An account of the professional career of Robert Weinstock, physics major in the College class of June 1940, University of Pennsylvania - with a brief prelude on his undergraduate years at Penn - as reported in February 1997 to Professor Paul A. Heiney, Department of Physics, U. of P.

When I entered the University of Pennsylvania as a freshman in autumn 1936, my family was desperately poor. I lived at home in Kensington, as I did all four of my years at Penn. My aim was to become a high school mathematics or physics teacher, a situation obtainable through competitive examination (in Philadelphia, at least) and one that attracted me strongly because of the job security it would provide.

In those years Penn undergraduates did not enter the School of Education before the junior year. As consequence my first two years were in the College, where all of my friends were also enrolled. When I (but none of them) switched to the School of Education at the start of my third year in 1938, I declared math as my major although I would rather have majored in physics. To do the latter in the School of Education, however, would have required my taking more chemistry and/or biology courses than I had a taste for. So I majored in math but enrolled in the junior-year courses required for a physics major. I also entered two education courses. After two years in the College, I found the School of Education atmosphere oppressive.

Although I and my contemporaries were at the time unaware of the fact, the Penn Physics Department had by spring 1938 reached an advanced state of decay. To remedy the situation, Gaylord P. Harnwell and several other young high-quality physicists had been hired by the University to join the Department faculty in summer 1938, with Harnwell as chairman (head?) to replace a man who had just then retired as consequence of age.

It was well into the 1938 autumn term when one day I visited Harnwell's office - just for a chat with him, as I recall. That visit changed the course of my life. During it I learned two major facts from Professor Harnwell: (i) One could be a physicist without doing any work in a laboratory: One could be a theoretical physicist. (ii) One could be a teacher in this world without having to slog through any education courses. It took me few microseconds to make up my mind and not many more to implement my change of direction: I fled from Education, returned to the College, and switched my major from math to physics.

Second semester 1938-39 Fred Seitz joined the Penn Physics Department, teaching the E and M course for juniors and seniors - a wonderful experience for nearly all of us in the class. I guess I sort of imposed on him, but he didn't seem to mind: By the time I got to thinking about graduate school in the autumn of '39, Fred was pretty much my mentor; I shall ever be grateful to him for his guidance and inspiration.

The prospect faced by an aspiring senior-year physics major in 1939-1940 was unrecognizably different from what confronted h' counterparts at any time since the end of World War Two. Take a look at my case: Without money, I could continue in physics only if I had a graduate fellowship or assistantship - for which I applied to about ten universities, including Princeton, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Cal Tech, and Stanford. (I can't recall with certainty whether I applied to Yale and/or Harvard; nor am I sure as to which midwestern institutions I sought help from.) My undergraduate record in physics and mathematics was outstanding, and I have the sense that I received correspondingly strong recommendations. Cal Tech offered me a teaching assistantship for which the tuition fee would be waived, but with no stipend - totally unacceptable by a young pauper, of course. The rejection from Johns Hopkins was accompanied by a wonderful letter from David Inglis, to whom Fred Seitz had introduced me during a visit to Penn by the Hopkins physicist earlier in 1939-40: Professor Inglis promised that if nothing else were offered to me, he would see to it that I would be provided for at Johns Hopkins. By that time, however, I had accepted a jump‑the‑gun almost‑immediate‑response offer from Stanford, which turned out to be fortunate from the standpoint of my immediate objective: Aside from Cal Tech's and, obliquely, Johns Hopkins's there were no other offers of anything from anywhere. Stanford awarded me a teaching assistantship that paid $700 per annum; but the Physics secretary neglected to inform me that my annual (part‑time) tuition bill would be $150 until after I had arrived at the Department. (The duties were so heavy that teaching assistants in physics were not permitted to enroll for a full schedule; I deemed this a benefit, since I couldn't conceivably have afforded the cash cost.) I found excellent room and board in Palo Alto for $35 a month.

Accepting the offer from Stanford was fortunate, I should add, from every conceivable standpoint from which my life that followed might be viewed. How this is so may become somewhat clear in the account that follows.

When I arrived at Stanford in September 1940, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, and France were all under German military rule, and Britain was heroically striving to save itself from the same condition. A military draft law in our country was about to be implemented. Within a few months there became noticeable in the United States a trickle of academic physicists from campus to war‑related employment ‑ a trickle that became an outpour by the middle of 1943.

