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21. Flunking my exam in an interesting way | 633 | 01:27 | |
22. My terrible thesis | 1 | 627 | 01:16 |
23. Working at the Harvard Cyclotron laboratory | 428 | 01:23 | |
24. Why the Institute for Advanced Study appealed to me | 590 | 01:16 | |
25. Julian Schwinger's letter of recommendation | 1394 | 01:07 | |
26. Getting my Q clearance | 467 | 02:30 | |
27. The security levels at Los Alamos National Laboratory | 445 | 01:56 | |
28. Witnessing test explosions of the nuclear bomb | 438 | 01:17 | |
29. Travelling to the nuclear bomb test site | 381 | 00:51 | |
30. Beating the casino one minute, Operation Plumbbob the next | 400 | 02:27 |
I had a very good time in graduate school. A lot of people had a miserable grad, I had a great time in graduate school and wrote my thesis. It was a terrible thesis. It was… I mean, unjustified approximations, it was just an awful thesis. Really no purpose to this thesis. But I once met… I wrote my thesis on the deuteron, and I told Zemach, 'I'm writing my thesis on the deuteron, I'm calling it Deuteronomy.' He said, 'Well, I'm calling mine Exodus.' And that's what I should have called mine, was Exodus, because, you know, it got me out.
And then I, of course, had no job. I had a vague offer, which thank God I didn't take, to go to the University of Virginia and work on centrifuges. Boy, I'm lucky I didn't do that.
Born in 1929, Jeremy Bernstein is an American physicist, educator and writer known for the clarity of his writing for the lay reader on the major issues of modern physics. After graduating from Harvard University, Bernstein worked at Harvard and at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton. In 1962 he became an Associate Professor of Physics at New York University, and later a Professor of Physics at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, a position he continues to hold. He was also on the staff of The New Yorker magazine.
Title: My terrible thesis
Listeners: Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.
Tags: Virginia University
Duration: 1 minute, 16 seconds
Date story recorded: 15th June 2011
Date story went live: 17 August 2011