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Melissa
Gym climber
berkeley, ca
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One of my grad school profs (who is now the director of the whole program) was on the first US ascent of K2 and the FA of the Kanshung Face of Everest. Rumor was he used to sleep in the cold room to train. When it was his turn to give a slide show presentation to us about his research (as all of the facuty did), he brought some of his Himalayan pics too, much to everyone's pleasure. He said everyone always asks, so he just started including it.
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Klimmer
Mountain climber
San Diego
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Topic Author's Reply - May 2, 2007 - 04:42pm PT
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Melissa, who would that be? :-))
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Melissa
Gym climber
berkeley, ca
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Sorry..Lou Reichardt.
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Mighty Hiker
Social climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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I believe Enrico Fermi (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1937) was something of a mountaineer, or at least a mountain hiker. His autobiography "Atoms in the Family" has something about it.
More than a few supertopians seems to be physicists, too. Not to mention any names...
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Crimpergirl
Social climber
Hell on earth wondering what I did to deserve it
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Matisse
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JohnR
Trad climber
State College, PA
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Leo Vietoris
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Vietoris
If you have studied algebraic topology you will know of the "Mayer-Vietoris sequence". Vietoris was drafted into the Austrian (?) army in 1914 and was an army mountain guide. He finished his PhD thesis in a POW camp. Reputedly he gave up climbing on doctors' orders at age 90. He died in 2002, aged 110.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 22, 2010 - 01:44am PT
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I just completed reading a biography of Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man; The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo (ISBN 978-0-465-01827-7). Some say that Dirac was the greatest British physicist since Isaac Newton. I learned, much to my surprise, that Dirac also climbed. The normal outings in the Lake District, Scotland, etc... but also in the Soviet Union (a very good friend and colleague was Peter Kapitza, and his student Igor Tamm introduced Dirac to climbing while Tamm was studying at Cambridge).
Related was the fact that in 1936 Dirac summitted Mount Elbrus (5,640m) with Tamm and a group of others, by the "eastern side" of the mountain (page 279). That is not the contemporary route, which is from the South Face (see http://www.summitpost.org/mountain/rock/150255/mount-elbrus.html ).
I had attended maybe two or three lectures by Dirac at the New York Academy of Science when I was a student at Columbia U. in the mid to late 1970s, he died in 1984. I don't recall the content of the talks at all, but I could not have imagined Dirac as a climber... he was a person who walked, however, and did quite a lot of walking...
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aguacaliente
climber
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Apr 22, 2010 - 02:05am PT
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Watusi is correct, Lyman Spitzer, who endowed the AAC's Spitzer grants, also originated the idea of placing a telescope in space (first proposed in 1946!!) and was very influential in getting the project that became Hubble Space Telescope approved.
NASA's infrared space observatory is named after him. http://spitzer.caltech.edu/mission/241-Lyman-Spitzer-Jr-
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tuolumne_tradster
Trad climber
Leading Edge of North American Plate
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Apr 22, 2010 - 02:13am PT
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Christof Koch - born in 1956 in Kansas City, Missouri, Christof Koch grew up in Amsterdam/Holland, Bonn/Germany, Ottawa/Canada, and Rabat/Morocco, where he graduated from the Lycče Descartes with a French Baccalaurčat in 1974. He studied Physics and Philosophy at the University of Tübingen in Germany and was awarded his Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1982. After four years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Koch joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology in 1986, where he is now the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology. He lives with his family in Pasadena.
The author of three hundred scientific papers and journal articles, and several books, Dr. Koch studies the biophysics of computation, and the neuronal basis of visual perception, attention, and consciousness. Together with his long-time collaborator, Francis Crick, he has pioneered the scientific study of consciousness.
Outside of science and writing, Dr. Koch's interests are eclectic. He proudly wears an Apple tattoo indicating his love for the Apple computer which he feels --- together with the Boeing B-747 Jumbo Jet and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco --- is the most beautiful and elegant artifact of the 20th century. Dr. Koch loves to climb mountains, towers, and big walls.
http://www.questforconsciousness.com/
http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/
Brad Esser
Research Interests
The use of groundwater age-dating, isotope biogeochemistry, and reactive transport modeling to develop better tools for water resource management, especially with regards to groundwater nitrate. The source, transport and fate of metals, radionuclides and nutrients in natural waters and sediments. Inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICPMS), including isotope-dilution methods for accurate and precise concentration measurements and isotopic composition studies to elucidate metal sources and geochemical processes.
https://www-pls.llnl.gov/?url=about_pls-scientific_staff-esser_b
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 22, 2010 - 03:04am PT
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Jeff Batten...
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TwistedCrank
climber
Ideeho-dee-do-dah-day boom-chicka-boom-chicka-boom
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Apr 22, 2010 - 08:49am PT
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Larry Hamilton aka Chiloe - tell us some tales of climate change and its impact on society at northern latitudes. Yo.
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myterious
Trad climber
Joshua Tree
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Apr 22, 2010 - 09:48am PT
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I plan on donating my body to medical science, does that count?
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Will Hobbs
Trad climber
Santa Monica, CA
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Apr 22, 2010 - 04:47pm PT
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Jeff Dozier.
Mari Gingery.
Me.
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EdBannister
Mountain climber
CA
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Apr 22, 2010 - 05:08pm PT
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a second on Mari,
she is a research biologist at UCLA last i knew...
and is possibly the best, as in could climb the hardest stuff onsight, female rock climber... ever.
yes there have been many who devoted themselves more to competition,
but i can't recall anyone better, that would include destivelle, hill, bensman, and those of that era and before, maybe someone new is better?
Mari always impressed me with her cogent and clear, understated, self.
She is very bright.
edit
and, Marco Bonaiti is a Phd
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Apr 22, 2010 - 08:07pm PT
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Ed mentioned Lester Germer(1896-1971), but I think he needs more recognition. He was a fighter pilot in WWI, and became a well-known physicist, collaborating with a colleague in the Davisson-Germer Experiment showing the wave/particle duality. He started climbing at age 49, and died while climbing in the Gunks.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Apr 22, 2010 - 10:29pm PT
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The mysteries of quantum physics . . .
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matisse
climber
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Apr 23, 2010 - 02:13am PT
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Tom Hornbein
Peter Hackett
Brownie (Robert) Schoene
Steve Ruoss
Peter Bartsch
Robert Naeije
Michael Ward
Andy Peacock
Anabel Nickol
Carmel Schimmel
...almost everyone in the high altitude field.
I'll think of more
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ryanb
climber
Seattle, WA
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Apr 23, 2010 - 02:50am PT
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Leroy Hood grew up in montana and climbed in Yosemite while he was at Cal Tech (inventing the genome sequencer). I once heard him mention a one day ascent of the nose as the peak of his climbing carear.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 27, 2010 - 02:30pm PT
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A quote from a 1963 interview with Werner Heisenberg in Abraham Pais' book Niels Bohr's Times, In Physics, Philosophy and Polity, page 276
"When you do mountaineering.... you sometimes... want to climb some peak but there is fog everywhere... you have your map or some other indication where you probably have to go and still you are completely lost in the fog. Then... all of a sudden you see, quite vaguely in the fog, just a few minute things from which you say, 'Oh, this is the rock I want.' In the very moment that you have seen that, then the whole picture changes completely, because although you still don't know whether you will make the rock, nevertheless for a moment you say, '... Now I know where I am; I have to go closer to that and then I will certainly find the way to go...' So long as I only see details, as one does on any part of mountaineering, the of course I can say all right, I can go ahead for the next 15 yards, or 100 yards, or perhaps one kilometer, but still I don't know whether this is right or may be completely off the real track."
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