Roberta Gordon

http://tinyurl.com/2vvu7w

That’s an image which has always stayed with me and which I think about often. It is a reminder of the glory of the process, that though we may not get all the answers in the end, several decades decades down the line, we can still be inspired to go into the office and wonder about how it all works. That is a tremendous gift.

(Later he admitted that he was attending some other formal function later that day.)

My favorite story was the time he was asked to teach a course at 10AM. He said he had to refuse because he couldn’t stay up that late.

He was extraordinarily generous with his time. I recall calling him once, out of the blue, and asking him whether the tunnelling rate for vacuum decay was gauge-dependent (since the effective potential is). He spent the next half hour on the phone with me (then a lowly postdoc) constructing a proof that the decay rate is gauge-independent.

He has taught a generation of physicists, and we’ll all miss him.

A great loss for physics, he was a giant of the field.

But there is no reason for the cosmological constant (equivalently, the absolute energy density of the vacuum) to vanish. Indeed, if it were not for the irrefutable empirical evidence, one would expect it to be a typical microphysical number, [and] the radius of the universe to be less than a kilometer.

==> “Modesty forbids me but honesty compels me.”

Prof. Coleman had a great sense of humor. One of my favorite quotes from him occurred during the 1989 World Science Fiction convention in Boston. On a panel about quantum physics, he said,

“If you mentioned quantum physics at a cocktail party ten years ago, no one would invite you back. More recently a woman approached me and said, ‘Isn’t quantum physics just what Eastern mystics have been saying for the last two thousand years?’ I had to summon every ounce of dignity and told her, ‘No.!’”

“Reality is blue, and clouds fly through it.”