It was 2003 and Steven Weinberg was sitting with me in the lobby of a hotel in Geneva, explaining his research into fundamental physics, when he paused to grab a handful of peanuts from a bowl on the table in front of us.
I had been speaking to Weinberg as he’d come to Switzerland to give a lecture at CERN on the development of the Standard Model of particle physics, in which he’d played a key part, and had agreed to an interview with Physics World during a break in his schedule.
The old-fashioned Dictaphone on which I recorded our interview on has gone missing so I’ve only got a hazy recollection of what he said. I do remember that Weinberg was charming, friendly and witty, but it was pretty clear he felt he was in the company of some kind of intellectual buffoon.
Turning round, he asked me: “Do you like nuts?”
You see, the only time Weinberg properly interacted with me was to reveal how he enjoyed those little bags of nuts you get on plane journeys (he was obviously used to flying business class); it was then that he wanted my view of them too. It was as if Weinberg doubted I could handle anything deeper than airline snacks and was just trying to be kind.
That’s what happens when you an interview a Nobel laureate. Apart from them enjoying the sound of their own voice, they obviously know they know several orders of magnitude more than you do about their specialist subject.
You’re left squirming and feeling ever so slightly inadequate, trying to absorb a whirlwind of high-level information while at the same time desperately wondering what your next question should be.
His opinion of me certainly must have dipped further a few weeks later. Despite some misgivings, I decided to write up our interview and e-mail Weinberg my draft, which covered his life, research and career.
Stupidly, I’d made a few schoolboy errors near the start, prompting Weinberg to write back, explaining he didn’t have the time or energy to check my nonsense any further (I paraphrase slightly) and, no, he wasn’t going to spend time pointing out my mistakes either.
At least Weinberg was polite, which is more than you could say for the late Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who shared the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics for his theoretical work on the structure and evolution of stars. Robert P Crease takes up the story in this memorable article.
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