The Life and Times of a Dissident Scientist

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Solar Phys (2017) 292:147
DOI 10.1007/s11207-017-1156-6
MEMOIRS
The Life and Times of a Dissident Scientist
Peter Andrew Sturrock1
Received: 23 February 2017 / Accepted: 7 August 2017
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017
1. Early Days
The first home that I remember (I was born in 1924) was in a small quasi-village called
South Stifford, near the town of Grays, which is about twenty miles east of London on the
north bank of the river Thames. South Stifford was too small to be a town, and it did not have
the cohesion and sense of identity to be a village, so I have to invent the term “quasi-village”
to characterize it. Located on the Thames, not too far from London, it was a very industrial
area producing basic commodities such as cement, lumber, and margarine. That had proved
fortunate during the depression when there were jobs to be had in and near South Stifford
when jobs were scarce in London and other parts (especially northern parts) of the country.
By contrast, North Stifford – about two miles away – was a genuine village with an
old village church, an ancient road called “Pilgrims’ Way” that dated back a few centuries,
and a village green. The Stifford School, which I attended from age four to age eleven
(see Figure 1), was half-way between North Stifford and South Stifford. Like most of the
children, I walked to school and back twice a day, since we all went home for the mid-day
meal, which was called “dinner.” That was the substantial, meat-and-potatoes, meal of the
day, whereas the evening meal, called “tea,” comprised cold meats, cheese, and maybe a
salad. As best I can recall, no one got obese on that diet.
I always had an inclination toward mechanical objects. My favorite pastime was building
little machines with wheels and pulleys, etc., with Meccano. We had an old alarm clock that
was no longer used, and I asked permission to take it to pieces. Permission was granted.
I am not sure to what extent I actually deconstructed it, but I was able to put it back together
again. Whether it kept time afterward, I do not recall. Another favorite toy was a model
airplane – the kind with an elastic motor, designed in such way that the wings would detach
on impact, rather than break.
BP.A. Sturrock
sturrock@stanford.edu
1Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and the Center for Space Science and
Astrophysics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4060, USA

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Figure 1 A school photograph,
about 1930.
Today, in the United States, I might be regarded as introverted, but I just did not seem
to need much company. However, I did like to be with my next-oldest brother Malcolm,
so much so that he eventually told me to stop following him around. I was part of a happy
family (I had two brothers and a sister, all older than me), and I had friends among the boys
in the neighborhood. Three or more of us might play a rudimentary game of football or
cricket on the street (luckily it was a cul de sac, and no one on the street owned a car).
Until I was two-and-a-half years old, I did not speak a word. My mother’s father warned
her that I might not be quite normal, but she dismissed the idea. Eventually, I spoke one
word, and then more, but words would come slowly, not quickly. I am still trying to learn to
make small talk. A speech impediment that began at age ten contributed to my tendency to
live as a loner.
At that time, children began school at age four. Since my birthday is in March and the
school year begins in September, I would have been four and a half when I went to my first
class. I came home very angry at my mother: some of the other children had already been
taught the alphabet at home, but I had not. My mother promptly solved that problem. Every
child attended “elementary school” from age four to fourteen. My brothers and my sister all
left school at fourteen, as had my father. My mother was taken out of school at age twelve
and sent into “service,” that is, she became a live-in servant to a middle-class family.
There were two high schools in Grays, the town nearest to South Stifford, one for boys
(named Palmer’s Endowed School) and one for girls. Some of the boys lived at the school,

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but most were day-students. One could attend the school for a fee, but most boys attended
by virtue of scholarships. To get a scholarship, one had to take and pass an examination at
age ten, so that one could enter the high school at age eleven. I began to study hard at age
nine to get ready for the entrance examination, but I contracted a rheumatic illness in that
period, which kept me out of school. Luckily, our wise old doctor (Dr. Murray, a Scotsman
who spoke with a burr) understood my distress, and recommended that my family arrange
to have schoolwork sent home to me so that I could continue my studies. That worked well,
and I was able to pass the scholarship exam and move to the high school (which was within
bicycling distance) at age eleven.
My parents were not religious: if pressed to state a religion for some official document,
they would have said “Church of England,” which was pretty close to disclaiming any reli-
gion. I once asked my mother about Jesus Christ and she replied, “I believe he was a very
good man, but I don’t believe he was supernatural.” Some time before I moved into Palmer’s
School, my parents felt an obligation to expose me to religion, so that I had the choice of
becoming religious – or not. I was asked to go to the neighborhood Sunday School. One
Sunday I obediently went to the local church, which looked more like a Nissen hut than a
church: it was built from corrugated iron, it was painted red, and its furnishings were dark
and smelled musty. My experience was one of depressing music and the rote repetition of
what I would now call mumbo jumbo. My parents did not ask me to give it a second chance.
When I had made the transition to Palmer’s School, I found that some of the boys be-
longed to a boy scout program and seemed to like it, so I decided to try it. All went well until
at one of the scout meetings, the scout master (who was also the curate at a local church)
remarked, “I did not see you at church last Sunday.” I still had vivid enough recollections of
Sunday School that I had no intention of repeating the experience. So ended early attempts
to get me interested in religion.
Although I had been the brightest student in the primary school in Stifford, I was just
another student at Palmer’s. There were three levels for each “form” or class – A, B, and C.
Greatly to my chagrin, I was assigned to the B level. However, I was promoted to the A level
the next year. Maybe the new school had to get to know the incoming students, just as the
students had to get to know their new teachers.
I had a truly exciting experience at age 14, when I achieved my first publication. My
hobby was building and playing with radios (called “wireless sets” at that time in England),
and I had a collection of vacuum tubes (called “valves”), etc., to use in assembling a radio.
I also had a voltmeter, but it was not a very good meter. I found that I did not get the same
measurement when I changed from one voltage range to another. In measuring a voltage,
I might get a reading of 60 Volts when I used the 0 – 100 Volt range, but 70 Volts if I used
the 0 – 200 Volt range. I wondered if I could combine the two measurements in such a way
as to infer the actual voltage. I found that I could. I arrived at the formula
V=R1−R2
(R1/V1)−(R2/V2),
where V1is the voltage reading when using range R1and V2is the voltage reading when
using range R2. For instance, for the measurements just mentioned, I would have found that
the actual voltage was 84 Volts. I submitted this little calculation to Wireless World, the radio
magazine that I purchased every week. It was accepted and I received the grand payment of
five shillings (worth about 50 dollars today).
Although I did well in the scientific subjects, I did not do so well in history and geography
and languages, which depended more on memory than on insight. I did particularly badly
at Latin, which I disliked mainly because the teacher was a mean man. I got an F in Latin

147 Page 4 of 40 P.A. Sturrock
at the end of my Latin studies, and that caused an unfortunate problem. A year later, when
I was seventeen years old, I was awarded scholarships that made it possible for me to go to
Cambridge University (one scholarship worth £100 a year from the State, and another for the
same amount from the County). All was set for me to move to Cambridge in October 1941,
until someone discovered that I had failed the Latin examination. (It was then necessary to
be proficient in either Latin or Greek to enter either Cambridge or Oxford.) As a result, I
spent three months studying nothing but Latin, and then took a special Latin examination
– called the “Little-Go” – in December. I did well enough to be allowed to enter St. John’s
College in January 1942.
Although I had become a star student in my high-school, I soon found I was regarded as
just an average student at St. John’s. I also found that the class distinctions were much more
pronounced at Cambridge University than they had been in Grays. At Palmer’s school, all of
the boys had been from middle-class or working-class families, so it had been no handicap
to have come from a working-class home. At Cambridge, however, it was rather different;
only a small fraction of the students were from working-class families, most were from
middle-class families, and some were from very upper-class families. Students who came
from Yorkshire or Scotland might make it a badge of honor to keep their original accents,
but a cockney-like accent (such as I grew up with) was hardly a badge of honor. On the other
hand, it would not do to return home on vacations and start talking like a BBC announcer.
Someone would have said, “Ooh! Listen to Alvar Liddell!” So the transition from Grays to
Cambridge was not an easy one.
Fortunately, what counts most at a university is how one performs in examinations. I
studied mathematics and, at the end of my first year, I got a “First” in Part 1 of what was
impressively entitled “The Mathematical Tripos.” [I was told that the word “tripos” origi-
nally referred to the three-legged stool on which a student would sit during classes. The term
“chair,” as in “Chair of Mathematics,” originally referred to the fact that the teacher actually
had a chair to sit on.]
During my second year at Cambridge, each (male) student was interviewed by one com-
mittee or another to determine his role in the war effort. I was interviewed by a committee
led (as I recall) by C.P. Snow, who would later become famous for his essay on The Two Cul-
tures. (This was the theme of his 1959 Rede Lectures.) I was assigned to join the Telecom-
munications Research Establishment (TRE, now known as the “Radar Research Establish-
ment”). I therefore spent the next three years (1943 – 1946) in a delightful little town called
Malvern in Worcestershire in the western part of England. (For a group photograph, see Fig-
ure 2.) Oddly enough, TRE was never targeted by German bombers. My role was to help
develop radar – then known in Great Britain by the more cumbersome term “radiolocation.”
We had to work in collaboration with RAF (Royal Air Force) crew, who would test the
equipment we were designing. The airmen treated us with amused tolerance, and called us
“boffins.” The boffins, in return, referred to the fliers as the “Brylcreem Boys.” During my
time at TRE, I got to know Francis Graham-Smith, Anthony (Tony) Hewish, and Martin
Ryle, who would become leaders in the new field of radio astronomy after the war.
The success of radar (and, later, of the atomic bomb) greatly elevated the status and
perception of science and scientists in Britain and in the United States. Maxwell’s equations
were the basis of radar operation, and were unquestionably trustworthy. My assignment was
to a division responsible for countermeasures – how to counter German radar operations.
Within the division, I was assigned to a group responsible for providing fighter aircraft with
a direction-finding capability. It was a very simple system (code-named Abdulla – which
was the name of an expensive brand of cigarette). The aircraft had two antennas, one on
each wing, that emphasized signals coming from the left or from the right. The receiver

