My blog about my Dad’s work with Oppenheimer and the new movie | Hacker News Reader

My blog about my Dad’s work with Oppenheimer and the new movie

markwatson.com

41 pointsmark_l_watson18 comments

Am I missing something? Are there details or is that all there is?

Yes, it seems to be just a simple anecdote.

I think the author's father is this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_M._Watson

Sounds likely but I also don't get the subheadline "Oppenheimer and Edward Teller hired my Dad at the Berkeley Physics Department."

The elder Watson could have met Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1947-48 when a fellow there. But Oppenheimer was long gone from Berkeley when Watson became a faculty member in 1957.

Anyway, this comment is almost longer than the article so I'll stop here.

I will be staying with my Dad next week, so I can ask him more details. My understanding from my Dad was that both Oppenheimer and Teller facilitated my Dad getting the job at Berkeley.

I can understand that a recommendation from either or both would have been taken very seriously by Berkeley. Teller was certainly on the roster at the time while getting Livermore going. Your wording made it seem like Oppenheimer was "on prem".

I knew Teller late in his life (80s+). Mans had stage presence.

Title Said it All.

I just wrote that blog because I liked the story my Dad told me right before my wife and I went to see the movie. As people here have said, no big deal.

EDIT: my Dad’s girlfriend has asked me to write a biography on my Dad, but I have resisted that. So many of his stories about his life and people he has worked with seem personal and private to me.

Did your father overlap with Freeman Dyson who was at the IAS around the same time (1948)? Or perhaps through JASON?[0]

If so, did he attend the Dyson lecture series on QED?

I hope that would be a sufficiently professional topic to be able to relay here. According to Dyson, he gave five lectures in all and Oppenheimer fought him beak and claw until he (Oppenheimer) had to concede.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn0XpyR_sLg&list=PLVV0r6CmEs... et.seq.

Small world; it seems like Mark's Dad worked with Charles Townes, inventor of the maser.

I got to meet Dr. Demitrios Matsakis last year. He also worked with Townes and was the US Naval Observatory's Head of Time Services, helping advance the state of the art in time synchronization during his tenure.

It seems like there's a generation slowly fading away who have stories of a different era, where massive new achievements in physics and earth sciences came year after year. It doesn't feel as frequent these days, but maybe that's due to living in the now, where history hasn't yet judged what were great or mediocre discoveries?

It's also that those discoveries brought turning-points in what we traditionally see as history (wars, epidemics, etc). Inventing CPUs, RAM, hard-disks, and spreadsheets, has probably been as influential, on human development, as inventing a couple of terrifying weapons; but they came staggered, as progressive refinements rather than "aha" moments, and they altered our parable in the background as a slow burn, rather than in a big flash...

I remember Charles Townes. My Dad thought very highly of him: he was wildly creative in what he built, and also things he just thought of building. Many decades ago when my older brother graduated from optometry school, my brother was unhappy to hear my Dad talking effusively about an idea Townes had for building a vending machine like device to produce both eye prescriptions and glasses.

I attended an undergraduate seminar by Charles Townes sometime around 1999-2000 at UC Berkeley, on laser interferometry, and it was the first time I heard about LIGO. It set a little seed in my mind, so that when my future PhD advisor walked into the classroom where I was teaching undergraduate lab at University of Rochester and asked whether I'd like to work on LIGO -- I agreed immediately.

Los Alamos, not Las. (I grew up there myself, 1st grade on)

Thanks, I just corrected that.

Have you verified your dad actually met him? He is 102 so could be confused, im sure you would have known about this years ago if it happened.

Doesn’t seem unlikely at all based on his dad’s career/bio (see the Wikipedia page posted elsewhere in this thread).

I have a hypothesis that 1/8 of fatherhood is treating the most interesting things about your life like a FOIA request is needed to get you to tell them.

My Dad may be almost 102, but let me assure you he is not confused. Also, Edward Teller was a good friend of my Dad and I remember him well.

My Dad worked with and knew many famous people like John von Neumann, Einstein, etc., so this anecdote was just another experience for him.

EDIT: I was saying that he was not confused about this story. I notice that my Dad is no longer as facile using computers. For years his hobby was writing screenplays, adding 3D animation, video segments of friends and family, and he had us all help with voices. He has mostly stopped doing that in the last year of two. I am not judging him at all: I am only in my 70s and I do much less technical work than I used to. My Dad has a saying: getting old sucks, but it beats the alternative.

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