Totally Random Frey Family Quotes

(And not pregnancy related...)

I found this old notebook in a drawer this weekend. It's a small notebook I used to carry in my purse to jot down things on the fly. In 2005 Kurt and I were up in Seattle visiting his brother and two of his cousins had come for a visit as well. I had met Burt but not Richard. Both are science geniuses and charming in their oddness. Burt is a fluid dynamics expert (used to teach at MIT and now is one of the few experts in the country who design air flow systems for skyscrapers and is a brilliant cellist) and Richard was a chemist and mathemetician (he is also a world ranked chess player, even played against Bobby Fischer as a kid (but lost).) Anyway, listening to the two of them talk was wild as I am NOT a scientist of any kind. I had to write down a few gems but I didn't note who said what.

At one point they were talking about how in 2nd year physics they learned "This year physical observables will become eigenvalues of hermitian operators."

I think I burst out laughing at that point and grabbed my notebook to write this down.

I then learned that ""mathematicians laugh at physicists, Niels Bohr was a bastard and that Linus Pauling "was no dumb-ass." (Finally words I could understand!)

The whole visit was a lesson for me in "wow, I had a completely different college experience."

In another time and place, I believe it was Paris in 2006, we were visiting with our friends Pranab and Kate, also two very highly educated people (both PhDs - he in physics, she in....oh man I forget! Sorry Kate!). Pranab is slightly more down to earth than the above cousins, but still said something I had to write down: "I had a key to the [nuclear] reactor!" Dude, that's cool.

Later we must have been talking about food (hey, we were in Paris, it's often a big topic) and Kurt said, "It suddenly occurred to me that I misplaced a large wedge of cheese." Context? Who knows -- so much more fun out of context.

I wanted to write these things down only because we still talk about the brainiac cousins and their conversations that fly over our heads (okay, mostly MY head). Good times!