My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.

The remoteness of my parents from the schools, so unfashionable today, was often painful for me, but I learned early to deal with an outside and sometimes hard world.

Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's.

Going to school and working for good marks, indeed working for very good marks, was a serious business.

A parent being called to the school because their child had misbehaved was as serious as a parent being called to the police station because their child had robbed a bank.

My final remark to young women and men going into experimental science is that they should pay little attention to the speculative physics ideas of my generation. After all, if my generation has any really good speculative ideas, we will be carrying these ideas out ourselves.