Gerard tHooft, IAMP Congress, July, 2000.

Gerard 'tHooft, Nobel Laureate

I was an editor of the journal "Nuclear Physics", to which tHooft sent his paper on the renormalisability of non-abelian gauge theories. Due to a very favourable referee's report, I was able to recommend its immediate publication. This paper led to tHooft's winning the Nobel Prize for Physics. See his wonderful page.

When I was beginning to develop statistical dynamics, I became worried about the thermalising map $Q$, which replaces the current state of the system by the state of maximal entropy having the same means for the slow variables. This would convert a state with certainly N particles into the grand canonical state, in which states of all number of particles enter with positive probability. Surely this cannot be the actual state? The same procedure had been used in the theory of spontaneously broken gauge invariance. At a conference, I asked tHooft about it. His reply was worth keeping:

"The theorems and results in mathematical physics are not theorems and results about Nature, but our description of it".

With this assurance, I worried a little less about things.