American - Physicist | December 19, 1961 -
My freshman year of high school I joined the chess and math clubs.
Eric Allin Cornell
SchoolHigh SchoolYearChessHigh
Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic.
MyselfSchoolLanguageEnoughSpeed
Just before my final year of high school, my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco.
MotherSchoolBrotherSisterYear
It was there I met my future wife, Celeste Landry, although our lives took us separate ways for many years and we were not to marry until more than ten years later.
FutureWifeTen YearsMoreYearsUs
The postdoc explained to me how to distinguish different sorts of particles on the basis of the amounts of energy they deposited in various sorts of detectors, spark chambers, calorimeters, what have you.
MeEnergySparkYouDifferentHow
Six months after that, I left Taiwan, first for Hong Kong and then for mainland China, where I spent another three months studying still more Chinese and generally kicking around the country.
CountryThreeMoreFirstHong Kong
Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.
LearningTravelLanguageInteresting
There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser.
PhysicsDaysExperimentsLaserFew
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Eric Allin Cornell quotes