Diary2

Sept 1. Finally, after a week in the shop, Honda has repaired the car. What was wrong? The distributor blew up, said Bob. So continued the spate of unusual repairs: the driver-side window shattered on rolling it up, the two front springs broke, the oil seal gave way, now the distributor blew up. The engine itself seems OK and now pulls the car along at its normal fast clip.
Sept 25. Dined at Bello Sguardo, an Italian restaurant near 79th and Amsterdam, just around the block from our apartment. Excellent lemon chicken dish. Intend to return.
Oct. Dr Auerbach took two samples from my black toenail to determine whether it was a melanoma.
Oct 16. Emergency visit to Dr Wong at the Princeton Eye Group. A nasty stye was growing rapidly on one of my lower eyelids. Treated it with erythromycin. Three times a day.
Oct 30. Lab results show that the black crud on my toe is a fungus. Can be controlled by drugs, but Auerbach advises against it. Eyelid slowly heals.
Oct. 31. At PPPL Michael Lieberman talks of the recent and future advances in manufacturing chips. Chips can contain about 4 billion transistors. The factories that manufacture them now cost 3 billion dollars, far too much for an individual company. Foresees steady decrease in transistor size up to the year 2020, when the gate widths will shrink to 5 atoms! What comes later?
Nov 10. Attended the Princeton Research Symposium at the Friends House near the computer center. Lively, articulate grad students talked of communication between bacteria, reconstructing a 1300 year old ship found off the SW coast of Sicily, the compact muon solenoid at CERN, and gravitational lensing of the cosmic background radiation. It was a sheer delight to discuss their work over lunch provided by the Uni.
Dec 6. Antimatter Creation at Cern, colloq at PPPL. Joel Fajuns, physics prof at Berkeley, described a Program Impossible. Create protons in a multi-Gev beam at Cern, have them interact in targets to form antiprotons, then slow them down to a few eV and trap them in a mirror geometry. Meanwhile, take positrons from radioactive decay, slow them down and trap them in the same mirror. That's the easy part; they've done that. Then these particles must be cooled to a few degrees Kelvin, then interact to form antimatter. How do you trap uncharged antimatter? Fajans says that they will use the magnetic moment of the hydrogen antimatter to do this. Never heard of it. This is the type of work that can use up your life--with no results! You need tons of guts even to think of pulling this off.
Dec 25. Great evening and meal at the house of Prof Wen Fong, retired distinguished professor of Chinese art at Princeton and the Met. Both he and his wife Connie are superb conversationalists, who know how to disagree with you without insulting you. Loved their spacious house with 12 foot ceiling and huge open fireplace in the living room. Forgot to ask him about his memories of Shanghai in the thirties.
Dec 31. A pleasant New Year's evening with the Brailovsky's, an evening of music, singing of Christmas songs, and desert and tea.