A young executive is working late one evening. As he comes out of his office about 8 PM he sees the Big Boss standing by the shredder in the hallway, a piece of paper in his hand. "Do you know how to work this thing?" the older man asks. "My secretary’s gone home and I don’t know how to run it."
"Yes, sir," says the young executive, who turns on the machine, takes the paper from the other man, and feeds it in.
"Now," says his boss, "I just need the one copy."
Pierre-Gilles de GennesDied 18 May 2007 at age 74 (born 24 Oct 1932).French physicist who was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize for Physics for "discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to more complex forms of matter, in particular to liquid crystals and polymers." He described mathematically how, for example, magnetic dipoles, long molecules or molecule chains can under certain conditions form ordered states, and what happens when they pass from an ordered to a disordered state. Such changes of order occur when, for example, a heated magnet changes from a state in which all the small atomic magnets are lined up in parallel to a disordered state in which the magnets are randomly oriented. Recently, he has been concerned with the physical chemistry of adhesion. |
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