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.

About 1900 my parents came to the United States as children from what was then the Polish area of Russia.

The experimenter dealing with nature faces an outside and often hard world. Natures' curriculum cannot be changed.

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.

My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

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.

I was also interested in chemistry, but my parents were not willing to buy me a chemistry set.