Anthony Legget

Our friend and colleague, Tony Leggett, died on March 8. His obituary appeared in the New York Times.

While not a participant in the Aspen Center for Physics in recent years, Tony did play an interesting role in the early days of the Center, and was a participant in 1965 and 1967, as well as later in 1989 and 1993. In the early years he was developing the Landau Fermi liquid theory for superconductors, a predecessor to his Nobel Prize winning work on the superfluidity of He-3 a few years later.

Up to the summer of 1967 the Center was part of the Aspen Institute. However the Institute felt that it no longer wanted to run the Center. So to carry out the separation, the Institute decided that it would be classy to have a debate with scholars from the Institute against the physicists from the Center. The physicists were presented with two possible debate subjects. The first was something on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, and the second was about Thucydides Funeral Oration.

Tony became the representative of the Physics Center to the 1967 debate, and it happened that he was the only debater who had actually read the Oration in its original classical Greek — as an undergraduate at Oxford, where he studied classics. Needless to say, the physicists won the debate, and the Center went on by itself successfully.

Photo Credit: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign/L. Brian Stauffer