Today is Warren Siegel’s birthday and as is usual to post private messages publicly on social media (Are blogs considered social media nowadays? Were they ever?):
“Wishing you a pleasant day and a great year ahead.”
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Reminiscing about past, especially all those semi-physics chats I had with him, I stumbled onto some of his “quotes” that I had saved somewhere secret. And then I thought what better (space)time to air them out than (my blog) on his birthday. Some of his quotes have already appeared here, for example, in “Random Quotes” section of this post.
The first one is about E. Sokatchev, one of the discoverers of ♫ Superspace:
If it is so easy, why give it to a grad student? Why doesn’t he do it by himself? Though I am getting you to do these calculations, so I shouldn’t complain!
I guess the context is pretty clear. The “it” above refers to some (easy?) calculations that Sokatchev assigned to one of his students and “you” is me (obviously). I also had nothing to complain about “those” calculations.
The second quote is about D. Storey, whose work on Feynman supergraphs was relevant to our work (context for the quote on InSpireHEP):
He wrote these two papers in 1982, and then wrote one paper in phenomenology in 1985 and that was the end of him. Hope this is not a prediction.
The prediction refers to the fact that I had barely two papers till then. I haven’t written any phenomenology papers yet but who knows what future holds.
The third quote is a little bit philosophical and I don’t really remember the context. Though, even without context, it is quite relatable and true and a great candidate for inclusion in a list of top 50 quotes by him:
It seems people no longer read others’ papers. They just do their own thing and ignore anything different from their own way of doing things.
The fourth quote is again philosophical and is a great candidate for inclusion in the list of his top 10 quotes:
You know, people forget other people.
