These are some images, websites, and quotes of interest to me.

Images

• Picture of me at conference XXV Workshop on Geometric Methods in Physics with collaborator S. Wickramasekara.
• I was interviewed about the science of popular culture objects for a TV show on the Discovery Channel called Pop Nation (it has since changed formats). Here is a screenshot from a segment where I am talking about Silly Putty.
• Here is a photograph from the Workshop on Quantum Information Theory, York University, England, 6-8 July, 2005.

Websites

• Last marathon: Steamtown Marathon, Scranton, PA, 9 Oct 2005. Results page.
• Next marathon: SunTrust Richmond Marathon, Richmond, VA, 11 Nov 2006.
• I have (for now) retired from Scrabble tournaments. As of my last tournament my rating was 1271. Highlight: I participated in the Last Scrabble Tournament of the Millenium in Austin, TX and won second place in my division.

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.

E.P. Wigner from ``The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences'' in Symmetries and Reflections, (Oxbow Press, Woodbridge, Conn., 1979), p. 237.

There does not exist...a rigorous theory to which these various methods can be considered as approximations.

Maurice Levy referring to the Wigner-Weisskopf approximation and theories of resonances in Nuovo Cimento 13 (1959) 115.

A role of rigorous mathematics in physical science is to make sense of heuristic ideas (i.e. find the `correct setting') - not to assert they are nonsense.

M. Fischer from talk ``What's Mathematical Physics to Physicists? Some Examples from Past, Present and Future'' at VIIth International Congress on Mathematical Physics, Boulder, Colorado, August 1983.

To obtain nonreversing transitions and a progressive depletion of the initial state it is essential that the discrete initial state be coupled to a very large number of states with similar frequencies. However, the fact remains that the exponential decay law, for which we have so much empirical support in radioactive processes, is not a rigorous consequence of quantum mechanics but the result of somewhat delicate approximations.

Eugen Merzbacher, Quantum Mechanics, 2nd Edition, Chap 18, Sect. 9, pg. 484-485

Our present day [1964] thinking about the relativistic Quantum Thoery has been decisively channeled by E.P. Wigner's fundamental paper on the representations of the inhomogeneous Lorentz group (Ann. of Math., 1939). It is worthwhile to spend a few minutes recalling the rather unusual fate of this now [1964] celebrated paper. In the first place there is the "time bomb" aspect. For over ten years this paper remained unnoticed by most physicists and, to my knowledge, it took the enthusiasm and missionary zeal of Arthur Wightman to explode it finally in the early 50's. More amazing still: in all this long time there was no similar independent work on these questions, which in retrospect appear to us now as the most logical, the first questions anybody should ask who wants to treat relativistic quantum theory. Most amazing of all is the fact that up to 1960 Professor Wigner's paper was regarded as extremely difficult and practically beyond comprehension by many theoretical physicists who were happily working on problems of far greater complexity. This just gives us a reminder that the human mind is extremely slow and reluctant in conceiving or even assimilating simple ideas if there is some tradiational predjudice against them while it is very capable of solving the most complex problems once the ground rules are laid down.

R. Haag, from ``Lorentz invariance and breaking of Lorentz invariance in quantum theory,'' in Lectures in Theoretical Physics, Volume VIIA, Eds. Wesley E. Brittin and Asim O. Barut, (University of Colo. Press, Boulder, 1965), pg. 107.

I would like to make a confession which may seem immoral: I do not believe in Hilbert space anymore.

John von Neumann in a letter to G. Birkhoff, quoted in G. Birkhoff, Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics, Vol. 2, ed. R.P. Dilworth, (American Mathematical Society, Providence, Rhode Island, 1961), p. 158. The letter is dated 13 Nov. and Birkhoff believes the year was 1935.

Physical causality can be traced directly to the existence of a simple initial condition of the universe. But how does that initial condition enter into the theory?

Murray Gell-Mann in The Quark and the Jaguar, (W.H. Freeman, New York, 1994), p. 216.

When in the 18th century Euler discovered those formulas which today still delight the mathematical phantasy, he seriously stated that his pencil was more clever than himself. This impression that mathematical structures can include a kind of self-determination concerns me at this time...Mathematics and Philosophy attack the world's problems in different ways. Only by their complementary action do they give the right direction.

E. Kaehler, translated from original German by A. Bohm.