[dboreham]

Nice to see this article available on the Internet: I read a PDF that was passed around by email at the time it was published (Frank Yang is a relative of one of my neighbors and I once tried to chat with him about Maxwell over dinner...).

If you haven't read Wigner's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" it's worth a look : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...

[zaph0d_]

Thank you. Awesome! What did he say at dinner?

[dboreham]

It was pretty amazing and I was so such awe combined with fear of saying something stupid that I don't remember everything. He mostly talked about non-Physics subjects. He did talk about Fermi and working for Oppenheimer. I asked about Teller...do not now remember what he said to that. I had attempted to understand something about Yang-Mills Gauge Theory in preparation for dinner, but completely failed, so instead I figured as a Scot and card-carrying EE I'd ask him what he thought about the apparent quantum jump in progress made by Maxwell -- how was Maxwell able to come up with such modern looking physics in the age of steam, for example. At the time I did not know that the history of Maxwell was one of his subjects of interest. He talked about some of the themes that you can see in the article above (which was written 10 years later). He also mentioned, in a joking way, his prediction years earlier that "In the next ten years, the most important discovery in high-energy physics is that `the party's over'.".

[zaph0d_]

Thank you for sharing that story! It must be really amazing to hear storys from a Nobel laureate about working for other laureates like Fermi.