My early childhood memories center around this typical American country store and life in a small American town, including 4th of July celebrations marked by fireworks and patriotic music played from a pavilion bandstand.
During my participation in the Manhattan Project and subsequent research at Los Alamos, encompassing a period of fifteen years, I worked in the company of perhaps the greatest collection of scientific talent the world has ever known.
However, I had a chance encounter with an admissions officer of Stevens Institute of Technology, who so impressed me by his erudition and enthusiasm for the school that I changed course and entered Stevens Institute.
I turned my attention for a while to gamma ray astronomy and soon began the first in a continous series of experiments at the Savannah River site to study the properties of the neutrino.
In 1958, I was a delegate to the Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva.
This line of research continued when I went, and brought my research group with me, to the new University of California, Irvine campus in 1966 to become the founding Dean of the School of Physical Sciences.
