[Principles Of Physics Nelkon Pdf Download
Elliott Davis
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Okay. This is David Zierler, Oral Historian for the American Institute of Physics. It is March 22nd, 2021. I'm delighted to be here with Professor Michael Green. Michael, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for joining me.
Well, Michael, a question we're all dealing with right now, how has your research been affected by the pandemic, not being able to see people in person, only communicating over Zoom? How have you fared over the past year?
That's true. That's exactly right. And that's, of course, one of the reasons why it's possible to continue even during a lockdown. On the other hand, as I say, there's an undefinable quality to meeting people in person, and drinking coffee sitting at a table with them, and being able to show people things, or ask them questions, spontaneously. Zoom doesn't really work that way. It's much more impersonal.
In many senses, it's a parallel trajectory. However, there is a difference in the way that American academic institutions seem to react to fashions in physics. So, I think the ups and downs have been much more extreme in the States than in Europe in general, but in particular, the United Kingdom. My impression is people have a somewhat different attitude to hiring faculty. I think in the periods in which there was a big boom in string theory, the boom was probably bigger in the States. On the other hand, the subject never really collapsed in the same way in the United Kingdom. So, I think that fashion seems to count much more in the States than it does here.
Of course, I knew about it. My friends in the States were talking about it. The Americans seemed much, much more concerned than the Europeans in general, but I don't think that whatever Shelly Glashow thought had much impact at all in the United Kingdom. I think the way hiring is done here is not so much contingent on what other people say about the subject, but more about how good the candidate is. So, there's no question that my American colleagues were far more concerned about what Shelly Glashow and other people might have been saying about string theory.
Well, my parents were immigrants into this country just before the war started, in 1939. They were both secular Jews of Central European/Eastern European origin. My father was born in what is now Israel. He was born in Tel Aviv. His parents and many brothers and sisters -- he was the youngest of seven -- came from Odessa, in the Ukraine, and they had been immigrants into Palestine in the earliest years of the 20th century, about 1905. So, my father grew up there, and he studied architecture there. My mother was Polish, and she emigrated to Palestine, as it then was, when she was a teenager. She was a member of a left-wing organization that was setting up a kibbutz in Israel. Her family then followed her from Poland. In the mid '20s she left the kibbutz and studied engineering. That's how she met my father.
So, my father and mother both studied in Haifa, in Israel, or Palestine at the time. And then they left to continue their studies in Paris. So, they left Palestine in the early '30s, and I suppose that at that time they would never have conceived that they wouldn't be able to get back to see their family, because of the Second World War. They were in Paris from about 1933 to 1939, to just before the war started. By sheer coincidence my father was offered an architecture job in London, and they left Paris. Of course, they would have had no idea that staying in Paris would have been a disaster for them. So, they ended up in London just before the war, and I was born a year after the war ended. I have a sister who is two years older than me, and who was born in the last year of the war. So, that's how they came to the UK. My father had a job at a very prominent architecture firm, and my mother in an even more prominent engineering firm.
Well, the amazing thing is how many languages my father, in particular, would have spoken. His parents only ever spoke Russian. They immigrated into Palestine, but they never learned any other language. So, he grew up learning Russian from his parents. When he was a very small kid, it was under the Ottoman Empire occupation. I don't suppose he spoke Turkish, but the Jewish community was speaking Hebrew by then, so he would have learned Hebrew. And they were very integrated with the Arab community, so he learned some Arabic. Then, the First World War came, and the Turks were displaced by the British. So, when he was a teenager, and a young student, he would have been under the British mandate. So, he learned English. And then they moved to France, and he learned French. So, he spoke at least five languages, and a bit of Yiddish as well, I guess. When I was a kid, if they wanted to say something that I didn't understand, they would say it in French. But I learned French at some point, so that didn't work for too long.
I went to the local Church of England primary school. The school system in Britain starts with primary school from about 5 to 11, and I was sent to the local Church of England school, which was in retrospect very peculiar. My parents had no religious feelings at all, but that school was closest to where we lived. That was one reason. But I also suspect they really felt this was some way to integrate into being British. My parents had foreign accents, and in those days, and even now, that's not always totally acceptable in Britain. So, I think part of the reason for sending me to a Church of England school would have been to somehow fit in better. Church of England schools have close relationships with the local church, and the church curate, that's a sort of priest-like position, spent a lot of time in our school, and organized morning Christian services. I and another academically prominent Jewish boy were often chosen by the curate to play a prominent role on stage reading out the Christian morning prayers.
Oh, absolutely. My parents had a secular background, and also their close family friends, were from very similar backgrounds to themselves. They were very un-British in many ways. Most of them had immigrated into Britain before the war, maybe shortly after the war, and I think they were basically a bunch of misfits. They certainly didn't fit in with the local Jewish community and furthermore, my parents wouldn't have understood the local Christian community. So, I think I grew up in an atmosphere which must be a bit like many children of immigrants today. They are born in this country, but actually, their culture is so influenced by their parents that they don't have a really close cultural connection with this country.
The answer is no to all of those things. Not at all. My parents were secular and very politically involved on the left. They had been members of the Communist Party in the immediate post-war years, and probably pre-war years as well. All their friends were left-wing, secular Jews with foreign accents, because they all came from other countries. So, I didn't have a standard childhood like most other English people.
No, not particularly. They were not Zionists. They were children of immigrants into Israel. My father was born in 1909, my mother in 1907, so they had grown up with the original people who eventually formed the state of Israel. But that community in Palestine were not really Zionists. Their community. I mean, the kibbutz communities where they grew up were founded on idealistic socialist principles, and had very little religion, if any. They were non-religious organizations. I think a lot has changed since then. The kibbutz movement is completely different now. So, there's this peculiar quality. I'm Jewish by culture. My parents were about as Jewish as you could get in terms of their backgrounds and their childhoods, but absolutely no religion at all. In fact, if anything, they were anti-religious.
Nowadays, there are still some grammar schools, but there are few, and they are very selective. The school I went to turned out to be one of the best grammar schools in North London, so I ended up at a very good school. And by complete chance, my physics teacher, a man called Michael Nelkon (I only discovered his first name after I left school), was quite inspirational. He was very well-known to almost anyone in England who studied school physics in my generation because he wrote several of the major school textbooks in physics. He was the author of the best-known physics textbooks aimed at the state exams called O-Levels that were taken at the age of 16, and A-Levels, that are taken at the age of 18. He was very good. But I eventually realized that he didn't know much physics beyond A-Level. What he knew, he knew incredibly well, but he didn't know anything beyond the school curriculum. The maths teaching was also very good. Yes, I went to an academically good school although I'm not so sure about other aspects of school life.
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