A Frog's View of Physics

A decade ago Freeman Dyson, in the Einstein lecture delivered to the American Mathematical Society, divided mathematicians into birds, who fly high above and have a broad picture of the field, and frogs, who are confined to the mud and observe only nearby flowers. He argues that both species are necessary for a field to progress and thrive. Certainly the same categorization is true of physicists and my own physics journey has definitely been that of a frog. I review various “flowers” which have caught my attention during my career, including weak nonleptonic and semileptonic decays, CP violation, and chiral dynamics and at the end attempt a bird's eye view that ties this work together.