![\"Detention](\"http:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/yamamoto.jpg\" "\\"Detention")
<\/a>My second memory of Dick was when he showed up at SLAC for his regular visits. He would collect us for lunch and inevitably we’d go for Japanese food. On one of the trips, he brought along a photo his then girlfriend had printed off the web. The site let you put anything you wanted in a picture of Einstein writing on a blackboard. His girlfriend had written “Detention Yamamoto” in the picture. Until recently, that picture still sat on the door name-plate outside the old BaBar MIT office where I used to work.<\/p>\nMy final memory of Dick is the one that struck me most deeply. I had become interested in doing searches for new physics, specifically dark matter, using invisible decays of mesons. I gave a talk at a BaBar physics meeting that was meant to motivate this topic and suggest means by which BaBar could do this work. I was nervous. I wasn’t sure there was any support for these ideas, when there was “more important” physics to do. I felt like I was out on a limb, just me and a few other people really interested in the topic.<\/p>\n
After my talk, Dick came up to me at the front of the room. He was excited. “That was great,” he said, “one of the best things I’ve seen in a while. We need more of this kind of stuff.”<\/p>\n
Dick’s comment, whether he realized it or not at the time, was the antithesis of a comment made to me when I was an undergraduate. I was asking a professor if he would write a letter on my behalf for graduate school. He agreed, but said, “I don’t think you should be a particle physicist. I think you’ll be happier doing something else.”<\/p>\n
We’ll see. Thankfully, while it took almost a decade, Dick took the sting off that old memory by creating a new and encouraging one. Thanks, Dick.<\/p>\n