By December 1941, when our country was blasted into World War Two, Stanford had lost to war jobs about half its senior physics faculty; there was a distinct shortage of graduate courses being taught in the Department as consequence. But Felix Bloch, the Department's theoretical physicist whose only contemporary theory student I became on my arrival at Stanford, did not make his departure until less than a month after I was transformed, on 13 June 1943, into a very weakly educated PhD in physics. (Bloch had at least one other PhD candidate as his student during my time, working with him and Professor Hans Staub on the cyclotron the two men had built ‑ their first significant ion beam having been achieved during summer 1941.)

 Meanwhile, I had been elevated to an instructorship in January 1943, by which time Stanford ‑ with many hundreds of soldiers, all male, on campus for study ‑ was in full session twelve months a year: four academic quarters annually. Every other member of the Physics Department was teaching military personnel, but I was assigned to teach only lecture courses for regular (civilian) Stanford students. I acquired considerable teaching experience in two levels of introductory physics and in what was in those days graduate‑level mathematical physics.

My PhD thesis ‑ the solution of a problem given to me by Professor Bloch ‑ was the determination as a function of polycrystalline scatterer temperature of the elastic and single‑phonon inelastic scattering cross sections of room‑temperature fixed‑energy neutrons. Although I had not come upon the problem on my own, all the work on its solution was entirely mine ‑ but each time I thought I was done with it Bloch seized upon additional features that I must look into. He also produced interesting conceptual interpretations of several of my results where none had occurred to me. The paper presenting the work/results of the thesis, written at Stanford after Bloch had left, was published in the 1st and 15th January 1944 issue of Physical Review as "Inelastic Scattering of Slow Neutrons” ‑ under my name alone: a mark of Felix Bloch's strong sense of fairness.

While on a Philadelphia holiday in December 1942 ‑ after the hard nut of my thesis problem had been cracked ‑ I was invited by Leonard Schiff, then chairman (head?) of the Penn Physics Department, to present a talk on what I had accomplished. I gave the talk a few days later; it was very poorly done ‑ although at the time I failed to realize how poorly.

(The thesis evidently enjoyed a period of nontrivial usefulness; but I was totally unaware of It at the time ‑ for a reason that should emerge in what follows below. In an address before the APS in June 1946, Professor Eugene Wigner cited work done at the wartime Metallurgical Laboratory atChicago: "The work on neutron diffraction received considerable attention [from] Goldberger and Seitz. They interpreted and extended Weinstock's results considerably and took into account phenomena not previously considered. Their work is being continued by Mr. M. Moshinsky in Princeton." (Symmetries and Reflections: Scientific Essays by Eugene P. Wigner, Indiana University Press, 1967; pp. 124‑125.) In 1965‑66 I encountered several solid‑state theorists at Oxford University who in their early years of study had evidently become well acquainted with my 1944 paper based on my thesis. In a 1955 paper describing a neutron‑scattering experiment for which B. N. Brockhouse shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics, Brockhouse and Stewart (Phys. Rev. 10 0 (1955) 756) claim that "the basic theory of inelastic coherent scattering is largely due to Weinstock" ‑ with a reference to my January 1944 paper, from which they reprint two equations arrived at in it.)

Because physics teaching at the time conferred draft‑law immunity, I was able to continue as instructor through the first quarter of 1944, when word began to circulate that such a privilege was soon to end. Just before the second quarter's start in April, a phone call from Felix Bloch ‑ who had first gone to the nuclear‑bomb laboratory at Los Alamos but then moved to the Radio Research Laboratory (RRL) at Harvard near the start of 1944 ‑ suggested that I come to work with him at RRL I jumped at the opportunity and soon found myself comfortably ensconced in Cambridge, MA, in a position largely devoted to the solution of E and M boundary‑value problems. (It wasn't until I had been enrolled at RRL that I was informed of the lab's sole purpose: radar countermeasures ‑ a piece of information that remained officially secret for the war's duration. By April 1944, incidentally, it was no secret that MIT's Radiation Lab was devoted to radar development.)

