Zdzislaw Szymanski in Copenhagen in the late fifties

It was the time when Niels Bohr was still around: still coming to Blegdamsvej 17, still entertaining members of the Institute at his Carlsberg residence on various occasions. His presence was strongly felt by all, and gave to the atmosphere of the Insitute some unique flavor one has had remembered forever.

I came to Copenhagen in 1957, Zdzislaw in 1958. In 1957 the CERN theory division had already moved from Copenhagen to Geneva, but a newly organized institute, NORDITA, was already in residence at Blegdamsvej 17. In the beginning members of NORDITA were distributed all over the offices of the Niels Bohr Insitute (whose official name was still "Universitetets Institut for Teoretisk Fysik"). For instance, I shared my office with Torleif Ericson who was with NORDITA, the office next to ours belonged to Gunnar Källén, a senior member of NORDITA etc.

Another factor which helped to maintain contacts between members of both institutions was the lunchroom in the attic of the central building where all of us had lunch at more or less the same time, and where we also used to seat and talk (sometimes for hours) not only on physics but on whatever was on our minds. In this spirit of informal and continuous contacts between all physicists in was easy to know who was doing what, and simple to switch the fields of interest. The style of doing research initiated by Niels Bohr long before the II-nd World War was still alive: the Institute and NORDITA still formed one organism. All problems of physics were classified by this community as "interesting" or "not interesting", without paying much attention to whether they belonged to nuclear or particle physics, to high or low energies, to abstract mathematical physics or were close to realities of experiments.

Fragmentation of both institutions did take place, eventually, but it happened some years later (as, in fact, must have happened sooner or later). Zdzislaw and myself, we were lucky enough to live through this happy and carefree "scientific childhood", although it came fairly late in our lives (we were both over 30, and authors of a few papers). Now, when I hear (or read) high praises of Zdzislaw abilities to lead research groups, and of his ways of working and influencing people, I think that some of these qualities have roots in his work in Copenhagen. I think so because myself, I can certainly name quite a few features of my behavior that formed because of my stay there.

We overlapped in Copenhagen for one year. During this time we were seeing each other frequently and became very good friends, although we never worked on even similar problems. Zdzislaw concentrated on research projects of nuclear structure which were led by Aage Bohr and Ben Mottelson, and formed the main theme of activities of the Institute. I, on the other hand, kept changing the subjects of my work all the time. In retrospect of over forty years that have passed since then, it seems that his choice was wiser.

When I think now of these long gone days of our common sojourn at the Niels Bohr Institute, I feel happy and I am moved that I had a privilege of sharing all these riches with such a fine man as Zdzislaw.