecdotes told to us (and written up in various fanzine pieces) by our and his friend, the late science-fiction editor Terry Carr. Since Terry was famously one of the perpetrators of the Carl Brandon hoax, we took to needling him about this unlikely-sounding "Sid Coleman" character whom we'd never actually met. This ended one afternoon in a Mexican restaurant on University Avenue in Seattle, when, amid the loud conversation between several physics students at the next table, we suddenly heard one of them say "Well, you'd have to check with Sid Coleman at Harvard about that."

Terry died in early 1987. Later that year, at the Worldcon in Britain, we were on a memorial panel about his fan and pro career. Which is where we finally met Sid Coleman--who arrived, late, carrying a cardboard sign over his head featuring a downward-pointing arrow and the word "REAL."

No comparison intended.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Also RIP to Evel Knievel (http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/kibology/evel.html), whose physics demonstrations of ballistic flight, often at terrible expense to himself, enthralled us all.

Re: No comparison intended.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

A few years ago, Evel's heirs actually sold the rights to do Evel Knievel: The Rock Opera, though I never heard anything else about it. I always wondered if I had anything to do with that.

There was nobody else quite like that guy.

Re: No comparison intended.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Er, not his heirs, I guess, since he was still alive. You know what I mean.