Some of you may not know who I am, so let me introduce myself. My name is Ed Wesly, and I worked for Tung Jeong for ten years, from 1982 to 1992 at the College, after having seen him make two holograms in front of a group of amazed spectators at a Society for Photographic Education conference.
I would like to celebrate the wit and wisdom of Dr. Jeong with a collection of memorable phrases that I recall hearing more than once. Beginning with the one probably everyone in this room has heard, “You can call me TJ, unless you are older than me; then you can call me Sunne.”
Recent excavations by Alec Jeong have unearthed TJ’s explanation of the odd spelling of what I thought at first was Sonny: “PS: Sunne is a funny nick name I gave my self before I learned English. It was picked because my calling name in the Fong village (before I became a Jeong) was "Sun" and I thought adding an "e" would make it sound like Sunny. But people started to call me Sune, like June. So I threw another n into it but then people--------. So I just quit, and let it be.” However it’s spelled, his sunny disposition would light up any classroom.
Maybe it’s not a bad thing he was unsuccessful with the pun, so he could turn his inventiveness toward holography, as in his famous dictum, “If you’re going to go 3-D, why not go 360?” The concept of encircling an object with a holographic film, plus the utter simplicity of using a single beam to light the object and provide a reference beam earned him a spot on Mt. Holympus, where reside the inventors of holographic recording schemes that bear their names, like Gabor, Denisyuk, plus Leith and Upatnieks, who became great friends with TJ.
“Everyone is, to a degree, familiar with the characteristic curve of vacuum tubes and how it affects the transmission of information in radio.” This phrase is from his little blue book, “A STUDY GUIDE ON HOLOGRAPHY (Draft)” and I like its turn of phrase, and include it somewhat facetiously as I was of the generation where we did use vacuum tubed equipment in Physics 102 labs, but it was such an odd supposition that tout le monde would know it. But the book was written for physics teachers, and he knew that would be an analogy understood by them.
For TJ could grasp the level a student was at, and teach to them following Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, never condescending, never at a loss for a metaphor that the student could grasp. The academic tone of the blue book for teachers is balanced by “Laser Holography – Experiments You Can Do ...From Edison” which contains similar setups for recording holograms and demonstrations but for a more general audience.
The phrase that really sums up TJ’s teaching philosophy is “Learning is by doing!” He writes in the blue book, “The student should ‘do it’ first. The understanding and formalism will come naturally once his interest and curiosity are aroused.” John Dewey would agree with that!
There is the corollary to that, “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes”, as that is another avenue to understanding. And he was the master of demonstrations, my favorite being how an etalon in a laser works, using a sabre saw as a standing wave generator and a couple of rubber bands on a piece of sheet metal placed at the standing wave nodes as the etalon. And I found his Geometric Model Of Holography as fascinating as Op Art with its overhead projector moiré patterns.
“Best-dressed man in room is boss.” Perhaps intimidating, but it certainly has been proven useful in my teaching career. If you have a mental snapshot of TJ, you might see him in his jacket, with his Yale pin on his tie.
“The wind waits for no one” means that one shouldn’t expect to see TJ in his office in the late afternoon when the wind whips up, but on the lake, taking advantage of its energy, windsurfing. I hope TJ is in a place where he will never have to wait for the wind again, and all his experiments work right the first time.