Walter Kohn: Personal Stories and Anecdotes Told by Friends and Collaborators PDF
Preview Walter Kohn: Personal Stories and Anecdotes Told by Friends and Collaborators
Walter Kohn − Personal Stories and Anecdotes Told by Friends and Collaborators Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg GmbH Matthias Scheffler Peter Weinberger (Eds.) Walter Kohn Personal Stories and Anecdotes Told by Friends and Collaborators With 59 Figures 1 3 Matthias Scheffler Fritz-Haber-Institut Faradayweg 4-6 14195 Berlin, Germany e-mail: On the Occasion of the th 80 Birthday of Walter Kohn Walter Kohn receiving his Prize from the hands of His Majesty the King, Stockholm, December 1999 (⃝c 1999 The Nobel Foundation, photo: Hans Mehlin) Preface All of Walter Kohn’s personal friends readily agree that it is almost unthink- able that he is turning 80 in March 2003. Considering all his activities – from human rights to theoretical physics – it is indeed wonderful to see that “age” has not changed his radiant lifestyle. He still seems to be one of the most frequent flyers, whether to Cuba or, as his next destination, to India and/or China, not counting his various annual transatlantic flights between Santa Barbara and Europe. He has never stopped talking to people in the same personal way, whether they are heads of state or graduate students. It is probably his open, convincing smile that brushes away all possible obstacles in communicating with fellow human beings . . . Born in Vienna into a rather well-to-do Jewish family – his father and his uncle ran a famous art-postcards shop – he grew up in the learned atmo- sphere of an assimilated Jewish stratum that once carried to a large extent the cultural outburst of fin-de-si`ecle Vienna. There was no question that he would attend the “Akademisches Gymnasium”, not because it was close by – in the same direction as the “Eislaufverein” (an ice-skating rink next to the main concert hall), where he often went on briskly cold winter afternoons – but because it was simply considered to be “the” best. Although Austria was ruled at that time by a clerico-fascist regime whose political antisemitism created a cultural atmosphere in its image, dramatic changes in Walters’s life only took place after the Nazi occupation in 1938. He was forced out of his beloved gymnasium and eventually was transferred to the (Jewish) Chajes-Gymnasium, where the number of students diminished on a da liy basis. There, he also met two outstanding teachers who intellectually stimulated him for the rest of his life. Fortunately he escaped to England on one of the last “Kindertransporte” (“children transports”) – a 16-year-old boy transplanted into a foreign country who had left behind his parents. In England he was put up as an apprentice in horticulture and was later deported as “enemy alien” to Canada, where he worked as a lumberjack. But the learned atmosphere could not be banished VII Preface Walter Kohn, Thanksgiving in Santa Barbara, 2002 (photo: M. Scheffler) even within the fenced-in camps: an ad hoc school took care of the semi-adult kids that Hitler Germany had uprooted. Eventually he managed to be accepted at Toronto University. His first pub- lication was written in the same spirit as his former teachers’ at the Chajes Gymnasium in Vienna and dealt with contour integrations, a mathematical technique he still loves. If there was anything he rescued from the old conti- nent, from his parents’ home, something he always carried along in his mind, then surely enough it was this learned atmosphere, intellectual enlightenment and the feeling that curiosity-driven science leads to new perceptions. This is not the place to cite or even comment on his by-now-famous papers – on the “Kohn anomalies”, just one example of his various contributions to modern solid state theory, or on what is now well-known as “Density Func- tional Theory”, for which he was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1998. Here the focus is on Walter’s personal contacts – with colleagues, collabora- tors, friends – which were always intense, and not only with those who ended up co-authoring works with him. Some of his scientific friendships, with Lut- tinger or Friedel, for example, were a permanent source of new ideas. Looking back it has to be noted that – very typically for Walter – none of his friends in physics were narrow-minded scientists; all of them also had broad “other” interests. Walter’s other interests are a most rewarding aspect of meeting him, be- sides, of course, the notoriously sizzling discussions about certain aspects of theoretical solid state physics. It is a real pleasure to go with hi m t on a VIII Preface Mara Vishniac Kohn, summer 2002 in Berlin (photo: M. Scheffler) exhibition, a gallery, to talk about fictional literature; his enthusiasm for the exceptionally new, for the yet-unknown old, seems to be unlimited. His enthu- siasm extends from certain styles of Greek vases, discovered during a scientific trip to Crete, to drawings by Egon Schiele to be seen at a special exhibition in the capital of an Austrian province. One cannot write about Walter without also writing about Mara, his wife, perhaps the only fixed point in the space of his vibrant activities. Mara and the house in Santa Barbara – which contains an incredible collection of precious old books and the archives of her father, Roman Vishniac, many of whose famous photographs hang on the walls – constitute the Kohn’s home. The house, with its staggering view of the coastline – sometimes the Channel Islands seem to pop up only few miles away – seems an appropriate resting place for Walter before he goes off again, touring the world in matters of science or human relations. Mara and her soft, quiet voice – a friendly but decisive “Walterchen” has the ability to momentarily cut the thread of his fascinating stories about people he met or one ought to meet – occasionally give the urgently needed reminder that even a Walter Kohn needs moments of creative quietness. Quite a few stories collected in this book give account of the circumstances of working with Walter, of being a collaborator of his, of being accepted as a friend of the Kohns. There is no doubt that these stories also cover a certain chapter in the history of science in a very personal manner: a kind of “oral history” of modern theoretical physics. Besides physics, besides stories about IX Preface physics, however, they all speak to Walter Kohn’s enduring humanity – if only by recalling his infectious, giggling laugh, which he must have saved from his early childhood. Berlin, Vienna, Matthias Scheffler January 2003 Peter Weinberger About the Editors Matthias Scheffler is director of the Theory Department of the Fritz-Haber- Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and professor at the Technical University and at the Free University Berlin. His research concerns condensed-matter theory, ma- terials, and the chemical physics of surfaces. His current interests include devel- oping first-principles methods (using density-functional theory) for molecular sim- ulations that bridge the time and length scales from those of the atomistic pro- cesses to those that determine the properties of realistic systems. Contact: Fritz- Haber-Institut, Faradayweg 4-6, D-14195 Berlin-Dahlem, Germany; scheffl
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