My Coherent History
Robin Blume-Kohout
I was born on a kitchen table in the Alaskan bush in 1976. I grew
up in a cabin on the Tozitna River, with occasional side trips to
Mexico, Belize, Fairbanks, Las Vegas, and a few other places in the
company of my parents, Jack Blume and Karen Kohout. At times,
they seem to have believed that I was produced by aliens.
In 1988
we
moved to Apache Junction (AZ), where I learned about social interaction
through junior high school, and Mom earned an M.S.W at Arizona State
University. We moved back to Fairbanks (AK), I started at Lathrop
High School in 1990, and I graduated in 1994. Along the way I
spent three years
swimming for L.H.S. and Midnight Sun Swim Team, set a
couple of state records in swimming, and won competitions in
various things (e.g., swimming, track, math, photography).
I moved all the way to Gambier (OH) in 1994, to attend Kenyon
College. I graduated in 1998 with various honors. In
between I spent four years swimming, and won three individual national
titles and four team titles. I also managed to minor in
mathematics and collect majors in English (thesis title, John McPhee
and the Literature of Fact, with Prof. Timothy Shutt) and
physics
(thesis title, Chaos in the Quantum
Measurement Record, with Prof.
Benjamin Schumacher). More importantly, I collected a set of
friends who are a bunch of the neatest people in the world, and with
whom I expect to be close for the rest of my life.
I moved to Berkeley in 1998 to start graduate school at Cal. I
spent 2 ½ years in residence at Berkeley, during which I met a
few more really good friends and a wonderful girl, played ultimate for
a year and a half, and experimented with heavy drinking. The
latter began to lose its appeal when I moved Los Alamos (~7200 ft.) in
January of 2001, and discovered that high altitude makes the hangover
worse. Except for a great semester at UC-Santa Barbara's KITP in
the fall of 2001, I've
spent the past four years in Los Alamos.
Meg joined me from Berkeley in early 2002, and
we married on January
31, 2004 at Wayne (PA) Presbyterian Church. I spent the next 14
months working like a maniac on my dissertation on decoherence &
quantum information
(Decoherence and
Beyond, with Dr.
Wojciech H. Zurek), which I completed and
filed on March 28, 2005 -- in all its 422 pages of glory. I moved
to Southern California
on April 10, 2005, after packing my car so efficiently as to amaze
almost everyone around with its overflowingness. I actually
graduated about 6 weeks later -- on May 20, 2005 -- which still sort of
amazes me.