Last year in June 2020 I had the privilege of attending the biennial IARD conference as a participant and to give talk. Because of the world situation, the talk was a virtual one over Zoom, as was all of our talks. I think it can be said accurately that we were able to capture the spirit of the organization online, at least for this one time. Yet there is no substitute for personal meetings in the long term to foster the joyful interchange of scientific ideas and knowledge.
As I have done much active physics work in years, certainly nothing worthy of a real conference talk, I decided to devote my talk to the organization itself, and the history of our conferences. As such I got the pleasure of telling many people who have been attending for years, but who knew little of the origins of our conference, about the first one back in 1998, held in the suburbs of Houston, in a modest motel next to a miniature golf course. The motel had a small conference room into which we gathered and gave our talks. In the evenings we walked to nearby restaurants along the suburban road.
The best part about telling these origin stories was mentioning the men involved in this, who brought us all together that first time and started us on our trajectory. They included our hometown organizer John Fanchi, Tepper Gill, and Larry Horwitz, as well as his graduate student, Martin Land, who serves as our current organizational president.
I came there as a postdoc fellow of my advisor, William C. Schieve of the University of Texas at Austin. Along with Larry, he was perhaps one of the two twin pillars around which the organization was founded, as means to present papers and share ideas on the relativistic theory they had developed together over several decades.
When I gave this talk last year, highlighting some of the work I had done with Bill many years ago, some of which I had presented at that conference, Bill had already been retired form physics for many years. I had last seen him at his retirement banquet in Austin 2012. I knew it would not be possible for him to have attended our conference in 2012. It was delight to share my memories of my beloved advisor with people who had never met him.
As it happened I was particularly glad to have given this talk when I did, as it was only three months later that I heard that Bill had passed away at age 91 at his home out in the Hill Country of Texas, which he loved so much.
I don't intend to give you a full biography of Bill's life, even of his scientific career. For such a summary, I would defer to you the one compiled by his UT colleague Mel Oakes which he has submitted to the Physical Review.
Instead I wish to add to my conference talk from last year by telling you a little about this remarkable man in a personal sense, and how that has to do very much with our organization and its unique conferences that we have come to cherish.
By the time I met Bill in 1989, as one of my graduate professors teaching my quantum mechanics course, he had been at the UT Physics Department for 25 years, which was as long as I had been alive. By then he had completed his transformation from the clean-cut young physicist of the 1960s, the one I see in pictures from his early career, into the quirky, loose and offbeat man who shuffled into the classroom wearing a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sandals and begin filling the chalk board with a sporadic Jackson Pollack-like tapestry of equations of bras and kets, creation and annihilation operators. and perturbation expansions.
Looking at him, and listening to him as he narrated his lectures, one might be forgiven for thinking he was the quintessential absent-minded professor, loose in his thoughts and disconnected in this ideas. In this one could not be further from the truth.
One quickly learned that this man who seemed at times so deep into thought as to be into his own world of amazement at a theory was not detached from his surroundings but keenly embedded into everything that was happening. Instead of scatterbrained, he possessed a rock solid and accurate recollection of the deepest nooks and crannies of every bit of theory he had explored and every experimental fact he had encountered.
One learned that despite his Professor Slacker appearance in the classroom, his colleagues in the department, including the ones who neatly ironed shirts, and even the ones who wore three-piece suits, treated him a respect that would have puzzled the casual observer.
Bill might listen to you talk, his head half cocked as if perhaps in his own world, and at the end he could utter one sentence, draw up reference a paper he had read years ago but which was filed into his meticulous system of recollects, and upon tracing down the reference, one would learn that remark was exactly correct and on point.
From Bill I learned that physics is a contact sport, and he taught me how it is played. By that I mean that for physics to stay what it is, physicists must mercilessly challenge each other's ideas, without prejudice or personal feelings. It must be so, or else it will be overwhelmed by the torrent of falsehoods that would be indulged by any bending of the rules of truth.
In some ways, Bill's appearance and demeanor were a disguise that hid his keen mind that would leap from one idea to another nimbly, and correct errant falsehoods in the next breath.
Yet despite the Hawaiian shirts, he was at once to me the epitome of the old school, even Old World, physicist. He loved being called Herr Doktor Schieve. He was a living link to the European and American physics of the post war decades. His secretary, for many years the able Annie Harding, prepared his telephone calls for him. Long into the 1990s, he referred to email by its old name bitnet long after the name had disappeared, as if it were a still innovation that he didn't need for his work. He left such type sof communication for his graduate students. But he knew exactly how to turn the crank of publishing, and get journal articles in print in the practical way.
In retrospect, the Bill of that time seems like the epitome of the post-counterculture Austin that was about to make it the mecca of slackers, including misfit graduate students like me who had shown up looking to be creative and explore the fringes of intellectual achievement.
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