Gloria Lubkin (1933–2020)

I won’t go into what made my mother exceptional in her professional life; I leave that to others. What I will say is that what seemed like my ordinary life has probably not been so ordinary, due to my mother’s extraordinary life.

My mother started at Physics Today in 1963 but was soon fired when it became clear that she was pregnant with me. They rehired her, six weeks after I was born, and she stayed there for another 45 years. Then in 1968 she became a single parent of two. She moved from the big Betty Draper house to a run-down third-floor walk-up, above heavy traffic, in the best school district. She managed everything with heroic levels of help from her mother, Anne Becker, who would commute to New York weekly from Philadelphia by streetcar and train to take care of us, returning each weekend to cook a week’s worth of food for her husband until he died and she moved in with us. My grandmother lived with my mother until she was 95, and my mother managed the care of her mother, her uncle, and her cousin for a number of years. In 1970 my brother David suddenly moved to Israel to live with our father’s second family. Not being with her son for five years was the worst heartbreak of my mother’s life, and it affected her health.

As I got old enough, there was the occasional unofficial “bring your daughter to work day.” I learned to be polite when introduced: “This is Sam Goudsmit. He is very important.” I learned the culture of science very early. One of my crayon drawings was up on her wall at PT for years: “Love makes the world go round but money makes Skylab fly.” One day I asked my mother why men got paid more than women, and she explained, “because they have a family to support.” I was too young to catch the irony.

I absolutely hated moving to Harvard for a year for my mother’s Nieman Fellowship, and took it very hard. Much later, when I took my first and only sabbatical to the other Cambridge, my son Micah absolutely hated moving, and took it very hard. In the long term, my mother’s sabbatical taught me that I can live with major changes, and grow; I hope my son learns the same from mine.

Eventually I was old enough to come along to conferences, which gave me a deep love of travel and a comfort in other cultures. We continued to travel together well into my twenties, and I have wonderful memories of those trips. When my own children were old enough, I began taking them on work trips, and at least one of them has absolutely loved exploring the world and can’t get enough of it.

Sometimes things got a little awkward socially. All teens are embarrassed by their parents, but how many of us find ourselves debriefing about our date the previous night, only to discover that Mom had dated his father?

It would not be quite true to say that my mother influenced me to go into science, in particular into an area that many people count as a branch of physics. I was always interested in the same questions of form and flow, carefully pouring the milk into my coffee to watch the fluids dance around and through each other; seeing how high I could pile the sugar on the spoon; watching the fat droplets advect and coalesce on the surface of the soup. Although we talked about her work all the time, somehow my mother and I never talked physics much. I originally became excited about physics through an amazing high-school teacher, Mr. Powell. I dabbled in several fields in college, eventually majoring in math/physics, but I had to switch to a math major my last semester after flunking quantum mechanics the penultimate semester. Somehow nobody had advised me to take differential equations as a math/physics major. I got my doctorate in applied math, still interested in form and flow but not finding my scientific community until much later. In retrospect, I was probably just born in the wrong decade, since the science that intrigues me is only just coming into bloom after close to a century of neglect.

But I did make my way out into the world, professionally and personally. My Mom was relentlessly proud of everything I did and bragged about me and the kids to anyone who would listen. When she wasn’t visiting, and I wasn’t visiting, we were on the phone or on email.

I loved meeting my mother’s sea of friends. Some of them became near-aunties to me, or in a couple of cases, near-stepfathers. All were brilliant, accomplished, interesting people. Particularly important to my mother were her “mafia” gatherings, semiregular lunches or dinners with a small close circle of professional women friends. She had a group in New York, and when the American Institute of Physics moved, she formed a DC-area group. When you are in a minority, you need the support of people like yourself. I have had my own such group, which has been immeasurably important to me.

My mother never seemed to be pushing me in a particular direction, though I know she was grateful that for college I chose Brown over Stanford, and she made it clear that she would be sad if I took a tenure-track job abroad. Her influence on me was almost completely by example. She always spoke and wrote precisely, and if she wasn’t sure about a fact, she made that clear. If she told you an anecdote, you could be confident that it was true. I am the same way. It never even occurs to me to lie, because she never lied. Having children was for me a given, since her children were so important to her. Looking after my mother was of obvious importance to me, since my mother took in her own mother for 25 years. Surrounding myself with interesting people is just the way I was raised. Working hard to develop a joyful career in science was just what everyone did. What could be better?

