I missed this earlier this week: physicist John Wheeler has died at the age of 96. A snippet from the NY Times obituary:
At the same time, he returned to the questions that had animated Einstein and Bohr, about the nature of reality as revealed by the strange laws of quantum mechanics. The cornerstone of that revolution was the uncertainty principle, propounded by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, which seemed to put fundamental limits on what could be known about nature, declaring, for example, that it was impossible, even in theory, to know both the velocity and the position of a subatomic particle. Knowing one destroyed the ability to measure the other. As a result, until observed, subatomic particles and events existed in a sort of cloud of possibility that Dr. Wheeler sometimes referred to as "a smoky dragon."
This kind of thinking frustrated Einstein, who once asked Dr. Wheeler if the Moon was still there when nobody looked at it.
Wheeler recognized that physics is about ideas and the language used to express those ideas, not just mathematics and experimentation. He coined and popularized several phrases during his long career, including black hole, wormhole, and quantum foam.
Obituary of Charles Fawcett, who led an "unlikely" and "unbelievable" life.
In Paris Fawcett also took part in the rescue of a group of British prisoners-of-war who had been placed under French guard in a hospital ward by the Germans. By impersonating a German ambulance crew, Fawcett and a comrade marched in at 4am and ordered the French nurses to usher the PoWs out into the yard. "Gentlemen," he announced as he drove them away, "consider yourself liberated."
"You're a Yank," said a British voice.
"Never," came Fawcett's lilting southern burr, "confuse a Virginian with a Yankee."
He also romanced Hedy Lamarr, starred in movies with Sophia Loren, and got married a few times:
In three months at the end of the war, Fawcett married six Jewish women who had been trapped in concentration camps, a procedure that entitled them to leave France with an automatic American visa.
(via cyn-c)
When I heard that chess champion Bobby Fischer had died, I immediately went searching for some of that "sprawling New Yorker shit" on Fischer. Sure enough, the New Yorker ran a piece on Fischer back in 1957, when he was 14 and still "Robert". Also from their archives, a 2004 review of a book about the 1972 Spassky/Fischer match. The NY Times has extensive coverage of the hometown boy from past and present, including the annoucement of his victory against Spassky.
Edmund Hillary has died at age 88. He and Tenzing Norgay were the first people to climb to the top of Mount Everest.
Short but sweet obituary of Frank Viola, lover of pigeon racing.
He could spot one of his own pigeons in a whirling flock a block or two distant, his nephew said. Studying a prospective purchase, he examined its eyes with a jeweler's loupe, looking for the telltale subtleties of color and form that are believed to indicate prowess.
"He paid thousands of dollars for birds, but he would never sell a bird," Peter Viola said in a telephone interview on Monday. "If you wanted one, and you came to the house and he liked you, he would give you the bird, with two stipulations: that you don't sell it and you don't kill it."
Legendary mime Marcel Marceau died Saturday at age 84.
Michael Jackson borrowed his famous "moonwalk" from a Marceau sketch, "Walking Against the Wind."
I tried to find video of that sketch but came up empty.
Update: Here's some video of Marceau teaching wind walking to a class...and miming with Michael Jackson. (thx, andy & mike)
Update: Here's a better video of Marceau doing his wind walk, from a Mel Brooks movie no less. (thx, manuel)
R.W. Apple, longtime and beloved political and food writer for the NY Times, died early this morning aged 71. "In the interests of efficiency, The New York Times recently equipped its main office with...a 185-pound, water-cooled, self-propelled, semi-automatic machine called R. W. Apple Jr." Here's Apple's last piece for the Times, on the cuisine of Singapore.
Update: The NY Times put up a piece that Apple filed right before he entered the hosptial that they were going to run later in the fall: The Global Gourmand.
Update: Ed Levine wrote a nice personal remembrance of Apple. See also Trillin's article on Apple from the New Yorker.
Alan Fletcher: "I'd sooner do the same on Monday or Wednesday as I do on a Saturday or Sunday. I don't divide my life between labour and pleasure."
Bill Stumpf, designer of the Aeron chair, passed away late last month at age 70. "I work best when I'm pushed to the edge, when I'm at the point where my pride is subdued, where I'm an innocent again." (via matt)
Long obit for Jane Jacobs. She honed her thinking by having imaginary conversations with Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and a Saxon chieftain. Here's another obit from the Toronto Star.
Kirby Puckett dies at age 45. Aw, shoot. As a local, I cheered the Twins on to their two World Series victories...I can still hear Bob Casey's "KIR-beeeeeeeeee PUCK-it" echoing around the Metrodome.
A collection of pre-Katrina obituaries from New Orleans of people with distinctive nicknames. "New Orleans in the pre-Katrina world was full of characters that you'd sooner expect to read about in a Flannery O'conner short story than meet in real life. " (thx, sara)
Bob Moog, electronic music pioneer, died yesterday aged 71.
Are you worried about the future glut of obituaries in national newspapers? Because I sure am. Think about it: because of our networked world and mass media, there are so many more nationally known people than there were 30, 40, or 50 years ago. Fifty years ago, to be famous you had to be a politician, a movie star, a sports star, a general/admiral, a writer, a musician, a TV star, or rich. These days, we have many more popular sports, more sports teams, more movies are being made, there are 2-3 orders of magnitude more TV channels and programs, more music, more musical genres, more books are being written, and there's more rich people. Plus, these days people routinely become famous for appearing in advertising, designing things, being good cooks, yammering away on the internet, etc. etc. A year's worth of guests on Hollywood Squares...there's 2300 people right there that probably wouldn't have been famous in 1953, and that's just one show.
Frankly, I don't know how we're all going to handle this. Chances are in 15-20 years, someone famous whose work you enjoyed or whom you admired or who had a huge influence on who you are as a person will die each day...and probably even more than one a day. And that's just you...many other famous people will have died that day who mean something to other people. Will we all just be in a constant state of mourning? Will the NY Times national obituary section swell to 30 pages a day? As members of the human species, we're used to dealing with the death of people we "know" in amounts in the low hundreds over the course of a lifetime. With higher life expectancies and the increased number of people known to each of us (particularly in the hypernetworked part of the world), how are we going to handle it when several thousand people we know die over the course of our lifetime?
Yesterday afternoon, the Washington Post posted a series of stories in their RSS file for the national news page on Chief Justice William Rehnquist's death. Here's a screenshot from Bloglines:
According to the Christian Science Monitor, "speculation swirls around the ailing chief justice" and a retirement announcement may come very soon. The Post's jumping of the gun on the story (and the timing of the CSM article) may indicate that Rehnquist is closer to death than retirement. Thanks to Steve for the heads up.
Update: The Post has issued a correction.
