Abstract
This paper is a faithful description of the author’s career as a scientist, which often intersected that of Yves Couder. The emphasis of this paper is a true description of how the science that the author has been associated with really came about. Included are brief descriptions of the science associated with the research paths described. It is hoped that this rather accurate account may be amusing for the senior scientists among us and educational (and possibly useful) for younger scientists.
Highlights
Yves Couder was a good friend and an amazing scientist
In parallel to our work on surface waves, my group continued the work on fracture that I had started in Texas
As I know, still haven’t been tried. While this project was never completed, it contributed, in a major way, to some entirely new and rather fruitful research directions. These are (1) fooling nature to enable the study of fracture with unprecedented detail; (2) establishing a new and fundamental paradigm for friction and (3) obtaining a fundamental understanding of earthquake dynamics
Summary
Yves Couder was a good friend and an amazing scientist. His death was a terrible loss to both science and to me, personally. After years of banging our collective heads against the wall do we find true (or partial) enlightenment; our results have steadfastly dragged us, kicking and screaming, to the realization that we have been asking the wrong question the whole time This process is never, noted in the scholarly paper that comes out of this work. I’m an experimental physicist who comes from a long line of contrarians Perhaps this characteristic is a good one to have for a scientist, as it is never a good idea to entirely believe what is generally assumed to be true. I’m not claiming that, in order to see the big picture, we should have bad vision – but it sometimes is useful to really not see the trees in order to see the forest
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