Evergreen Physics

 

This volume, Optical Physics by Lipson and Lipson (2nd edition 1981), has special meaning to me for several reasons. It was the textbook for an undergraduate course at Willamette in the Spring of 1988. Among the reasons it is special is because it is not simply an undergraduate textbook but a real research monograph on the subject published by Cambridge University Press--the first of many books I would acquire from them. One of the big insights I had in graduate school was to be able to evaluate publications by the publisher in that way.  It was first published in 1969 and revised in 1981. As a research monograph on a fundamental topic, it is hardly outdated at all and is as evergreen as the day I acquired in January 1988. Today--this very day in the year 2025, 37 years later--I am probably going to use it as a background for the research I doing in conjunction with ChatGPT. Some things in life fade way. But some things I keep coming back to, over and over, and never give up thinking about. This is one. Or perhaps it is more appropriate to say they keep coming back to me, sprouting again like long-lived perennials that may stay dormant and then bloom more vibrantly than ever. One does not know until it happens.  
Leafing through the pages of this book brings back many good feelings. That optics class taught by Professor Stewart in the Spring of '88 was when I first began to think that I might possibly pursue being a physicist as a career. Someone I "got it" in a way I hadn't until then. I can almost remember the exact moment that spring in Salem, sitting on the floor of a friend's house doing my homework on a Saturday afternoon, and for once, and perhaps fleetingly, things all made sense to me. 

I didn't start out wanting to be a physicist. I became a physics major because I had come to Willamette, a small liberal arts college, wanting to formulate a classical education.  This was in part a reaction to my first college experience, which felt too applied in its scope. I took my first physics class because I had been overseas that summer, and the university had randomly assigned me a physics professor as my faculty advisor---Maurice Stewart. He was a quirky fellow with a long white beard and I decided on the spot at registration that I needed to be well-rounded and take his introductory class. I should take his class! Things just kept going from there.