Life in Physics

(as told by Vernon Work Myers)

It was sort of by chance that I got into physics.    Geneva College was close to where I lived so that’s where I went as an undergraduate.  I took a physics course and worked as a lab assistant in the physics lab.  I got paid a $1 an hour.  $1 an hour was considered not bad in those times.   When I was a freshman or sophomore at Geneva College, I was in a mob scene in the play Enemy of the People.    That was the only dramatic thing I’ve ever done.  I didn’t play a big role.

After I graduated from Geneva College, I went to Syracuse University in 1940 for two years to get a master’s degree.  My tuition was covered but I had to teach laboratory science.  I was paid $60 a month for 10 months or $600 a year.  Classes weren’t that long.  I would grade papers and work in the laboratory.  Syracuse was very nice until Thanksgiving and then a big snow came.  I remember I didn’t have the right kind of boots for it.  At Syracuse, I went out with an undergraduate named Eleanor Love.  She lived in New Castle and knew how to fly a plane.  Unfortunately her father embezzled money.  He was sent to prison.

Syracuse didn’t offer a doctorate so then I went to Yale.   I think Cornell was my first choice but I ended up going to Yale.  My professor Henry Margenau showed me a letter that he had written to Albert Einstein.  It was a beautiful letter that was in the old German script.  I couldn’t read it but it looked beautiful.  Einstein never liked quantum mechanics.  He thought something else would be developed that would go back to all classical physics but no one’s found a way of doing that.  I studied quantum mechanics at Yale.   I graduated in 1947 when I was 28.

But people don’t understand.  They think you must be rich to go to such a school.

ELIZABETH PERKINS BUCHHEIT:  Remember when you got that letter from Yale saying, Vernon, we’d like to have a donation of about $10,000 from you?

VERNON WORK MYERS:  It should’ve been sent to the Bush family.

During the war, I worked in the Naval research laboratory.   There were all kinds of laboratories in Washington that were controlled by the Navy at that time.  Two afternoons a week we did drilling and marching and that kind of thing.  From 1947 to 1948 I worked in Argonne Laboratory in Chicago and then I taught at Penn State for 15 years.  I also spent a year at the Brookhaven Lab on Long Island.  Then I look a job with the government in the Bureau of Standards