Thank You, Space Program, for my Scientific Career

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.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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