Ken Wilson - A Tribute: Some recollections and a few thoughts on education

📝 Abstract

I had the marvelous good fortune to be Ken Wilson’s graduate student at the Physics Department, Cornell University, from 1972 to 1976. In this article, I present some recollections of how this came about, my interactions with Ken, and Cornell during this period; and acknowledge my debt to Ken, and to John Wilkins and Michael Fisher, who I was privileged to have as my main mentors at Cornell. I end with some thoughts on the challenges of reforming education, a subject that was one of Ken’s major preoccupations in the second half of his professional life.

💡 Analysis

I had the marvelous good fortune to be Ken Wilson’s graduate student at the Physics Department, Cornell University, from 1972 to 1976. In this article, I present some recollections of how this came about, my interactions with Ken, and Cornell during this period; and acknowledge my debt to Ken, and to John Wilkins and Michael Fisher, who I was privileged to have as my main mentors at Cornell. I end with some thoughts on the challenges of reforming education, a subject that was one of Ken’s major preoccupations in the second half of his professional life.

📄 Content

Ken Wilson - A Tribute:
Some recollections and a few thoughts on education

H R Krishnamurthy Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore 560012, India

Abstract

I had the marvelous good fortune to be Ken Wilson’s graduate student at the Physics Department, Cornell University, from 1972-1976. In this article, I present some recollections of how this came about, my interactions with Ken, and Cornell during this period; and acknowledge my debt to Ken, and to John Wilkins and Michael Fisher, who I was privileged to have as my main mentors at Cornell. I end with some thoughts on the challenges of reforming education, a subject that was one of Ken’s major preoccupations in the second half of his professional life.

I joined Cornell as a graduate student in physics in the fall of 1972, after completing an M.Sc. degree in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur [1]. I was pretty much sold on becoming a theoretical physicist, but wasn’t very clear what area I would work in. I remember that among the graduate programs I had gained admission to, I was able to eliminate all but Caltech and Cornell relatively easily, but found the final selection between these two a tough one to make. Caltech was the more acclaimed (Feynman and Gell-Mann were among the physics faculty), and had offered me a fellowship; whereas Cornell had offered me only a teaching assistantship. I finally decided to go to Cornell nevertheless, because of the perception that this allowed me to keep my options open for doing either high-energy physics (then more commonly referred to as particle physics) or condensed matter physics, as Cornell was strong in both [2]. Among the flyers I received from the physics department at Cornell, there was one with a list of recent publications from their faculty, and Ken Wilson’s name figured prominently at the end, with a string of 4 papers published in 1971, three of them with “renormalization group” in their titles. I looked up the papers in the library, but didn’t understand much of what I read, except that the papers seemed very important. By the time I arrived in Cornell, “epsilon expansion” had been discovered [3], and there seemed to be a clear consensus that Ken had achieved a profound breakthrough.

The physics department at Cornell those days had a system that a committee of “four wise men” was designated every year to advise the entering graduate students. Ken was one of these four the year I joined, and by a fantastic stroke of luck, I was assigned to him. I met him soon after my arrival at Ithaca, and asked him whether I could skip the first year graduate courses in Quantum Mechanics (QM) as I felt I knew the course material well. He said he would give me a written exam, and advise me based on my performance. The exam consisted of a bunch of QM problems, and I had no difficulty solving them. When I met him later, after he had a chance to look at my solutions, to my great joy he suggested that I skip all the first year graduate courses, and instead credit the second year courses, including a special topic course that he was teaching that fall term on the renormalization group (RG) and epsilon expansion (from notes that were later published as the seminal Wilson-Kogut Physics Reports article [4]). I did as he suggested, but partly because of my limited exposure to advanced statistical physics, field theory and critical phenomena, and partly because of limitations in my approach to learning (I was very reluctant to plunge in and learn something without having mastered what I considered the “prerequisites”), found his course rather difficult to cope with. I eventually dropped out of crediting the course (though I probably continued to sit in on the lectures), and focused on the other courses I was taking, on Solid State Physics [5] and Quantum Field Theory. I don’t think I had much interaction with Ken the rest of that academic year, except for occasional meetings for him to sign papers as my adviser.

During my second semester at Cornell, and during the summer that followed, I tried my hand a bit at experimental physics, by doing a couple of projects with Bob Buhrman, which also helped me to fulfill the experimental physics course requirements that were mandatory for all physics graduate students at Cornell. Bob was a wonderful person to work with, but by the end of this period it was clear to me that I should stick to theory. I was also clear that I wanted to work on problems related to RG and critical phenomena. I met Ken and asked him whether I could work with him. He basically said yes, but added that he had switched his interest to lattice gauge theory [6], and asked whether I would be interested in working in that area. I told him that I was keener to work in condensed matter theory, and he suggested that I should talk to Michael Fisher. So I went and met Michael, and joined his

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