The length and breadth of the world...
08/10/09 18:17 Filed in: Science Anecdotes | Personal
... as measured by human contact.
The world seems a bit smaller today. Which, while not quite as much the world traveler as Kerri is, I have lived in some pretty different places. Something very odd happened when I was looking at Stephen Hawking’s webpage a few days ago. Something I really didn’t expect.
I noticed a name that struck me as... unusual, Chamblin. When I was very young (5-8ish) I had a friend whose last name was Chamblin. I’ve not seen him in let’s say at least 25 years. However, it’s not a name I’ve seen spelled that way anywhere else and I suppose for some reason when I saw it written it struck me as kind of odd. So there it is on the Cambridge University website along with Stephen Hawking.
Now, the little neurons in my head (overworked and deficient to be sure) probably would not have made any connection were it not for something I’d heard uttered while I believe I was an undergraduate. I remember my mother saying that, “do you remember your friend? His older brother has gone on to study mathematics in England.”
Mathematics, England, and Chamblin... that statement hit enough things in my head while looking at Hawking’s publications to wonder, could it possibly be that this Chamblin and my friend could be related(or even his brother)? I shelved the thought last week as I got busy with some other work, but it’s come back into my consciousness a few more times since then. Today I had the thought while sitting at a computer and looking for something else to do while one of my programs finished running.
The story, at least the start of it, is that in fact the Andrew Chamblin, theoretical physicist and Andrew Chamblin, older brother to my friend, were one in the same. I say “were” because tragically he passed away 3 years ago.
It is a very odd feeling... Amarillo TX is a pretty small town, especially when one considers the mentality of many of the people there. I’d more or less assumed that I’d been about the only person to leave Amarillo for a career as an academic/research physicist, at least during my own years. What’s more is as soon as I’d made the connection that indeed there was someone else that had come from the same place, going out into the wide-wide-world doing physics, that the connection was broken. For the shortest moment I knew that there was someone that would be really fun to contact. Someone perhaps to meet if we overlapped on a holiday visit some winter. Someone that had traveled the same road out of Amarillo and into the world of physics.
It’s actually not the same road and I’m being a little too liberal with my nostalgia. Andrew Chamblin excelled early in school and showed a bright future very early on. I on the other-hand experienced a terrible education by the same school district, gaining the distinction of “mentally retarded” during the 2nd grade and having it follow me through high-school. Andrew Chamblin went to Rice, then Oxford, and then Cambridge directly from Amarillo after high school. My high-school guidance councilor recommended that I “find a good trade school,” and there was some mention that I could make a decent plumber. My path to physics was a bit circuitous. Hmmm.... I’ll be nice and say I took the scenic route. It was only after attending community college that I found people that inspired me to do well (and even since, throughout the years, my academic path has been somewhat unusual).
What is more is that I may well have seen Andrew Chamblin during my adult life, perhaps passing him in a hallway though without realizing our common geographical origin. In fact, had I not decided to switch from theoretical physics to experimental condensed matter physics I almost certainly would’ve met him (again). He collaborated with several of the theorists at the University of Washington while I was a graduate student there.
This has been a rather unusual half an hour.
I only have only a couple sets of memories of Andrew Chamblin. Even then they’re not of him as “Andrew Chamblin”, but only the older brother of my friend. There’s nothing insightful to my memories, just typical things of kids growing up, one from a birthday party and one of running down an alley.
I’ve not spoken to my friend nor anyone from his family in years. I’m not even sure if he’d remember me. However, I think it’s worth tracking him down just to see where this goes.
The world seems a bit smaller today. Which, while not quite as much the world traveler as Kerri is, I have lived in some pretty different places. Something very odd happened when I was looking at Stephen Hawking’s webpage a few days ago. Something I really didn’t expect.
I noticed a name that struck me as... unusual, Chamblin. When I was very young (5-8ish) I had a friend whose last name was Chamblin. I’ve not seen him in let’s say at least 25 years. However, it’s not a name I’ve seen spelled that way anywhere else and I suppose for some reason when I saw it written it struck me as kind of odd. So there it is on the Cambridge University website along with Stephen Hawking.
Now, the little neurons in my head (overworked and deficient to be sure) probably would not have made any connection were it not for something I’d heard uttered while I believe I was an undergraduate. I remember my mother saying that, “do you remember your friend? His older brother has gone on to study mathematics in England.”
Mathematics, England, and Chamblin... that statement hit enough things in my head while looking at Hawking’s publications to wonder, could it possibly be that this Chamblin and my friend could be related(or even his brother)? I shelved the thought last week as I got busy with some other work, but it’s come back into my consciousness a few more times since then. Today I had the thought while sitting at a computer and looking for something else to do while one of my programs finished running.
The story, at least the start of it, is that in fact the Andrew Chamblin, theoretical physicist and Andrew Chamblin, older brother to my friend, were one in the same. I say “were” because tragically he passed away 3 years ago.
It is a very odd feeling... Amarillo TX is a pretty small town, especially when one considers the mentality of many of the people there. I’d more or less assumed that I’d been about the only person to leave Amarillo for a career as an academic/research physicist, at least during my own years. What’s more is as soon as I’d made the connection that indeed there was someone else that had come from the same place, going out into the wide-wide-world doing physics, that the connection was broken. For the shortest moment I knew that there was someone that would be really fun to contact. Someone perhaps to meet if we overlapped on a holiday visit some winter. Someone that had traveled the same road out of Amarillo and into the world of physics.
It’s actually not the same road and I’m being a little too liberal with my nostalgia. Andrew Chamblin excelled early in school and showed a bright future very early on. I on the other-hand experienced a terrible education by the same school district, gaining the distinction of “mentally retarded” during the 2nd grade and having it follow me through high-school. Andrew Chamblin went to Rice, then Oxford, and then Cambridge directly from Amarillo after high school. My high-school guidance councilor recommended that I “find a good trade school,” and there was some mention that I could make a decent plumber. My path to physics was a bit circuitous. Hmmm.... I’ll be nice and say I took the scenic route. It was only after attending community college that I found people that inspired me to do well (and even since, throughout the years, my academic path has been somewhat unusual).
What is more is that I may well have seen Andrew Chamblin during my adult life, perhaps passing him in a hallway though without realizing our common geographical origin. In fact, had I not decided to switch from theoretical physics to experimental condensed matter physics I almost certainly would’ve met him (again). He collaborated with several of the theorists at the University of Washington while I was a graduate student there.
This has been a rather unusual half an hour.
I only have only a couple sets of memories of Andrew Chamblin. Even then they’re not of him as “Andrew Chamblin”, but only the older brother of my friend. There’s nothing insightful to my memories, just typical things of kids growing up, one from a birthday party and one of running down an alley.
I’ve not spoken to my friend nor anyone from his family in years. I’m not even sure if he’d remember me. However, I think it’s worth tracking him down just to see where this goes.