Taxi rides

By Fernando Rodriguez Villegas

I am not sure if it is an Austin phenomenon or not but I have had a few interesting taxi rides back and forth to the airport over the years.

I’ll leave aside the late night taxi ride where the driver, a young woman, told a few off-color jokes (“you are not a prude man, are you?”); including one that I am pretty sure was popular when I was in primary school. (Let’s just say that it involved traveling by camel in the desert.)

More curious was the guy with the fourth dimension. It started innocently enough: “what’s your business?” or something like that. When I said I taught math (often a risky move) he went off about the fourth dimension and extra-terrestrial beings living among us. He actually showed me a pile of issues of a magazine called “The Fourth Dimension”. I also recall something about a meeting of extra-terrestrials in Washington DC the following month. And this was just a few minutes into the ride.

I then made a really reckless move. I mentioned that in fact, I was currently working with some physicists (this was at the time of my collaboration with Ph. Candelas and X. de la Ossa) and that in string theory the thinking was that the universe was actually ten dimensional.

The response was a chilly silence. I distinctively recall thinking: the driver must be saying to himself “Now, there is a nut in this taxi … and it is not me”.