Memoirs      
1970s America – An Indian student’s journey
by Dr. Anil K. Rajvanshi

Chapter 5

Brush with Greatness

My first brush with greatness at UF was with Jimmy Carter who became the American President in 1976.

One day in later part of January 1975 I was coming back in the evening to my office from Beaty Towers when I saw posters all over the campus announcing that Jimmy Carter the Democratic presidential candidate will speak at 8 p.m. in the McCarty Auditorium.

I normally used to go to my dorm around 5 or 5:30 p.m. to cook and after dinner would usually come back to my office in the department to study or do experiments in the lab till about 12 or 12:30 a.m. The quiet atmosphere of the office at night was excellent to study.

Hence when I saw those posters in the evening I thought it might be worthwhile to go and see what a potential President of US is all about. Coming from a political family I was curious about the politics in US and the talk by Jimmy Carter provided an excellent opportunity to find out more.

Thus I went a little early to the auditorium and sat in an aisle seat near the back so that if I got bored I could leave the talk without disturbing other people.

At exactly 8.00 p.m. Jimmy Carter entered the auditorium from the back smiling his toothy smile and shaking hands with the audience as he passed by. He shook hands with me and casually asked where I was from to which I replied India and he moved on.

His thick southern accent was difficult to follow but his smiling face and charming and gracious manners captivated me and so I sat through his speech. After the lecture came the question/answer time. A black woman got up and literally lit up into Jimmy Carter accusing him of racism since he came from the South and calling him names etc. Throughout this question Jimmy Carter simply kept on smiling and answered the question without any rancor or irritation. He never appeared to be perturbed or rattled at all. I was extremely impressed by his demeanor and behavior.

So I came back to my office around 9:30 p.m. and told my officemates that I just saw the next President of US. One of my officemates got livid and told me that I had been in US for only a month and how dare could I pass judgment on the political candidates. “The next President will be Ronald Reagan” he told me. I had no idea who Reagan was but somehow my gut feeling told me that Jimmy Carter may become the next President. I became so interested in his campaign that I used to read everything on him that came in the newspapers.

So I used to go to the main library on UF campus and read editorials in New York Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald etc. and became quite knowledgeable about Jimmy Carter and his policies. I was delighted when he became the President and I still feel that he was the most decent President that US has had in the last 50-60 years. I used to debate with my American friends and officemates regarding the pros and cons of Carter candidacy and they were amazed at my knowledge. That is when I felt that Americans had become quite illiterate since they hardly read the papers and formed their opinion only from news bites on TV. My crowning glory came when I persuaded successfully my officemate to vote for Jimmy Carter in 1976 Presidential election!

Another great man I met at UF was Vernher Von Braun. He was the father of US space program and a genius rocket expert who designed and developed the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany and later on came to US after the Second World War. He set the tone for NASA and was its deputy administrator and chief designer of rockets.

Dr. Von Braun and my professor Dr. Erich Farber were good friends. Both were of German-origin and since Farber also played an important role in the design of Saturn 5 rocket, they knew each other quite well. On 15 July 1975 the first US-USSR space docking took place. It was a great achievement in terms of the peaceful space cooperation between two super powers. Dr. Von Braun came to UF to meet Dr. Farber so that both of them could go and see the launch of the US spacecraft from Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral. Naturally they were VIPs so saw the launch from a close range. I also went to see the launch later that day but saw it from 15 miles away !

Thus Dr. Farber introduced me as his star student to Dr. Von Braun. I could only chat with him for 5-10 minutes since both of them were in a hurry to go to Kennedy Space Center. He seemed a very nice and simple man and we had a very pleasant conversation. He told me that I was very fortunate to study with a world-renowned Solar Energy expert.

Stanley Ulam was another great name at UF. He was a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at UF and was an extremely humble person. He kept a low profile and very few students knew that such a great figure was at UF. He was the true father of the Hydrogen Bomb. This title was usurped by Dr. Edward Teller who was quite an obnoxious person and took most of the credit himself. But it was Dr. Ulam’s paper in early 1950s which clearly showed the possibility of a hydrogen bomb and how it could be built. Later on I heard Dr. Teller at UF and in his lecture he appeared very arrogant and pompous. After the talk Dr. Teller had a long meeting with Dr. Farber on solar energy and next day Farber told me how Teller tried to show that he knew much more than him !

I forget exactly how I came to know Dr. Ulam, but he enjoyed Indian philosophy and we did discuss a couple of times some issues in Indian philosophy. Dr. Ulam was one of the few persons in whose presence I felt extremely humble and had a feeling of well being. He used to give excellent seminars and loved to tell wonderful stories of his interactions with brilliant scientists both at MIT where he was a professor and at Las Alamos where he was one of the key scientists in the Atom Bomb Manhattan project.

Another great mathematician at UF was Vasile M. Popov. He was very soft spoken and a thorough gentleman. He had a stability criterion named after him. I took an advanced mathematics course under him called stability theory. It was a very deep course and I was the only mechanical engineering student in it. All others were students and faculty from mathematics department. I was extremely interested in mathematics and it was my favorite subject. Dr. Popov’s course was a logical step after a good number of courses in mathematics that I had taken at UF. Dr. Farber once told me that if I took one more mathematics course, then I would have to shift to Mathematics department from Mechanical Engineering!

