Comments on: Bruce Winstein

By: morris

morris — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 20:34:56 +0000

I remember Bruce as a boy when we went to grade school in West L. A. He grew up in a small, older home, near Brentwood Elementary School. He live a few blocks away from me, and I would visit with him to trade coins and talk baseball. He also enjoyed bowling and became rather good at it.

In High School, Bruce was entered into an advanced level of study, along with some of my smarter friends. Bruce had a sense of humor and never minded when his friends would tease him for studying too much. He was capable of doing the same to you. I remember that he sought out Stan Laurel and was granted an interview. His pals were quite impressed. I saw him once or twice when he wast at UCLA and knew he was interested in becoming a physicist. I am glad that he was successful at it. I wondered if he was going to go to our 50th High School reunion this summer. He was the one of the people that I, and another friend, Glenn Lyons, wanted to see.

By: Dragan Huterer

Dragan Huterer — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 20:44:08 +0000

It is always sad to lose someone so talented and unique.

Bruce taught an experimental physics class I took when I was a grad student at Chicago; at the time he was still a particle physicist. About 6-7 years later, he was a cosmologist and director of KICP while I was a postdoctoral fellow there. Most recently, he visited to Michigan to give a colloquium, and over dinner with a few of us, he recalled the golden years of physics at Chicago by recounting fascinating anecdotes involving Fermi, Telegdi, Garvin, Chandrasekhar, and others.

One thing that was already briefly mentioned was Bruce’s passionate love for the cinema. He was a world-class expert on the Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, and, I believe, taught an undergraduate *course* on Antonioni on more than one occasion at the University of Chicago only a few years ago.

Really sad day.

By: Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 15:51:51 +0000

I was a grad student on KTeV. Bruce was already transitioning to cosmology when I arrived at Chicago, so I didn’t get to work with him very much, but when we talked about KTeV it was amazing how well he remembered all the details and would get to the heart of the problem so quickly. Talking to him was always good for a morale boost too, because he would get so excited and that enthusiasm was contagious. He often stopped by the student office to chat about sports, music, or running. The last time I saw him was about a month ago at his retirement celebration; while he was obviously ill, he was warm, gracious, engaged, and enthusiastic just as he always had been. He was the driving force behind the research that I have so loved and he was an example of life well-lived. He was a larger-than-life figure in my life and it is hard to comprehend that he is gone. My thoughts are with his friends and family.

By: Excuse me?

Excuse me? — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 04:46:56 +0000

Charon, if you exhibited the same discretion in your work under Bruce as in your posting here, I have an entirely different interpretation of your personal history.

By: Michael Weiss

Michael Weiss — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 03:12:51 +0000

How very sad. Bruce was a wonderful colleague even outside of Physics. When I was a professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago, Bruce joyously “conspired” with my wife Carol to arrange a family 40th birthday party at FermiLabs. The evening coincided with a lecture on evolution and baseball statistics by Stephen Jay Gould (which reflected his discussions with Ed Purcell). Bruce’s passion for science enlivened a tour of the KevT experiment (including the salt crystals from mines beneath Lake Erie) for non-physicists.

By: UChicagoman

UChicagoman — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 02:20:27 +0000

I will always remember him, he was my first physics professor as a 1st year undergrad at the UofC. (Honor Mechanics,Fall 2002). He got me off to a good start too, A-
I have a vague memory of the class having a good chuckle after he made some funny quip about string theory being like trying to prove God exists, or something along those lines.

Huge loss for the community. Too young indeed.

By: Charon

Charon — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 08:34:04 +0000

I’m sorry to hear that. Unlike everyone else here, I had a very bad experience with him. I worked with him when I was an undergrad, and he never managed to demonstrate any understanding of the topic I was supposed to be working on, or any mentoring ability. (The only support I got was from a Princeton grad student – thanks, Denis! Oh, and then Bruce made me the CfCP webmaster. Which meant I had to ask the sysadmins to do things like, say, install PHP, on the authority that I was… a second-year undergrad? That didn’t go over well.) I happily left that research position to work the door at a bar (yes, really), until I found a great research position with Don York.

But I never wished Bruce ill, and now regret that I never got to know his clearly excellent side.

By: Michael Zeller

Michael Zeller — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 22:17:15 +0000

I just found out about Bruce’s death, and I am greatly saddened. We were competitors in the field of Kaon physics, but I always found our interactions stimulating and instructive. I had great respect of him as a physicist, but was more impressed watching him change fields and excel again. Too soon we have lost one of the great men of contemporary physics. He will be missed.

By: Simon DeDeo

Simon DeDeo — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 20:17:04 +0000

I was thinking about Bruce since I heard the news, and then read Hiranya’s comment about his little folding bicycle and it just reminded me again of how much fun he was to see every day. Charles mentioned how Bruce always used to ask “naieve” questions at talks, and how it gave the rest of us a push to understand things better and not to feel guilty when, after trying as hard as possible, a slide went over your head.

By: Sean Blanton

Sean Blanton — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 14:34:30 +0000

Bruce was on my thesis and candidacy exam committees, and I TA’d Electricity and Magnetism for him. I liked him a lot. He was a top notch guy and it meant a lot to me when he said “This is a great thesis!” in my thesis defense. My association with him made me raise my standards of quality, which I continue to hold in my professional life.

I lost both parents to cancer and I feel for his family and what he went through.