In the beginning
I first met Phill in August 1996.
We were first-year graduate students in the chemistry program at UC Berkeley. There were ~150 of us in total, but we quickly learned that there are two types of chemists: “synthetic” and “non-synthetic”. The two camps were soon separated, and us non-synthetic chemists heard little from our synthetic brethren for the next five years.
Within non-synthetic chemistry, there was a rarefied breed who wished to become theoretical chemists when they grew up. Out of the whole class there were only eight or so of us, and Phill and I constituted 25% of this unusual cohort.
I don’t remember now why Phill and I connected so quickly or what our first interaction would have been. I only know that within a month he was my closest friend and confidante in the school, and we started to form the basis for an inseparable friendship that lasted throughout our time on campus and for the rest of the decades that followed.
That first semester Phill and I became increasingly close and we realized that we had mutual passions for not only the deepest questions in science, but also music and a desire to live life well while working hard, and we started to enjoy each other’s company more and more outside of school as well as within our class-based interactions.
In those first few months, after a full day of courses and our respective lab work, we’d often meet up at Berkeley’s Triple Rock Brewery — only a block away from Phill’s first apartment.
At Triple Rock we both became quite adept at shuffleboard, and we often migrated to competing against the informal teams there as the night progressed. Late in the first semester we were playing shuffleboard together against an older Berkeley denizen and — after the game was over — he looked at us and asked if we wanted to get high.
I don’t know if I can completely capture this moment. Phill and I knew each other as two of the strongest students in our chemistry class. But we had no reason to suspect that the other would ever consider smoking marijuana. It might sound crazily prude, but in a professional environment and pre-legalization there were some things you simply didn’t talk about! I had had my share of experimentation in my recent undergraduate years, but I really had no idea if Phill, my incredibly smart friend, would bend in this way.
We looked at each other with mutual suspicion and somehow signaled to each other the slightest conspiratorial shrug. The next thing we know we found ourselves up the stairs to the always-closed top floor of Triple Rock, sharing a joint amongst the three of us. It was a quintessentially Berkeley moment. A random stranger offered to smoke out with us, and suddenly two friends realized they had even more in common than they thought.
After that first semester we were fully cemented as friends. There wasn’t a week that passed that we didn’t eat lunch together, hit the seminars together, and hang out about town.
As our paths developed at Berkeley, Phill chose to work in the lab of a world-renowned statistical mechanician. I had considered also working in this lab, but I couldn’t get past the PI’s notoriously gruff manner and chose instead to work for a new scientist, loosely affiliated with the chemistry department. Our respective bosses did not see eye-to-eye, and it was always a particular point of humor for us that we were close friends through this, and to compare notes between our respective corners of theoretical chemistry. We played the young lovers to the backdrop of our respective groups’ Montagues versus the Capulets.
Every day we would coordinate to have lunch together. These were the days before cell phones, and this was all over e-mail (nothing corporate and fancy, just barebones UNIX e-mails!). Our e-mail exchanges trying to coordinate a lunch meetup formed hundreds of messages by the time I left Berkeley, and it’s always been a regret of mine that I lost this archive years ago.
It’s a regret because we didn’t correspond like normal individuals. In fact we never corresponded like normal people in those early days or ever in our years since. We corresponded like two people who always had a joke — or two or seven — in mind*. The simple lunch-time communique became an art form riddled with puns, word play, satire, mock conversations, subtext, jokes, riddles, you name it. It was never “Meet at the quad at noon?”. It was much more like “Heiddly Ho Jo Jo, fancy some food today? Noon at the library, be there or be square.” Each day became a new challenge to be funnier or crazier than the previous message, but it wasn’t a challenge between people with something to prove. It was between two people who both knew that their lives needed a distraction from mathematical equations and code and spending a few extra minutes composing a creative lunch e-mail might be the best thing that happened to them that day.
Thinking about it now, the care that we took in composing our lunch-time invites is not unlike the flirtations that characterize the first years of early love. And this analogy is apt. Phill had a quality about him where we might act like lovers even if the two of us were always straight in our romantic relationships. When eating at a restaurant he thought nothing about taking a bite of my food or offering me a sip of his beer. He had none of the hangups of toxic masculinity that I had grown up with; in those mid-90s Phill was more comfortable with beyond-gender roles than anyone I knew.
