On Tuesday, my Seminar in Science Writing professor and fellow Stute columnist John Horgan invited Professor Vladimir Lukic into class.
I remember the day that I met Professor Lukic. He walked into our first Mechanics lecture—this is going back to the Spring of 2015—with slightly wind-blown hair, donning black jeans and a dark T-shirt. He sat his bag on the table in an overcrowded EAS classroom and jumped into the lecture. While his accent intrigued me—Russian, perhaps?—it was his enthusiasm towards his field that captured my attention. It was like he weaved the kinematic equations into prose, a kind of “physics for poets,” if I may so myself.
Fast forward to this past week, and Professor Lukic has not changed. He entered the Richardson Room in Morton with the same wind-blown hair, black jeans, and a navy “Got physics?” T-shirt under a dark zip-up jacket. Professor Horgan invited him so we could practice profiling a scientific individual from an in-person interview. Instead of jumping right into astronomy, quantum mechanics, or the existence of a unified theory, Lukic began with the story of his childhood in Yugoslavia, a war-zone at the time. He mapped his own educational journey: his physics-heavy curriculum in primary and secondary school, a change of major from EE to physics after a strange bout of amnesia following a car accident, and translocation to Illinois for graduate work.
For an hour, my classmates, Professor Horgan, and I asked him a great variety of questions, ranging from “Are we at an end of science?” to “What was the last thing that you read about that rocked your world?” Hands clasped behind his head, Lukic responded to all questions in the same excited and slightly-rushed tone—it seemed as though every moment he had to speak to students was not one to be wasted.
Professor Lukic is an interesting character teaching an even stranger subject (strange to me, at least), but in all the strangeness, parts of his own experience, his outlook on life, and his methods of continuous learning resonated with me. There’s a lot to learn about a person if you just take the time to sit down with them, something I wish we could all do more frequently.
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