Fred Cummings

Fred Cummings has two main claims to fame in physics. First, he worked with Ed Jaynes on the "Jaynes-Cummings" model of N two-level quantum systems, which was very influential in the development of laser theory and even has found uses in quantum information theory. Second, he was Jack Sarfatti's PhD. thesis advisor at the University of California, Riverside in the late 1960's. Fred met Jack first at Ford Philco Aeronutronics in the summer 1963. Cummings became interested in biophysics and edited a journal "Collective Phenomena" with Herbert Frohlich in the early 1970's. Sarfatti published a paper there in which he explained the universal Regge slope of the hadronic resonances as rotating extreme Kerr blackholes with an effective G* ~ 10^40G using Abdus Salam's f-gravity idea. This paper caused Abdus Salam to invite Sarfatti to ICTP in 1973-74. Of course today the connection between strings and blackholes is a cutting edge idea.