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Figure 2 Group photograph taken at TRE (the Telecommunications Research Establishment) in 1945. From
the top, right corner, I am seven places in, with my right arm pointing to my left. My friend John Newton
(now professor at the Australian National University) is three places in, with an open-neck shirt. Martin Ryle,
later professor at Cambridge and a leading British radio astronomer, is second from the left in the front, center
group of six men.
sampled the antennas alternately, with a longer sampling of the left than the right. Hence if
the pilot heard a series of dashes, he would know the target was to his left, and if he heard a
series of dots, he would know it was to his right. The plan was to use this system in the days
leading up to the invasion of France, with the goal of putting the German radar stations out
of action. However, events did not quite work out that way. The Germans rarely turned on
their radar stations, and then only briefly. Many of the German radar stations were destroyed
by fighter aircraft – but with minimal help from Abdulla.
In retrospect, my three years at TRE were an introduction to what I would later call
“applied physics.” It gave me some useful insight into the practical applications of physics.
Being away from the lecture-room also broadened my intellectual interests. I enjoyed read-
ing poems and attempted to compose one or two. One was a parody of Shakespeare’s famous
18th sonnet: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? etc. My version inevitably began Shall
I compare thee to a winter’s night? I of course assumed that this poem had been written by
a romantic young man from Stratford-on-Avon to a beautiful young lady. It was many years
later (as I discuss in Section 9) that I learned better.
I was happy and excited to return to Cambridge in September 1946, when I received
my MA degree (Figure 3). I had made a number of good friends in Malvern, and several
returned to Cambridge with me; among them was the nuclear physicist John Newton, who
later became Professor of Physics at the Australian National University. My tennis had im-
proved considerably and I was chosen to play for the College (but not for the University),
and I took great pleasure in Scottish dancing. I was more mature, less introverted, and led a
more balanced life. Hence, for various reasons, my three years at TRE proved to be highly
advantageous for my social development as well as for my intellectual development. On
my return to Cambridge, my studies went well, and I had no difficulty in obtaining a First

147 Page 6 of 40 P.A. Sturrock
Figure 3 Receiving my MA
(Master of Arts) degree in 1947.
in the third-and-final-year examination. (A curiosity of Cambridge is that a student who is
awarded a First in the “Mathematical Tripos” is called a “wrangler.”) There was an optional
“Part III” of the Tripos, which I took from 1947 to 1948. I used that opportunity to broaden
my knowledge of physics. It was a pleasure to sit through lectures on quantum mechanics
àlaPaul Dirac. They were not actually given by Dirac that year, which may have been a
good thing, since he was not a good lecturer. It strikes me as curious that there were three
professors at Cambridge who were brilliant scholars and scientists and wrote beautifully –
but were dismal lecturers. They were Dirac, Harold (Sir Harold) Jeffreys, and Arthur (Sir
Arthur) Eddington. (Dirac – modesty itself – had declined the offer of a knighthood.)
During the year that I studied for Part III (in September 1947), I had a very disturbing
experience. On a particularly warm and sunny day, I had cycled out to the Gog Magog Hills
near Cambridge. For better or for worse (or perhaps a combination of the two), I saw a small,
bright circular disk, about one tenth the size of the moon, which moved from north to south,
horizon to horizon, in about one minute. It was a shock to realize that I might have seen a
flying saucer! Of course, I could not possibly mention the experience to any of my fellow
students. I would never have heard the last of it. This event and its aftermath are described
in my book A Tale of Two Sciences (Sturrock, 2009).
2. Electron Optics
After completing Part III of the Mathematical Tripos in 1948, I remained in Cambridge and
began research for a PhD degree. In retrospect, I should have given long and serious thought
to the topic of that research, but I did not. I had spent the summer of 1947 on a temporary
appointment back at TRE, where I was assigned to assist a physicist (Dr. Cavanagh) in his

The Life and Times of a Dissident Scientist Page 7 of 40 147
Figure 4 A group photograph taken at the Associated Electrical Industries Laboratory in Newbury in 1948.
The leader was Michael Haine, on the right, smoking a pipe. I am in the middle, toward the rear.
design and construction of a mass spectrometer. I was asked to design and build a stable
power supply, which I did. However, I became intrigued in the focusing properties of the
instrument, and this led me to acquire a general interest in electron optics.
I already had a strong interest in the elegant techniques of the classical theory of particle
dynamics that had been developed by Sir William Rowan Hamilton. Hamilton was born and
lived in Ireland, but came from a Scottish family. As I recall, this led the Scottish scientist
Peter G. Tait to write, in a biography of Hamilton, “The fact that Hamilton was born and
raised in Ireland has given the impression that he was Irish whereas he was in fact Scottish.” I
sensed that the use of Hamiltonian techniques would provide a powerful approach to electron
optics, which it did.
There was at that time a program of research concerning the electron microscope at
the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, under the direction of Dr. Vernon Ellis Cosslett.
I arranged to meet Cosslett in 1948 and found him to be a warm and supportive person.
I proposed electron optics as a topic for a PhD dissertation without giving the matter the
careful consideration that such an important decision deserves. Cosslett was supportive of
this suggestion, and agreed to be my supervisor. Since I had a very clear idea of what I
wanted to do, I never consulted him and never asked him for advice, but I would drop into
his laboratory from time to time to show him the results of my latest calculation. He was
always interested in and unfailingly supportive of my research.
I spent the summer of 1948 working at the Associated Electrical Industries (AEI) Lab-
oratory in Aldermaston, Oxfordshire. (A group photograph is shown in Figure 4.) AEI was
a manufacturer of electron microscopes and had a team, led by Dr. Michael Haine, working

147 Page 8 of 40 P.A. Sturrock
on the design of those instruments. There were two types of electron microscopes that used
either an electric field or a magnetic field as a lens to focus the electron beam. The AEI
version used a magnetic field that was produced by an iron pole-piece.
In order to produce good images, it was essential that the magnetic field should be as
close to cylindrically symmetric as possible. (In practice, of course, it is impossible to con-
struct lenses that have perfect symmetry.) The performance of the microscope is limited by
the degree to which the actual construction departs from perfect cylindrical symmetry, and
Haine asked me to examine this problem. It was necessary to classify possible departures
from perfect symmetry, and then calculate the effect that each departure would have on the
final image produced by the microscope. I was able to solve that problem during my time at
AEI, so I made an early start on my PhD project.
My first attendance at a scientific conference was one on Electron Microscopy, held in
Delft, The Netherlands, in 1949, where I presented an early version of my theory of magnetic
lens design. (This was my first time away from England, and I found that one could get much
better meals in other countries than in England.) My presentation was very mathematical,
so much so that the next speaker said, “Now that we have finished with the highbrow stuff,
we can get back to business!” My theory of magnetic lenses, as it had been developed at
that time, was published in the proceedings of that conference. During that year, I also
published an article on the theory of beta-ray spectrometers (Sturrock, 1950). My analysis
of the magnetic-lens problem was subsequently published in the Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society (Sturrock, 1951a).
During the year 1948 –1949, I wote a long essay on Hamiltonian Electron Optics,which
I submitted to the University for the annual competition for the Smith and Rayleigh Prizes.
Each year, the University awards just two Smith Prizes (the more prestigious) and an arbi-
trary number of Rayleigh Prizes. The examiners decided that there were six essays that were
of Smith Prize caliber, but they could award only two of those prizes, so they chose for this
distinction the first two in alphabetical order. Since my name comes late in that sequence, I
had to settle for a Rayleigh Prize. Soon after that award, I visited Professor Werner Ehren-
berg at Birkbeck College in London. I showed him my essay, and he commented, “Well, now
you have written your PhD dissertation, what are you going to do for the next two years?”
I had followed the publications by Ehrenberg and his colleagues, and taken a particular
interest in an article by Ehrenberg and his colleague Rory E. Siday, then at Edinburgh Uni-
versity (Ehrenberg and Siday, 1949). The article was rather academic, but I was fascinated
by one of their conclusions. They pointed out that if an electron beam were to be split into
two parts, and the parts went around a magnetic flux tube before recombining, then, even if
the electron beam were traveling in a region free from magnetic field, there would be a fringe
shift by an amount determined by the amount of magnetic flux. This struck me as really in-
teresting since one normally thinks of a vector potential simply as an artifact introduced for
mathematical convenience, but without any intrinsic physical significance. I discussed this
article and the vector potential proposal with some physicists in Cambridge (and, later, at
Stanford). No one that I talked to could see anything wrong with the argument, but no one
seemed to think it particularly significant.
That all changed in 1959, when Yakir Aharanov and David Bohm published a short
article in Physical Review Letters (Aharanov and Bohm, 1959). Their article had exactly
the same discussion of the physical significance of the vector potential – the same sketch,
the same formula, and the same numerical value. But it got tremendous attention, as a re-
sult of which what should be known as The Ehrenberg–Siday Effect is now known as The
Aharanov–Bohm Effect. Timothy Groves and I have since urged physicists to recognize
Ehrenberg’s and Siday’s priority, but to no avail (Sturrock and Groves, 2010). A new result

