Editor’s Note: Over the decades, Victor Weisskopf (1908–2002) was a great friend of this magazine. He contributed no fewer than 10 feature articles, as well as letters, book reviews, opinion columns, and more. The following article, reprinted from the August 1969 issue of Physics Today, captures much of Viki’s love of physics and breadth of thought. This and others of his past contributions to the magazine can be found at http://www.physicstoday.org. To learn more about his life, see the article by Kurt Gottfried and J. David Jackson on page 43.
There are certain obvious privileges that a physicist enjoys in our society. He is reasonably paid; he is given instruments, laboratories, complicated and expensive machines, and he is asked not to make money with these tools, like most other people, but to spend money. Furthermore, he is supposed to do what he himself finds most interesting,...