Gloria and I started collaborating in the mid 1980s and quickly became good friends. Our friendship began when she inaugurated a new Physics Today column of opinion, Reference Frame, and asked me to contribute to it. I said I wasn’t sure I’d be able to be a columnist. Producing something clever and entertaining at regular intervals was not my style. On the few occasions when I’d done it, it seemed like a small miracle, unlikely ever to happen again. So while I didn’t say no, I kept stalling. A couple of years passed. She kept asking.

Then a day came when I discovered that Physical Review Letters was doing something ridiculous. It had escaped the attention of all the physicists I asked about it. That absurd policy, and the fact that nobody noticed it, made a good story . I sent it to Gloria and became one of her columnists.

After that she would phone several times a year requesting more miracles. Somehow she induced them. Over the years I came to view her as my muse. Over two decades she stimulated 30 essays I didn’t know I had in me. She criticized first drafts. She negotiated final texts. Over my career, relations with editors have often been tense, but working with Gloria was a great pleasure. She knew exactly how to do her job, and she was able to get me to do mine. As I gave talks at universities and conferences in the years that followed, I found that I had become better known among physicists for the columns I wrote for Gloria than for my technical papers and textbooks.

She was friends with enormous numbers of physicists, both in my generation and the generations just before and after mine. Gossiping with Gloria was hugely entertaining. She taught me much of what I know today about the profession of physics in the late 20th century. I have greatly missed our editorial exchanges since she retired a decade ago, and I will miss our friendship even more in the years to come.

It’s been my good fortune to have had Gloria Lubkin as a boss, a colleague, and a friend since 1979. And when Physics Today moved from Manhattan to College Park, Maryland, in 1993, she also became my neighbor.

At PT, from which I retired in 2014, my primary responsibility was reporting research news for the magazine’s Search & Discovery department, which was largely shaped by Gloria. She urged us Search writers to report important developments over a broad range of specialties in physics and related fields. And, most of the time, she allowed us adequate space to explain things to nonspecialist readers.

I’m particularly grateful to Gloria for the opportunity she thus afforded me to become better acquainted with fields, and their often marvelous practitioners, far removed from particle physics, the field in which I was hatched.

Gloria Lubkin was my mentor and my friend from the day I joined the editorial staff of Physics Today in 1969. At that time, I was trained in physics but not in journalism. I couldn’t have had a better instructor than Gloria. Under her tutelage, I learned to apply the highest standards to the stories I wrote. Indeed, Gloria set a very high bar for the entire magazine. The mantra at Physics Today was to be accurate, balanced, and clear. To achieve balance in our news coverage, Gloria taught us to talk not only to the researchers who had done the newsworthy work but to those who might have contributed to the progress, those who were doing similar work, and those who could put the finding in perspective. For accuracy, we sent our drafts to all our sources for their comments and corrections. For clarity, we had to pass scrutiny from our fellow reporters. Gloria was tough: She would circle a paragraph or two in my drafts and scrawl “unclear” in the margin. I’d find upon rereading my text just how right she was!

I admired Gloria for her impeccable judgement and high integrity. I would trust no one more than Gloria to give me the best advice.

Gloria was as interested in the people who did the physics as in the physics itself. She cultivated personal relationships with many leaders in the field, encouraging their support of and contributions to Physics Today. She could always tell me who might have the deepest insight or most balanced take on a particular development. She often got tips on “what’s new” from schmoozing with her contacts in the physics community. In 1986 she started the stimulating Reference Frame column, which showcased the creative musings of selected eminent physicists. The success of that column had a lot to do with Gloria’s personal ability to charm, cultivate, and encourage its contributors.

Gloria also loved the history of physics and, indeed, had a front-row seat to many significant developments in the roughly 50 years she spent at Physics Today. She was active in the APS Forum on the History of Physics, serving as its chair in 2009–10. She had a good store of lively anecdotes to share with her friends and often gave talks to groups about her “Adventures of a Physics Reporter.” She was saving her copious notes for the book she planned about her reminiscences but was never able to complete the project.

