One of my earliest memories of something that caught my attention was of a steam locomotive. I guess mainly because they have so many moving parts that are out in the open. You can watch the valves moving back and forth - the driving rods.
One of my earliest memories was throwing a tantrum because I wasn't allowed to put together the coffee percolator.
My advice is not to aim for prizes and awards. We are in this for the joy of research, the fascination, the love of science. That's the reward, really.
Life will go on. I suppose the aura of the Nobel is such that my life will change, but I don't think I'm going to let it change much. You understand, I'm used to a quiet life.
I started in engineering, where I think I could have happily remained and, who knows, made a bundle as a civil engineer or mechanical engineer. But more of my friends happened to be majoring in physics than engineering, so I switched over. No more compelling reason than that.
I went to public schools, which is to say publicly financed.
A static universe isn't physically self-consistent.
Research such as ours is driven by the human imperative to understand where we are. It motivates the study of our positions in family, or in society, or on earth. The results may be termed geology, or sociology, or poetry.
I arrived at Princeton as a graduate student from the University of Manitoba in 1958. To my great good fortune, I fell into work with Bob Dicke, a truly great physicist who decided a few years before that that gravity is too important to ignore, as it had been in recent years in physics.
You should enter science because you are fascinated by it. That's what I did.
I loved to take things apart and put them back together. I loved the way things work.
Science does not emerge in some perfect, complete crystalline form.
The sun can't shine forever.
There must be enormous numbers of planets around the stars in the many galaxies in our observable universe. We may be sure that wonderful things are happening on these planets that the human race never will observe.
I was very uneasy about going into cosmology because the experimental observations were so modest.
I've always loved Bob Dylan.
My mother was a housewife, and she had no job throughout her entire life.
What might we learn from lines of research that are off the beaten track? They check accepted ideas, always a good thing, and there is the chance nature has prepared yet another surprise for us.
My father worked at the Grain Exchange.
I was born in Saint Boniface, which is a small city right next to Winnipeg, nominally French speaking.
