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Exploring the Physics of the Unknown Universe
264 pages, Hardcover
First published October 28, 1991
3 people want to read
About the author
Milo Wolff
4 books7 followersPrologue - Autobiography of the Author
Dear Reader:
I would like you to know about me, the author of this book. I was born 8 August 1923 in Verona, New Jersey where my father was an architect-builder and my mother an artist. In those years of the great Depression, few persons had much money, so I sought my education in bits and pieces where it could be had cheaply. Our Verona high-school principal gave me a one-year scholarship at nearby Essex Junior College. When that ran out, I studied electrical engineering at the NJ Institute of Technology and for money, I took a night job fixing test equipment in the National Union radio tube factory. When WWII began, I joined the U.S. Navy and went to radar school. I became an electronic-technician’s mate on the heavy cruiser Bremerton, the flagship planned to lead the invasion of Japan. As it happened, the A-bomb ended the war and we sailed to Shanghai, China. I was the chief 'fix-it man' in the radio room repairing radar, loran, sonar, teletypewriters, coffee pots, anything.
After the war, my education was free using the GI Bill, but there was a flood of ex-GI students filling up colleges. Free places were hard to find. I studied chemistry and economics at Rutgers University and then Upsala College. BS degree in hand, I went to work for the Philco Corporation writing military radar manuals and fixing radar as a field engineer for the U.S. Navy in Great Lakes, Illinois.
I am a person driven by curiosity wherever it leads although this has not always been wise. My curiosity demands to know the reasons why scientific and technical apparatus works. I never felt I knew enough so I decided to use the last of my GI Bill at the University of Pennsylvania to study physics and EE. For my PhD thesis, still a fix-it man, I helped build a Van de Graff accelerator and did an experiment shooting tritium atoms at carbon and oxygen targets. During summer vacations, I found a wonderful job fixing sailboats at Alliquippa, a kids camp in Small Point, Maine. This was a happy time; I loved the kids and they loved me and we had a grand time, playing, sailing, fishing, and eating lobsters. View those memories at www.Alliquippa.net.
PhD in hand, I was hired by the University of Kentucky to teach at the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia. During four years there I learned to speak and teach using Bahasa Indonesia. I was fascinated by the cultural attitudes of other people, because learning and living a new language became a 'mirror' in which I could see glimpses of my American culture against a background of varied world cultures. Seeing oneself is more difficult than seeing others. I married one of my students, Ching Lie. We had two children, Lan-Ling and Winston, adding to my three children, Eric, Jennifer, and Douglas, from my previous wife Bettina.
President Sukarno was in the first graduating class (1919) of this Institute, so he often brought foreign dignitaries to hear his elegant speeches to the students. He was a sensational speaker, first telling jokes in Indonesian, Javanese, Balinese, French and English, before turning serious in Indonesian. Afterwards, he invited us professors to lunch. At other times, he asked us to dine with Ho Chi Min, Robert Kennedy, and the Sultan of Borneo.
While in Indonesia, where teakwood is grown and is famed for boats, I hired a Dutch architect to build a sailboat for me that I named "Bettina". The boat and I, with the aid of motley crews, eventually arrived in Boston. Then in 1963 I went to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as one of 50 scientists and engineers designing the navigation system for the Apollo Moon Rocket. It successfully reached the Moon six years later.
The Apollo astronauts needed to know the structure of the Moon's surface where they would land. Was it deep dust into which the lunar vehicle would helplessly sink? It was my job to find out. In France, an astronomer, Prof. Auduoin
Dear Reader:
I would like you to know about me, the author of this book. I was born 8 August 1923 in Verona, New Jersey where my father was an architect-builder and my mother an artist. In those years of the great Depression, few persons had much money, so I sought my education in bits and pieces where it could be had cheaply. Our Verona high-school principal gave me a one-year scholarship at nearby Essex Junior College. When that ran out, I studied electrical engineering at the NJ Institute of Technology and for money, I took a night job fixing test equipment in the National Union radio tube factory. When WWII began, I joined the U.S. Navy and went to radar school. I became an electronic-technician’s mate on the heavy cruiser Bremerton, the flagship planned to lead the invasion of Japan. As it happened, the A-bomb ended the war and we sailed to Shanghai, China. I was the chief 'fix-it man' in the radio room repairing radar, loran, sonar, teletypewriters, coffee pots, anything.
After the war, my education was free using the GI Bill, but there was a flood of ex-GI students filling up colleges. Free places were hard to find. I studied chemistry and economics at Rutgers University and then Upsala College. BS degree in hand, I went to work for the Philco Corporation writing military radar manuals and fixing radar as a field engineer for the U.S. Navy in Great Lakes, Illinois.
I am a person driven by curiosity wherever it leads although this has not always been wise. My curiosity demands to know the reasons why scientific and technical apparatus works. I never felt I knew enough so I decided to use the last of my GI Bill at the University of Pennsylvania to study physics and EE. For my PhD thesis, still a fix-it man, I helped build a Van de Graff accelerator and did an experiment shooting tritium atoms at carbon and oxygen targets. During summer vacations, I found a wonderful job fixing sailboats at Alliquippa, a kids camp in Small Point, Maine. This was a happy time; I loved the kids and they loved me and we had a grand time, playing, sailing, fishing, and eating lobsters. View those memories at www.Alliquippa.net.
PhD in hand, I was hired by the University of Kentucky to teach at the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia. During four years there I learned to speak and teach using Bahasa Indonesia. I was fascinated by the cultural attitudes of other people, because learning and living a new language became a 'mirror' in which I could see glimpses of my American culture against a background of varied world cultures. Seeing oneself is more difficult than seeing others. I married one of my students, Ching Lie. We had two children, Lan-Ling and Winston, adding to my three children, Eric, Jennifer, and Douglas, from my previous wife Bettina.
President Sukarno was in the first graduating class (1919) of this Institute, so he often brought foreign dignitaries to hear his elegant speeches to the students. He was a sensational speaker, first telling jokes in Indonesian, Javanese, Balinese, French and English, before turning serious in Indonesian. Afterwards, he invited us professors to lunch. At other times, he asked us to dine with Ho Chi Min, Robert Kennedy, and the Sultan of Borneo.
While in Indonesia, where teakwood is grown and is famed for boats, I hired a Dutch architect to build a sailboat for me that I named "Bettina". The boat and I, with the aid of motley crews, eventually arrived in Boston. Then in 1963 I went to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as one of 50 scientists and engineers designing the navigation system for the Apollo Moon Rocket. It successfully reached the Moon six years later.
The Apollo astronauts needed to know the structure of the Moon's surface where they would land. Was it deep dust into which the lunar vehicle would helplessly sink? It was my job to find out. In France, an astronomer, Prof. Auduoin
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