A Black Hole in Honor of Jack Leigh

Dr. John "Jack" Leigh, a scientific genius, prolific reader and oddball eccentric, sadly passed away last week. Jack's desk sits about 10 feet from my own and has an assortment of gadgets like bar magnets, canned beaver and a book of crude yiddish vocabulary. The corner of his filing cabinet has innumerable beer bottle caps which are suspended from bar magnets.



I wrote an article a couple of years ago on an infrequently used (overstatement) technique called an off-resonance rotary echo and its application to MR imaging. While writing, I had a conversation with Jack that went something like this:

Me: When you transform to the tilted rotating frame you can show that the off-resonance rotary echo refocuses the magnetization...
Jack: Tilted rotating frame? That's bullsh$t!

Dr. Ari Borthakur wrote to me his thoughts, 'Over the years, I have related several stories to you of his genius in topics such as physics (e.g. approximating how long a human can survive immersed in freezing water) to love ("You don't really want to be with a promiscuous girl. People just says these things. You want a girl that is happy being with you sometimes and is quite content being without you too.").

This year Siemens licensed from the University of Pennsylvania some awesome, endogenous contrast, technology that was developed by Jack and other clever Penn scientists called arterial spin labeling. Using slice selection and spin inversion, flowing blood is 'tagged' as it flows to the brain. The initial tagging alters blood flow contrast and is used for perfusion imaging. The Center for Functional Neuroimaging at Penn investigates many of these techniques for vascular disease, substance abuse and sleep studies.

Jack + brain will be sorely missed.

Unrelated, but interesting: There is a small chance - as in monkeys typing Shakespeare kinds of odds - that the world will end when CERN attempts to replicate the first several nanoseconds of the Universe's existence. The New York Times wrote an article about the two individuals who decided to sue CERN to protect humanity. Largely the issue is jurisdictional; a court in Hawaii cannot force a massive, multi-University/Institution organization in Europe to halt its experiments.

In general, scientists are driven by curiousity and not by evil intent. More likely, although not much more likely, are our chances of using the black hole as a nearly infinite renewable energy source or to travel rapidly to a solar system with a planet with clear blue water and soft sandy beaches. From a moral and recreational perspective, I think particle physicists are obligated to create the black hole.