Mined from the notebooks, Friday, June 21, 2019. Posted Sunday morning, July 19, 2020.
Via Memento.
Another note from the Department of Lost Time, Friday, June 21, 2019. Round about a year ago, we were up here on a visit to the Old Homestead and I started reading one of the books I’d decided I’d inherited from Pop Mannion: Jennet Conant’s “Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II”...
Some folks play Six Degrees of Separation From Kevin Bacon. I play One Degree of Separation from Albert Einstein. The object of the game is to reduce the number of people who stand between me and direct acquaintance with Einstein, which currently stands at two---or three, depending on whether or not Pop Mannion actually took a seminar with Hans Bethe. I remember Pop’s telling me that he did and downplaying that connection, the seminar having lasted only a week. I’ve always had an excellent memory, reinforced by a habit of writing stuff down in my notebooks and in long letters to friends and family, and, for the last fifteen years here on the blog. But memory is unreliable even at its best, and mine’s been slipping lately as screws inside my head have been loosening. It still seems true that Pop knew Bethe, if only briefly, and, if he did, the degree of separation between me and Einstein is two: Pop to Bethe to Einstein. But if Pop didn’t take that seminar with Bethe, he took one with John von Neumann, and the degree of separation is still two. It’s possible, even probable, Pop knew both Bethe and von Neuman, and there are two two-degree paths from me to Einstein. Otherwise, though, it’s three: Pop to his doctoral dissertation adviser at RPI, Richard Erlich, who worked at Los Alamos directly under Robert Oppenheimer, to Oppenheimer to Einstein. Either way, two through Bethe and/or von Neumann, or three, it’s been stuck there for the many decades since I first became aware of it when I was in high school, and it’s likely to remain stuck there for however many I have left.
At any rate, it’s not why I started reading “Tuxedo Park” tonight, it’s just something I was curious about---if there was another set of scientists who worked at Loomis’ secret lab during the War separating me by only a few degrees from Einstein. Using the index, I determined there’s not. The only scientist I've heard of who passed through there connecting me to him is, redundantly, Bethe. What I did find is that, still through Pop by way of Bethe, there are only two degrees of separation between me and two other great physicists, Ernest Lawrence and Niels Bohr---or, again, if I discount Bethe on the grounds of faulty memory, three: Pop to Erlich to Oppenheimer to Lawrence and Bohr.
But, as it happens, there are only two degrees of separation between me and Kevin Bacon.
Maybe.
Depending.
Back in the day when the young women I dated could still be called girls, I dated a girl whose older sister, an aspiring actress, had a bit part in “Animal House”. She played the roommate of the dead sorority girl Otter pretends to be the grieving fiance of in order to seduce whichever sorority sister offers the most sympathy. That turns out to be the roommate. My girlfriend’s sister didn’t have any scenes with Bacon, but she might have gone to the wrap party. I like to imagine Bacon began working out the steps he would use a few years later in “Footloose” dancing with her.
By the way, my girlfriend was prettier than the sister. Just FYI.
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