Just before my final year of high school, my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco.

With every passing year, BEC proves that it still has surprises left for us.

The postdoc explained to me how to distinguish different sorts of particles on the basis of the amounts of energy they deposited in various sorts of detectors, spark chambers, calorimeters, what have you.

My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.

Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.

Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic.

Just before my final year of high school, my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco.