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Saturday, August 13, 2005
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ROCKET MAN “The Baffling Descent of a Nobel Prize Winner,” headlines today’s LA Times. “Friends of physicist John Schrieffer [scroll down a few posts for more on this story], who faces prison in [a] fatal crash, are sad and perplexed,” writes the reporter. Everyone is stunned at this “catastrophic aberration,” this “tragic fluke.” UD finds it hard to believe that his university colleagues and his friends are stunned. Even UD, rotten at math, can do the numbers. Schrieffer, so heavily recruited that Florida’s governor called him for a long phone chat, joined FSU in 1991. Since 1993, he has “piled up nine speeding tickets,” and last year, “at the time of the accident, he was driving on a suspended Florida license.” So a couple of years after Schrieffer came to FSU, he began to demonstrate a pattern of such reckless speeding that his license had been suspended. For twelve years FSU had on its faculty a high-profile professor who was a notorious peril behind the wheel. “In his plea, Schrieffer … made no mention of any illnesses that influenced his judgment or his ability to drive.” Schrieffer has to have had a good attorney. Why was no such mention made? Probably because whatever illnesses he has -- he’s a man in his seventies -- they aren’t bad enough for him to have used in his defense. How impaired could he have been to be directing a big important lab? The LA Times writer settles for being as baffled and stunned as Schrieffer’s friends. But a likely explanation is right there in his article. Schrieffer just loves to make things go fast. Ever since he was young, Schrieffer’s had a “passion for technology,” which “showed even during high school in Eustis, Fla., where he shot homemade rockets over the orange groves…” Later in life, he became addicted to high-tech, late-model sports cars. He obviously loved to gun them and see how fast their engines could go. The police tried to stop Schrieffer from taking his enthusiasm with the creation of speed to higher and higher levels, but tickets and a suspended license don't discourage people like Schrieffer. UD continues to await evidence that his friends or FSU did anything about him for over a decade. She fears that everyone decided to protect so powerful and powerfully desired a faculty member. She’s therefore a bit nauseated by the shock and awe currently being expressed. Someone should have had enough imagination to conjure the innocent people Schrieffer was eventually going to destroy. But it’s early days. UD awaits the next article about Schrieffer in the LA Times. It will, she predicts, be an exclusive interview with a graduate student in his lab, full of guilt over having said nothing to anyone for so long about the scary man for whom she worked. |