When I put this on paper, I realize that Phill was the only male friend I’ve ever had who I’ve freely cried with. Phill had the type of soul that let you feel comfortable letting all of your guards down. He approached all of his relationships from a position of compassion and curiosity, and if he weren’t one of the world’s top chemistry professors, he would have been a renowned therapist and counselor.
As our lives became increasingly intertwined in graduate school, we spent most of our formative time together in late-90s style. Every Sunday was characterized by a South Park watch party. We consulted each other when we both wanted to install Linux for the first time on our personal computers — it was 1997 and this was not an easy thing! Phill hosted a Christmas party at his apartment, and his advisor and I played jazzy song renditions. We went book shopping together (I bought a book called “Pianist’s Problems” and Phill purposely flubbed the name saying I had a book called “Penis Problems”). We were at Triple Rock when we watched in awe at Michael Jordan’s flu-stricken game 5 of the 1997 NBA finals. Phill introduced me to his cabal of friends from Cornell and back East, including his new girlfriend, and it was through them that I met my girlfriend in the late 90s.
When I look at it now, I feel incredibly privileged to have been included in the inner circle of friends of Phill before Phill became the academic superstar that emerged from the 90s. His friends from Cornell became dear friends of mine to this day, but it all started from the same premise: if you were cool enough to be worth Phill’s time, you must be worth our time as well.
Knowing Phill over the years, I see him now, rightly or wrongly, as a kindred spirit to Rainer Maria Rilke. He was possessed by remarkable intelligence, remarkable integrity, remarkable compassion and yet an intensely private spirit at his core. He was fiercely introspective, but also fiercely connected to his friends, colleagues and students. He lived the balance that confronts pure theoreticians: navigating the seductive joy of being surrounded by nothing but books and your own mind versus the pleasure of helping others and reaching across scientific disciplines to collaboratively understand our world.
Music
It didn’t surprise either of us that our early connections revealed a mutual love of music. Phill came from a very musical family, and he showed up to Berkeley with a well-honed talent for classical guitar. For my part I loved classical piano and we quickly bonded over music performance and musical styles…although he always made fun of me for thinking electronic music was anything but noise, and I couldn’t get into his love of bluegrass.
I couldn’t tell you then who Phil Lesh is, but I still know that Phill thought Phil Lesh was amazing (“we have the same name!”) and followed the Grateful Dead and Phish. When Sun Ra came to the Starry Plough in Berkeley, Phill made a special point of attending and couldn’t believe he was in town at such a small joint. It didn’t matter if it was classical, jazz, folk, or avant garde; if it was exceptional music Phill was open to it.
As a musician Phill was understated and perfect. He didn’t embark on anything he couldn’t do, but if he approached it he played it flawlessly and seemingly effortlessly. I remember one year in graduate school he bought a mandolin and said “this is what I want to play now.” A year later you’d think he had been playing mandolin his whole life.
In the last few years, Phill took his musicianship out on stage for everyone to see. While still a professor by day, he joined up with the partner of one of his post-doctoral students in a musical ensemble that could be found playing all across the Bay Area. In that format Phill displayed a subtle virtuosity that mirrored his ordinary life: a man simultaneously humble and yet effortlessly demonstrating skills at the top of his art.
The academic
When Phill and I met in 1996, we were connected by a passion for the statistical mechanics of liquids (like most of us in our 20s?) but we seemed to come from very different backgrounds. Phill came from a long line of academics and had the self-confidence of a young scientist who had learned physical chemistry first hand from Ben Widom and Roald Hoffmann. I came from a suburban Southern California household where my father was the first in his family to ever finish college — let alone obtain a higher degree — and my college education was excellent, but hardly geared toward the higher echelons of theoretical chemistry.
However, it didn’t take long after first meeting Phill to find out that he was reeling from a personal tragedy. The year before our graduate studies Phill’s father had suddenly passed away. We were young, this wasn’t supposed to happen — it racked Phill.
As we continued our graduate studies, the role of his father became clear.
