I am a theoretical physicist currently employed at Duke University in
the Physics Department, where I teach various bits of physics esoterica
to graduate and undergraduate students and conduct original research on
a variety of topics. I am married to a rather beautiful physician
(Susan F. Isbey, M.D.) who is an internist in private practice in
Durham. We have three charming sons, aged twenty, sixteen, and eleven
as of this writing (they were only just-born to nine when I first wrote
this introduction many years ago). We also share our house with a cat
named Luci(fer) who is very tolerant of boys and dogs. The dogs are
represented currently by Buttercup, a fat yellow lab with no hips and
Satchmo, a bouncy and intelligent black border collie mutt from the
pound.
In addition to a Ph.D. and B.S. degree in physics from Duke University,
I completed the work for a B.A. in philosophy (Duke at the time didn't
formally recognize a double major in humanities and sciences). I have
completed at least masters level work in mathematics, and am a systems
and network administrator and systems engineer/computer consultant in my
not particularly copious spare time, with a great deal of expertise in
Unix in general and Linux in particular.
As an interesting consequence of my work with computers, I have been
working with Web documents for well over a decade. I originally
typeset this document on my Sun workstation (using LATEX),
used dvips to produce a “perfect” postscript image of the manuscript
which can be laser printed almost anywhere, and ran latex2html on the
dvi file to produce the online Web version of the book. In more recent
years (pretty much the last twelve) proprietary Sun and SunOS has been
replaced with commodity PC's and Linux, and I'm finishing off this book
(the second in a list of a half-dozen I have lined up) for Lulu on my
laptop.
So how did a perfectly ordinary computer/mathematics/physics nerd like
myself manage to write two volumes of poetry? What do physics,
math, and philosophy have in common? More than you might think – see
some of the musings on my philosophy website:
especially the book Axioms being developed for Lulu
printing. And anyway, nerds read books!
I have read approximately a book (full sized novel) a day for at least
twenty of my fifty two years of age, and gave up the book a day thing
only when the mix of overwhelming work, kids, my own writing, and a
compulsion for doing both New York Times crosswords andn Sudoku
intervened. I write extensively, both professionally (I have a long
list of publications in Physical Review and elsewhere) and for
fun. I have been writing poetry since the age of eight or nine, and
many of the poems in these works date back to my college days. My
favorite poets are W. B. Yeats (da man), A., Lord Tennyson, and T.
S. Eliot in roughly that order, although I also enjoy Blake, Kipling,
and many, many others.
So, I'm not just a technogeek. I am, at worst, a generalist-geek.
In addition to the specific fields of physics, mathematics, general
computing, philosophy and literature where I am professionally
competent, I am a better-than-average fisherman, possess the skills
required to build a house from the ground up (I worked construction for
a while), operate an extensive kitchen/house garden, can do intermediate
level auto servicing and repairs, and am a house-husband who does all
the cooking and more than half the housework and child rearing in favor
of my time-bound physician wife. The amazing thing isn't that I can
write poetry; it is that I ever have time to write anything.
