So Now They Tell Us

Abstract

When I was an undergraduate, those who aspired to be “cool” made sure to do certain things. A cool person should always give the impression of doing very little work—for example, I can remember one occasion when I spent most of the evening in a bull session and then left saying that I had a date. In fact, my “date” was an all‐nighter with the famous text by Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky and Melba N. Phillips on electromagnetic fields. Working through the night required stimulants such as multiple cups of truly rotten coffee and 10 or 15 cigarettes. By the end of a semester, a person would look kind of pale, but that could be corrected by another really cool activity—getting a deep, dark suntan.