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\centerline{$\Sigma\Pi\Sigma$ Induction Ceremony, 13 April 2000}
\centerline{David A.\ Rabson, University of South Florida}
\bigskip

According to Faraday, induction relates the curl of the electric field
to the time rate of change of the magnetic field, as demonstrated in this-here
device.... Oh, I'm sorry: wrong induction ceremony.

I wish to congratulate you, the new inductees into $\Sigma \Pi \Sigma$, on your
accomplishment and to encourage you ``to advance and diffuse the knowledge
of physics,'' as it says on the physical-society membership card.  I've always
wondered, if the knowledge of physics diffuses, why do we have to work so hard
to learn and to teach it?

It is customary at an academic exercise such as this for a Greek-letter
society to recite a passage in a classical tongue.  Unfortunately, the only
classical language I know how to fake is Latin, but I got some coaching
in Greek, so here goes:
\vskip-1.25\baselineskip

\def\omicron{{\rm o}}
\def\longaccent#1{\skew{-3}{\mathaccent "017F}#1}
$$
\delta\acute\omicron\varsigma
\ \mu\omicron\iota
\ \pi\omicron\longaccent\upsilon
\ \sigma\tau\longaccent\omega
\ \kappa\alpha\grave\iota
\ \kappa\iota\nu\longaccent\omega
\ \tau\grave\eta\nu
\ \gamma\longaccent\eta\nu
\quad,
$$

\noindent attributed
to Archimedes: ``Give me a place to stand, and I will move the
Earth.''  The lever, the water wheel, and the textbook ``Archimedes's
principle'' of displaced volume have indeed moved, if not the Earth, then the
civilizations that reside on it.  None of you will have trouble coming up with
a long list of physical discoveries and inventions that
have changed the world, but let me offer a short one: Hooke's law, Newtonian
mechanics, electricity, radio, lasers, nuclear energy, the
transistor, and as we learned
in a physics colloquium earlier this month, Day-Glow plastic.

Of course, there's another principle of Archimedes that isn't mentioned in
the textbooks.  Already an old man, Archimedes responded to an emergency call
to the defense of his city, Syracuse, against a Roman invasion led by
the general Marcus Claudius Marcellus.  The ramparts,
catapults, and machines he invented were so successful, they held off the
Romans for eight months.  If he had tried something like that today,
the Syracusan national laboratory
would probably have revoked his Q clearance and
jailed him on suspicion of handing state secrets to the Chinese.

Unable to take the city by force, Marcellus
besieged Syracuse; famine, rather than arms, eventually compelled the
surrender.  According to legend, Marcellus was so impressed by this one
man's defense against a Roman legion that he planned
to honor Archimedes and sent a soldier to summon him.  Unfortunately,
Archimedes, deep in thought, was working out mathematical proofs in the
sand and failed to obey the soldier, who consequently slew him.
I call this Archimedes's second principle: if a funding agency offers
you a grant,
don't turn it down.  I won't mention Archimedes's third principle, but it
has something to do with running around naked in the streets shouting
``$\epsilon\raise1.5pt\hbox{'}\kern-3pt\acute\upsilon\rho\eta\kappa\alpha$!''

I've been reading students' teaching evaluations, and apparently
people think that they live in the first generation to get
professors who are eccentric, ill-dressed, dottering slave-drivers who couldn't
explain the lever principle to a Roman soldier without invoking ten blackboards
full of fractional-order Bessel functions of the third kind.   Actually,
though, I've checked the history books, and
there have been hundreds of generations of students putting up with
professors who are eccentric, ill-dressed, dottering slave-drivers who couldn't
explain the lever principle to a Roman soldier without invoking ten blackboards
full of fractional-order Bessel functions of the third kind.
Let me cite one example from Westfall.  A student sees his professor
walking down the street on campus and says ``there goes the man that has writt
a book that neither he nor any body else understands.''
The campus was Cambridge, and the professor, of course, was Isaac Newton.

In the corpus of Newton's work, nothing can match the simplicity and
majestic splendor of the second law:

\smallskip
{\narrower\narrower\narrower\noindent
Mutationem motus proportionalem esse vi motrici impress\ae,
et fieri secundum lineam rectam qua vis illa imprimitur;\par}
%{
%Corpus omne perserverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi
%uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur
%statum illum mutare.\par}
\smallskip

I {\it told\/} you I could fake Latin.  The crib sheet reads

\smallskip
{\narrower\narrower\narrower\noindent
The change in motion is proportional to the motive force impressed,
and is made in the direction along the line in which this force
is impressed.\par}
\smallskip

Some cretin in the textbook department Bowlderized the poetry
into
$$
F = ma\smash{\quad,}
$$
but you can appreciate in the original phrasing that this idea was of no
merely practical utility, not just a formula to solve some problem at the
end of the chapter with levers and inclined planes, but the embodiment of
earth-shattering revolution that prompted Pope to write his famous epitaph:

