Pursuit Nontrivial

Having taught physics at Swarthmore College from 1955 to 1958, I suspect I know something of Matt Landreman’s experience there. I had some very good students, but unfortunately for them and me, I don’t believe any of them made it to Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. To the litany of trivial stories I can add mine from when I took Philip Morse’s Methods of Theoretical Physics course at MIT. When Morse explained how he got the answer to some problem, I complained, “That was a trick!” He replied, “A trick that works twice is a method.”