I benefited not only from Gloria’s invaluable and steady guidance but also from her personal friendship. We became friends outside the office, enjoying social events and sharing both tears and laughter. Among the many fond memories I cherish is the trip we both took to the Nobel Jubilee in 1991, hobnobbing with the many Nobelists in attendance and dining in formal gowns at the Nobel banquet. Gloria was a warm and caring person who took deep interest in those around her. I am grateful for her influence on my life.

From editor to senior editor to overall editor of Physics Today, Gloria Lubkin was unceasingly in search of what she called “the best physics” done by “the best physicists.” Her opinions were strong, her standards high, and her leadership unquestioned as she became one with the upper echelons of physics-related academia, industry, and government. Her strong-willed management style eventually led to her role being changed to that of a valued contributor and adviser for many more years. Thus, over her long career at Physics Today, she elevated the magazine’s reputation and solidified her own as a mover and shaker of the physics community.

I met Gloria in 1989 when Larry McLerran, director of the William Fine Theoretical Physics Institute at the University of Minnesota, invited me for a visit from the Soviet Union, a country that does not exist anymore. As a cochair of the Oversight Committee, Gloria, together with William Fine, was quite instrumental in putting the Institute on its legs. When I got a job offer, a particular honor for me was to be a recipient of the Gloria Becker Lubkin Chair in Theoretical Physics.

With my wife, Nelly, we had warm personal relations with Gloria: Once she stayed in our Minnesota place, and we also visited her in the Washington, DC, area. She always impressed me with her broad knowledge of a variety of past and present activities in physics and the people involved. I will miss her dearly.

Over the years I spent many happy and productive hours with Gloria, both in helping to get the Fine Institute up and running at the University of Minnesota, and in getting 25 Reference Frame articles into shape for Physics Today. She laughed both often and infectiously. She loved physics and she loved its community. She had a story for every occasion. I’ll miss her. We’ll miss her.

When I first moved from Physics World to Physics Today 20 years ago, Gloria Lubkin was one of the most welcoming individuals, always inviting me to sit at the lunch table with the editors and the senior executives of other physics societies. I learned more about what was moving in the physics community at that table than I would have by making a half-dozen phone calls. Gloria’s extensive knowledge of who was working on what and who would be the best person to talk to about a particular topic was invaluable. All the details were precise and factual. With her remarkable set of recall, she could pinpoint the exact moment in the past 50 years when a field changed dramatically.

One of the biggest challenges I faced early on was digitizing the Physics Today archive. Gloria had one of only two complete bound collections of the magazine, and thanks to her generosity and trust, it was those books that formed the basis of our scanning project. She was also helpful in the bigger project of trying to index all the resultant PDF files into a coherent order.

But it was other, more personal aspects that will stick with me for the rest of my life. During my reporting on the Nuclear Posture Review in 2003, some administration officials exerted pressure that could have impacted my H1-B residency status. A phone call from Gloria to her government contacts helped make those concerns disperse. Later, when I was getting married, Gloria acted almost as a local surrogate family member. In fact, my daughter thought of Gloria as a grandmother figure, especially when she invited us to use her apartment’s swimming pool. If one of her friends whom she knew I was a huge fan of, like science-fiction writer and physicist Gregory Benford, was coming into town, she would invite my wife and me to dinner.

One unsung quality of Gloria was her love of art, which she shared with friends like John Layman, Eugenie Mielczarek, and Evelyn Bitterbaum. Together they had season tickets to the opera. For more than 12 years, Layman, my wife, and I would go with her to every performance of Washington, DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company. It was never the same going to the theater after she was unable to continue in 2014. During the past few years, after overcoming a bout of illness that had led to her move into an assisted living facility, she was more like her old self, still talking to her friends in the community and forging new ones. She was delighted if you could arrange to go out for lunch. My regret as a journalist is that I did not record an oral history of her life before she passed. My bigger regret is not hearing from her again as my friend. She will be missed.