Rod Reid Remembrance

I was saddened when I heard the news that Rod Reid had passed away. I, like many other UCD physics graduate alumni, was profoundly influenced by Dr. Reid, primarily by being a student in his first-year graduate courses in quantum mechanics (in 1982-1983), and I consider myself to be most fortunate for having had this experience. Dr. Reid’s intelligence, technical expertise, endearing quirkiness, passion, and concern for us as his students impressed me when I was at Davis, and impress me even more upon reflection as my life has unfolded. In many ways, Dr. Reid has been a role model for me throughout my career in very specific ways.

When I left Davis in 1993, I started teaching at Southwestern College, a tiny (~600 student) college in south-central Kansas where I have remained to this day. From 1994 until two years ago when we discontinued the physics major due to declining enrollments, I taught a biyearly course in undergraduate quantum mechanics. To say that Dr. Reid influenced both my teaching style and content in this course is an understatement. Until I started teaching this quantum course, I didn’t realize just how much of Dr. Reid’s essence I had taken with me from Davis. When I first started teaching the course, I would often have a recollection of Dr. Reid while I was in class. Because I think that the sharing of background stories with my students adds to the richness of a course, I would generally stop at these moments and say to my class, “This reminds me about the guy who taught me quantum in grad school. Listen to this . . .” By the time I last taught the course two years ago, my lectures and discussions with my students were peppered with references to Dr. Reid. Although I could go on for quite a while with specific examples, there were two that come immediately to mind because not only were they amusing stories, they were also effective as teaching tools.

My first example of a “Dr. Reid moment” occurred in both my quantum mechanics and my mathematical physics courses whenever we discussed functions that are orthogonal on an infinite-dimensioned space. I would tell my students that this orthogonal was like perpendicular but in more than three dimensions, or a better way to think about it is that there is no overlap among the functions. To help them understand the concept, I would tell them about the time that Dr. Reid was musing about his (and by extension, all physicists) relationship with much of the rest of humanity when he said, “I dunno . . . sometimes I feel . . . orthogonal to other people.” (Even as I type this I can still hear his voice.) Being physics nerds, my students immediately understood the feeling and then had a deeper and visceral appreciation of what orthogonal means in more than three dimensions.

My second example of a “Dr. Reid moment” occurred when my students would calculate transmission probabilities in quantum tunneling situations. We would do the standard calculation and then apply it to a macroscopic case, like bouncing a tennis ball off of a wall. For the specific parameters that we considered, the transmission probability would end up being something like 10^-62. To comment on the size of this number, and to show my students that I’ve had some goofy ideas in my day, I would tell them of the time that I did a similar calculation in Dr. Reid’s class. Upon getting the result, I noted that even though the transmission probability was tiny, wouldn’t it be fun if you were the person who saw the ball actually tunnel through the wall. I recall that Dr. Reid then looked at me with a mixture of disbelief and amusement and said, “Anybody who doesn’t think that that number is actually zero . . . should be in . . . poetry . . . or some such.” Upon a moment’s reflection, though, I think he realized how this statement may have been received and he quickly added that we all have crazy ideas every once in a while (which was similar to the statement that he would make when correcting our mathematical errors, “But what’s a minus sign among friends?”) This episode clearly illustrated for me both Dr. Reid’s desire to have us become competent physicists with a minimum of wacky ideas, and, even more so, his concern and gentleness in dealing with those of us who were still learning. As I mentioned above, Dr. Reid has been a role model for me in my own teaching career, and I’ve consciously attempted to emulate these two aspects of his teaching motivation and style.

In summary, Dr. Reid was a both a remarkable teacher and a remarkable person who lived his life with an uncommon enthusiasm and passion (as can be attested by anyone who experienced his unmitigated joy in describing his trips to the Coronet Theater in San Francisco to watch the latest installment of Star Wars). I consider myself to be fortunate to have known Dr. Reid and to have learned from him.

Bob Gallup