Gregory Breit arrived from Wisconsin, and he was supposed to bring the latest in physics and I, as an undergraduate, I took his graduate courses, but he was so strange. He was very bright, Breit. Breit was very bright, but he was extremely strange, psychotic really. And it was very difficult to deal with him. He permitted no questions. If anyone asked a question he left the room and wouldn't come back until some of his students that he had brought with him from Wisconsin went out into the hall and begged him to return, saying, ‘Well, these Yale students don't understand the rules, they don't understand how wrong it is to ask a question, and they promise never to ask any more questions. Please, come back and teach some more’. Then he would come back and teach. Another thing that wasn't permitted was reading books. Sometimes after class, when it was permitted to ask a question, someone would ask him a question, and he would say, ‘I can tell! You've read a book!’ For example Bethe's Little Book [of Scientific Principles] was forbidden and… another thing you mustn't do was to learn about general relativity. He said it was very bad for young students to learn about general relativity. They get all sorts of big ideas and they want to combine general relativity with quantum mechanics and so on and so on, and they get led off into paths that lead nowhere. They… they go off on paths that lead nowhere and it’s very bad. And so, if anybody asked him a question connected with general relativity, he flew into a rage. A very strange man.
[Q] So by the time you graduated there, did you feel you were a physicist?
Well, I didn't know, I didn't… no, no I certainly didn't feel I was a physicist. My father had always filled me with this idea that really understanding things was way in the future, because he had struggled so hard to understand Einstein and so on and so forth, and he gave me the impression that these things were very difficult. Just the opposite of Margenau who said they were all very easy – and showed us that they were all very easy.
[Q] So that must have been very important, I mean Margenau's role seems like it was extremely important in your development.
And who were the other students in that class? Paul MacCready, my best friend, Harold Morowitz, whom I see all the time now at the Santa Fe Institute, and so on.
