Pastoral Resources

Medical physics is an applied area of physics.

I have devoted much time and energy to helping medical physics in developing countries.

I was the Chair of the first department of medical physics in a medical school in the U.S.

When I entered medical physics in 1958 there were fewer than 100 in the U.S. and I could see many opportunities to apply my knowledge of nuclear physics.

The growth of technology is such that it is not possible today for a nuclear physicist to switch into medical physics without training. The field is now much more technical. More training is needed to do the job.

Nuclear physics is interesting but it is unlikely to help society.

If someone is interested in medicine and also in physics and they like working with people and communicate well with others, I would strongly encourage them.

Well, I'm leaning probably toward the sciences like physics.

The fundamental laws of physics do not describe true facts about reality. Rendered as descriptions of facts, they are false; amended to be true, they lose their explanatory force.

Although important nuclear physics work was to go on in laboratories such as ours had become - and we had to cut down to a lower energy group - it was not fundamentally opening up new insights on the structure of matter. That required you to be in a higher league.

I was so pleased to be at university to do physics and mathematics.

My latter schooldays and my university days were during the war, when science - physics, in particular - was a very important and glamorous subject. A lot of us felt that if we couldn't get into science, we might try engineering or medicine.

Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.

The development of physics, like the development of any science, is a continuous one.

My physics teacher, Thomas Miner was particularly gifted. To this day, I remember how he introduced the subject of physics. He told us we were going to learn how to deal with very simple questions such as how a body falls due to the acceleration of gravity.

Relativity must replace absolutism in the realm of morals as well as in the spheres of physics and biology.

There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser.

While at Chicago my interest in the new field of particle physics was stimulated by a course given by Gell- Mann, who was developing his ideas about Strangeness at the time.

I did a thesis in experimental nuclear physics under the direction of Samuel K. Allison.

In 1971 I returned to the University of Chicago as Professor of Physics.