The graduate program in chemistry at Berkeley only serves one purpose: to produce the next generation of (top tier) chemistry professors. Yet when we continued in our graduate years, I started to question whether I wanted to sacrifice my life to the hamster wheel of academic success.
When I talked with Phill about my desire to depart the path he would sigh and explain why this wasn’t an option for him. Phill’s father had been a professor of music. Earlier in his life he had been denied tenure, and this had a profound effect on Phill’s father. Coming off of his father’s early death, Phill had a deep conviction that he owed it to his father to obtain a tenured position. For Phill there was no question of whether or not to be an academic. For Phill there was no choice but the path that his father’s legacy requested.
(At one point in these years, Phill mentioned that his surname “Geissler” referred to medieval personae who adopted the practice of self-flagellation. He found the reference humorous but apropos to explain his personal choices.)
In the years after graduate school Phill and I explored our destinies. He chose the academic route and I chose to leave our flock.
By the mid-2000s I started to think of Phill and I in terms of Stellan Skarsgård and Robin Williams from Good Will Hunting. I never suspected how true this would prove a decade later. In the movie, Stellan plays the Harvard professor of mathematics who’s an exceptional genius and plays by all of the rules of academia. Robin Williams is Stellan’s dear friend from graduate school who couldn’t quite cut it in the academic sphere, but somehow manages to retain all of Stellan’s respect for what could have been. I liked to think that Phill was my professor counterpart and, while I had carved out a fairly successful career in industry, Phill and I were quantum entangled particles and our success was a mutual exploration in our respective spheres.
And succeed Phill did.
I haven’t mentioned yet that Phill was the brightest contemporary I’ve ever met. I went to a very exclusive undergraduate college, I matriculated from Cambridge University, I matriculated from Berkeley, I’ve worked at some of the top biotech firms in the U.S. And yet I don’t have to consider for a moment that Phill was the smartest person in my already exclusive cohort of fellow students and colleagues. My younger self might have felt sadness or envy to have finally met a better, but when I understood that Phill was more gifted than me I didn’t blink much. I loved him too much to care that he was the anointed one.
After a few quick post-doctoral years in Massachusetts, Berkeley couldn’t wait to have him back and he joined their faculty in 2003.
I went out to dinner with Phill shortly after he accepted the new position but before he had moved out here. One of my complaints about academia had been that you couldn’t make a decent living. Phill politely told me that Berkeley had given him an insane loan to buy a home in a coveted area near campus, and that I should 1) buy a home as soon as possible and 2) reconsider if academic careers might actually be financially favorable. If only we could all be rockstars!
Growing older
As we grew in our respective professions, I missed that we were drifting apart in our passions. In our graduate years, we easily spent as much time discussing the thermodynamics of water as we might spend talking about the weekend or our romantic lives. In our friendship there was no boundary between the most difficult intellectual topics and the mundane.
But in our later years we couldn’t hit the highest notes of our youth because we simply had drifted too far apart in the intellectual realm. Phill never knew it, but I would sometimes look up his papers to find out what he was really up to, and what he might care about most at this point. I had a fantasy of talking with him again and being able to ask a semi-coherent question about his research.
Of course to Phill this didn’t really matter. He never expected anyone to understand what he cared about, and he never required this as a condition for his love. I just didn’t want to slip into that corner of Phill’s loves that didn’t meet him head-on in his pursuit of scientific truth**. I had been there with him every step in our youth, and not sharing that sphere with Phill in our later years gnawed at me.
On the other hand, as bonded friends, we continued to be there for each other in our darkest hours.
In 2014 Phill contacted me out of the blue with a desire to meet up at a local drinking establishment close to my house. Over a session of beers he described to me how his life had completely disintegrated in recent months. In a little under six months, he had gone from the very productive life of a young professor and vice chairman of the department to barely being able to get up in the morning and having zero energy for the day. After a diagnostic odyssey, his doctors had identified that he had lupus. He was just starting on powerful drugs for this, but the effect on his life was profound, and at that time he wasn’t able to return to Berkeley in any type of full-time capacity. He was starting to consider if a position outside of Berkeley might be in his future.
Why did he seek me out? We were mutually notorious to each other for caring too much about “work” to spend time on friendships. We likely hadn’t really talked for 5 years at that point, but given our personalities, that seemed more like a 30-minute pause in an ongoing conversation, not a significant lapse in friendship.
