Response to the award of the Wigner medal

An exciting journey through frontier science against obstacles now forgotten. Electrical engineering professors told us that there was no future in electronics. Niels Bohr told us that there was no future for quantum mechanics which was a theory for the atomic scale; the nuclear scale would need a new theory as different from quantum mechanics as quantum mechanics was from Newtonian mechanics. Fermi's theory of beta decay was wrong; a new theory was needed. The first experiment showing that relativistic positrons obeyed the Dirac equation. The nuclear shell model was nonsense. Parity was conserved, the Mossbauer effect was nonsense, group theory was useless and quarks were nonsense. There were side trips like nuclear reactor dynamics, where this postdoc was allowed to test a theory of reactor stability by turning on a reactor and watching to see whether it would blow up like Chernobyl or stabilize according to his theory.