“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding.” 1941
A remarkable thing about our lives is that we cannot comprehend the paths that brought us to "now". In the language of physics, there are too many parameters, dimensions, interactions, and uncertainties to follow with too few neurons. I do not know exactly where or when the photo was taken other than that it captured a moment between 1948 and 1950 in one of cities (DesMoines, Cleveland, Hartford or Atlanta) where we lived before settling in Louisville for my first formal school year.
I think my lifelong interests may have been formed by 1950's television -- Superman, Sky King, and Roy Rogers -- that had me imagining the possibilities of physics, flight, and horses. I was reading books on science that my aunts and my cousin had given me when the era of Sputnik arrived in 1957. By then I had made a connection with the young members of the Louisville Astronomical Society and gained access to its 20-inch Star Lane telescope. The senior members had just completed it, and with the guidance of Walter Moore, a professor at the University of Louisville, they offered it to us for hands-on experience that stimulated our desire to be astronomers some day. Twenty years later the telescope was relocated to a new home at Moore Observatory.
In the summer of 1961 I was in an NSF Summer Science Workshop at the University of Tennessee taking college courses in chemistry and physics, and learning to find microscopic cosmic ray tracks in photographic records from balloon flights. The next year, with the confidence and new knowledge this experience provided, I entered the University of Louisville's Early Admissions program to major in physics, intent on a career in astrophysics. With advice from my friends in other universities, mentoring by the faculty in the department, and collaboration with the atomic spectroscopy group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, I completed a Master's degree in the summer of 1966, was selected a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and entered the doctoral physics program at Johns Hopkins University. There I studied theoretical atomic structure, quantum optics, and plasma physics while qualifying to begin research, met my lifelong friend Peter Antich, discovered Helen, and analyzed the structure and spectrum of triply ionized gadolinium for a doctoral dissertation. By the fall of 1969 I was back in Louisville as a new assistant professor of physics and beginning to focus my research on the effects of the environment of atoms on the spectra they emit. Helen joined me in Louisville a year later.
There are highlights in the passage from that time to now, especially Clara, our daughter, who arrived in 1972. In 1974 a tornado took our first house and we learned on the site building a new one that Helen designed. The University developed Moore Observatory in 1978. Clara found "her" horse, Zane, who dominated our lives afterward. For him and his companion Star to have a home, in 1985 we got the land that became Hidden Hollow Orchard. Helen developed the orchard to feature antique varieties of apples, including one grown from scion wood from Isaac Newton's tree. With funding from NSF, DOE, DOD, NASA, and AFOSR my research on atomic spectra, stellar physics, exoplanets, and remote sensing technology has continued. Clara and her family are in Rochester, NY, where she is professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of Rochester Medical Center. We still have retired and rescued horses that share our lives too.