My father worked in high-energy nuclear physics, and my mother was a mycologist and a geneticist. After both parents completed postdoctoral fellowships in San Diego in 1962, my father took a faculty position in the Physics Department at Yale, and so the family moved to New Haven, Connecticut.
There are good reasons why we don't want everyone to learn nuclear physics, medicine or how financial markets work. Our entire modern project has been about delegating power over us to skilled people who want to do the work and be rewarded accordingly.
I did a thesis in experimental nuclear physics under the direction of Samuel K. Allison.
If you're talking about nuclear physics, I have to defer to the next guy. But if you're talking about football, I don't have to take a back seat to anyone.
Nuclear physics is interesting but it is unlikely to help society.
When I entered medical physics in 1958 there were fewer than 100 in the U.S. and I could see many opportunities to apply my knowledge of nuclear physics.
Although important nuclear physics work was to go on in laboratories such as ours had become - and we had to cut down to a lower energy group - it was not fundamentally opening up new insights on the structure of matter. That required you to be in a higher league.
Football isn't nuclear physics, but it's not so simple that you can make it simple. It takes some explaining to get it across.
In the late '30's when I was in college, physics - and in particular, nuclear physics - was the most exciting field in the world.
Originally I had planned to revert to nuclear physics there, in particular the structure of the deuteron.
