Naturally, I have compensated in my adult years by owning very large numbers of books.

This was good training for research, because large parts of experimental work are sometimes boring or involve the use of skills in which one is not particularly gifted.

Natures' curriculum cannot be changed.

As Jews, their families left Russia to escape the poverty and the antisemitism.

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.

Their educations ended with high school – my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.

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.

Nature’s curriculum cannot be changed.

Along with my parents insistence, soon internalized, that I do very well in school, went my love of reading and my love of mechanics.

A parent being called to the school because their child had misbehaved was as serious as a parent being called to the police station because their child had robbed a bank.