A Tale of Two Nobels
Kip Thorne and John Jumper
One of the perks of attending a college like UChicago is the opportunity to attend guest lectures. Marko Papic, the author of Geopolitical Alpha, once did a guest speaker session. So did Canada’s former prime minister Justin Trudeau.
Once in a while, you get to meet a Nobel Laureate. Kip Thorne did a Zoom session in November. John Jumper gave an in-person talk last week. Here are some memorable insights from listening to those who have expanded the frontiers of knowledge.
Kip Thorne said he was never the stereotypical ‘bright’ physics student who intuitively understood everything the moment it was presented. Instead, he would learn by starting from scratch on pen and paper, and re-derive every result for himself.
In his Zoom background, there were several large cardboard boxes. Turns out, the boxes stored all the notebooks Kip had filled with equations over the years.
John Jumper is jovial. He cracked a couple of jokes that left everyone in splits.
He said that at Google DeepMind, it felt like he was attending a machine learning conference every single day. The best minds doing ML research were down the hall from his office.
While he was doing his PhD at UChicago under Prof. Tobin Sosnick (who was sitting in the front row), he was a teaching assistant for an undergraduate general chemistry class. Apparently, he wasn’t very good with chemistry at the time (he did his undergrad in physics), and he managed to stay one week ahead of the content of the class he was TA-ing.
John Jumper’s talk was technical; Kip Thorne’s wasn’t. Regardless, it wasn’t so much the content of what they were saying that stuck with me. Rather, it was the vibe and aura of hearing them speak that was greatly inspiring.
It is easy to get lost in the day-to-day grind of classes and problem sets. But once in a while, it is important to be inspired, see the big picture. Unlike Edison, I think it’s 99% inspiration, 1% perspiration.
Completely agree! Inspiration is the ingredient that keeps you going