The first was Richard Feynman [Physics 1965], back in 1981 or '82. I was a student at Santa Monica College, and a friend took me to a lecture at UCLA by Feynman. At this point, I hadn't taken any physics, or perhaps I was in my first semester, so I didn't understand a thing. From what I know now, he was talking about the two-slit experiment, but to me it was very confusing. The hall was jam packed, though, and I recall sitting on the steps in the aisle. I couldn't figure out what all the fuss was about. Of course, I know now. I also remember where I was when I found out he had died - I was in my TA office in the basement of Knudsen Hall, and I was discussing him with my fellow TAs in 1988.
The second and third were up in Santa Cruz. Hans Bethe [Physics 1967] came to the physics department to give a talk on SN 1987a, so I'm guessing it was in the spring of 1987. He was old, but definitely still very sharp. Around the same time, Linus Pauling [Chemistry 1954, Peace 1962] came to Santa Cruz to give a talk. I don't remember the topic, but I was very impressed at how he was able to switch gears. Apparently, he was scheduled to give a fairly high-level department colloquium, but so many people showed up that the venue had to change at the last minute. He correctly realized that most of the audience would not understand his planned talk - they had just come to see Linus Pauling - so he gave a more popular level talk, on the fly. That, to me, is someone who really knows his subject - and his audience - well.
As a young grad student at UCLA in about 1988, Carlo Rubbia [Physics 1984] came to the department (we had several faculty who worked at CERN) and one of the "events" that was organized was an informal talk between Rubbia and the grad students. It was mostly a question-and-answer session, and I recall that he was rather pompous. But I guess that's just his style, and people have speculated that someone with a less forceful personality would not have been able to get the experiment built that detected the weak intermediate vector bosons.
The next was in 1993. Russell Hulse and Taylor [Physics 1993] had just won the prize in October for the discovery of the binary pulsar from Arecibo in 1974. Hulse at that time was Taylor's grad student, but he had since switched to plasma physics. He happened to be going to the annual plasma physics meeting in November, so they quickly organized a special lecture for him. I don't recall any of the details, but he talked about the history of how he made the discovery.
The next was John Mather and George Smoot [Physics 2006], who gave talks at the April 2007 meeting of the APS (American Physical Society) in Jacksonville. They had just won the Nobel prize in 2006, and I went to that meeting with several students from ERAU. It was mostly to give them experience at a technical conference, but a happy bonus was the joint talk by the Nobelists. They gave a great lecture to a packed, standing room only, audience.
Sometime in 2011 or '12, I think, the Prescott campus organized a lecture by Steven Weinberg [Physics 1979], and they streamed it live to the Daytona campus. Unfortunately, there were only 3 of there to watch it - a disappointing turnout. Apparently, Weinberg was just recovering from an illness, so he didn't actually travel to Prescott, but gave the talk via video from his office at UT. For us in Daytona, it didn't matter, we weren't there in person. But he have a excellent explanation of why the Higgs is a necessary component of the electroweak theory - i.e., the standard model of particle physics - and how it fits into the puzzle, even though its discovery by the LHC hadn't yet been confirmed.
Now, I never met him, nor heard him speak, but John Bardeen [Physics 1956, Physics 1972] has to go on this list, since he's a member of the family! My wife is his first cousin, twice removed. That is, my wife's grandmother is a Bardeen, and she's a first cousin with John. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to meet him. But I have met several of the other incredibly smart Bardeens, including Chris Bardeen.
The reason for this list is that John Mather is coming to speak at ERAU-Daytona on February 20, 2015 at 7:00pm. So, even though I've heard him speak before, I will increase my "Nobel number" by 1.
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