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Nobel Prize Winner Just Wanted to be Famous

Concert Hall
Holger Motzkau 2010, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

When Dr. Richard Glauber took the stage and accepted the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2005, he should have been ecstatic.  Instead, the Harvard Professor felt nothing but disappointment.  Had all his hard work really amounted to this?  Where were the adoring fans?  Where was the paparazzi? He was a leading researcher in quantum optics and his quantum theory of optical coherence had just won him the most prestigious award in his field and yet he still could not get his name into Us Weekly.

 Ever since he picked up his first issue of People in 1976, he knew he was destined to schmooze with the Hollywood big wigs, get his name in the papers, and put his face on the silver screen.  And so, he set off to be a theoretical physicist.  The young hot shot researcher played it fast and loose getting papers published on everything from photodetection to the use of first-order phase transitions in statistical physics. Everything he was doing should have put him on track, but something was wrong.  He was not getting the kind of attention he wanted.  He was shooting to get on Larry King and instead was getting letters from grad students.  He reached such a low point that he almost accepted an invitation to go on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect.

After a brief speech, Glauber returned to his seat at the back of the Stockholm Concert Hall.  The eighty-year-old was scheming a way to give himself one last shot at fame.  With a few choice edits and some dubbed audio TMZ would have to accept his sex-tape resubmission.  He was sure of it.