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beccastareyesI'm not looking forward to going to work tomorrow. Not because of anything I have to do -- I'm in the 'advisor wants a report that we can start editing into a paper' stage, which is a good one. Plus, I'm already starting on another project, or picking up an old half-finished one, rather. I had planned to have both of these done, so I could do the final bit for my thesis over my fifth year (possibly edging into my sixth if I had to). I think I also have a meeting for student government but that just means I have to spend an hour and a half talking about money and eating free food.
But, I happened to have an office across from Ed Salpeter, an emeritus professor, and he passed away over the holidays. He was a pretty nice guy -- I mean, the man was in his eighties and officially retired, but he still hung around the department and went to functions. And, since we worked in the same place, he would say hello to me occasionally. The grad student group hosted a dinner for him just last month and he and his wife sat down and talked about the history of the department. She also asked us to do something about the Styrofoam cups the department used, because we're in 2008, and they should know better.
He did a lot of science -- he worked out the process that red giant stars use to power themselves once they run out of hydrogen, which is one of the places where we get elements other than hydrogen and helium, and worked out what the rate of star formation should be. He also worked out exactly what a quasar was, or at least offered an idea that they could be accretion disks around large black holes and that if that was right, they should be pumping out the Xrays. He was a smart guy, and did a lot of different things (which impresses me more than doing one thing really well), but he still talked about people like Dick Feynmann as being really smart.
He also kept political posters* on his office door and we'd joke about that: if a grad student had something like that, someone would ask us to take it down for Alumni Weekend and whenever the Friends of Astronomy were visiting, lest it interfere with the department's efforts to get donations from rich people who like Mars and black holes, but when a famous emeritus professor does it, you don't say a thing.
* One for the Sierra club and one about closing Guantanemo Bay.
Every year the department has an invited speaker in his honor. He was usually in the front row asking questions about whatever it was -- since we had to share with the physics department, it was usually cosmology or black holes or things blowing up, but we got a speaker on Titan's interior once. This next spring is going to be weird, too.
But, I happened to have an office across from Ed Salpeter, an emeritus professor, and he passed away over the holidays. He was a pretty nice guy -- I mean, the man was in his eighties and officially retired, but he still hung around the department and went to functions. And, since we worked in the same place, he would say hello to me occasionally. The grad student group hosted a dinner for him just last month and he and his wife sat down and talked about the history of the department. She also asked us to do something about the Styrofoam cups the department used, because we're in 2008, and they should know better.
He did a lot of science -- he worked out the process that red giant stars use to power themselves once they run out of hydrogen, which is one of the places where we get elements other than hydrogen and helium, and worked out what the rate of star formation should be. He also worked out exactly what a quasar was, or at least offered an idea that they could be accretion disks around large black holes and that if that was right, they should be pumping out the Xrays. He was a smart guy, and did a lot of different things (which impresses me more than doing one thing really well), but he still talked about people like Dick Feynmann as being really smart.
He also kept political posters* on his office door and we'd joke about that: if a grad student had something like that, someone would ask us to take it down for Alumni Weekend and whenever the Friends of Astronomy were visiting, lest it interfere with the department's efforts to get donations from rich people who like Mars and black holes, but when a famous emeritus professor does it, you don't say a thing.
* One for the Sierra club and one about closing Guantanemo Bay.
Every year the department has an invited speaker in his honor. He was usually in the front row asking questions about whatever it was -- since we had to share with the physics department, it was usually cosmology or black holes or things blowing up, but we got a speaker on Titan's interior once. This next spring is going to be weird, too.
