In 1990, while still a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute
for Quantum Optics in Garching, I was writing a paper with the John A. Wheeler and the
Wolfgang P. Schleich, entitled, “Interference
in Phase Space.” I had first met Wheeler years before, when I was an
undergraduate student at the University of Texas, where I audited his course,
“Quantum Measurement Theory,” taught jointly with Wojciech H. Zurek. When I
asked Wheeler for permission to audit, he said to me, “How much trouble could
one undergraduate student be?”
Taking that as challenge, I would sit in the
front and constantly ask questions until the graduate students threatened to
take me out in the parking lot and beat me up. I finally told them all that I
knew karate (at that time a yellow belt in tae
kwon do) and they left me alone after that so I could still interrupt class.
The paper, “Interference in Phase Space,” was a review
article on phase-space methods in quantum optics; a topic that Wheeler and
Schleich began working on in Texas when Schleich was a postdoc there. My
primary job on the paper was to type up the whole thing in TeX. (This was back
in the day when women were women and men were men and we all wrote our own
macro packages and had no need for that namby pamby LaTex.) I also helped with
some of the calculations and preparing the figures. Even sometimes I had help
with double-checking the English, as when Schleich accidentally translated the
German nickname for Bohr’s Correspondence Principle, Bohr’s Zauberstab, as “Bohr’s Magic Stick” (instead of “Bohr’s
Magic Wand”).
Wheeler refused to let anybody start writing the body of the
paper until we had all the figures and figure captions done up to his liking.
We would lay the figures end to end and endlessly discuss their ordering, the
captions, the style of the drawings, etc. In this way we had a very clear
storyboard of the paper long before I started typing the main text. This is a very
useful technique that I still use to this day, especially with students and
colleagues who have writer’s block.
Schleich and I were working in Garching, Germany, and
Wheeler was back at Princeton. As I typeset the manuscript, which eventually
ran to nearly 50 pages, I would fax
drafts of it to Wheeler to mark up and fax back to me to make his changes. We
must have had done nearly 20 rounds of this faxing back and forth. Of course,
being the junior author, I mostly implemented Wheeler’s changes as were given
to me, but for one particular typesetting bone of contention. When Wheeler would
refer to a short snippet of mathematics (that followed the noun that defined it)
let us say “The variable x is
inserted into the function f(x) in
order to....,” he would put these math terms in parenthetical commas, e.g.,
“The variable, x, is inserted into
the function, f(x), in order to….”
If you have read Knuth’s big book of TeX or various physics author
style manuals, you learn that putting short math expressions like this in
commas is considered old fashioned and is frowned upon. Figuring that the
Editors would delete these commas in the final typesetting at the Annalen der Physik, I simply left them
out of the manuscript.
In that way then the battle with Wheeler over the commas had begun.
I would diligently fax the 50-page draft of the manuscript
to Princeton, over and over again, sans the parenthetical commas around the
short math, and Wheeler would send back his revised draft where, by hand, he
would painstakingly add each and every one of those mission commas back in
again. One must realize in a 50-page theoretical physics paper there were
thousands of such corrections in each round. Just writing the commas in, alone,
must have taken him hours in each review.
Finally he had enough. One day my office phone in Germany
rang and it was Wheeler, calling long distance from Princeton, and he was
understandably quite upset. “Dowling, he growled into the phone, why are you
not putting my commas back into the manuscript!?” I replied, evenly, “Prof.
Wheeler, putting parenthetical commas around such short math expressions in a physics
journal is old fashioned and is recommended against in the journal’s style
guide. Besides, the editors will just remove them.”
Stunned into a moment of silence, Wheeler then barked back, “I
have been putting parenthetical commas around my short mathematical expressions
since before you were born!” I
paused, and then answered, firmly, “Perhaps so, Prof. Wheeler, but it is I who is typing this darn 50-page manuscript!”
He hung up on me.
I won the battle. In the end the commas stayed out. (I don’t think Schleich
ever knew about this battle.) Some years later, in the mid-1990s, I ran into
Wheeler at a conference reception. I went to say hello but at first he did not
recognize me. So I said, “Wheeler, it’s me, Dowling — the smart-mouthed postdoc
who would never put your commas back in our manuscript!” Wheeler’s jaw dropped
and then, just when I though he was going to punch me, he started to laugh, and
then he patted me on the back. “Dowling! You know you know that fight over the commas nearly put me in a coma?”
Then I laughed too and wandered off to the bar.
That was the last time I ever saw Wheeler.
