A Start on the High Seas
By the time I was 22, I had crossed the North and South Atlantic eight times in cargo ships. These were freighters of the Robin Shipping Line, with romantic names like the Robin Hood and Robin Sherwood; they plied the oceans between North America and the coast of South and East Africa. I usually stood the 4 to 8 watch, at sunrise and sunset, when the navigator--or second mate--has command of the bridge. I learned to take star sights with a sextant, make weather observations, and to steer a 16 thousand ton ship by hand. I was not a merchant mariner, so I was not required to do this. I had a scholarship from the shipping line for my undergraduate studies at Yale and was just hitching a ride home during the three-month vacation between academic years. The navigation techniques I learned are rarely used today, because they have been overtaken by GPS and computers. The only enduring thing I learned, as I stood watch on the bow of the ship, was how to light a cigarette in a strong wind. I think of it every time I light a cigar on the porch after dinner.
What does this have to do with being a scientist? Perhaps nothing; perhaps everything. It has to do with a sense of adventure, with a desire to find out how things work. If this desire can be pursued in exotic places, so much the better. Since those days at sea, I have done scientific research in 23 countries, on all the continents except Australia and Antarctica. These two are obviously an oversight on my part and I will have to do something about it.
Into the Physics Lab: The adventure continues...
How does one become a scientist? Since you are in the midst of your training, your thoughts may now turn to the science courses you have taken from high school till now. These are obviously crucial to your training as scientists. When I think back, most of those courses blur into a composite memory of completed requirements, while only a few stand out. One of these was a year-long physics laboratory course in my second undergraduate year, called Classical Physical Measurements. We each had a lab partner and we had to do things like measure the speed of light and the charge on an electron, without supervision. That sounds simple enough, but we had to use the equipment that was used to measure those quantities for the first time.
Measuring the Speed of Light
The speed of light we measured in a long dark passage in the attic of the physics building, using a candle, several mirrors to bounce the light back and forth, and a rotating gear wheel that ran off a battery. The attic was badly overheated, which made us miserable, and the passing traffic vibrated the mirrors just enough to throw off their careful alignment. It took us a month to measure the speed of light. Next came the charge on an electron, for which we repeated Millikan's Oil Drop Experiment. For this purpose, we had a tiny room in the basement, next to the heating plant. It was very hot, which made us miserable, and we discovered that oil drops floating in an electric field frequently refuse to act according to theory. In the process, we discovered empirically why Millikan, in his original experiment, had trimmed his data by publishing only the oil drops that behaved well. This fact was established many years later from his lab notes and is still the subject of discussion in seminars on the ethics of science.
In any case, we managed to make the experiment work. My lab partner was somebody like Bernie in the Doonesbury cartoon strip, who drinks the potions he makes in chemistry lab and turns into a werewolf. Bernie and Doonesbury were also students at Yale, of course, like Gary Trudeau, the creator of the cartoon strip. My lab partner had been fixing radios and TV sets since the age of six and was the chief engineer of the campus radio station. I learned more about electronics from him than the assembled staff of the physics department. We stayed partners for two years and had a lot of fun.