 As the months passed during my life in Cambridge, the notion gradually enveloped me that I'd not return to physics or academia once the end of the war had put an end to my job at RRL. I had been taken over by an urge to spend my life in an effort to help solve problems of society: social, economic, political ‑ which I had come to consider a far more important activity than solving problems in theoretical physics. In 1945 it was not completely ridiculous for an idealistic 26‑year‑old to suppose that the most likely agency for satisfaction of my urge was the American labor movement. I would therefore start by becoming a "working stiff": i.e., a non‑white‑collar worker.

In January 1946 I came aboard the freighter Elmira Victory, anchored in San Francisco Bay, to serve as a wiper ‑ one of three engine‑room personnel who, without the need of previous training, did little other than clean, paint, and perform other jobs on orders from the First Assistant Engineer. From January into September 1946 I was a wiper on a succession of two merchant ships; these took me twice through the Panama Canal and provided visits to all three World War Two enemy nations: Italy, Germany, and Japan. I experienced what were surely the most fascinating eight months of my life. (I'm convinced, in retrospect, that I was in 1946 the only wiper in the U.S. Merchant Marine with a PhD in physics.)

In September '46 I left my second ship, the Costa Rica Victory, in San Francisco directly after its return from Japan. I planned a three‑week vacation in Palo Alto (staying at the home of a family of friends with whom I had lived from September '42 to April '44) before shipping out again in October. It began on the first of a two‑day registration period at Stanford ‑ in a month during which American college and university enrollments just about doubled by the addition of military veterans supported by the GI Bill. Two days later, for reasons too complicated to relate here, I found myself teaching in the Stanford Mathematics Department ‑ having agreed to help relieve the math-teacher shortage for just one quarter. I planned to ship out in January 1947. As it turned out, I never did try to ship out again.

I taught in the Stanford Mathematics Department through spring quarter 1954. My three major achievements during the eight years were, in chronological order, my marriage in April 1950 to Elizabeth W. Brownell, a Stanford graduate student in mathematics, who is still my wife; publication by McGraw‑Hill in June 1952 of a 326‑page text, Calculus of Variations with Applications to Physics and Engineering, which is still (1997) in print as a Dover paperback; and the birth of Frank, our first child of two, in January 1953.

There were other accomplishments also, but my being awarded tenure in the high‑powered Stanford Mathematics Department was not one of them. Our next five years found us in South Bend, Indiana, where I taught in the Notre Dame Mathematics Department and received tenure after the fourth year. There our second son, Robert, was born in April 1955. In autumn 1958 I was invited to fill a one‑year sabbatical‑replacement slot in mathematics at Oberlin College, for the acceptance of which I sought and received 1959‑60 leave of absence from Notre Dame.

I had had brilliant students at Stanford and ditto at Notre Dame; and, of course, I had several of that impressive ilk the visiting year at Oberlin. What struck me most forcefully, however, was the serious approach to their own education widely evinced by even run‑of‑the‑mill Oberlin students a phenomenon I had not experienced at either Stanford or Notre Dame. As consequence, I soon developed a wish to stay at Oberlin College; but since its Mathematics Department had no opening, I expected to return to my position at Notre Dame in September 1960.

My wish to stay at Oberlin was fulfilled, however, by the retirement in June 1960 of a man who had been in the Physics Department here for decades. At the time, normally qualified candidates for his replacement were in minute supply; and the outstanding person to whom the job was first offered, an Oberlin alumnus, eventually rejected the offer under the influence of his university's appreciable effort to keep him and, as he much later informed me, for more fundamental reasons. Next in line, I joined the Oberlin Physics Department 1 July 1960, having resigned from Notre Dame. It is obvious that returning to physics after fifteen years' absence was something of a gamble for me at age 41, but the switch evidently worked out reasonably well. I was awarded tenure in 1962.

 Until 1965 our Physics Department was severely understaffed, so that some of our teaching assignments were painfully heavy. Mine were so every semester through June 1965. During two of the semesters I presented lectures six hours each week along with active supervision of four three‑hour introductory laboratory sections; normally I handled only three laboratory sections. Much of my time during three of the heavily loaded years was spent in devising new lab experiments and writing sets of instructions for them. Moreover, I discovered that undergraduate physics is, from the conceptual standpoint, somewhere between 10¹⁷ and 10¹⁸ more difficult to teach than undergraduate mathematics. All of the foregoing notwithstanding, I found teaching physics at Oberlin College satisfying despite its consistent occupation of seven days of my normal week during most of my first five years of it. From 1960 through 1965 I attended five annual June national AAPT meetings, presenting uninvited papers at four of them. In the same period I attended at least three joint AAPT/APS January meetings in New York, at which I presented at least three uninvited papers. During the same set of years eight papers, a post‑use book review, and two brief notes of mine appeared in Am J Phys. Except for the summer months, I paid inadequate attention to my family.

