KITP: Gross as actor, Feynman inventing Hawking radiation

As many of you, I am receiving hundreds of nonsensical e-mails from not terribly reliable sources but this one is pretty interesting because it authentically describes the atmosphere in Santa Barbara which hosts Science, Theater, Audience, Reader, an activity attempting to combine physics and literature:

• I am driving back to San Francisco from Santa Barbara in a few minutes but I want to get this down while it's fresh in my mind. I just had breakfast with Alan Lightman, a delightful Southern intellectual, and equally delightful Marcia Bartusiak (both from MIT). We were discussing Phil Morrison, Bethe, Salpeter - old days at Cornell. It got around to Hawking and what he will be remembered for. Then Alan Lightman, author of "Einstein's Dreams" told us the following "narrative" which was a big theme at Kavli meeting hosted by David Gross, who actually is a GOOD ACTOR. He did a scene as Feynman in QED - good job.
  
  
  

It is not hard to imagine David Gross as an actor - won't they put the video of this Feynmanian scene on-line? ;-) Note that Alan Alda is among the previous actors who were playing the role of Feynman, and therefore David Gross is in a good company even though Alda received the Nobel prize neither for the strong interaction nor for liquid nitrogen. OK, now the "narrative":

• In 1972 before Hawking came out with the Hawking radiation formula. Feynman was meeting with Kip Thorne's grad students, Bill Press, Saul Teukolsky & Lightman. They discussed a recent calculation of shining light on a rotating black hole and getting more energy out then in at expense of decreasing rotational energy of the hole. They all went back to Lightman's office. Feynman said: "Hey this is like stimulated emission. So he went to black board and did a A & B coefficient model and then when angular momentum J of the black hole J -> 0 there was still "A" spontaneous emission and it was the later Hawking formula!
  

Well, let me admit that I don't quite understand how the formulae from stimulated emission are useful for deriving the "Hawking formula", whatever it is. It could be interesting to try to reconstruct Feynman's blackboard.

• A maid erased the board that night before Lightman and the others realized they should have written down what Feynman wrote. Not even Feynman thought it was important enough to write a paper about apparently.

Well, the idea that Feynman derived Hawking's results before Hawking certainly sounds entertaining, but the details so far don't seem to be completely solid. Well, let me admit that my source is closely associated with extraterrestrial civilizations. He "shared a woman with Feynman" (different years) and an extraordinary photograph of Feynman with not-too-dressed women may be found in his book. Bizarre. ;-)




Finally, not all participants of the KITP activity enjoy these exhilirating stories about Feynman. Some of them - well, at least one of them - want to figure out how to prevent young physicists from hero-worshipping the politically incorrect and narrow physicist whose name was Richard Feynman, and convince them to hero-worship "broad intellectuals" and "better human beings", especially those who never "denigrate other fields".