\smallskip
{\narrower\narrower\narrower\noindent
Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night:\hfil\break
God said, `Let Newton be!' and all was light.\hfil\break
\par}
\vskip-0.5\baselineskip

You've probably heard the follow-on:

\bigskip

{\narrower\narrower\narrower\noindent
It did not last: the Devil, shouting ``Ho,\hfil\break
Let Einstein be'' restored the {\it status quo}.\hfil\break
\par}


Most of my favorite Newton quotes, however, come from the {\it Opticks}.
I own an \$8 paperback edition printed by Dover.  The role of this book
in intellectual history is perhaps best represented by the fact that
my edition has not one but three introductions.  I quote from the
title page: ``with a Forward by ALBERT EINSTEIN, an Introduction by
SIR EDMUND WHITTAKER, a Preface by I.\ BERNARD COHEN, and an
Analytical Table of Contents prepared by'' some graduate student I've
never heard of.

Newton's portrait gazes
off to the side
and out of the cover in blue-tinged black-and-white, his mouth slightly
downturned, almost frowning, as he sits serenely on a throne-like chair.
The nearly black background forms an overall impression of eighteenth-century
musty reserve.  In the middle of the cover, however, like Oz landed from
a tornado on
top of monochrome Kansas,
a bold horizontal
band in all the colors of the spectrum spells out the title: ``O-P-T-I-C-K-S.''
OK, so physicists don't know how to spell, but I doubt anyone on the Kansas
Board of Education knows how to spell either.

In Book Two, Part Three, Proposition VIII, Newton reports his experiments on
light transmission through hammered gold and observations of a variety
of other substances that draw him to the conclusion that most of matter
consists of empty space, or ``pores.''  He writes

{\narrower\narrower\narrower\noindent
How bodies can have a sufficient quantity of Pores for producing these Effects
is very difficult to conceive, but perhaps not altogether impossible....
[I]f we conceive these Particles of Bodies to be so disposed amongst themselves,
that the Intervals or empty Spaces between them may be equal in
magnitude to them all; and that these Particles may be composed of
other Particles much smaller, which have as much empty Space between
them as equals all the magnitudes of these smaller Particles: and that
in like manner these smaller Particles are again composed of others
much smaller, all which together are equal to all the Pores or empty
Spaces between them; and so on...\par}

\noindent and here he goes on detailing several more orders of Russian-doll
particles for almost a page, and then finally

\smallskip
{\narrower\narrower\narrower\noindent
And there are other ways of conceiving how Bodies may be exceedingly
porous.  But what is really their inward Frame is not yet known to
us.\par}

Newton allows himself to speculate further on this theme in the
31$^{\tenpoint\rm st}$ and final query at the end of the {\it Opticks}.  He
begins by asking whether undiscovered forces may be responsible at the
smallest scale of particles for the bending of light, capillary
action, and the very cohesion of matter.  After building his argument
carefully over many pages, and recalling his quantitative experiments on
Newton's rings, he works toward the climax:

\smallskip
{\narrower\narrower\narrower\noindent
By the Table in the second Part of the second Book, wherein the
thicknesses of colour'd Plates of Water between two Glasses are set
down, the thickness of the Plate where it appears very black, is three
eighths of the ten hundred thousandth part of an Inch.  And where the
Oil of Oranges between the Glasses is of this thickness, the
Attraction collected by the foregoing Rule, seems to be so strong, as
within a Circle of an Inch in diameter, to suffice to hold up a
Weight equal to that of a Cylinder of Water of an Inch in diameter,
and two or three Furlongs in length.  And where it is of a less
thickness the Attraction may be proportionally greater, and continue
to increase, until the thickness do not exceed that of a single
Particle of the Oil.  {\bf There are therefore Agents in Nature able
to make the Particles of Bodies stick together by very strong
Attractions.  And it is the Business of experimental Philosophy to
find them out.}
\par}

In this last sentence, Newton has laid out for the next 300 years the
reductionist program of particle physics.  I really don't how to
analyze or say anything intelligent about it; I read his insights and stand
in awe.  Any garden-variety genius can understand something new; it took
Newton to identify correctly those things that would require
three centuries to understand.

So at this convocation, I welcome you to the business of natural
philosophy.  It is a business that will take you to some very distant places,
to the centers of stars and atoms; you will also meet up with certain eccentric
characters (to be charitable): superconductivity, second sound, anyons,
axions, and so forth.  However, it is a business, I hope, in which you
will be able to apply your knowledge to very practical questions, from
how to accommodate the population of the planet without destroying it to
how to get a job when you graduate.  I am pleased to report that this last
question has a relatively easy answer: statistics show consistently low
unemployment and high starting salaries among physics graduates at the
bachelor's, master's, and doctoral levels.

In your first course, you learned to move weights with levers.  In qualifying
for admission to $\Sigma \Pi \Sigma$, you have found a place to stand.
Congratulations.



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