My first sabbatical leave, 1965‑66, was subsidized by half salary from Oberlin College and an equal amount from an NSF Faculty Fellowship. I spent the year as a visiting member of the Oxford University Department of Theoretical Physics, where I had intended to study solid‑state theory under the direction of the Department's head, Professor Rudolf Peierls. My year's steady occupation, however, was devoted to the most satisfying piece of work I have ever accomplished: a rigorous derivation of the Maxwell‑ Boltzmann, Bose‑Einstein, and Fermi‑Dirac distribution formulas by means of the fundamental Darwin‑Fowler formulation ‑ but with the sole use of undergraduate‑accessible multivariate calculus and the avoidance of the multivariable analytic‑function theory used by Darwin and Fowler, which I have always found impenetrable. My work was eventually published as "New Approach to Statistical Mechanics" in the August 1967 Am J Phys. Over the years it elicited a total of 201 reprint requests by mail.

I also spent the academic years 1972‑73 and 1976‑77 and the first half of calendar 1981 at Theoretical Physics in Oxford, as well as summers '67, '68, '69 and '70 ‑ always, as in 1965‑66, with the cordial personal and intellectual companionship of several permanent and visiting members of the Department.

My remaining teaching years in the Oberlin Physics Department ‑ whose size had increased from four‑plus to six by 1966 ‑ were accordingly less arduous than my first five. Until 1977 I taught, at various times, every one of the standard undergraduate courses except astronomy, electronics, and nuclear physics; I directed no laboratory beyond the introductory. I continued to attend APS and AAPT meetings, both sectional and national, but not quite as frequently as I had done during 1960‑65. I continued to present uninvited papers at various, but not all, of the meetings I attended.

For a device aimed at keeping in our department an outstanding young physicist/teacher who had been hired as a several‑successive‑year sabbatical replacement, my position was reduced in 1977 to a fraction of full size and my duty became merely the teaching of our year‑long applicable‑mathematics course attended primarily by junior‑year physics majors. (Because of my two‑discipline background I had been teaching this course, with breaks only during my leaves of absence, steadily since 1969.) The device was successful, but about a decade later the superb young man left us for what he considered a more attractive situation.

 In 1983 Oberlin College offered, on an experimental basis, a rather generous early‑retirement plan for faculty members sixty or older. I accepted the proposal, becoming Emeritus Professor at age 64 in 1983, but continued to teach the applicable‑math course while no longer on the payroll. I finally stopped teaching at the end of academic 1989‑1990, closing a career of instructing that began in 1940 and ended fifty years later. Fortunately our Physics Department can spare the space: I still have my office and continue active in it five‑and‑a‑half days a week. At first I missed the teaching but was relieved to be done with it. Seven years later I do not miss it at all.

On coming back to physics in 1960, I readily acknowledged that I would not return to its frontiers, that my professional occupation at this four‑year college would involve little other than the teaching of undergraduates. And so it has been. Yet I've been pleased to discover that it was possible to produce nontrivial by‑products of the teaching that could make their way into print: An appreciable number of published papers, most of them in Am J Phys, have appeared over the years 1961 to 1993. As of early 1997 more, some not yet written, are on their hopeful way to publication. Four of those already published are included in the two Am J Phys "memorable papers" lists (March 1991 and February 1993); their publication dates are October 1961, December 1969, July 1982, and July 1992.

Around 1978 my professional career took an unexpected veer not long after I had submitted to Am J Phys, jointly with low‑temperature theorist James C. Rainwater, an unusual geometry‑based solution of the inverse‑square orbit problem. When a referee declared that our geometric approach had already been used in Newton's Principia, a mere glance at appropriate portions of the treatise expectedly revealed in them no resemblance to our approach. And then a careful examination of the Principia's argument eventually convinced me that what had long been acclaimed as a proof that inverse‑square force implies conic‑section orbit is no proof at all, not even an outline of one. (The Rainwater‑Weinstock proof, incidentally, was eventually published in the March 1979 Am J Phys.  And another proof that I discovered in early 1991 can be found in the July 1992 Am J Phys.)