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Figure 5 A party photograph
taken in 1949, my last year as a
student in Cambridge. My
companion is Allan Cormack,
who received the 1979 Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine
for an invention that led to X-ray
computed tomography.
by a professor best known for his work in electron optics, and his young colleague, was
neither interesting nor important. The same result by a well-known physics professor and
his young colleague was highly interesting and hugely important. The difference was more
a matter of sociology than of physics.
Like most scientists at that stage in their careers, I was interested in spending a year (or
more) in the United States, and I applied for a Fulbright Fellowship for that purpose. How-
ever, I did not have a well-thought-out plan to present, partly because there was no research
in electron optics going on at any major United States university. I discussed my interest in
spending a year in the United States with Professor Douglas Hartree in the Cavendish Lab-
oratory. He advised me to choose a university on the West Coast, rather than the East Coast,
and specifically recommended my going either to the University of California at Berkeley
or to Stanford University. However, I was not offered a Fulbright Fellowship. If I had been
and if I had followed Hartree’s advice, I might have come to Stanford several years earlier
than in fact I did.
During my time at the AEI laboratory at Aldermaston, I had met Dr. Ladislaw (Bill)
Marton, who had recently left Stanford University to set up an electron microscopy group
at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC. Learning that my application for a
Fulbright Fellowship had been turned down, Marton invited me to spend a year working in
his group. I then had a number of American friends at Cambridge, and they encouraged me
to accept this offer. But those were tense times, and one of my English friends cheerfully
pointed out that if World War Three were to break out, Washington would be one of the first
cities to be incinerated!
However, I was also interested in the idea of spending a year in France. During my years
as a student at Cambridge, I made friends with a number of students at Newnham and Girton
(which were then the only womens’ colleges at Cambridge). The academic year always ends
with a big party that is held in June, but is known as the “May Ball.” My partner in the 1948
ball was Margaret Bowen of Girton, daughter of the famous chemist E.J. (Edmund John)
Bowen. My partner in the 1949 ball was Jeanine Métier of Newnham. One of the men in the
1949 party was John Newton, my old friend from TRE days. Another was Allan Cormack
(my companion in Figure 5), a South African who subsequently received the 1979 Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine for an invention that led to X-ray computed tomography.
It was probably my friendship with Jeanine that got me interested in the idea of spending
time in France. So, in addition to applying for a Fulbright Fellowship, I also applied for a
fellowship offered by the CNRS (Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique), with the

147 Page 10 of 40 P.A. Sturrock
idea of studying at the laboratory of Professor Pierre Grivet at the École Normale Supérieure
in Paris. Jeanine was a student of both English and French poetry, and she once composed
a French version of the Shakespeare poem “Oh mistress mine...” that began “Où cours-
tu, Maîtresse jolie...?” They were the days when I thought that the plays and poems of
“Shakespeare” had been written by a shrewd entrepreneur and moneylender from Stratford-
upon-Avon. It was many years before I learned better, but at least I did learn, whereas most
English Scholars have not.
I was placed on the short list for the CNRS Fellowship, and in due course, I was inter-
viewed by a panel of ten or twelve scientists. All went well until, suddenly, one of the panel
members asked me a question in French! I did not understand the question at all, but my
French was good enough that I could say, “Pardon monsieur, mais je n’avais pas tout à fait
compris ce que vous avez demandé. Voulez vous le repeter, s’il vous plait? Peut-être un peu
plus lentement ?” (“Pardon me, sir, but I regret that I do not fully understand your question.
Would you be so kind as to repeat it, perhaps little more slowly?”) He repeated his question
– but not more slowly, and not more understandably, and I again did not have a clue what he
was asking. However, I could not go on asking him to repeat his question, and I realized that
what mattered was not to answer any particular question, but to show that I had an interest
and some competence in speaking French. So I responded with a long statement in French
about the French scientists whom I had met, what they were doing, how much I admired
their work, and what a privilege it would be to work with them. My gambit worked: there
were no more questions in French.
I was subsequently offered a CNRS fellowship – but not in 1949. Some other applicant
edged me out that year, but (as I discuss later) I was offered a CNRS fellowship in 1950.
In November 1949, I left Cambridge for Washington DC. My student days in Cambridge
had come to an end. I was required to spend three years in preparation for a PhD, but I
was required to spend only one of those years in Cambridge. I had spent the first year in
Cambridge. I would spend the second year in Washington, and the third in Paris.
I faced the problem of getting myself to Washington when I had no money in the bank.
Fortunately, one or two businessmen in Grays learned of my problem and came up with a
solution. The Grays Rotary Club generously presented me with a check to pay for my travel
by ship to New York and then by train to Washington. I was very grateful.
I had three cabin mates on the ship. They were all American, and they liked to tease
me about my accent. It was interesting to note the differences between English speech and
American speech. The American version was typically more colorful and more forceful.
When an Englishman might say “I think I’ll turn in,” an American might say “I am going to
hit the sack!” There were two dinner seatings, one at six pm and the other at eight pm, and
I asked to be seated at six pm, but the head waiter would not hear of it: “Oh, no,” he said,
“You must have dinner at eight pm with the young people.” The “young people” were very
cheerful and fun loving. That is when I first heard “I’ve been working on the railroad,” and
other camp-fire songs.
On arrival in New York, by arrangements kindly made by the English Speaking Union, I
was able to stay at the home of a well-to-do elderly couple who had an apartment on Fifth
Avenue. It was not exactly on Fifth Avenue (the entry was actually on a cross street) but it
was close enough that it was apparently OK to use that as the address. The apartment had a
view of Central Park but, unfortuntely for my hosts, a taller building was being constructed
in the next block. My hosts were not happy at that development.
I had planned to spend a week in New York, but after two days, there was a phone
call from Bill Marton, who asked me to come to Washington right away to meet Simon
Lachenbruch, one of his employees, who was about to leave. Although I saw no point in

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going to meet Lachenbruch, since I knew what I planned to work on, I had no choice but to
acquiesce.
As I had planned, I continued my work on the aberrations of magnetic lenses due to
asymmetries, which was subsequently published in The Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society (Sturrock, 1951a). Mrs Marton thought that was too obscure a journal to use,
and referred to it as Enterrement de Première Classe (A First Class Burial). However, that
proved not to be correct; it was beautifully printed and widely cited, and – most important
of all – it had a first-class referee. All of the articles that I submitted to the Royal Society
were (I later learned) reviewed by Dennis Gabor. (He once complained to me, in a humorous
way, that I had given him a lot of work to do.) Gabor paid great attention to detail and his
recommendations always led to improvements in the articles. If only I could have been so
lucky with all of the articles I have submitted to scientific journals!
I remember one educational exchange during my time in the United States. I was visiting
Dr. James Hillier, who was in charge of the electron microscopy development program at the
RCA laboratory in upstate New York. I spent some time in explaining the fascinating calcu-
lations I was carrying out. When I had finished, I was taken aback when he asked “What are
your conclusions?” I was so intrigued with the mathematical methods I had developed that
I had given no thought whatever to the implications of my calculations. (Any implications
were probably insignificant.) I learned that, when starting a new calculation, it is good to
have a goal in mind.
My first marriage took place in June of 1950 to a young lady (Betty Murray) whom I had
met soon after I arrived in Washington. I had arrived as a cheerful single man, but I left in
September as a not-quite-so-cheerful married man.
I had a pleasant surprise in the spring of 1950, when I received a letter from the Centre
Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, offering me the fellowship for which I had applied
in 1948. I was happy to accept, and I moved from Washington to Paris in September to join
the research staff of Professor Pierre Grivet of the École Normale Superieure. His laboratory
was in the rue Lhomond in the Fifth Arondissement (on the Left Bank). There was a tennis
court on the roof of the building where I would sometimes play at midday. I rented an
apartment on the boulevard Saint-Germain near the river. It was a short and pleasant walk
to the laboratory, taking me by various little shops, including one with a gold-colored horse
head that advertised the fact that it sold horse meat. Another shop sold wine, which was
pumped into the shop through a large hose from a tanker truck.
On one occasion, an elderly gentleman with a cane was almost run over by a taxi. He
demanded that the taxi-driver get out of his vehicle: “Descendez, monsieur!” The taxi-driver
duly got out of his car, stretched out his open hands, and said “Je vous respecte, monsieur,
mais...”, etc. After a few minutes of this intense – but rigorously polite – exchange, the
gentleman and the taxi-driver could both leave the battlefield with honor. An exchange in
England or the United States under such circumstances would not have been as polite.
In the spring of 1951, while in Paris, I completed and submitted my PhD dissertation on
Hamiltonian Electron Optics. I had to visit Cambridge for an oral examination by Profes-
sor Redman and Dr. Linfoot, who were completely happy with the dissertation. They were
particularly pleased that I had taken the trouble to check my formulas for aberrations by
applying them to simple models. With the assistance of Professor Grivet in writing the text
in French, I also published three short articles in Comptes rendus des séances de l’Academie
des Sciences.
While in Paris, I also completed and published an article on Perturbation Characteristic
Functions, in which I took perturbation theory beyond first order to second order (Sturrock,
1951b). That development had no significant application to electron microscopes that use

147 Page 12 of 40 P.A. Sturrock
structures of cylindrical symmetry, but proved significant for application to structures that
had no such symmetry and provided a useful foundation for my later research concerning
accelerators and plasma physics. My analysis of focusing in arbitrary electromagnetic fields
was quite sophisticated, using Riemann tensors (Sturrock, 1952). This seemed rather eso-
teric at the time, but it turned out to be very useful when I later moved to Stanford.
When I later returned to Cambridge in 1953 (as a Research Fellow at St. John’s Col-
lege), I took the opportunity to organize my thoughts on electron optics and produced my
first book, Static and Dynamic Electron Optics (Sturrock, 1955). The Dynamics part of the
book dealt with the theory of accelerator dynamics, which I discuss in the next section. In
retrospect, I may have spent too much time on electron optics. My little book on the subject
received many enthusiastic reviews, but electron optics was something of a backwater of
science. On the other hand, it gave me an excellent base for research on accelerator design,
which became an important topic for research once strong-focusing was invented. It also
gave me a useful point of entry into my later research on plasma physics.
As I have mentioned, Denis Gabor, then a professor at the Imperial College of Science
and Technology, was the referee of the articles I submitted to the Proceedings and the Trans-
actions of the Royal Society. After refereeing two or three of these articles, he advised me
“not to stick too much to my eikonals”, but I did not take his advice. It was 1957 before I
first published an article that was not on electron optics. In retrospect, it would have been
sensible for me to branch out sooner.
Denis Gabor had a brilliant mind, many abilities, and many interests. In 1949, he pub-
lished an article entitled microscopy by reconstructed wavefronts, which introduced the con-
cept of holograms (Gabor, 1949). I was tremendously impressed with this invention, which
he originally proposed for microscopy. He suggested writing a hologram using an electron
beam and reading it using light. This would have given a magnification equal to the ratio
of the two wavelengths. Using a ten keV electron beam and yellow light, this would have
given a magnification of about 100 000. However, no one paid attention to this proposal until
the laser was invented nine years later. Gabor received the Nobel Prize for his invention of
holography in 1971, 22 years later! If you hope to receive a Nobel Prize, be sure to do your
important work early!
3. Accelerators
From Paris, I moved (in the fall of 1951) to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment
(AERE) in Harwell, England, with a visiting appointment as Harwell Fellow. I joined the
Theory Division, where I had wonderful colleagues, including William (Bill) Thompson,
John Bell, and John Lawson, the inventor of the Lawson Criterion for the performance
of a thermonuclear reactor (Lawson, 1955). The Director of the Division tried to get me
interested in the theory of angular correlations of nuclear decay products, but that struck me
as a lot of very boring mathematics, so it was agreed that I could drop that topic.
In my negotiations leading up to my move to AERE, I had been interviewed by a panel
of scientists, one of whom was Donald Fry, then in charge of the Accelerator Division at
Harwell. When I proposed working on accelerators, Fry said that was not a good idea, since
– in his words – “accelerators are all worked out.”
However, it turned out that accelerators were not “all worked out.” An article appeared
in the Physical Review in 1952 that got the attention of the Accelerator Division. Three
scientists in the United States – Ernest Courant, Stanley Livingston, and Hartland Snyder
– had invented a new technique, which they called “strong focusing,” that opened up a

