Evidently Glenn Dixon is a former physicist who went on to what he believed were better things. As another member of the breed, I enjoyed his trip down Memory Lane combined with a review of an art exhibit which only works to the extent that the science professions have left the larger public effectively ignorant of their subject matter (“Physics for Poets,” 11/28).

Yes, the Tektronix “scope” was fun back in the day. And it may have been the first gadget to measure time finely enough for the now hip word “nanosecond” to enter the language.

But as to J. Robert Oppenheimer calling himself an avatar of Krishna at the first nuclear test: The more recent elementary-particle types who speak of “quarks” always sound to me like the ancient Brahmin priests who debated the optimum ingredients for the agnihotra sacrifice in exhaustive detail. And they eventually lost influence to the more generalist Upanishad thinkers because they couldn’t explain what they were talking about to the masses.

Lincoln Park