Kamal K. Seth
Department of Physics
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60208
kseth@nwu.edu
(Received 20 July 2001)

In 1963, the Chairman of the Northwestern Physics Department told me that the Department was putting me up for promotion from the rank of Assistant Professor to Associate Professor with tenure. He asked me to give him a list of ten suggested referees who would be willing to write on my behalf.

I told him that I was not sure that I could come up with ten names, and he rather humorously added that not all referees were equal, and, for example, one Nobel Lauriate was equal to ten others (I do not remember if he really said ten or five). So I took him up on his word.

In those days I was working in neutron physics and had been in correspondence with Wigner about aspects of his R-matrix theory, level spacing distributions, etc, in relation to our experimental findings. I therefore bravely decided to ask him for a letter of recommendation.

On a visit to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, I ran into Wigner in the hall. I approached him and asked him if he would be willing to write for me. I will never forget his reply. To recall as accurately as I can 38 years later, he bowed and said, "Why, Professor Seth, I will be honoured. But I must warn you of one thing." (At that point, I froze, thinking that he meant that the recommendation would not be a good one.) Fortunately, he went on to add: "You see, physicists don't like to be told by engineers what to do, and I am only an engineer"." I do not know how I suppressed my laughter at this remark, but I did say to him, "Professor Wigner, let me worry about that, but will you write?" He said, "With pleasure". Needless to say, he wrote, and wrote in a complementary enough manner, so that my Chairman told me a couple of weeks later that Wigner had written, and I should consider my promotion a done deal. So, in a very real way, I owe my entire career in physics to this very unique engineer!!