Boss (to the new employee): We are very keen on cleanliness. Did you wipe your feet on the mat as you came in?
New employee: Yes, sir.
Boss: We are also keen on truthfulness. There is no mat.
David M. LeeBorn 20 Jan 1931.David Morris Lee is an American physicist who, with Robert C. Richardson and Douglas D. Osheroff, was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize for Physics in 1996 for their joint discovery in 1972 of superfluidity in the rare isotope helium-3. Working at the low-temperature laboratory at Cornell University, they built their own apparatus to reduce temperature to about 0.002K. This was substantially lower than about 2K at which the common isotope helium-4 becomes a superfluid, as observed by Pjotr Kapitsa in the late 1930s. But He-3 had to be reduced in temperature to almost absolute zero before becoming superfluid, and able to flow without resistance, even to climb the walls of containers and flow down the outside. The atoms had until that point had moved with random speeds and directions. But as a superfluid, the atoms then move in a co-ordinated manner.« |