The Life and Times of a Dissident Scientist Page 13 of 40 147
completely new branch of accelerator design (Courant, Livingston, and Snyder, 1952). I
became intrigued with this development and found that I could apply my knowledge of
electron optics to this new field. I did not neglect to remind Fry of his earlier pronouncement.
Early in my time at Harwell, Peter Thonemann had asked me to look into the effect of
a sequence of lenses that alternated between converging and diverging (which was the key
concept in Courant, Livingston, and Snyder’s proposal). I duly looked into that scenario, but
only approximately, which led me to conclude that the net effect was focusing, but it was
only a weak effect. Courant, Livingston, and Snyder carried out an exact calculation, with
no approximation, and found that the net result can be very strong. This taught me that if
I was going to look into a problem, I should do it thoroughly! In retrospect, it would have
been appropriate and helpful for Thoneman to ask me to make a new calculation, dropping
the small-amplitude approximation.
Bill Thompson – a tall, handsome Canadian who was to become a lifetime friend – gave
a splendid set of lectures on plasma physics, later published as a book (Thompson, 1964),
which sparked my interest in that field. Its significance for AERE rested on the possibility of
constructing a controlled thermonuclear reactor, which would generate energy by “burning”
deuterium. This goal is still being pursued, but seems to be about as remote now as it was in
1951.
The red-headed and red-bearded Irishman John Bell, later to be famous for Bell’s The-
orem (Bell, 1964), and two or three other theorists were at that time discussing a proposal
by David Bohm (1952) that quantum processes only appear to be random, but in fact re-
spond to “hidden variables” and behave in a deterministic manner. (Most physicists thought
they were wasting their time.) This led eventually to his elegant and powerful theorem that
hidden variables cannot play a role in quantum mechanics.
I continued to study strong focusing, spending a summer at Brookhaven National Labo-
ratory in 1956, where I had the pleasure of meeting Nicholas Christofilos, a Greek engineer
who had invented strong focusing before Courant, Livingston, and Snyder, and had in fact
patented the invention in 1950. I visited CERN (The European Center for Nuclear Research)
in 1955 at the invitation of John Adams (whom I had known at TRE), who was involved in
the design of their accelerator. I later spent the year 1957–1958 at CERN, where I collab-
orated with David Finkelstein in studying the stability of dense, high-energy particle beams
(Finkelstein and Sturrock, 1959,1961). My research concerning instabilities in alternating-
gradient synchrotrons was published in a long (76 pages) article in 1958 (Sturrock, 1958a).
During my time at AERE, I submitted an essay to St. John’s College for a Prize Fel-
lowship. My application was successful, and I received a telegram from the Master, James
Wordie, probably in the spring of 1952, notifying me of the award. A Prize Fellowship (also
known as a “Title A Fellowship”) runs for three years with a stipend at that time, as I re-
call, of £300 per year. However, a recipient was not required to actually be in residence for
the first of the three years. Not unreasonably, I chose to defer moving to Cambridge until
the summer of 1953. The move was accomplished by loading our few possessions, and our
recently arrived daughter Myra, into our ancient (1920s vintage) Singer motorcar that I had
purchased from a colleague at AERE for the grand sum of fifteen pounds. Once arrived in
Cambridge, we moved into a small apartment on Castle Hill just three or four blocks from
the College.
One of our neighbors in the apartment building was a young Pakistani physicist named
Abdus Salam, who was to become famous for his contribution to the unification of electro-
magnetism and the weak interaction, for which he received a Nobel Prize in 1979, jointly
with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg. Other theoretical physicists had attempted
to accomplish that development before him, but he did not study those earlier attempts.

147 Page 14 of 40 P.A. Sturrock
He once told me that if he had studied the other attempts first, he would probably have been
discouraged and not made his own attempt. I remember that Abdus once invited my wife
and me to join him and his wife to dinner in their apartment. Mrs Salam prepared and served
a delicious Pakistani meal – but she never sat at the table.
Abdus’s comment reminds me of a story told me by Ray Lyttleton, a fellow at St. John’s.
The great mathematician John Littlewood had a research student who rarely saw him. One
day, the student saw Littlewood in Trinity Great Court and introduced himself, and reminded
Littlewood of the project that he had suggested. He asked, “Sir, is it necessary to read all the
preceding work on that subject?” Littlewood replied, “It is neither necessary nor sufficient.”
And walked on.
My time at AERE had been very stimulating, but the discussions were almost all about
physics. My two years back in Cambridge as a fellow (where I was completely free to work
– or not work – on whatever I pleased) were even more interesting because I was exposed to
a wider range of science and I met many nonscientists, too. Looking back, I can recognize
that I was in very distinguished company. Two of the more senior fellows were Paul Dirac
and Harold (then Sir Harold) Jeffreys. Lyttleton was between their age and mine, as also was
Fred Hoyle. I knew Lyttleton and Hoyle well, since they had been two of my supervisors
when I was a student. I should have been smart enough to realize that Lyttleton and Hoyle
must have been supportive of my appointment to a fellowship, and I should have thanked
them for it, but I regret to say that the idea never crossed my mind.
As a fellow, I was entitled to have dinner in college at the “High Table,” as often as I
wished – which was quite often. (As one of the most junior fellows, I was required to serve
port to the senior fellows in the Senior Combination Room on Sundays – but I could take
any unfinished bottle home with me.) Dirac rarely came to dinner, and – when he did – he
would utter very few words. Jeffreys, a great geophysicist and mathematician, was a little
more talkative – but only a little. The story is told that he once agreed to be a consultant to a
company that had a difficult problem of geophysics. It was agreed that he would attend three
or four meetings at which the problem would be discussed (for a handsome fee). During
the first two or three meetings, Jeffreys did not say a word. Toward the end of the last
meeting, the chairman is reputed to have said, “Professor Jeffreys, you have heard all of our
presentations and discussion, what are your thoughts on this matter?” Jeffreys is reputed to
have chewed his moustache for a while, then answered: “I am glad that it is your problem
and not mine.”
The idea of continental drift, which had been advocated by Alfred Wegener, was much
discussed at that time since physicists had begun to compare the magnetic signatures of
rocks on the west coast of Africa with those of rocks on the east coast of South America.
They found a provocative agreement, supporting Wegener’s claim that they had once been
joined as part of a much larger continent, now called “Pangea.” I recall that in a conversation
on that topic, Jeffreys asserted that “There is no force inside the Earth that is strong enough
to move continents.” Such was his eminence that I knew no one who would contradict him.
Yet we now know that Wegener was right, and Jeffreys was wrong. This is reminiscent of
Arthur C. Clarke’s first law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist says something is
possible, he is almost certainly right. When he says it is impossible, he is very probably
wrong” (Clarke, 1980).
A few years later, I became interested in probability theory. I regret that I did not al-
ready have that interest in 1953, since Jeffreys was a leader in the development of Bayesian
probability theory.
In the course of dinners at High Table, I learned from the humanists, too. During one
discussion, I was minimizing the importance of a publication that did not conform to

The Life and Times of a Dissident Scientist Page 15 of 40 147
my current views. Professor E.A. Walker, an historian, fixed me with his eye, and said,
“Remember, Sturrock, it always pays to see the other fellow’s point of view. It makes
your counterattack much more effective when it comes. And besides, there is always a
chance that he is right.” I got another jolt in the arm from Maurice Wilkes, who was
leading the development of the EDSAC computer (reported to be the first practical stored-
program computer) at Cambridge. We were discussing some claimed experimental or ob-
servational result, and I said that it could not be true because it was in conflict with Ein-
stein’s theory of relativity, to which Wilkes remarked drily, “Relativity theory is not sa-
cred.” I often think of that remark when I walk to my office at Stanford University and
pass a bronze bust of Einstein: the words of a great scientist should not be taken as
gospel.
During my two years at St. John’s, I was a consultant to AERE, so I traveled there reg-
ularly, sometimes in the company of Sir George Thompson, who was also a consultant.
(They were the only occasions when my train travel was first class!) My main contribu-
tion to AERE research at that time was to develop the theory of strong focusing, mentioned
earlier, with special attention to instabilities, which of course played an important role in
determining the design parameters. My background in electron optics was well suited for
that research. I also began to collaborate with John Adams and his colleagues at CERN in
Geneva, since they were beginning to develop their plans for an accelerator based on the
strong-focusing principle (Sturrock, 1958a).
I also began to study plasma physics, another topic of interest to AERE, and found that
perturbation procedures that I had developed for electron optics were well suited for study-
ing the nonlinear behavior of waves in a plasma. During my two years back in Cambridge, I
developed my electron-optics theory into a book, which I entitled Static and Dynamic Elec-
tron Optics, since it also covered the basics of focusing in particle accelerators (Sturrock,
1955).
My years as a fellow in Cambridge introduced me to an exciting new field – astrophysics.
As a student, I had attended lectures on astronomy, but they were based on Smart’s Spherical
Astronomy, which any normal human being would find terribly dull. But Astronomy V 1953
was completely different. At St. John’s College, at the Cavendish Laboratory, and at various
seminar series, I would be thrilled to learn about the research of Hermann Bondi, Geoff
Burbidge, Thomas (Tommy) Gold, Tony Hewish, Fred Hoyle, Francis Graham-Smith, Ray
Lyttleton, and Martin Ryle. Margaret Burbidge then had an appointment in London, but of
course she was frequently in Cambridge. Willy Fowler, a physics professor at CalTech, was
a close colleague of Hoyle and the Burbidges, and he spent his sabbatical year (1954 to
1955) in Cambridge.
It was from Hewish that I first learned about solar radio bursts. That was my introduction
to solar physics. I learned that Type III bursts are due to plasma oscillations excited by beams
of electrons. My bright idea was that Type II bursts might be due to beams of protons, but I
was soon made to realize that they are caused by shock waves. But, as Francis Bacon once
wrote, “Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.” Or, as Tommy Gold
once remarked, “In choosing a hypothesis, there is no virtue in timidity and no shame in
being sometimes wrong.”
These contacts paved the way for my later interests in astronomy and astrophysics. It
was a small step from electron optics to plasma physics, and it would be only a small step
from plasma physics to solar physics and astrophysics – a step that I took after I had left
Cambridge.

