Shakespeare Got It Wrong: Jack Oliver’s Memoirs of a Geophysicist

OCT 14, 2025

Trevor Owens

Chief Research Officer, AIP

Every time I venture further into AIP’s Niels Bohr Library & Archives’ unique collection of unpublished memoirs of physical scientists , I find myself grateful to be part of an organization stewarding such a unique and intriguing set of personal stories. Today I wanted to share a favorite item from the collection: Shakespeare Got it Wrong. It’s Not “To Be,” It’s “To Do”! The Autobiographical Memoirs of a Lucky Geophysicist. Written by Jack Oliver in 1998, this memoir includes personal reflections on his research on earthquakes and the role he played in advancing our understanding of plate tectonics.

Jack Oliver Manuscript Bio Cover — Cover of “"Shakespeare Got it Wrong. It’s Not “To Be”, it’s “To Do”! The Autobiographical Memoirs of a Lucky Geophysicist.” Call number: MB 2000-83

I’ve included an image of the first paragraph of the preface to the manuscript to provide some context about the memoir’s origins and his reasons for writing it.

Text in this image reads "This autobiography was stimulated by a joint request from the Committee on the History of Geophysics of the American Geophysical Union
and the Center for the History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. Otherwise I might not have attempted it. For someone who throughout the bulk of his career and until its later stages confined his writing almost entirely to topics of science, writing about oneself calls for a change of style, and a change of focus that seems uncomfortably self-centered. I make this attempt therefore and to some degree as a consequence of urging by others. Yet it would be unfair if I did not also note that I hold the hope that somehow and somewhere in this document I will record, perhaps inadvertently, something that will be stimulating or useful to others, particularly to my descendants, t o rising young scientists, and to those attempting to understand the way that science works and how science and scientists sometimes interact with other elements of society and life. What this book is decidedly not is a search for accolades or some sort of fame. I have already had enough of each. It is instead merely an attempt to pass on something from the past that may be of use and value to someone in the future. — First paragraph from the preface of Jack Oliver’s unpublished memoir.

In the preface, Oliver explains that writing this autobiography was stimulated by a request from the American Institute of Physics and the American Geophysical Union . Without that request, it is entirely possible that no one would have access to this story.

He also stresses that he hoped that this might inspire “rising young scientists” and “those attempting to understand the way that science works and how science and scientists sometimes interact with elements of society and life.” He opens the memoir, “If I had to describe my life’s story in the fewest possible words (a course some readers might prefer!), I would probably choose the simple but overworked phrase “The American Dream.”

Along with a detailed record of developments in geophysics, the memoir also includes a series of Geoscience-themed limerick interludes. I have included an image of one of these in the except below from chapter five.

Oliver Geoscience Limerick Interlude. Text reads,
On the rock surface he found a striation,
Which he blamed on Pleistocene glaciation.
But one question poser
Asked if it came from a dozer,
During the epoch of civilization!
As Pleistocene ice spread over the land,
The sea took a much lower stand.
But sea level rose,
As the ice sheet unfroze,
And the coast moved much farther inland.
The mysterious land of Tibet,
As enchanting as enchanting can get.
For an explorer quixotic,
There's a culture exotic,
And each new day brings lots of kismet!
He said, "What makes this Canyon so Grand,
Is that it's such a big ditch in the land.
No nuclear explosion,
It's an effect of erosion,
By tiny droplets of water unmanned!"
A Finger Lakes waterfall,
Is a kind of artistic ball.
Gracefully each water droplet
Cavorts without stop, yet ,
Responds to gravity's call .
Alone on the Arctic ice pack,
Your footprints the only track ,
Don't tarry but go,
Before drifting snow ,
Obscures the only way back.
The pack ice of the Arctic ocean ,
Thick and thin and incessant in motion,
A place for explorers' deeds ,
Mid pressure ridges and leads ,
It's a kind of frozen commotion!
Most everyone will celebrate the millennium,
But not geologists, no, hardly any of 'em.
A thousand years is so brief,
Geologically, there'd be relief,
If, in fact, there weren't so many of 'em.
By movie stars he once was glamoured.
Now with geology he's been enamored.
His favorite cutie s
No longer are beauties,
But rocks that are properly hammered !
There's scientific and philosophical worth,
In knowing the age of the earth.
A figure corrective
Of human perspective:
4 1 /2 billion years since its birth!
The tectonic plates are a-driftin' ,
The ocean floors are a- ' ' '.
Continents ride,
Until they collide ,
And mountains find that upliftin' .
He said, "Why is earth so complex?
We never know what we'll find next.
Are things geological,
Teleological,
Their purpose to geoperplex? " — An example of one of the geoscience limerick interludes included throughout Oliver’s memoir

For anyone interested in learning more about Oliver’s life and work, his papers are in Cornell University’s collections . If you want to read his full memoir , Cornell has digitized and made a copy of it openly available online.

We all have access to Oliver’s story, in large part, because our predecessors at AIP, in collaboration with colleagues at AGU, explicitly asked him for it. Building on that tradition, last fall I put out an open call for similar life stories from people working in the physical sciences in Radiations magazine . You can learn more about five other stories like these that we recently added to our collections as a result of this invitation here . It is a real honor to have the opportunity to invite people from the physical sciences community to share their stories like this and to be a part of an organization that is dedicated to preserving and sharing those stories with future generations.

We are very much committed to continuing to be a home for these kinds of unique stories and we welcome donations . Now that we have our new digital repository platform in place , it is easier than ever for us to receive these kinds of stories, preserve them, and make them openly available to the community for reading and engagement.

The Niels Bohr Library and Archives is an ideal home for these simultaneously personal and professional stories and histories of the physical sciences. Alongside inviting unpublished memoirs like Oliver’s, we have made it straightforward for anyone in our community to donate digital photos for potential addition to our collections , and we recently launched an initiative to collect and preserve stories about the impact of federal funding cuts on physical scientists lives and careers . With generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation, we are focusing our outreach efforts in these areas over the next year on documenting and celebrating the contributions of women to the physical sciences .

So, stay tuned for more stories personal histories and stories like these. Along with that, please consider asking someone you know in the physical sciences community to start working on telling and sharing their story. There are so many outstanding physical science professionals out there, like Jack Oliver, who have stories to tell but might need some encouragement from their friends, family, or colleagues in the scientific community to help understand that their story matters to us all.