Shimon Malin
Shimon Malin, Colgate University emeritus professor of physics, died on 17 March after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. Malin was a theoretical physicist with strong interest in fundamental principles of general relativity and quantum mechanics. He is author or coauthor of four books and more than 50 papers. In addition to treating technical issues with insight and competence, he sought to fit the fundamental principles into a holistic philosophy of life and consciousness. When asked why he had studied physics, his answer was “because I thought it held the answers to life’s most important questions.”
Malin was born in Tel Aviv and educated in Israel up through an MSc degree from the Weizmann Institute, supervised by Amos de-Shalit. Malin studied at the University of Tokyo, Japan, from 1963 to 1965, and then at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where in 1968 he received his PhD supervised by A. O. Barut.
I met Shimon at the 1968 APS April Meeting where he was looking for a job. He interviewed at Colgate and later recalled how when talking with a small group of students and faculty in the reading room, he was suddenly asked to give an impromptu lecture; it was a surprise, but he did it very well. A calm demeanor and easy adaptability characterized his teaching for his entire career. A lasting interest in Zen Buddhism, Gestalt therapy, and Gurdjieff practices influenced his approach both to physics and teaching. More than once he taught introductory quantum mechanics as a group interaction. Unlike many professors, Malin wanted more to hear what students had to say than to talk himself.
He taught me to tolerate silence in a classroom. For most physics professors the typical delay between “any questions?” and “all right then” is 4 seconds. He showed me that if you can wait 30 seconds or longer, students will break down and ask questions. In class he would stop talking and ask the students to think about the topic at hand for a few minutes. Shimon and I profoundly disagreed about what a professor should require from students, but the disagreement never affected our mutual respect. Maybe this was because although I knew I was right, I was never sure that he was wrong.
At Colgate he taught a remarkable range of courses—traditional physics theory courses such as classical mechanics and quantum mechanics, but also courses in the general education program where he could pursue his quest to understand what it means to be human. Philosophy professor Anne Ashbaugh remembers teaching “Soul, Self, and Emptiness” with him. “I taught ‘soul’ from the perspective of the Greeks, … Shimon ’emptiness’ in Tibetan Buddhism. Then, Shimon and I taught a course on cosmology, … then another on mythology … and finally, a course on causality named ‘Why things happen.’ We spent many hours discussing his work on quantum and my work on the Greeks.” The title he chose for his book, Nature Loves to Hide, is a fragment from Heraclitus.
Shimon had a directness that could surprise. When he became interested in Piaget’s ideas, he went to Switzerland and met with Piaget. When he and a colleague were chewing over problems of interpretation of quantum mechanics, they went to Florida and discussed them with Dirac. When he participated in an online journal club discussing a paper by Anton Zeilinger on entanglement, he got the organizer to have Zeilinger participate in the discussion. When he was briefly departmental chair and was faced with the job of selecting a text for the algebra-based introductory physics course, he hired physics majors to read, annotate, and review different texts.
Shimon had a powerful effect on students who were ready to discover that they could take charge of their own learning. He also elevated his colleagues’ understanding of physics. He helped me realize that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox was important and that Bell’s theorem’s implications about quantum mechanics are deeply significant. This realization inspired a group of Colgate physics faculty to put some serious quantum mechanics into the beginning physics course and its laboratories. These innovations are part of the heritage of this remarkable man.