However the diagnosis of lupus came with the severe banner of likelihood of premature death. During that night we dug into our pasts and both came away with tears. It wasn’t our first night of tears, but, like I wrote, I’ve never cried with any other friend. Can that happen again without Phill?
In graduate school Phill mentioned to me that he expected to die young. He said that his father died in middle age, and his father’s father died in middle age, and that it was a natural consequence that he would die in middle age. In some sense he said this with a wink in his eye to explain his crazy passion to do it all now. In another sense he said this as a man complicit with a preordained fate. It’s only now that I can wonder if he was possessed by premonition?
In 2017 I suddenly reciprocated Phill’s outreach to me from three years previous when I had my first manic episode (I have bipolar disorder, type I). We hadn’t talked in three years, but I asked to meet with Phill, he responded immediately, and we saw each other a few days later.
This time it was me who couldn’t drink that many beers. While before he drank less because he was being treated for lupus, I now had to drink less because I was on powerful drugs for controlling mania. In that gathering, I confessed to feeling simultaneously smarter than ever and intensely ashamed for being crazy, and Phill was radiantly supportive and humorous. In our field of studies we know dearly the (non-existent?) line between genius and insanity and we shared plenty of good laughs and stories that night of our crazy colleagues and heroes.
In 2014 he came to me with the news of a life-crippling disease and three years later I came back to him with my own version. We needed each other to make sense of what this all was supposed to mean.
Phill wasn’t a natural athlete, but he possessed the stamina and determination that I associate with many scientist colleagues. He didn’t come to graduate school as a runner, but we had a mutual friend who loved long distance running, and once Phill started he couldn’t stop.
We would occasionally go on long bike rides together and one year on Memorial Day Weekend we took our bikes to Walnut Creek to ascend and descend Mount Diablo. It made for a good several-hour ride and afterwards Phill joined me for a BBQ party at my house. Later that night Phill had severe abdominal pain and ended up being admitted to the hospital for appendicitis. A year later I invited him to my house’s BBQ party, but Phill politely declined saying “the last time I went to your party, my appendix burst!”
Phill loved the outdoors and he was an avid hiker. He grew up in Virginia and spent many days traversing sections of the Appalachian trail. Most of his vacations were directed to spots of natural beauty and wilderness.
I last spoke to Phill a little over a year ago when I had the good fortune to be hiring one of his former students. I had offered to do the reference check for the new hire as a favor to the hiring manager, but I really just wanted to have the chance to call an old friend. We quickly dispensed with business and then got to catching up. The vaccines were just starting to get rolled out and Phill mentioned that he had been extra cautiously sequestered throughout the pandemic because of his immune system. I hadn’t had my shots yet, but we promised each other we’d get back together in person, once it was safe to venture outside again.
That day didn’t come. Phill passed away a few days ago, the victim of a hiking accident. For those of us who knew him the loss is unfathomable. Phill represented the best of all of us, and the world is a considerably smaller place without him.
*While I don’t have our Berkeley e-mails anymore I have this sent e-mail in my outbox from 2004:
Hi Phill,
wE hAVe yOuR UMbrELL@ hOStAGe. t0 rEtRieVE pLeEz sENd $1,000,000,000,000,000,000.78 iN uNmaRKeD bILlS tO oAKlAnD sUX!! pALo AlTo rOX!!! fUnD.
Or, alternatively, if you and R would like to join L and I for dinner at our Palo Alto home this Sunday night, we’d be happy to exchange your umbrella and a fine dinner of Thai-style green beans in spicy peanut sauce with rice for your company. Sorry for the late notice, if you’d like to take a rain check, let me know. We’d love to have you guys over!
** At one party when we were all sufficiently inebriated, Phill was having a heated discussion with his girlfriend about the kinds of things he naturally knows and cares about. As a point of reference he pointed to me and said, “Let’s ask Jon. Jon, what’s the square root of 3?”. We were all very drunk but I immediately started rattling off the digits of 1.73… In those years, we couldn’t feel good about ourselves if we didn’t know all of the basic physical constants, the Boltzmann constant in kilocalories per mole, and the roots of the small integers.
