Another important aspect of our home was respect for ideas.
As a consequence while we had a roof over our heads, food on the table, and clothes to wear to school we were constantly conscious of being of modest means.
At Berkeley I had my first encounter with real professional scientists.
At the time I felt that my induction into the military was a giant step backward.
But it was impressed upon me that there was such a thing as good study habits and that I would have to acquire them if I wanted to be a scholar.
But the need for conflict to expose prejudice and unclear reasoning, which is deeply embedded in my philosophy of science, has its origin in these debates.
But through my interests in electron motion in vacuum tubes I discovered a need to describe trajectories of moving particles with equations.
Early on in his career my father left the District Attorney's office and set up a private law practice in town.
I also taught myself how to blow glass using a propane torch from the hardware store and managed to make some elementary chemistry plumbing such as tees and small glass bulbs.
I did well in my mathematics courses in school but was not that challenged and, truthfully, not that interested either.
I owe my interest in mathematics to my father, or more precisely the sense that mathematics was something important and mysterious.
I remember particularly one day hearing a shout from my father's bedroom and rushing in to discover that he had just discovered Euler's theorem.
I was an extremely reclusive and introverted boy.
I, for example, used to take appliances apart when they broke in an attempt to fix them, which I rarely did successfully, being a kid.
In parallel with the development of my interests in technical gadgetry I began to acquire a profound love of and respect for the natural world which motivates my scientific thinking to this day.
It is an interesting fact that during my tour I was never allowed access to computers, radios, or anything else that I might damage through curiosity, or perhaps something more sinister.
It was at Bell Labs that I first made direct contact with real semiconductor experts and thus began to fully understand what amazing materials they were and what they could do.
It was at this moment that I wrote my first important paper in theoretical physics. I was 32 years old, 5 years beyond the alleged age of senility for theorists.
Like so many other American families mine had roots that were deep but temporary.
My childhood home backed onto wheat and cotton fields.
My father had grown up a widow's son in Chico, served as a naval officer in the war, followed his brother into the law, and had come to Visalia fresh out of law school to work in the Tulare County District Attorney's office.
My job at Stanford is rather different from the ones I had held previously in that my own ambitions must take a back seat to the well-being of the students with whom I work.
My maternal grandmother had a mountain cabin deep in the Tule river canyon just south of Sequoia Park, to which we were often invited as a family or as individuals.
My mother also had us take piano lessons, and this had a similar effect. I hated those lessons, but I now play regularly for pleasure and have even tried my hand at composing.
My mother, who was professional schoolteacher, was particularly concerned about our formal education and even went so far as to start a private school together with some other parents so that our intellectual needs would be met.
One of the terrific aspects of MIT in those days was the enormous variety of experimental work that either took place there or was talked about in seminars by outside speakers aggressively recruited by the faculty.
Over the course of time this gave us a deep respect for ideas, both our own and those of others, and an understanding that conflict through debate is a powerful means of revealing truth.
So mothers everywhere take heart. The indoctrination you administer now may have unanticipated positive effects years later.
Some time near the end of basic training a computer somewhere decided that I was suited for missile school, so I was ordered to Fort Sill, Oklahoma to learn how to fire Pershing missiles.
The experience that firmly placed me on a course toward a professional career in science was the four years I spent as an undergraduate at Berkeley.
The questions worth asking, in other words, come not from other people but from nature, and are for the most part delicate things easily drowned out by the noise of everyday life.
To this day I always insist on working out a problem from the beginning without reading up on it first, a habit that sometimes gets me into trouble but just as often helps me see things my predecessors have missed.
Western society has many flaws, and it is good for an educated person to have thought some of these through, even at the expense of losing a lecture or two to tear gas.
When I moved to Stanford I began to pursue the line of research I have been following ever since, namely trying to understand the larger implications of fractional quantum hall discovery.
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