Country Joe and the troll doll

In the scene in A Serious Man where Danny runs into his room when he hears F-Troop start on his television set, when everybody is supposed to be sitting shiva for the deceased Sy Ableman, and Larry comes to the door of Danny's room and reminds him that they're supposed to be sitting shiva--and as usual in the movie, the child just ignores the command or question of the adult--on the floor of Danny's room a group of record albums can be seen on the left, the first one in the stack being a Country Joe and the Fish album. A little ways away from the albums, a troll doll is lying on the floor. Ah, yes, I remember mine fondly.

Interference of probability amplitudes, not photons

"The things that interfere in quantum mechanics are not particles. They are probability amplitudes for certain events." So says Roy J. Glauber in a letter to the editor of the American Journal of Physics, printed in the January 1995 issue. Glauber was describing how Dirac's writing that each photon interferes only with itself, and thus interference between different photons can never occur, is not strictly correct. So there. The great ones can get it wrong too, and frequently do, so don't worry too much about your own little pultritudinal mistakes.

2-D complex vector space is still waiting in the wings to be written about...