Tobi's Fun Stuff

This is a collection of random things collected since about 1990 - some of them saved from the original pages in Carver Mead's Physics of Computation lab at Caltech.

Max Delbruck papers and other material

My father Max wrote some papers and articles of general interest that I really enjoy. There is also a good oral history from Caltech's Engineering and Science Magazine. This content was inspired by the Max 100 Centennial celebration at Cold Spring Harbor that took place August 2006, followed by the Delbruck Centrum Berlin centennial and the subsequent Delbruck Centennial in Salamanca in Oct 2006. The first Delbruck centennial took place in Nashville Sep 2006, and the last one will take place at Caltech 8 Jan 2007.

Essays/History

  • Max's chapter entitled "Out of this world" about his friend the physicist and practical joker George Gamow, for the Gamow Memorial Volume edited by Fred Reines, Cosmology, Fusion, and Other Matters. It is a wonderful snapshot of the culture of physics in Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen in 1928. To me, the title is curious because it is also the name of a famous and very effective mind-reading card trick from Paul Curry that Max liked to do for people.
  • Max's annotated copy of his 1978 Caltech commencement lecture "The arrow of time"
  • Max's 1972 piece "Homo Scientificus according to Beckett" done in question/answer style with Norm Davidson about Sam Beckett, his literary hero
  • The 1971 article Max wrote "Aristotle totle totle," in which Max discusses Aristotle's view of life. From the book From Microbes to Life edited by J. Monod and E. Borek.

History related to Max from others

Scientific articles

Videos