Since 1979 an appreciable number of physicists and mathematicians to whom the case has been presented have expressed agreement that the Principia's purported proof rests on an invalid argument. But there are several quite eminent historians of science, a small number of physicists, and a mathematician who have published what they offer as support of Newton's argument. It is easy to pinpoint the fallacies employed by all but the mathematician; his argument is cogent, but it is his own, not Newton's. It uses ingredients found in Newton's purported proof, but no logical equivalent of it resides in the Principia. My first paper on the subject is in the July 1982 Am J Phys; there are several later publications in which I respond to various of the published defenses of the Principia's argument.

I have not studied anywhere near the entire Principia, but have from time to time been led to examine various portions of it ‑ most often by scholars who seek help with particular sections and/or opinions thereof, sometimes by references I've encountered, and twice by my skepticism on being informed of specific Principia achievements that I found doubtful. These examinations have resulted in several critical essays: a few already published and two awaiting editors' publication decisions.

My latest multipage activity ‑ prior to this piece of self‑advertisement ‑ is an analysis of a March 1964 lecture to Caltech students in which the late Professor Richard Feynman presented what he claimed to be a calculus‑free proof of Kepler's first law: Planetary orbits about the Sun under inverse‑square gravity must be ellipses. An expanded reader‑friendly version of the lecture in the book Feynman's Lost Lecture by Goodstein and Goodstein, who present with it Feynman's lecture verbatim, is available to readers of English. My analysis firmly supports the conclusion that Feynman's Lost Lecture does not present a proof that closed orbits under an inverse‑square attraction are ellipses, although it claims to do so. I hope that a report of this conclusion will soon reach the pages of The Physics Teacher. Meanwhile I have sent copies of it to Goodstein and Goodstein.

So there it is: a response to Professor Heiney's request: "We would like to know what you have been doing since you left Penn .... Letters or extended essays will be appreciated and read attentively...." ‑ considerably farther extended than any essay he expected to receive. It does not, however, even touch the purpose of his request; nothing I could write "could really aid present and future physics or astronomy majors" ‑ except perhaps the advice that resides in a letter of mine published in Science about a year ago:

.... About half a century ago there had for at least a decade been in place, as described below, a self ‑regulating system for producing Ph.D.'s in science that required no selection process and no rationing; and in light of external circumstances, that is, the job market, it was successful.  I am convinced that a like system would be successful in our time and beyond.

A single addition to the present mode of producing Ph.D.'s in science should be sufficient to reestablish the old system's essential equivalent: Every student embarking on a scientific education must be made unequivocally aware that there is no guarantee of employment in a field of one's choice as consequence of one's studies ‑ not even, with a Ph.D. Let each become imbued with the spirit of the following injunction: "Study this field because you love it. If eventually you are sustained by a career in it, so much the better; if not, the career's failure to materialize must neither surprise nor bruise you. Bear no resentment, but cherish the experience and insight your education will have brought you."

In the late 1930s, physics majors knew of no guarantees of eventual employment in physics. Nor was a particular group of graduate students surprised in 1941 on being informed by its department chair that "this is a physics department, not an employment agency."

Research professors must be ‑ compelled to be, if necessary ‑ persistently frank with their students with regard to career prospects. What has evidently long been a practice of sustaining unjustifiedly sanguine future‑career illusions in graduate science departments must be halted. Establishment of a rigorous "no‑career‑guaranteed" understanding within each graduate science department would likely entail (i) a reduced, if not eliminated, production of many more Ph.D.'s than the market can bear; (ii) a greater proportion of Ph.D. candidates who are in the pursuit for the love of it; and (iii) a lowering of the number of bruised, resentful science Ph.D.'s among those who are obliged to seek employment outside their fields of preference.

Robert Weinstock
Emeritus Professor, Department of Physics
Oberlin College
Oberlin, OH 44074, US

SCIENCE  -  VOL. 270  -  8 DECEMBER 1995