147 Page 16 of 40 P.A. Sturrock
4. Particle Dynamics
My fellowship at St. John’s College came to an end in the autumn of 1955. During the
summer of that year, three professors and one senior scientist from Stanford University
were visiting Europe and passed through Cambridge. I am not sure how it came about, but
I was able to meet them all – probably through the good offices of Fred Hoyle and Willy
Fowler. Leonard Schiff was Professor and Chairman of the Physics Department at Stanford;
Marvin Chodorow and Edward Ginzton were also Professors of Physics. Chodorow was
the senior physicist in the Microwave Laboratory, where Ginzton was the Director. There
was an opening for an Assistant Professor in the Physics Department and I applied for it
– fortunately unsuccessfully. I would have had much less time for research and it would
have been a higher-pressure situation. (I am reminded of the words of the Dalai Lama:
“Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.”)
Ginzton had offered me a position as Research Associate in the Microwave Laboratory
at what was then the handsome salary of $700 a month. I had no hesitation in accepting that
offer. The interests of that laboratory were well suited to my then current interests.
For some reason, I chose to drive across country to Stanford, arriving there late one
afternoon. Ginzton took me to his home for the night – and generously loaned me one
hundred dollars. During the evening conversation, Ginzton’s wife Artemis asked, “What
will Peter be working on while he is here?”, and Ginzton replied, “I hope that Peter will tell
us what we should be working on.” That was an eyer-opener! I had by accident arrived at a
most congenial and supportive place to work! I was further impressed when I learned that I
had been put on the payroll effective from December 1, although I had actually arrived on
December 10.
On my first day at Stanford, I was made to feel welcome and valued. Ginzton took me to
meet the Director of the High-Energy Physics Laboratory (“Pief” Panofsky) and the Dean of
the School of Engineering (William Terman). Ginzton had close ties with the Varian brothers
(Russell and Sigurd), and he later arranged for me to have a consulting appointment with
Varian Associates, which brought me a very welcome additional income of $100 per week.
No one could ask for a more supportive employer!
In my early research at the Microwave Laboratory, I was able to apply my knowledge
of electron optics to problems such as the focusing of electron beams in microwave tubes
and in accelerators. Although microwave tubes typically involved a pencil-like beam of
electrons, there was growing interest in sheet-like beams that could lead to devices of much
higher power. Since I had developed a theory of focusing in arbitrary electromagnetic fields,
it was easy to consider special cases such as a sequence of magnets of alternating polarity
(Sturrock, 1958b,1959a,1959b,1960a).
Ialsobegantoapplytoelectrontubes,etc., variational principles that I had developed
for application to electron optics. The usual approach to dynamical problems was to use
Lagrangian variables to describe the particles and Eulerian variables to describe the electro-
magnetic field. By introducing a field-like displacement variable to represent the fluctuation
of a particle ensemble, I was able to represent both particles and fields with field-like vari-
ables. The combined system could be represented by a Lagrangian function, from which
it was possible to derive an energy–momentum tensor, which led to an energy theorem,
etc. (Sturrock, 1958c,1958d). This approach made it possible to generalize relations (the
Manley–Rowe relations) that had been developed for the interactions of oscillations in elec-
tronic systems (Sturrock, 1960b) and to clarify and generalize the concept of “negative en-
ergy” in relation to waves in electronic systems (Sturrock, 1960c).
There was at that time a lot of discussion concerning amplifying and evanescent waves.
They both involve periodic variation in time and exponential variation in space. Yet one

The Life and Times of a Dissident Scientist Page 17 of 40 147
could be used to amplify a signal but the other could not. It was generally considered that the
distinction must be made on a case-by-case basis, taking account of the boundary conditions.
I eventually decided that it must be possible to make the distinction purely in terms of
the dispersion relation. Having arrived at that conclusion, I soon discovered that I could
distinguish the two by means of a certain diagram that could be derived from the dispersion
relation (Sturrock, 1958e).
I became interested in the possibility of designing a microwave tube that would operate
at millimeter wavelengths rather than the centimeter wavelengths of then current tubes. I
knew that the basis of the operation of the traveling-wave tube was to design a waveguide
in which the phase velocity was less than the speed of light, so that it would interact with an
electron beam. It occurred to me that one could alternatively arrange for the phase velocity
of a space-charge wave in the electron beam to be faster than the speed of light. This could
be achieved by “wiggling” the beam, which also helped to “focus” the beam. I called my
invention the Fast-Wave Tube. My analysis of this device was written up as a Microwave
Laboratory Report (Sturrock, 1957a), but never submitted to a journal, and thereby hangs a
tale.
The day after my report was circulated in the laboratory, Richard (Dick) Pantell com-
plained that I had taken over one of his ideas! (It is not unusual for the same idea to occur to
two or more people independently.) I assured Dick that I had no knowledge of his invention,
just as he had no knowledge of mine, and we agreed to prepare a joint article. Dick’s idea
was written up soon after as a Microwave Laboratory Report (Pantell, 1958), but neither
of us got around to preparing our joint article and submitting it to a journal. Dick and I
were unsuccessful in our attempts to interest Ed Ginzton, our Laboratory Director, in our
joint invention, so there was unfortunately no attempt in our laboratory to test our ideas
experimentally.
At about that time, Robert Phillips at the GE Microwave Tube Laboratory found acciden-
tally that a certain configuration of an electron beam, an array of magnets, and a waveguide
produced remarkably powerful microwave radiation. Philips’ device, which he called the
Ubitron, operated on the same principle as my Fast-Wave Tube. (For a history of the Ubi-
tron, see Phillips, 1988.) A decade later, John Madey (1971), also at Stanford University,
made headlines by inventing what became known as the Free-Electron Laser. The princi-
ple of that invention is identical to that of the Fast-Wave Tube. Madey had approached the
problem from a quantum-mechanical point of view, by analogy with a laser (but eventu-
ally setting h=0 (!)), and had in mind the generation of electromagnetic waves of optical
frequencies rather than microwave frequencies. His theory was verified experimentally and
was a huge success.
In retrospect, Pantell and I should have pressed our case with Ginzton and tried to find a
colleague who would test our theories experimentally. I learned that it is not enough to have
a good idea. You have to be willing to run with it.
In 1958, a major event in my scientific life occurred that had nothing to do with my
microwave or plasma research. I read one day of a series of seminars to be given by Ed
(Edwin T.) Jaynes, then a research professor in the Microwave Laboratory, with the rather
vague and rather dull title Probability Theory in Science and Engineering.However,the
seminars were anything but dull – they were an eye-opener! Jaynes gave me an entirely new
way of looking at science – a much broader perspective, one that is applicable not only to
known areas of science, but also to strange phenomena that are usually regarded as being
outside the realm of science, as I discuss in my recent books (Sturrock, 2009,2013,2015).
In addition to being a great scientist, Ed Jaynes was a fine musician and at one time con-
sidered becoming a concert pianist. His library consisted of more than a thousand books,

147 Page 18 of 40 P.A. Sturrock
including statistics, physics, music, chemistry, biology, history, and philosophy. Since the
Physics Department did not offer him a tenured appointment, he left Stanford for Washing-
ton University, where he spent the rest of his very productive career. Jaynes had deep insight
into both statistics and physics, and made great contributions by applying his knowledge of
statistics to statistical mechanics.
It was from Jaynes that I learned about Bayes Theorem – which I later came to regard as
the fundamental guide to scientific thinking (Sturrock, 1973).
5. Plasma Physics
As mentioned briefly in Section 3, my first contact with plasma physics occurred in 1951,
when I moved to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) at Harwell, England. I
was fortunate enough to be introduced to the subject by William (Bill) Thompson, who was
a Senior Fellow in the Theoretical Physics Division. Bill was born in Belfast, but moved
to Canada for his studies in mathematics, receiving his MA degree from the University of
British Columbia and his PhD degree from the University of Toronto. He had a brilliant
and encyclopedic mind and made the best zabaglione I have ever tasted. He was a dear
friend, whom I would visit whenever I could. Soon after I moved to Stanford, Bill moved to
the University of San Diego, where he became Chair of their Physics Department. He was
known for sleeping through a seminar, then waking up to ask the most penetrating questions.
The focus at that time at AERE was the possibility of designing a controlled thermonu-
clear reactor based on what we now call the “tokomak” principle. The project was classified
at that time, and there was keen competition between the plasma group at Harwell, who
were developing a machine named ZETA, and one at Princeton, led by Lyman Spitzer, who
were developing a machine named Stellarator. At one point, ZETA was producing neutrons
(which the physicists erroneously thought were being produced by a thermonuclear pro-
cess), and there was great excitement at Harwell. Brian Flowers, who was then the head of
the Theoretical Physics Division, traveled to the United States for a joint meeting of the UK
and US groups. At their closing dinner of the conference, he rather rashly delivered a poem
that began “See you later, Stellarator...”
Like the Stellarator, and the later more successful Russian machine named Tok oma k,
ZETA was designed to contain plasma in a toroidal magnetic field. The goal was to trap
plasma in magnetic field away from the walls of the vacuum chamber. The problem was to
suppress instabilities that cause the toroidal plasma to “wiggle” and hit the walls. Thompson
explained the principles of plasma physics and gave a detailed account of the magnetohy-
drodynamic (MHD) instabilities as they were known at that time.
My experience in analyzing the aberrations of electron microscopes gave me the tools for
investigating nonlinear processes. I applied these procedures to the study of plasma oscilla-
tions and other wavelike processes in plasmas. I found that the nonlinearity of the equations
led to wave–wave scattering that would lead to the damping of waves and oscillations, even
in the absence of collisions (Sturrock, 1957b,1961,1964). One procedure I used to analyze
nonlinear effects was to divide the Hamiltonian into two parts – the quadratic part and the
higher order part. From the quadratic part I determined the normal modes. I could then ex-
press the higher order part in terms of the normal modes, and in this way study the coupling
between those modes.
The study of inhomogeneities proved to be important for the study of Type III radio
bursts. Too strong an inhomogeneity would suppress the two-stream instability that is re-
sponsible for these bursts. However, a weaker inhomogeneity could lead to the coupling

