09/03/2023
❤️
In 1998 Walter Kohn, a physicist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his development of the density-functional theory." It led to a potentially tricky encounter:
"The day after I received the Prize of course it was quite a sensation in my little town in Santa Barbara, so I walked across the Campus and two students... are walking in the opposite direction, and they must have seen my picture somewhere, perhaps in the student newspaper, and so one of them turns around and comes back and says to me “Are you the guy who won the Nobel Prize?” and I said “Yes, I am” and so they both gave me a very friendly hug and then they kept going again, but then one came back again and said “Do you mind, we are just going to a chemistry exam, can we ask you a question?”
So yes I was in a very tight spot! So I said “well try me” and I started praying very hard because I knew that the more elementary the questions would be the less likely that I could answer them! And so then this one young woman began to ask a question and then I recognised an interesting fact. You see my … the fact that I got the Nobel Prize in Chemistry reflects the fact that at a certain theoretic level chemistry and physics are very close to each other, but also at the lowest level they’re very close to each other... So the question they had for me was in fact a physics question. So I gave them a brilliant answer! They were very impressed."
See the full interview with Kohn: https://bit.ly/2Vnvtk6
