I do not remember the event, of course, but I do remember being fascinated by wheels when other kids were just running around, playing. My very earliest recollections are about being obsessed with phenomena I observed. I watched the ants crawling in the sand, and wondered what life would be like if you were an ant. You would be able to go into the tiniest spaces between the pebbles, and those would be as big as houses for you. But, I realized, an ant's

life must be totally different from ours. Still being a toddler. I saw one day how the wheels of two children's bikes, which were upside down, touched each other.If you turn one wheel, the other one would start rotating as well. You can make one wheel turn by rotating the other. The principle of transmission. How fascinating Nature is. I was well over two years old before I started to speak. Was it because there were so much more interesting things I wanted to understand than to communicate with people? I was also late in reading and writing. This, I remember, was because I thought reading meant being able to decipher my mother's handwriting.

Being pedagogical was high on my teacher's priority list. But he also inspired us and made us think. "If there were any real geniuses in this class", he would say, "then they could have argued as follows,..."But then, he assured us, there were of course no real geniuses in this class. Then, there was an interesting page in his book about photons. "A light bulb emits about 109 Photons per second," it said. The argument was simple. "A single photon has a wave packet of about 10-9 seconds long. If there were much more than 109 photons, then for each photon vibrating in this way, you could find another photon vibrating in the opposite direction. You'd have destructive interference, and so there would not be any light" I had long arguments with him about this. Finally, with the help of my uncle, we could sort things out. This page does not appear in the later editions of the book.

There was a newly appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics who did specialize in subatomic particles, Martinus Veltman, or Tini, as he was normally called. When time came that I had to write an undergraduate thesis, somewhere in 1968, he was the person to advise me and judge me for it.

For a long time, I was among a small selected group of extravagant who studied quantum black holes. But superstring theory was catching on. As I had expected, superstring theory was not within a stone's throw of "the final theory", which had been what its addicts had prophesied, but if underwent fundamental changes. Membranes of various dimensionalities ("p-branes") were added, and now a door was opened for studying black holes in string theory. Suddenly, I found myself to be nearly back in the "mainstream" of physics: string theoreticians are now seeing the "holographic principle" everywhere. But the solution to our problems, bringing the gravitational force fully in agreement with Quantum Mechanics, has not yet been achieved. As long as this is the case, we will not be able to produce verifiable predictions concerning the enigmatic details of the Standard Model

About The Nobel Laureate...

Name : Gerard 't Hooft
Born : July 5,1946, Den Helder, The Netherlands
High School: Gymnasium-beta at the Dalton Lyceum, The Hague, 1964.

Personal life:
Married to Albertha Anje Schik M.D., July 1, 1972.
2 Daughters: Saskia Anne (30-3-76) and Ellen Marga (18-12-78).

Permanent address:
Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Utrecht University, PO. Box 80.906.
3508 TA Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Present address:
Spinoza Institute
Minnaertgebouw, Leuvenlaan 4, Utrecht.

Mail address:
Postbox 80.195
NL 3508 TO Utrecht The Netherlands

"CIVILIZATION WITHOUT SCIENCE IS LAME AND SCIENCE WITHOUT ITS APPLICATION IS BLIND"

We, the DAVians of Chandrasekharpur eagerly await for the magnanimous presence of the Nobel laureate with open heart and sincere gratitude.

Dr. K. C. Satapathy
PRINCIPAL