The Life and Times of a Dissident Scientist Page 19 of 40 147
Figure 6 At the time of my
appointment as professor, 1961,
trying to show an interest in
plasma experiments.
of electromagnetic waves to plasma oscillations, so explaining radiation at the plasma fre-
quency. Radiation at the harmonic of the plasma frequency could be understood as the result
of a nonlinear coupling of two plasma oscillations to one electromagnetic wave (Sturrock,
Ball, and Baldwin, 1965).
I enjoyed very fruitful collaborations with my research students and research asso-
ciates. Don Hall, as part of his PhD project, carried out a more general study of the in-
fluence of stochastic fluctuations on waves and instabilities in a plasma (Hall and Sturrock,
1967a,1967b), calculating the influence of these fluctuations on the diffusion and acceler-
ation of particles. Charles Newman, a research associate, analyzed the influence of a turbu-
lent magnetic field on the electrical conductivity of a plasma (Newman and Sturrock, 1969;
Newman, Sturrock, and Tademaru, 1971). Together with Peter Fung – a physicist and cham-
pion table tennis player then visiting Stanford – and Dean Smith, then a research student, I
analyzed the effect of weak turbulence in a plasma on the two-stream instability (Sturrock,
Fung, and Smith, 1971). Dean also investigated the maximum temperature of radiation from
waves and oscillations in a plasma (Smith and Sturrock, 1971).
In 1961, I happily accepted an appointment as professor (see Figure 6) at Stanford. The
School of Engineering had received a grant from the Ford Foundation to develop a pro-
gram in plasma physics, which of course required the School to appoint a professor in that
field. Luckily for me, Marshall Rosenbluth (who had tried to recruit me to the University
of California at San Diego) declined an offer of a professorship at Stanford. He may have
recommended that Stanford might as well appoint me, since I was already at Stanford. My
appointment was initially Professor of Engineering Science in the School of Engineering,
with a corollary appointment as Professor of Physics in the Physics Department. The title of
my appointment was subsequently changed to Professor of Space Science and Astrophysics
and then (after the Physics Department “spun off” a Department of Applied Physics), my
title was again changed – to Professor of Applied Physics.
After my appointment as Professor in 1961, I had teaching duties. My principal responsi-
bility was a course on plasma physics, and I served on two committees to develop the struc-
ture of plasma courses (Brown, 1963; Sturrock et al.,1966). My lecture notes were eventu-
ally developed into a book published by Cambridge University Press (Sturrock, 1994a).
My personal life also changed around that time. My first marriage came to an end in
1961, and in 1963 I was happily remarried to Marilyn Hanbury, nee Stenson, whom I had
met during my frequent visits to Charlottesville to stay with my friends David and Barbara
Yalden-Thomson. I had met David when he had spent a sabbatical year (1954 to 1955) at St.

147 Page 20 of 40 P.A. Sturrock
Figure 7 Group photograph taken at the US–Japan Solar Conference, Honolulu, February 1965. Bottom
row: Saito-san, Suemoto-san, Gordon Newkirk, Tanaka-san, Unno-san, Uchida-san, Miyamoto-san, Peter
Sturrock. Second row: Kawabata-san, Grant Athay, Keith Pierce, Robert Leighton. Third row: Frank Or-
rall, Jack Zirker, John Jefferies, Takakura-san, Gunther Elste. Fourth row: William Erickson, Hieisan, Jack
Thomas, Hirayama-san, Kawaguchi-san. Top row: Gerald (?) Mulders, James Warwick, Moriyama-san, Mak-
ita-san, Harold Zirin.
John’s College. David was a Professor of Philosophy who specialized in the study of David
Hume – but also specialized in what was called “good living.”
6. Solar Physics
As a result of my participation in a meeting on The Physics of Solar Flares at Goddard
Space Flight Center in 1963 (Hess, 1964), I acquired an interest in that topic. (An early
opportunity I had to meet some of the leaders in that field is shown in Figure 7.) Bruno
Coppi – who became a leader in plasma physics – was at Stanford at that time, and we
discussed possible plasma instabilities that might be involved in flares. We came up with
the (incorrect) idea that flares involve energy release by a gravitational resistive instability
(Sturrock and Coppi, 1964,1966). However, I later paid more attention to the observational
data, and I was intrigued by the observational fact that a large flare typically involves two
“strands” that are bright in Hα, and that the strands move apart as the flare proceeds. I
saw that this pattern could be produced by progressive reconnection in a current sheet that
extends from the magnetic neutral line up into the corona (Sturrock, 1966a,1968).

The Life and Times of a Dissident Scientist Page 21 of 40 147
In retrospect, it was typically the case that, in addressing a new problem, I would run
through one or two or more false ideas before coming across the correct (or at least a feasi-
ble) idea. Realizing one is wrong – hopefully as early as possible – is a very important part
of the discovery process.
I attended an IAU Meeting on The Structure and Development of Solar Active Regions in
Budapest in 1967, and I was anxious to share my new idea with anyone at that meeting who
had ears with which to hear. However, not all the participants at that meeting were anxious to
use their ears that way. Helen Dodson-Prince remarked rather tersely, “You mustn’t imagine,
young man, that just because you have a new idea, that we all want to hear about it.” (I was
still regarded as a “young man” at that time!)
Solar flares became a major interest of mine, and I pursued that topic for many years in
collaboration with colleagues at Stanford, including Spiro Antiochos (Antiochos and Stur-
rock, 1976,1978,1982), Taeil Bai (Bai and Sturrock, 1989), Gordon Emslie (Emslie and
Sturrock, 1982), Peter Fung (Fung et al.,1971), Jim Klimchuk (Klimchuk and Sturrock,
1989), Josh Knight (Knight and Sturrock, 1977), Ron Moore (Sturrock et al.,1984), Vahe
Petrosian (Sturrock and Petrosian, 1973), Dean Smith (Sturrock, Kaufmann, and Smith,
1985), Gerry Van Hoven (Fung et al.,1971), and Mike Wheatland (Wheatland and Sturrock,
1996; Wheatland, Sturrock, and McTiernan, 1998). I also began a long-term collaboration
with Pierre Kaufmann, whom I met at several conferences, and whom I visited in Brazil,
probably in 1982.
Spiro Antiochos came to Stanford as a graduate student in 1970 and left as a senior
research associate in 1985; he is now Chief Scientist of the Heliospheric Division at Goddard
Space Flight Center. Gordon Emslie was at Stanford as a research associate from 1979 to
1981, and is now Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Western Kentucky University.
Jim Klimchuk came to Stanford in 1987 as a research associate and left in 1994 as a senior
research associate. Jim is now Research Astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center. Ron
Moore came to Stanford in 1964 as a graduate student, leaving with a PhD in 1972. Ron is
now affiliated with the Center for Space Science and Aeronomic Research at the University
of Alabama.
It is interesting that what is now known as the CSHKP (for Carmichael, Sturrock, Hi-
rayama, Kopp, and Pneuman) model of solar flares arose from a combination of indepen-
dent contributions from solar physicists with different perspectives. The key idea is that of
magnetic flux extending from the photosphere into interplanetary space. This concept first
occurred to Hugh Carmichael of the Deep River Laboratory in Canada, who saw the possi-
bility that the gas pressure that drives the solar wind could carry magnetic field along with
the wind to produce a bipolar magnetic structure extending out from the photosphere into
the solar wind (Carmichael, 1964). Carmichael had prepared his paper for presentation at
the Symposium on The Physics of Solar Flares that took place at Goddard Space Flight
Center in 1963. However, the program ran late and Carmichael was not able to give his talk,
but his paper was included in the proceedings.
As I have mentioned, the suggestion for my similar model came from my attempt to
understand the fact that, during a major flare, typically two bright ribbons form on either
side of the magnetic neutral line and the ribbons move away from the neutral line. I saw
that this pattern could arise from the progressive reconnection of an open magnetic-field
configuration (Sturrock, 1966a). Tadashi Hirayama of the Tokyo Astronomical Observatory
also realized that a flare model must involve an open magnetic-field configuration. However,
Hirayama noted that major flares are often initiated by the eruption of a prominence system,
and realized that this process would naturally lead to the required open magnetic field (Hi-
rayama, 1973). Subsequently, Roger Kopp and Gerald Pneuman, both of the High Altitude

