I have something in common with Ernest Rutherford, that distinguished physicist and professor at Canada’s McGill University, who deplored the fact that, although a physicist, he got a Nobel Prize in chemistry. My career is the opposite. I started at Cornell as a chemist, and got a degree of bachelor of chemistry, which has since been discontinued. So I’m an orphan like the DeSoto, one of those cars that are no longer manufactured.
Anyway, after some years in which I tried various things that broadened my education but did not line my pocketbook, I went back to Cornell to study physical chemistry. But I’d taken all those courses so I said to myself “I’ll study physics, and put the two together.”
You know, that is somewhat like the person who wanted to study Chinese philosophy, so he looked up Chinese in the encyclopedia, and then he looked up philosophy, and...