In 1974, five years before he wrote his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter was a graduate student in physics at the University of Oregon. When his doctoral adviser went on sabbatical to Regensburg, Germany, Hofstadter tagged along, hoping to practice his German.
The pair joined a group of brilliant theoretical physicists who were agonizing over a particular problem in quantum theory. They wanted to determine the energy levels of an electron in a crystal grid placed near a magnet.
Hofstadter was the odd one out, unable to follow the others’ line of thought. In retrospect, he’s glad. “Part of my luck was that I couldn’t keep up with them,” he said. “They were proving theorems, but they had nothing to do with the essence of the situation.
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