My college roommate was blind from birth.  Despite that profound handicap, he was a brilliant student of physics.  As a physics major myself, I understood what his blindness meant.  For physics is a visual subject.  The best physicists have a great ability to visualize objects in motion, fields weaving through space and time, the subtle, complex correlations of quantum mechanics.  Most of all, one must deal with the intricate notations of mathematics, the language of physics.  My roommate could do none of that in the normal way.  Somehow, he was able to build non-visual models in his imagination.  Somehow, he could hear from his reader long strings of mathematical symbols, ponder them, then dictate back new strings of symbols.  How he did this is a mystery. Sometimes severe handicaps can differ from physical. In the aftermath of the fall of Saigon, I knew a refugee family from...(Read Full Article)