The Art of Rhetoric

The Romans, especially in the early and late Republic, greatly valued skills in debating and public speaking. Julius Ceasar was widely regarded as an accomplished and extremely skilled author and orator. For example, his political opponent Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero, consul of Rome in 63) spoke very highly of his Commentaries. In fact, Suetonius (c. 69-130 AD) writing in The Lives of the Twelve Caesars notes that Cicero remarked: "Does anyone have the ability to speak better than Caesar?" Fortunately such skills are not lost. For those who have followed the astonishing advances in particle physics in the first half of the last century, such abilities will be evident from an excerpt from the Nobel Prize acceptance speech made by Clinton Davisson (1881-1958, Nobel Prize in Physics in 1937 for the discovery of electron diffraction):

"Troubles, it is said, never come singly, and the trials of the physicist in the early years of this century give grounds for credence in the pessimistic saying. Not only had light, the perfect child of physics, been changed into a gnome with two heads - there was trouble also with electrons. In the open they behaved with admirable decorum, observing without protest all the rules of etiquette set down in Lorentz’ manual, but in the privacy of the atom they indulged in strange and unnatural practices; they oscillated in ways which no well-behaved mechanical system would deem proper. What was to be said of particles which were ignorant apparently of even the rudiments of dynamics? Who could apologize for such perversity - rationalize the data of spectroscopy? A genius was called for, and a genius appeared. In 1913 Niels Bohr gave us his strange conception of "stationary" orbits in which electrons rotated endlessly without radiating, of electrons disappearing from one orbit and reappearing, after brief but unexplained absences, in another."