LARRY AND ME----SIDNEY BOROWITZ

 

Larry and I arrived at New York University at approximately the same time (I think it was about 1950). I had just finished a two year tutorial in Quantum Electrodynamics at Harvard University with Julian Schwinger. Larry was fresh from a post doctoral appointment at MIT.

 

My experience at Harvard convinced me that my future in Quantum Electrodynamics was all behind me. During the preceding summer I had read Mott and Massey's book on Atomic Collisions and decided this was a relatively non-competitive interesting field I would pursue. (I could not have been more mistaken as it turned out in the first part of this opinion. I do not recall exactly when I told my decision to Larry and he decided to do theoretical work in Atomic Physics as well. This was a lucky decision for Atomic Physics. His work with Lenny Rosenberg contributed importantly, as his vitae show, to making this field an important area in theoretical, experimental and applied Physics. His contribution that I still regard as important in Theory is establishing upper and lower bounds in Variational calculations in scarttering problems. Others more familiar with the literature could probably point to other equally or even more important contributions.

 

After a while I decided that my future as an Atomic Physicist was also all behind me and I drifted into administration. This did not terminate our relationship. We continued to see each other socially, the agenda for our conversations was mostly political and social problems. There are few opinions that we shared, although I have treasured our conversations. Larry had, what I thought, was an off beat way of looking at the world. I must confess that he was sometimes correct in his conclusions. He will probably insist that he was always right, perhaps even conceeding that it might be almost always.

 

There few people one meets in a lifetime of whom one can say that meeting them made life more satisfying and pleasurable. Larry was one of those people for me.

Sidney Borowitz

Professor Emeritus, New York University

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