After I had completed a public elementary school, my mother enrolled me in the Akademische Gymnasium, a fine public high school in Vienna's inner city.
After my return to Carnegie Tech in 1952, I began a major collaboration with N. Rostoker, then an assistant of an experimentalist, later a distinguished plasma theorist.
At the same time my parents, especially my father, also were a part of the secular artistic and intellectual life of Vienna.
During one or two summers, as well as part-time during the school year, I worked for a small Canadian company which developed electrical instruments for military planes.
Finally, in 1966, we showed that superconductivity occurs even with purely repulsive interactions - contrary to conventional wisdom and possibly relevant to the much later discovery of high-Tc superconductors.
For the summer of 1949, I got a job in the Polaroid laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., just before the Polaroid camera made its public appearance.
However, while the Nazi barbarians and their collaborators threatened the entire world, I could not accept his philosophy and, after several earlier attempts, was finally accepted into the Canadian Infantry Corps during the last year of World War II.
I have just joined the Board of the Population Institute because I am convinced that early stabilization of the world's population is important for the attainment of this objective.
I offered early support to Jeffrey Leiffer, the founder of the student Pugwash movement which concerns itself with global issues having a strong scientific component and in which scientists can play a useful role.
I was born in 1923 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view.
I was fortunate to find an extraordinary mathematics and applied mathematics program in Toronto.
In particular, I established a reasonably accurate energy threshold for permanent displacement of a nucleus from its regular lattice position, substantially smaller than had been previously presumed.
In spite of my original disconnect with Van Vleck, solid state physics soon became the center of my professional life and Van Vleck and I became lifelong friends.
My commitment to a humane and peaceful world continues to this day.
My father, who had lost a brother, fighting on the Austrian side in World War I, was a committed pacifist.
My feelings towards Austria, my native land, are - and will remain - very painful.
My first wife, Lois Kohn, gave me invaluable support during the early phases of my scientific career; my present wife of over 20 years, Mara, has supported me in the latter phases of my scientific life.
My project was radiation damage of Si and Ge by energetic electrons, critical for the use of the recently developed semiconductor devices for applications in outer space.
My three daughters and three grandchildren all live in California and so we get to see each other reasonably often.
On another level, I want to mention that I have a strong Jewish identity and - over the years - have been involved in several Jewish projects, such as the establishment of a strong program of Judaic Studies at the University of California in San Diego.
Originally I had planned to revert to nuclear physics there, in particular the structure of the deuteron.
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