Commentary

An insider’s view on science and society. Re-reading John Ziman

part of John Ziman

A physicist. That is what John Ziman was in the beginning. As he tells us in “On being a physicist,” this implies a kind of nationality, that is, a laboriously learned identity that, at the end of the day, becomes natural. Physics was for him a way of seeing and a way of thinking, inextricably embedded in his own being: “a deeply rooted mode of personal existence.”