U Chicago Stories

85bears46
Thu, 23 Mar 2017 02:02:01 +0000

One of the best stories I read about U of C in the 1980’s:

At 6:30 a.m. one day in the autumn of 1980 the telephone roused the Hyde Park household of University of Chicago physicist James Cronin. The caller was a wire-service reporter who apologized for disturbing the Cronin family so early in the day. She wanted Cronin`s reaction to a news story that had just come out of Sweden.

It has just been announced in Stockholm that you and Val L. Fitch of Princeton University have been awarded the Nobel Prize for physics, she told the stunned Cronin.

Nobody was very surprised that Cronin, who took his Ph.D. at Chicago and had become a professor there in 1971, should win the Nobel for his work. Cronin himself, however, was surprised by all the hoopla generated by the announcement of the award. A justly famous man in the world of physics since he and Fitch announced the results of their experiment in 1964, he was, nonetheless, hardly a household name outside the scientific community.

A slight, shy, balding, 49-year-old when the 1980 Nobel was announced, Cronin was relieved when the university sent Larry Arbeiter to his home at 7 a.m. to help him handle the deluge of requests for press interviews. Arbeiter, a writer in the university`s press office, suggested that Cronin satisfy all the interview requests at once by holding a 10 a.m. news conference.

Oh, Cronin insisted, I cant do it then. Ive got a 10 o`clock class this morning.

With a good reporter`s instinct, Arbeiter asked what course Cronin was teaching, thinking of news photos of the newly minted Nobelist lecturing to his awed and adoring students.

No, no, Cronin told Arbeiter, Im not teaching a course, Im taking Chandrasekhar`s graduate course on the theory of relativity.

That probably should have been the news story that day. Editors would have loved a story about a man so curious and humble that he chose to sit in the classroom of another teacher on the morning he reached the pinnacle of intellectual success. Cronin didnt think it very remarkable, however. Its just something thats done all the time at Chicago. He didnt even bother to mention the incident when he eventually did appear at a press conference.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-09-29/features/8503070691_1_mesons-reaction-experiment

Of course, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar got his own Nobel Prize 3 years later.