University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The Grainger College of Engineering
Physics

Yoni Kahn

The Loomis Confessions: Yoni Kahn

 

Illinois Physics Professor Yoni Kahn plays a musical composition he wrote in 2006 on his French horn during the festival. Kahn told festival goers that the acts of thinking about physics problems and writing musical pieces have a beautiful symmetry.
Illinois Physics Professor Yoni Kahn plays his French horn.

If you couldn’t be a physicist, what career would you choose? 

Classical musician (though I guess I'm already doing this during my off-time from physics)

What is your favorite place?

A blackboard -- not a whiteboard!

What is the greatest scientific blunder in history?

Instead of blunder, let's go with "missed opportunity": in the 1960's, Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann told Fields medalist and mathematician Jean-Pierre Serre about his "eightfold way" of representing symmetries of elementary particles, which Gell-Mann had worked out from scratch, and Serre told Gell-Mann that in fact the whole theory (Lie algebras) had already been worked out by mathematicians in the 1920's! If Gell-Mann had known the language and where to look, he could have accelerated elementary particle physics by decades. This is my favorite anecdote for why it's important that physicists speak pure mathematics, if not fluently than at least conversantly.

Who is/are your favorite artist(s) in any medium—painters, composers, authors, filmmakers?

My favorite author is Jorge Luis Borges, his short stories are exquisitely beautiful in both their logic and their language, though I only read them in translation and I'm sure they'd be better in the original Spanish. There are too many favorite composers to name, so let's just say that pre-20th century my favorites are Brahms and Schumann, and in the 20th century my favorites are Bela Bartok and William Walton.

Who is/are your favorite hero(es) in life or in fiction?

People with seemingly endless reserves of creativity and productivity. J.S. Bach is a good example: his job for several years was to write a piece of music called a cantata for each weekly church service, every week, without fail. Sometimes he recycled and rearranged old music, and sometimes he wrote new music, but the 200 or so pieces that he wrote are some of the most sublime examples of Baroque music, and the quality is uniformly excellent with few exceptions. I wish I could write papers like that...

Who is/are the villain(s) you love to hate?

Tom Brady

What is your idea of happiness?

A really good latte, or a perfect bourbon cocktail

What is your idea of misery?

Boredom

What quality do you most admire in others?

The ability to explain difficult concepts both intuitively and precisely

What scientific question do you hope will be answered in your lifetime?

What is dark matter? I'm working on this question because I honestly believe that of the major unsolved problems in particle physics, it's the most likely to be answered during my lifetime. I'm probably not going to be the one who finds the answer but I want to at least make sure I understand the answer when it does come.