The Great Scientist without a Nobel Prize

 Last year Students had a Skype conversation with the old Physics legend Leonard Susskind . They asked him a lot of Questions . Here are the few of the questions . But before getting to that he mentioned that “ Sleeping during a lecture is a good thing . “

 

1. You were a plumber before you studied physics. How old were you then?

“My father was a plumber and I worked with him from the age of 13. When I was 16 he got very ill, so I had to work a lot. We were not very well off. I worked during school and in the summer. It was very hard work and very different from being a plumber now. It was in the South Bronx and the buildings were very old and had lead pipes. It was tough, rough work and it made my father sick. I did it until I went to graduate school. That was in 1962.”

2. How did your family respond when you told them you wanted to study theoretical physics?

 
“Well, at first my father wasn’t happy. He wanted me to work in his business, but I said I wanted to be a physicist. He left school after fifth grade, but he was a very smart man. However, he didn’t know what a physicist was and mixed it up with a pharmacist. He said “You’re not going to work in a drugstore” and I said, “No, I mean what Einstein did”. The minute he heard Einstein, he said no more. He got very excited about it; he wanted me to be a physicist. It was a good experience.”

3. Did you party a lot when you were a student?
“Not a lot. By the time I became a physics student I was already married and had a child. I was also still working as a plumber, so did I party a lot? No I did not.”

4. What do you think of lectures? Can you learn physics from them?

 
“They’re fantastically good for learning physics. The lecturer learns a lot of physics. After my first few studies, just about everything I learned about physics came from teaching it. I don’t know if the students learned a lot, but I certainly did. So I consider teaching physics very important.” 

  

5. Do the students learn from it?

  
“I think they learn from some lecturers and less from other lecturers. My students sometimes come back and tell me they learned a lot from me and the ones who didn’t learn much probably don’t come back. So my guess is that good physicists pretty much learn from themselves. The students at Stanford cooperate and learn together and that is clearly a good thing. But I think that it is sometimes good to sit and learn by yourself. But as I said, I never really learned a subject until I had to teach it.”