Reality is wilder

摘要

Job interviews can be harrowing, but few ultimately change one's career directions. One afternoon in 1967, a personnel clerk at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, California, ushered me into a large, messy office, saying only that 'someone' wanted to ask me a few questions. I was being interviewed for what was then (and still is) the best-paying postdoctoral position in physics. About to become a freshly minted PhD from the University of California, San Diego, I wondered if this was about security clearance. Instead, a distracted Edward Teller sat behind an untidy desk that was piled high with physics journals. Nobody had told me that Teller insisted on taking the measure of every postdoctoral candidate. "We didn't want you to be nervous," someone said later. It worked—I was merely terrified.