I have long noted the happy coincidence of Valentine’s Day and my daughter Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s birthday (for me, stirring memories of Boston Lying-in Hospital — now part of Brigham and Women’s Hospital — in 1965), but this morning I got a Facebook posting on one of the websites devoted to memorializing the astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky and his work, somewhat delayed in transit, celebrating FZ’s birthday, on VDay in 1898! Let’s just call it Zwicky Birthday.
Notes on FZ. From my 4/26/10 posting “German physicist Eugene Wigner?”:
Then there’s the case of Fritz Zwicky, described in his Wikipedia entry as a “Swiss astronomer”, though “Swiss American astrophysicist” would be more accurate. Occasionally you can find a reference to him as Bulgarian, or in a magazine article quoted by the questia site, as a “prickly Bulgarian-Swiss-American”. All this because Zwicky was born, in 1898, in Varna, Bulgaria, where his father was engaged in business for some years. But at the age of six, he was sent to live with his grandparents in Glarus, Switzerland (Canton Glarus was then and still is a veritable nest of Zwickys; the canton has supplied Zwickys to the Swiss diaspora around the world, many of them originally from the town of Mollis, where the Zwicky-Haus is located and where my Zwicky grandfather was born). Zwicky was educated in Switzerland and then moved to Cal Tech in 1925 to work with Robert Millikan. He was associated with Cal Tech for the rest of his life.
I think of Mollis as Zwicky Central, or as “where the Zwickys come from” (from Charley’s Aunt: “Brazil, where the nuts come from”).
Notable VDay birthdays. Besides EDZ and FZ. First, someone born even before FZ (but not by much):
comedian and actor Jack Benny (born Benjamin Kubelsky) 1894
Then a series of other people I find notable (your mileage might vary), all of whom turn out to be younger than I am:
businessman and politician Michael Bloomberg 1942; journalist and author Carl Bernstein (of Woodward & Bernstein fame) 1944; magician and actor Teller (born Raymond Joseph Teller) 1948; soprano and actress Renée Fleming 1959; actress Meg Tilly 1960
February 20, 2025 at 4:28 pm |
I wrote this because, well, the facts came to me, and then because it was the first entertaining thing that came up as a way to avoid weeping in fearful despair, of the “Oh Christ, what will become of me now?” variety. (Apparently I am a huge weeping sore of DEI infecting the professional world around me, and I did not take this news well.) But J, on his Thursday caregiving visit, brought me around with work to share, stories to tell one another, and a walk around the block in warm sun, after which I felt invigorated and energetic.
Turns out J is a *software* engineer (by training and previous career), like so many of my acquaintances, but it’s nice to have one in-house. Meanwhile, I entertained him with tales of word order typology and then, in a chat about sports expressions in American slang (a serious cultural challenge for the non-native), about the four bases of sex with a woman.
He asked about the pronunciation of democracy and democratic, which he knew he was getting wrong, and I got to tell him about pre-suffixal accent for the adjective-forming suffix -ic, which he viewed as a solid gold nugget. He taught me a lot about the Spanish letter LL.
We traded stories about doing two or three jobs at once (the story of my young life, and his current reality).
We admired some “California lilac”, and he was able to see the (remote) resemblance to lilac blossoms.
I still talk way too much, because I’m a lonely old man, but he humors me.