Remembering Rai Weiss

It is September 1st, 2025. I feel that there are lots of changes in store for me.

In our tradition, when we embark on a journey, we do a “puja” — a ritual to draw on the inspirations of successful folks who have walked on these journeys before. These journeys are commemorated as stories, and sometimes elevated to pedestals of worship. These journeys were not easy journeys: they entail really hard choices, a lot of discomfort often bordering on hardships that constitute a potent destructive force. You remember these hardships for inspiration.

Rai is one of those figures whose ears I had earned respect to approach. A visit to him was to listen to his advice, and in some sense — though he’d never agree to it — ask for his blessings. We do a ritual of touching people’s feet for those blessings, and I know that Rai would laugh away such a gesture and give a hug instead.

With tears in my eyes, I figuratively touch his feet that won’t exist with life any more.

What shall I remember him today for? In my last visit, I had asked him — Rai, who’d tell your story? He said that there were some folks working on it, but that work has not yet reached me. So, I will tell some stories.

In a strange arc of life that I followed, I came from Calcutta (now called Kolkata) to MIT as an undergraduate student. Physics had found me, and I don’t know why and how. May be because my father respected this subject a lot, having witnessed closely someone called Meghnad Saha in his life. Or may be because Physics was taught through these beautiful bound books full of pictures and printed on good quality paper. Or may be it was the tremendous respect that your peers had for you if you could wrangle a tough Physics problem to its solution! When you truly find Physics, it is liberating and exhilarating. It shows subtle connections that exist in the world that feel like magic. I remember doing an experiment where a particle (muon) born in the lab died very soon, but when the same particle came zipping from cosmos, could live on and on. The explanation, through Relativity, could explain everything on the dot! I had chills when I did that experiment in the lab and verified every detail by fitting with the Physics given explanation.

Long story short, I found myself in Rai’s laboratory. The laboratory was full of every possible gadget that anyone can dream of — vacuum pumps, big vacuum chambers manipulated by cranes, lasers of all types, a fully maintained machine shop, a place to solder together electronics of every shape and size and reach out to any number of electronics vendors’ catalogs, and mostly a niche that I loved — a network of personal workstations and state of the art embedded computing! Computers, after Physics, seemed like the next magic that humans had stumbled into during a war that annihilated almost everyone with extreme nation building pride.

Rai spent most of his time peering over his computer screen, soldering his own thing in the lab if he came down sometimes from his office, holding his own meetings as he saw fit, and mostly traveling. Graduate students were invited into his company as he found necessary, but he held his “office hours” at a lunch place called “Au-Bon Pain” on Saturday afternoons where any graduate student could join him. I joined him many times, but mostly was confused with his conversations with his buddy — Ziggy — who was an old graduate student of his who ran an “Aero-Astro” laboratory. The conversations were about funding, heads of departments, graduating students, etc. which seemed very important topics but mostly beyond me.

In the first few projects, I worked under the supervision of the head scientist of the “Gravitation and Cosmology” laboratory who essentially coordinated and oversaw the day to day activities of the laboratory personnel that included graduate students, post-doctorate fellows, and laboratory staff that were paid as employees. He was running a few experiments, and I did the grunt work for him — in the process, learning the vocabulary and the manual labor behind the experiments. In the course of this work, I’d be sent out to help out Rai because I seemed to be “computer inclined” — a pejorative kept for folks who did better with their thinking and coding than their manual dexterity and physical adeptness, and were therefore misfits for an experimental group.

The laboratory had a rhythm full of its own quirks but one day, the “clock” stopped. I came in and found every one in shock. Rai had a heart-attack the night before. The cleaning crew at night had found him on the floor, and he had been rushed to the hospital. The doctors were trying to stabilize his condition with a catheter …

When your potential thesis advisor is gone, your graduate student-hood holds in balance with several unknowns — will someone else in the university accept you, will you start from the very beginning again and what would that do to your number of years to graduate … Stories abound about the crazies on the T who were previously graduate students of MIT whose advisors were gone …

Did I say that he smoked a pipe continuously? Well, he did. He sometimes did wear a hat that I think was attributed to Sherlock Holmes, and he loved to light up his pipe with that hat on while he was outside. In his office, his window was always open no matter how cold the day was so that he could keep smoking. I saw the tins in which pure tobacco was sold, all over his room and also in some make-shift apparatus that he would build for some special project.

The smoking had taken a toll, and he had paid a price. By evening of that day, news reached us that he had stabilized and that he’d recover but that he had to make life-changing habits of not smoking again. We wondered if that were indeed possible, and what would become of Rai after that.

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The day after we got a “Get well soon…” card, and all members of the laboratory signed their “happy recovery” wishes. I wrote, “Now that you should rest up a little bit, how about spending time with us — graduate students — and teach us Physics in the way it should be taught….” Rai’s major complaint was that Physics was idealized in Physics text books, and that it was not how the real world worked. You had to “do Physics”, by which he meant doing Physics experiments, to understand how the truths of Physics could conspire to trick you into believing something that was not true. Nature was complicated: the simple pendulum formula that we verified in our high schools was actually not true!

The real Physics was understanding at what dimensions of space and time which important natural (and sometimes un-natural) phenomena were coming to co-exist in equilibrium. No books were written to explain these patterns that exist around us, and how to un-entangle them …. more on these later.

A few more days passed. Rai was now at home, and had asked for his mail to be delivered. He had asked for me, of all people, to deliver that mail. I was chosen, but was not sure, why — was the message that I wrote speak to him in some way?

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On the day, I took a long ride to Rai’s house in Newton if I remember correctly. I don’t remember very well, but I had to change from the T to a bus or had to walk a long way to Rai’s house as the sun was about to set. The house was quiet and dark, and I had to yell his name a few times before he shuffled out. It seemed he was all by himself, and we had to find the light-switch in his room to get through a lot of scattered books and other items. Somewhere, he said, there are brownies — please help yourself.

I was struck that someone just back from the hospital was all by himself. Did Rai push every one away, I wondered. Someone who was just back from a major surgery and possibly facing a big life change, back where I came from, would have a steady stream of visitors whether wanted or unwanted. I gave him his mail, and he eagerly tore apart a few letters and left the others on a table.

You know what you wrote to me make me think, he said. May be it is a reason I should go back. I told him that we would welcome that — we were so eager to learn from him. At that point, I heard some noise from upstairs as Rai’s wife came down. She seemed to be not well, and pointed out that she was in some kind of medical treatment herself. Hmm, all the more I thought that they should have company and there seemed to be none.

As I left that night back to my graduate school housing, I wondered about the loneliness inherent in someone’s life who loved his work so much.

Rai came back to the lab a few days later and took on work with great vigor without his pipe. The only other change we noticed was that he got rid of his old car, and got a shiny convertible. He always wanted a convertible, he told us and may be life was telling him that he should not wait any more.