What happens when you meet someone in an elevator? You would usually greet "Hey, how are you doing?" or maybe "Nice to see you". Not for USC professor John O'Brien from Caltech though. When me and Katsouleas watched him walking into our elevator right after our class, these are his first words towards Katsouleas:
"I looked in Landau and Lifsitz's Electrodynamics and when you treat the electron motion classically you get closed orbits, but when you treat it relativistically then they spiro inwards into the nucleus. They use a relativistic Hamilton-Jacobi which I cannot tell right away "oh, that's it". "
Damn, I love this guy!
