Lincoln Wolfenstein, teoretični fizik, ki je poučeval na Carnegie Mellon University, znan pa je predvsem po Wolfensteinovi parametrizaciji CKM matrike mešanja kvarkov, ter po MSW efektu pri oscilacijah nevtrinov, je preminil pred nekaj več kot mesecem dni. Nanj sem se zopet spomnil ravno danes, ker so v Long-Baseline Neutrino News zbrali nekaj njegovih bolj posrečenih izjav:
1. On quarks – For a long time I thought that quarks were a
mathematical model and weren’t “real” but when I found that I
couldn’t write a paper without mentioning quarks, they were real.
2. On neutrinos – As a student at Chicago, I walked next to Stagg
Field where the test reactor CP1 in the squash court was pouring
out trillions of neutrinos. Of course I didn’t know, but if I
had known I would have walked on the other side of the street.
3. On neutrino mass theories – We have thousands of theories,
which is like having no theory at all.
4. To an experimenter at a talk on the CKM matrix – I invented
rho & eta and I don’t care what their values are; why should you?
Posebej zadnjo sem večkart slišal tudi sam kot postdoc na CMU, kjer sem imel mizo dve sobi stran na istem hodniku kot Lincoln. R.I.P.
