For physicist and US Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ), the decision in 1998 to leave his job as assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and run for Congress wasn't too surprising. His father, Rush Dew Holt, was known as “the boy senator” who, at age 29, became the youngest person ever elected to the US Senate. And his mother was the first woman to serve as secretary of state of West Virginia.
“I can't remember a time when I wasn't interested in politics,” Holt said. “I've been interested in how the country works for as long as I've been interested in science.”
For physicist and Representative Vernon Ehlers (R-MI), it was garbage that drew him to politics. In 1968, eight years after earning his PhD in nuclear physics from the University of California, Berkeley, Ehlers was teaching at Calvin College in Michigan when he became concerned about the “terrible...
