Many believe that as talented as Tsien was a theoretician, he would be remembered primarily for his leadership in China rather than for his scientific work in the United States.
"His contribution to the United States was good but not overwhelming. His contribution to the People's Republic of China sounds like it was amazingly great." (查看原文)
*By 1910 the Jews, who represented only 5% of the population in Hungary, made up 80% of its financier, 59.9% of its doctors, 53% of its businessmen and 50.6% of its lawyers.
....
The school, known as the “nursery for the elite,” later turned out among its graduates internationally famous scientists such as Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Leo Szilard. (查看原文)
His most fantastic suggestion was to suspend an enormous mirror in space with a huge net of steel wire and use the reflected sunlight to bum enemy cities and to dry their lakes and seas. (查看原文)
Apparently, the government decided that the scientific abilities of people such as Tsien, Weinbaum, and Malina far outweighed the potential security risks. (查看原文)
Beijing was and is the most political of China's cities. For three thousand years it had been the political center of the country and for the past five hundred its capital. In 1908, just a short while before Tsien's arrival, approximately one-third of Beijing's seven hundred thousand people belonged to the military and administrative bureaucracy of the Qing reign. When Tsien arrived, he likely found the streets filled with officials wearing the dignified uniform of China's elite: the blue cotton changpao gown, which were as commonplace in Beijing then as the gray pinstriped suits are in Washington, D.C., today.
Fifteen years among Beijing's towers, stupas and gates, breathtaking in their bulk of marble, and among imperial courtyards that stretched unbroken for miles within crenelated wall... (查看原文)
Karman was born into that community. His father was the leading pedagogue in Hungary-the secretary general of the Austro-Hungarian ministry of education-and in that role he founded a model gymnasium (a European high school) for gifted children. His mother, a woman of great culture and refinement, was descended from a long line of scholars (most prominent among them Yehuda Loew Ben Bezalel, a famous sixteenth-century mathematician who invented a mechanical robot known as the "Golem" of Prague). Young Karman grew up within the sheltered confines of his parents' large apartments in the Jozsefvaros district of Buda and enjoyed the trappings of privilege typical of his class.
At the age of nine he was enrolled by his father in his father's gymnasium, where he learned advanced mathematics from ... (查看原文)
Karman also made a number of significant new contributions to aeronautics. He designed a simple, effective fillet for the famous Douglas DC-3 that eliminated severe wind buffeting. He helped aircraft industries complete the transition from wood and fabric planes to those with sheet metal skins by calculating how to put stiffeners along the surface to prevent the metal from warping under pressure. He developed a fundamental law of turbulence and skin friction, beating out his mentor, Prandtl, who had spent years on the same problem.
His contributions were not restricted to research. Karman was becoming one of Caltech's most popular professors. Despite his broken English, he was a natural lecturer, slicing the air with his hands as he talked and charming his audience with his wit. (When one... (查看原文)
He never learned the techniques of compromise and negotiation, because pride made him incapable ot it, and he was also completely inept at manupulating people politically. He was too brutally honest, too impatient, too impulsive, and too direct. (查看原文)
On this occasion of your seventy-fifth birthday, Dr. von Karman, what would be the proper words for a greeting? Shall I speak about our happy days together in Pasadena, m your house in Pasadena? No, that would not be proper, for I am not just your friend but, more important, your student. Shall I speak about your great contributions to science and engineering, and wish you will do more in the forthcoming years? No, that would be only a restatement of a world-known fact and a repetition of a very common birthday greeting. I wish to say more, to say something which may have a deeper meaning, because you are my respected teacher.
I presume that at the heart of every sincere scientist the thing that counts is an everlasting contribution to the human society. On this point, Dr. von Karman,... (查看原文)
