This post is a review of the book The Last Voice: Roy Glauber and the Dawn of the Atomic Age. The book covers the two main reasons Roy Glauber was an important person. First, he was (likely) the youngest theoretical physicist to participate in the making of the atomic bomb. Second, he was crucially responsible for the development of quantum optics, especially an understanding of the laser and of new kinds of stellar interferometry. For this, he was awarded a third of the Nobel prize for physics in 2005.
The Bomb
The book covers - not in sequence - Glauber's childhood, his early education and life as a prodigy, and his recruitment into the Manhattan Project while still at college in Harvard. Two notes about his childhood: first, as a child he played around with telescopes and other machines quite a bit, and even after he had won the Nobel prize for his achievements in theoretical physics, mused if he would not have been 'more successful' as an experimentalist (maybe he was thinking two Nobel prizes?).
Second, his father was a traveling salesman, and since he wanted to be understood by everybody he was selling to, put a premium on clarity of language. This was reflected, ultimately in the lucidity of Glauber's scientific papers, which played a major role in his academic success, as we will see below. This power of concise expression is amply evidenced in Glauber's talks and interviews on YouTube.
The book records Glauber's insightful, and sometimes trenchant, opinions about the people he crossed at Los Alamos: Oppenheimer [who had chosen the site for the bomb construction as he had spent time there as a boy, and later bought a cabin there he called Perro Caliente (Hot Dog)], Feynman (whose charismatic performances Glauber found unsettling), Bethe (for whom he had great respect), von Neumann (who traveled with him, though incognito, when Glauber first took the trip to Los Alamos), Teller, and General Leslie Groves, among other people.
Glauber's career after the war continued to intersect with physicists like Oppenheimer (who sent him to CalTech as a replacement for Feynman, who had taken off to Brazil), Pauli (Glauber took a famous photo of Pauli kicking a football into his camera), and Ramsey (his colleague at Harvard, who also won a Nobel). (Trivia: Norman Ramsey once beat me to the last muffin at a conference tea table; I don't think he realized it, though).
The Nobel prize
Glauber showed how quantum physics was essential to optics, especially emphasizing the concept of 'coherence', basically how waves from light sources like lasers and stars sync up with each other.
The book covers, briefly, the scientific dispute between Glauber and two professors at the University of Rochester: Len Mandel (I missed taking a course from him, but crossed him often in the hallway) and Emil Wolf (he taught me complex analysis) regarding the role of coherence.
Glauber won that argument, and the Nobel prize, on the basis of his lucid exposition of his physics arguments in his papers. I heard from one of Wolf's graduate students that he would often prod them to write clearly, citing Glauber's example: a graceful response.
The IgNobel Prize
For many years, Roy Glauber was the Keeper of the Broom at the IgNobel prizes. This is the person who cleans up the paper planes customarily launched at the stage. The subject is referred to lightly in the book.
Verdict
For 125 pages, the books is a quick and compact read. A lot of the descriptions have a flesh and blood quality about them. Glauber's wit and wisdom shine through. There are some useful tables in the appendices, including a description of the team structure at Los Alamos.
Bonus
Throughout the book, and in his interviews online, Glauber displays a quiet but permeating sense of humor. It's clear he liked to have a chuckle now and then. I got to experience Roy Glauber's chuckle first hand when I was a postdoc at the University of Arizona (circa 2006-9; he had recently won the Nobel).
He held an adjunct position there and would come to visit once in a while. My then boss, Pierre Meystre, would take him around campus (here's a nice talk by Pierre about Glauber's contributions).
So it came to pass that I found myself alone with Roy in Pierre's office when Pierre, after making the introductions, had to step out for a second for some reason. Roy then asked me what I was working on. I said I was trying to solve a problem in molecular physics. "Oh," he chuckled, with a twinkle in his eye, "I couldn't tell a molecule from a hole in the ground!"
I knew he was joking of course - every competent physicist knows some molecular physics - but I didn't get to press him on the topic as Pierre stepped back in. But in hindsight, it was quite cool that even with his exalted status, he wasn't above messing around with a humble postdoc.
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