147 Page 22 of 40 P.A. Sturrock
Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, focused attention on the dramatic loop-prominence sys-
tems that form in the corona during a flare (Kopp and Pneuman, 1976). They calculated that
energy released during reconnection of the open current sheet would lead to the rapid evap-
oration of chromospheric material, so that the newly reconnected magnetic field would con-
tain high-density and high-temperature plasma. This high-temperature plasma would then
cool rapidly, so explaining the appearance of Hα-emitting gas in loop formations high in the
corona. So the various ideas came together to generate the “CSHKP” model of solar flares.
My background in plasma physics led me to realize that the prevailing theory of the
solar wind involved the unjustifiable assumption that protons and electrons are at the same
temperature. In collaboration with Dick Hartle at NASA Ames, I developed the “two-fluid”
model that allows for different temperatures of the protons and electrons. We first submitted
a short account of the idea to Physical Review Letters, and I was not happy when it was
rejected, so I phoned who I assumed would be the referee and complained. The referee
(who answered to the name of Gene) admitted that he was indeed the referee, and said that
the reason he recommended rejection was that he thought the idea deserved more extensive
treatment. However, he admitted that that was not a good reason to reject our short article,
and reversed his recommendation. The Physical Review Letter (Sturrock and Hartle, 1966)
was later followed by a more extensive article in the Astrophysical Journal (Hartle and
Sturrock, 1968).
My plasma background also led me to look into the question of particle acceleration.
Once again, perturbation methods that I had developed for application to electron optics
proved useful in developing a theory of “stochastic acceleration” (Sturrock, 1966b). Don
Hall developed this idea extensively for his PhD dissertation (Hall and Sturrock, 1967a,
1967b).
Another plasma-physics-related topic was the study of magnetic field configurations, es-
pecially force-free fields. This led to collaborations with David Barbosa (Sturrock and Bar-
bosa, 1978), Chris Barnes (Sturrock and Barnes, 1972a), Spiro Antiochos and Wei Yang
(Yang, Sturrock, and Antiochos, 1986), Jim Klimchuk (Klimchuk, Sturrock, and Yang,
1988; Klimchuk and Sturrock, 1989,1992), Lisa Porter (Porter, Klimchuk, and Sturrock,
1992), George Roumeliotis (Roumeliotis, Sturrock, and Antiochos, 1994; Sturrock et al.,
1994a,1994b; Sturrock, Antiochos, and Roumeliotis, 1995), Mike Wheatland, and Mark
Weber (Wheatland, Sturrock, and Roumeliotis, 2000; Sturrock et al.,2001). We explored
several methods for computing force-free fields, of which the most useful were the Mag-
netofrictional Method (Yang, Sturrock, and Antiochos, 1986), the Stress and Relax Method
(Roumeliotis, 1996), and the Optimization Approach (Wheatland, Sturrock, and Roumelio-
tis, 2000).
I was fortunate that, in 1985, Loren Acton invited me to join a team centered on the
Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory for the study of data acquired by the Japan–US–
UK Yohkoh spacecraft. (An early planning session is shown in Figure 8.) This led to a variety
of studies related to the solar corona (Moore et al.,1994; Sturrock, Wheatland, and Acton,
1996; Wheatland, Sturrock, and Acton, 1997). This was the first time that my focus was on
data analysis rather than theory and model-building. I subsequently realized that the best
way to learn something new is by close study of the data.
Another topic of extensive research was that of coronal structure and coronal heating.
Josh Knight and Chuck Newman developed a two-fluid model of the corona (Knight, New-
man, and Sturrock, 1974); Bill Adams developed a model of coronal holes (Adams and
Sturrock, 1975); and Lisa Porter wrote a dissertation on the role of MHD waves in coronal
heating (Porter, Klimchuk, and Sturrock, 1994a,1994b).
During a short sabbatical in Japan, I collaborated with Yutaka Uchida in developing a
model of coronal heating by stochastic magnetic pumping (Sturrock and Uchida, 1981).

The Life and Times of a Dissident Scientist Page 23 of 40 147
Figure 8 Loren Acton, Lisa
Porter, Bill Brown, Taeil Bai, Jim
McTiernan, Peter, Keith Strong,
Marilyn Bruner (from left to
right), at meeting at Stanford
(probably around 1985) in the
planning stage of the Yohkoh
collaboration.
Figure 9 Vahe Petrosian,
Marilyn, Peter, and Yutaka
Uchida (from left to right) at
dinner party in Tokyo, in the late
1970s.
I remember how the idea came to me. I was walking the streets of Tokyo, and thinking of
variations of the photospheric magnetic field. I realized that, viewed as a stochastic process,
the free magnetic energy would vary linearly (not quadratically) with time, and so could be
viewed as a heating mechanism. (The rate of energy input would depend on the square of
the fractional change in magnetic field strength, which is proportional to the square root of
the number of steps.) One of my many enjoyable meetings with Yutaka is shown in Figure 9.
Some time in the early 1970s, I received an interesting phone call from NASA, probably
from Goetz Oertel. An aircraft had crashed in Alaska, and someone noticed that there had
been a major solar flare at the time of the crash. Would I be willing to look into this question,
to see if there is any connection? Of course I found the invitation irresistible, and I began to
research the question with Belinda Lipa (Lipa, Sturrock, and Rogot, 1976) and Josh Knight
(Knight and Sturrock, 1976) at Stanford, and with two epidemiologists, M. Feinleib and
E. Rogot (Feinleib, Rogot, and Sturrock, 1975). The analysis was inconclusive, but I was
fascinated by the idea that there might be some kind of correlation between the physical
world and the world of human activity.
My colleague Taeil Bai and I were intrigued by a publication in 1984: Eric Rieger of the
Max Planck Institute in Garching, and his colleagues in the team operating the Gamma-Ray
Spectrometer (GRS) on the Solar Maximum Mission, published an article entitled A 154-
day periodicity in the occurrence of hard solar flares? (Rieger et al.,1984). This was not
a known periodicity in solar activity, so there was inevitable skepticism about the claim.
However, the proposal was later confirmed by other observers, and it came to be realized

147 Page 24 of 40 P.A. Sturrock
that the oscillation discovered by GRS was just one of a group of somehow related oscilla-
tions. Taeil and I became intrigued with this enigma and published several articles (Bai and
Sturrock, 1987,1991,1993; Sturrock and Bai, 1992). We thought, at one time, that there
was a fundamental oscillation in the Sun with a period of about 25 days, and that the Rieger
and other oscillations were subharmonics of that oscillation. That was another wrong idea
to add to my list. Subsequently, I came to realize that the Rieger-type oscillations may be
attributed to r-mode oscillations (known in geophysics as Rossby waves) in the deep solar
interior.
I took a new look at the problem of coronal heating in 1999. Prior to that time, I had
assumed that the key processes of coronal heating are to be found in the corona (Sturrock
et al.,1990). For some reason, I came to question that assumption. It occurred to me that
a sudden change in the magnetic field in the chromosphere could shake up the field al-
ready in the corona, and could also inject new field into the corona (Sturrock, 1999a). It
also occurred to me that the key process in a large event such as a coronal mass ejection
may occur low in the solar atmosphere rather than in the corona. This led to the interest-
ing study of metastable magnetic configurations that are stable against small perturbations,
but unstable against sufficiently large perturbations (Roald, Sturrock, and Wolfson, 1999;
Sturrock, Roald, and Wolfson, 1999; Sturrock et al.,2001).
7. Astrophysics
Some time early in 1968, probably in February, my research student Paul Feldman came
into my office in a state of great excitement. He had just read in the library an article in
Nature, entitled Observation of a Rapidly Pulsating Radio Source (Hewish et al.,1968).
Oddly enough, I was not as excited as Paul expected me to be, but I did start to think about
it. My first thought, which I presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Soci-
ety in the Spring of 1969, was that the pulses were due to oscillations in the atmosphere
of a white dwarf (Sturrock and Moore, 1969). This may have been the last paper to advo-
cate the pulsating-white-dwarf theory of pulsars. Tommy Gold had already advocated the
rotating-neutron-star theory that was originally dismissed but soon became the accepted in-
terpretation (Gold, 1968). Gold told me that when he first asked for time at a meeting to
propose this idea, the chairman said “I can’t possibly give you time for that idea, Tommy. If
I do, I’ll have to give time for all sorts of crazy ideas!” Not to be defeated, Tommy delivered
his speech from the floor!
However, I soon changed my mind about pulsars. The most important factor that led to
this change was an article by Peter Goldreich and William Julian (Goldreich and Julian,
1969), who showed theoretically that a rotating neutron star must be expected to have a
corotating magnetosphere with a strong electric field. The other key stimulus to my thoughts
about pulsars was the report that Goldreich was aware that high-energy gamma raystraveling
at an angle to a strong magnetic field would generate electron–positron pairs, as had been
shown by Thomas Erber (Erber, 1966).
It happened that some time in 1969 I had a minor operation that kept me at home (much
of the time in bed) for about two weeks. That is when I began to fit the pieces together to
develop a neutron-star model of pulsars that was published first in Nature (Sturrock, 1970a)
and later, at greater length, in the Astrophysical Journal (Sturrock, 1971a,1971b). I realized
that the magnetosphere of a rotating neutron star was likely to have a strong electric field
(in addition to a strong magnetic field) and a relativistic plasma comprising electrons and