Dr. Popov had just joined UF as a distinguished professor in 1975 and this was the first time he was teaching this course at UF. I had difficulty in understanding the deep mathematics and so worked very hard on his lectures and used to go to the library to read extra material. Near the middle of the quarter we enquired from Dr. Popov when the midterm examination would be held at which he quietly told us that there will be no examination in his course and the fact that we were attending it regularly was enough proof that we are interested in knowledge. So all of us got an A grade !

There were other well know names at UF during my time. For example Prof. K. Polhauhsen a distinguished Professor in Engineering Sciences Department was one of the pioneers of fluid mechanics with L. Prandtl and H. Von Karman. He was an extremely old man and I saw him a number of times standing on the bus stand to catch the bus. A person like that in India would have been a national hero chauffeured in a car. Yet in US he was another professor with no special treatment. This fact had a tremendous impression on my young mind. Some of my friends who were in Engineering Sciences department used to speak often about him.

Two other great names with whom I interacted briefly were Peter Lowdin and Howard T. Odum.

Peter Lowdin was a Distinguished Research Professor in Chemistry Department. He was a theoretician and a well-known figure in Quantum Chemistry. I came to know about him from my Indian roommate who was doing his Ph.D. in Quantum Chemistry and Lowdin was one of his committee members. Peter Lowdin had joint appointments at University of Uppsala in Sweden and University of Florida. So he used to spend winters in Florida and summers in Sweden. In fact there were quite a number of big names in academia who came to UF because of the weather. They had done their major work in other well-known universities and when nearing retirement they would take an appointment (and sometimes joint appointment) at UF. Peter Lowdin was also a member of the Noble Prize Committee.

I once invited him for the multidisciplinary seminars on Energy that I used to hold in Mechanical Engineering during 1978/79. I was still a graduate student at that time. These university wide seminars had become quite well known and popular and there were a couple of stories written on them in the local newspapers. Thus quite a number of UF faculty used to look forward to an invitation to talk in these seminars. I think it was a remarkable event that a graduate student was allowed to run these seminars and the department gave all the help. Such a thing would be unheard of on Indian University campuses. After the seminar series ended in spring 1979 the chairman of Mechanical Engineering gave a glowing commendation letter to me stating that I as a graduate student could do what his faculty could not accomplish!

These seminars were the outcome of my conviction that nature knows best and that we should learn from it and copy it. This is now known as biomimicry but in those times this field was not so well explored. Thus I used to invite professors and faculty members from different disciplines including engineering, agriculture, entomology, medicine, physics, chemistry etc. to talk on energy. The seminars were held every Thursday in Mechanical Engineering auditorium and the series was spread over three quarters.

I had invited Peter Lowdin to talk on second Law of Thermodynamics and Energy problem. Before the seminar I would go to the concerned faculty member and discuss what he or she would talk on. I would request all of them to talk on how they saw a solution of the energy crisis through their work.

Since this was a popular seminar series and also due to the stature of Peter Lowdin the Mechanical Engineering auditorium which seated 250 people was jam packed. Out of the allotted 50 minutes Dr. Lowdin spoke for 45 minutes on an obscure theorem that he was working on in non-equilibrium thermodynamics and the last 5 minutes on the 2nd law and energy! By the time he finished there were only a handful of persons left in the audience. It was one of the most boring seminars in the series. Thus a well known name does not guarantee that he or she would also be a good speaker. In fact I have found quite a number of times that some very well known researchers are extremely poor teachers and speakers.

H.T. Odum on the other hand was a different fare. He was a good teacher and gave interesting and lucid talks. Dr. Odum was also a distinguished professor in Environmental Engineering and a pioneer in using systems theory in ecology. He had won many international awards and had set up a well-known center of wetlands at UF. He was tall and bulky, with a very prominent nose, but extremely soft spoken. I invited Dr. Odum to give a talk in the energy seminar series.
Dr. Odum gave a couple of talks on energy systems and public policy and the last talk he gave before I left UF for India was on the energy of soul! A lot of people thought that he had gone wonky but I thought that he had the guts and the courage to talk on a subject that he felt was interesting. To my mind the whole basis of scholarship is to conduct research on and talk on subjects which one finds interesting and in those times US educational environment encouraged such ideas.

A regular visitor to UF campus was Dr. Manfred Eigen - a Nobel laureate and the Director of Max Planck Institute in Germany. He used to come yearly to UF and gave a series of lectures on evolution and second law of thermodynamics. I attended these lectures which normally had 15-20 persons in the audience. Dr. Eigen was a great speaker, taught a very difficult subject with great ease and made it understandable. He was a handsome man and was always accompanied by very attractive female assistants which was an added attraction to attend his lectures.

Besides these there was a regular flow of outstanding educators, academicians and well known figures whose lectures I attended on all different subjects ranging from out of body experiences to particle physics to cosmology etc. This aspect of UF campus life I have always missed after coming back to India. Every good university in US has a large number of such intellectual interactions and it is upto the students to partake of and learn from them. I often found that very few students that I knew had the breadth of interest to take advantage of the rich intellectual life that UF offered.

– Continued

August 12, 2007

Government Scholarship | The Preparation | Landing in America 
Campus Life | Brush with Greatness | India Association | Marriage
Looking for Better School? | Exploring America | Graduate Studies
Teaching at UF | Decision to go back to India | Epilogue

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