Sidney Coleman; Harvard icon taught physics classes with wit
Sidney Coleman traced his interest in science to those early August days in 1945 when two explosions in Japan hastened the end of World War II. He was 8 years old at the time.
"I think the atom bomb probably had a significant effect - not so much that I was impressed," he said in a 1989 interview for Essays of an Information Scientist. "I was scared stiff by it."
From those early moments of fear emerged a mind for theoretical physics the likes of which his scientific colleagues rarely encountered. Mixing deep insights with improvisational wit that was the envy of any stand-up comic, Dr. Coleman became a beloved professor at Harvard University and the go-to guy for anyone who hoped to know the unknowable.
"He was a giant in a peculiar sense, because he's not known to the general populace," said Sheldon Glashow, who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1979 and is a professor of mathematics and science at Boston University. "He's not a Stephen Hawking; he has virtually no visibility outside. But within the community of theoretical physicists, he's kind of a major god. He is the physicist's physicist."
His mind stilled by the ravages of diffuse Lewy body disease, Dr. Coleman died Nov. 18 in the Vernon Hall nursing home in Cambridge. He was 70 and had lived in Cambridge since he was invited to lecture at Harvard in 1961 when he was 24.
An aspiring physicist by adolescence, Dr. Coleman and a few friends in his neighborhood built a laboratory in an unused coal bin in the basement of his family's Chicago home and began conducting experiments.
"He was a very motivated guy," said his brother, Robert, of Albany, Calif. "He once said to me, 'Robert, my passion has become my profession and I'm a very lucky person.' "
Just as fortunate were generations of students who passed through his quantum field theory class at Harvard. Some of them had T-shirts made with Dr. Coleman's likeness and the logo "Slick Sid" on the front. On the back was a sampling of his classroom quotations, including: "Not only God knows, I know, and by the end of the semester, you will know."
"I think he was one of the physicists who thought more deeply about problems in physics than most of the rest of us," said Steven Weinberg, a professor of physics and astronomy at University of Texas at Austin who also shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1979. "He was not so much concerned with interpreting the latest experimental result or hopping onto bandwagons created by new experimental discoveries. He wanted to understand at the deepest level possible what our theories really meant and what their implications were."
At what organizers dubbed "Sidneyfest 2005," colleagues and acolytes gathered at Harvard to pay tribute to Dr. Coleman. Nine Nobel Prize laureates attended, along with Errol Morris, an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker. Dr. Coleman was one of many people featured in a short film Morris created for the 2002 Academy Awards ceremony.
"The word I always think of in connection with Sidney is amiable," said Dr. Coleman's wife, Diana. "People felt really comfortable with him, they enjoyed being with him."
To do his most cerebral work, however, he needed a measure of solitude. By his teenage years, even before he received a bachelor's degree from Illinois Institute of Technology and a doctorate from California Institute of Technology, Dr. Coleman was nocturnal by nature, walking and thinking while others were sleeping.
"When he was thinking about physics, I could hear him when I was a young boy, pacing in the hallway outside my bedroom and into the living room," his brother said. "It was a very measured tread. It was the same tone and timber, the same distance. I would fall asleep to it many times. He would do this pacing for hours and hours while he was thinking about physics problems."
Because he preferred to slip under the covers when everyone else was slipping out, Dr. Coleman eschewed morning classes. Legend has it he turned down teaching a 9 a.m. class, offering by way of explanation: "I can't stay up that late."
Once in the classroom, though, Dr. Coleman taught quantum field theory with "wit and elegance," Glashow said.
"It helps to use simple declarative sentences," Dr. Coleman said in the 1989 interview for Essays of an Information Scientist about his approach to writing lectures. "And one should not resist jokes."
That interview was conducted when he won the National Academy of Sciences scientific reviewing award for his writings about field theory and particle physics. Last week, Diana Coleman said she had just been notified that her husband will be posthumously awarded the Erice Prize, selected by the World Federation of Scientists.
Dr. Coleman was fond of lecturing at a school for physics in Erice, Sicily, and he collected several of those lectures in his 1985 book "Aspects of Symmetry."
An Internet link to a video of Dr. Coleman at an American Physical Society meeting in 1994, delivering an hourlong lecture with the Colemanesque title "Quantum Mechanics in Your Face," can be found under his Wikipedia entry.
While his intellectual forte was theoretical physics, Dr. Coleman could be just as passionate about science fiction. In his late teens, he cofounded a publishing house dedicated to the genre, and for years he reviewed the work of writers in the field.
"Sid was witty, worldly, and wise," said Gregory Benford, a professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine and an award-winning science fiction writer. "Some of that he got from reading science fiction. He saw it as the literature of ideas. And he saw science fiction as the one genre that actually tried to depict how scientists think."
In a tribute to Dr. Coleman, Benford wrote about his friend's ability to turn a phrase in reviews, damning one novel with faint praise by writing, "Rarely has so little happened so delightfully."
And in another review, he used a line that Benford said could have been applied to Dr. Coleman himself: "Being a genius is a profession for the young."
A memorial service will be announced.
