Dream Log: Fun with Physicists

Before going to bed last night I browsed through a two-volume work: Electromagnetic Theory: A Critical Examination of Fundamentals by Alfred O'Rahilly (1884-1969), who wrote mostly in the genre of theology. Published in 1938, O'Rahilly's work on electromagnetics rejected major aspects of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory, and, as a consequence, also much of the mainstream physics which followed Maxwell, including Einstein's theory of relativity. Whether O'Rahilly altered his views on physics after 1945, when two rather large ka-booms had offered striking practical demonstration of the soundness of Einstein's formula E=mc2, I have not yet been able to determine.

So anyway, that's what I was reading before I went to sleep last night. And then I dreamed that I was hanging out in someone's living room with some contemporary physicists -- conventional ones, a dozen or so, both genders and a wide range of ages. The subject of O'Rahilly never came up. Neither did the subject of COVID-19. We did, however, talk about Newton, Maxwell, Faraday, Lorentz, Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Susskind and others. To be more precise: the physicists mostly talked and I listened.

One of the physicists, a thin, grey-haired man in a worn-out sweater, was also an amateur sculptor. He had made pieces each of which was intended to combine with one of us as a temporary, partly-living sculpture. The sculptures were plastic or metal or both, some looked somewhat like molecules, others looked somewhat like abstract animals. The art show was just for us. It was great. We would each stand next to the sculpture made for us, positioned according to the physicist-sculptor's instructions, as we quoted a famous physicist of the past. I quoted Bohr. There's no way I could quote a word of Bohr from memory right now. Nor could I explain any of his ideas to you. I was not mistaken in the dream for a physicist, and every other person in the dream was quite an advanced physicist. But everyone was very friendly, and they all seemed more than glad to explain any point of physics which was unclear to me. 

After the art show, we put on coats and headed out into a wintry, snowy afternoon. There was a woods nearby, and today was supposed to be especially good for bird watching in that woods, and sure enough, we saw woodpeckers and finches and cardinals and an owl. We kept walking through the woods until we got to a university campus where a conference was underway in which some of our group were scheduled to speak.

On the other side of the woods, we had to walk across a two-lane road, and then we would be on the campus. A new car with the windows rolled down, full of young men, probably rich kids and students at this college, and probably not straight-A students, roared past while the young men inside yelled obscenities in our general direction and one of them hurled some litter at us. He missed. A young woman in our group mumbled something which I didn't hear, but everyone else in the group laughed quite heartily, so I was going to ask her to repeat it, but I woke up.