Thank You, Space Program, for my Scientific Career
While I was not an astronaut or in the Space Program, it provided guidance and support for my scientific career. That was because of the foresight of providing a large boost in science education by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
I remember the Sputnik revelation in high school, which was accompanied by the foresight to fund science education to catch up with the Russians. While a Chemistry major at UCLA, my first project was to test materials for reentry shields on capsules. I also worked in geophysics on writing a computer program to propagate atmospheric waves. And then writing up the equations in Schwarzschild’s text on how the sun works, although computers were far from solving them at that time.
I was fortunate enough to get to go to a NASA summer school at Columbia University of space or atmospheric science, taught by Robert Jastro. After a few weeks of class, we were flown around to NASA facilities at Cape Canaveral and Werner Von Braun’s Redstone Arsenal. As a maverick, I was more enticed by meeting MIT students studying General Relativity, and decided to switch to Physics, via completing my degree in Mathematics.
I was extremely fortunate to get an NSF Graduate Fellowship to pay my graduate school tuition for five years at Stanford, as well as giving me living expenses. That was a program established by the Space Race. In graduate school I left Gravity Theory since as it turned out, it would take 50 years to show results. I moved into particle physics theory when it was at its most exciting, producing new results. I got my Ph. D. At Stanford in 1968. Today, we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first manned Moon landing on July 20, 1969 today. By then I was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University.
I think the government might have gotten its value from my education in that I made some contributions to particle physics, but also because I taught Physics for 30 years at UC Irvine. I still try to make contributions through teaching at lifelong learning and through my blog, having switched again, to energy and environment. We also have NASA and its many earth-observing satellites to thank for the many climate studies, and computer simulations, from which I report on a few.
