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Show l48 she performed for Frank, of seemingly reversing the influence of alcohols on tadpoles by application of hydrostatic pressure, has not encouraged us to increase our consumption of alcohol. Indeed, I don't know of anyone who has been encouraged to drink by this experiment despite the fact that you have seemed to want to encourage it by the wide publicity you have given to the experiment. Elizabeth joins me in wishing you many more years of influence, both direct and indirect, on chemistry, on institutions and on people. One of the best remembered characteristics of Eyring is his fine sense of humor and zest for life. Taikyue Ree recalls: We had a lot of fun at Princeton. The 'eraser game' which we invented was especially interesting. This game was and analog to horseshoes; we drew a circle a foot and a half in diameter on the cement floor of my office and standing five yards away threw erasers into the circle. The game was scored as follows: the person throwing his eraser completely inside the circle received the highest score (I forget the exact point); if he threw more than a half portion of the eraser inside the circle he received the second highest and so on. We played the game often--I believe at least twice a day. John L. Magee, a postdoctoral fellow at that time, was also one of the game's ardent players. Henry's visitors were often brought to my office to enjoy the game: Joe Hirschfelder and Allen Stearn were among the many who were introduced to it. Henry was the most skillful player among us: his throwing was stable and exact. We tried to beat him, but in vain. At last we discovered the reason why Henry was so skillful. It was very simple: because he did not drink sakfi or coffee at all, he had good equilibrium and steady hands. 8 Another student remembered other humorous occasions with Eyring: I fondly remember a number of humorous experiences with Henry. One of the most vivid is an incident in a statistical mechanics class. He was busy deriving a partition function which had in the denominator Ni. I questioned the reasoning behind the incorporation of N1, whereupon Henry patiently went through the derivation again. I still was not satisfied and responded with 'intuitively, it does not make sense.I Henry, with all the patience he could muster, turned to me and said: 'John, N! needs to be there and I'm going to tell you five more times. That will constitute a proof.‘ When I came into Henry's lecture room for my orals, only Henry was there. The other members of the committee had not yet arrived. He sensed my anxiety and in an attempt to relax me asked if I had ever seen him jump to the table from a standing |