The Life and Times of a Dissident Scientist Page 25 of 40 147
positrons. This would be a highly unstable situation: the electric field would drive electrons
and positrons in opposite directions, leading to a two-stream instability that would lead to
bunching of the charged particles, which would in turn generate radio emission. This system
would also generate intense gamma-ray emission. The pulsar would be a radio source only
as long as pair production occurred. At a certain point, as the rotation slowed down, the
electron energy would be too low to lead to pair production, and radio emission would cease
(but not the gamma-ray production). These ideas were pursued in collaboration with my
students Kile Baker, David Roberts, and Steve Turk (Roberts and Sturrock, 1972a,1972b;
Roberts, Turk, and Sturrock, 1973; Sturrock and Baker, 1979; Sturrock, Baker, and Turk,
1976; Sturrock and Roberts, 1973). I also collaborated with my colleague, Vahe Petrosian,
in developing a theory of the optical radiation from pulsars (Sturrock, Petrosian, and Turk,
1975). (Another theory that proved to be wrong.)
Recently discovered quasars were also very much in the news, and I collaborated with
my students in attempting to understand the structure of quasars and the mechanism of radio
emission (Mills and Sturrock, 1970; Sturrock, 1965,1966b,1970b,1971c,1985; Sturrock
and Barnes, 1972b; Sturrock and Feldman, 1968a,1968b).
When gamma-ray bursts were discovered in the 1980s, I collaborated with Alice Hard-
ing of Goddard Space Flight Center in exploring the possibility that they may be due to
a cascade of radiation and pair production following the development of an electric field
parallel to a magnetic field (Sturrock, Harding, and Daugherty, 1989). Over a decade later,
when giant gamma-ray bursts were discovered by the gamma-ray telescope on the Fermi
spacecraft (Abdo et al.,2011;Tavaniet al.,2011), I collaborated with Markus Aschwanden
of the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory in developing a theory again attributing the
radiation to the sudden development of an electric field parallel to the magnetic field in the
magnetosphere of the Crab Nebula (Sturrock and Aschwanden, 2012).
My involvement in the early research on pulsars, when astrophysicists were trying to
determine whether they were best explained by processes in white dwarfs or in neutron
stars, led me to investigate a topic of scientific inference: how should one – or how could
one – combine the analysis of observational data and the analysis of theoretical models to
determine which model best fits the observations? I now refer to this method as the BASIN
procedure, since it involves Bayes Theorem and requires an interface between observations
or experiments and theory (Sturrock, 1973). I have since advocated the use of this procedure
in a wide range of topics (Sturrock, 1994b,2013,2015).
8. Nuclear Solar Physics
Beginning in the 1960s, nuclear physicists – notably John Bahcall of the California Insti-
tute of Technology and Raymond Davis of the Brookhaven National Laboratory – began
to consider the possibility of designing and building an experiment to detect solar neutri-
nos (Bahcall, 1964;Davis,1964). Since I had little knowledge of either the solar interior or
nuclear physics, I initially had little interest in these activities. I was not alone in this: as I
recall, the topic elicited little attention from the solar-physics community.
The topic became more interesting to the community in 1976, when Bahcall and Davis
published an article entitled Solar Neutrinos: A Scientific Puzzle (Bahcall and Davis, 1976),
which set out the contradiction between the theoretical predictions and the experimental
results (a significantly smaller flux than expected). Physicists then began to consider the
possibility that the solar neutrino flux may vary with time, in particular, that the flux may
vary with the solar cycle. It occurred to me that it would be more helpful to explore the

147 Page 26 of 40 P.A. Sturrock
Figure 10 With Mike
Wheatland (left) and Guenther
Walter, Peter (middle) in 1997,
on the occasion of the publication
of our first neutrino article (credit
Linda Cicero).
possibility that the neutrino flux may vary as a result of solar rotation, which has a period of
order 30 days. One can acquire 12 cycles of rotation data in a year, but (since the period of
the solar cycle is 11 years) it would take 130 years to acquire data for 12 solar cycles.
I was fortunate to have as collaborators Mike Wheatland, then a Research Associate,
and Guenther Walther, then Professor (and subsequently Chair) in the Statistics Depart-
ment. Drawing on Guenther’s impressive expertise, we carried out a search for evidence
of periodicities in the Homestake neutrino data and found a peak in the power spectrum at
12.88 year−1, significant at the 3% level (Sturrock, Walther, and Wheatland, 1997). A pho-
tograph that accompanied a news article on that publication is shown in Figure 10.Inter-
estingly, we also found peaks at or near 10.88, 11.88, 13.88, and 14.88 year−1. It took me
some time for the penny to drop, but I eventually recalled that oscillations with frequencies
separated by one cycle per year are indicative of emission from an object that rotates about
an axis that is oblique with respect to the normal to the ecliptic (Sturrock and Bai, 1992).
We also examined data from an experiment named GALLEX, which used gallium as a
detector (the experiment was later refurbished and renamed GNO, for Gallium Neutrino Ob-
servatory), but then focused our attention on the Japanese neutrino experiment Kamiokande
(later redesigned and renamed Super-Kamiokande). I was fortunate to then have as collab-
orators Jeff Scargle and the late David Caldwell. Jeff, a physicist at NASA Ames Research
Center, is a renowned statistician with special expertise in time-series analysis. David, a
distinguished nuclear physicist, was a Professor at UC Santa Barbara, but also had an of-
fice at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. David, Jeff and I carried out a sequence of
increasingly detailed analyses of the Super-Kamiokande data. Our final calculation gives
strong evidence of an oscillation at 9.43 year−1, corresponding to a sidereal rotation rate of
10.43 year−1(Sturrock and Scargle, 2006).
When I first began to examine Super-Kamiokande data and found evidence for a rota-
tion rate much slower than that of the photosphere (which has a sidereal rotation rate of
14.7 year−1at the equator), I thought that the result must be spurious. However, our 2006
estimate seems to be statistically quite significant, representing a valid measurement of the
rotation frequency of the solar core. This finding supports early claims of the BISON (Birm-
ingham Solar Oscillation Network) helioseismology consortium that the core of the Sun
rotates more slowly than the outer layers (Elsworth et al.,1995). This was and remains a
challenging puzzle: since the solar wind carries off angular momentum along with the coro-
nal plasma, one would expect the outer layers to rotate more slowly than the inner layers,
but neutrino measurements point in the other direction.
Since Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande – like Homestake – detected fewer neutri-
nos than expected, physicists concluded there was a real deficit in the neutrino flux, which

The Life and Times of a Dissident Scientist Page 27 of 40 147
was found to be attributable to the conversion of electron neutrinos into muon and/or tau
neutrinos (Bahcall, 1989). On the other hand, most nuclear physicists do not yet accept the
proposition that neutrino measurements yield evidence for an influence of solar rotation.
During the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society held in Chicago in 1999,
John Bahcall gave a magnificent talk on the solar neutrino project, on the occasion of his
receiving the prestigious Russell Prize. There was a call for questions, and I ventured to ask
John what he would infer if it turns out that solar neutrinos show evidence of solar rotation.
John’s reply was along the following lines: “An influence of solar rotation is impossible. The
Sun‘s magnetic field is too weak and too fragmented to have any such effect.” I could have
argued that his comment is no doubt true of the magnetic field at the photosphere, but no
one knows the strength and structure of the magnetic field in the radiative zone or near the
core. However, I had no wish to rain on John’s parade, so I did not press the point. That may
have been a mistake: the audience (and perhaps John also) would probably have enjoyed a
lively argument.
For several years, I was in the habit of spending the Thanksgiving vacation with Mari-
lyn’s cousins in Scottsdale, Arizona. To our profound distress, Marilyn was diagnosed with
ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease), in 2004.
Marilyn passed away in 2007, but I continued to spend Thanksgiving with her relatives.
During my visits to Scottsdale, it was my habit to drive down to Tucson the day before
Thanksgiving to visit the National Solar Observatory (NSO). I made my usual visit to NSO
in November 2009 and reported on the status of my solar-neutrino research. During this
visit, Mark Giampapa showed me two articles that had recently come to his attention. The
lead authors were Jere Jenkins, then a research student in nuclear engineering at Purdue
University, and Ephraim Fischbach, Professor of Physics and Astrophysics at Purdue. These
articles drew attention to experimental results indicating that beta-decay rates are not all
constant, as is usually taught and believed. One article presented evidence, acquired by
an experiment at Purdue, of an apparent association between a solar flare and a sudden
change in the decay rate of 54Mn (Jenkins and Fischbach, 2009). The other article presented
evidence of an apparent association between the decay rate of 54Mn and the annual variation
of the Earth–Sun distance (Jenkins et al.,2009). Those two articles got my attention: as
soon as I returned to Stanford, I contacted Ephraim to ask if I could collaborate with them.
Ephraim replied that they had been about to contact me with the same proposal. So began
an exciting, fruitful, and ongoing collaboration.
Since there are many possible causes of an annual oscillation, I again decided to look
for evidence of an influence of solar rotation. Ephraim shared with me data that had been
acquired at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL; Alburger, Harbottle, and Norton,
1986). Time-series analysis of that dataset yielded strong evidence of oscillations with fre-
quencies 11.18 year−1and 11.93 year−1(Sturrock et al.,2010a), which I attributed to the
rotation of magnetic structures in or near the radiative zone. Ephraim also provided me with
data acquired at the Physikalisch Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Braunschweig, Ger-
many. This dataset also yielded evidence of an influence of internal rotation (Sturrock et al.,
2010b).
At that time, we were still assuming that if decay rates are influenced by neutrinos, they
would be solar neutrinos. We were also assuming that an annual oscillation would be at-
tributable to the annual variation in the Earth–Sun distance. Since this distance is a min-
imum on January 4, this hypothesis leads one to expect that an annual oscillation of the
decay rate would have its maximum value close to that time of year. However, analysis of
the BNL and PTB measurements gave results that did not fit that model (Sturrock et al.,
2011). We learned that the solar interior and its influences on neutrinos are more compli-
cated than we originally assumed. Of the two hypotheses originally proposed by Ephraim

147 Page 28 of 40 P.A. Sturrock
and Jere and their colleagues (a solar-flare association and an Earth–Sun–distance effect),
neither has been validated by subsequent research.
In July 2012, I took part in a conference in the Pat ra s series that was held in Chicago.
The meeting focused on Axions, WIMPs, and WISPs, all candidates for dark matter. A talk
on beta decays seemed at the time to be a little out of place (but now I am not so sure). From
an analysis of the apparent response of beta decays to solar neutrinos, I was able to estimate
the cross section for the response of radionuclides to neutrinos. This estimate seems to be
large enough that solar neutrinos may lead to a measurable force and perhaps a measurable
torque on a radionuclide specimen (Sturrock et al.,2013).
In 2010, Ephraim and I made contact with Dr. Gideon (Gidi) Steinitz, a geologist at the
Geological Survey of Israel (GSI). Gidi has been studying radon decay for many years: one
of his experiments – which is still running in 2017 – began operation in January 2007 and
makes measurements every 15 minutes. Fortuitously, it has proved significant that the princi-
pal detector (a gamma detector) is situated vertically above the source of radioactivity (rock
containing 235U). We found, to our surprise, that measurements made at midnight are quite
different from measurements made at noon: measurements made at midnight show clear
evidence of an influence of solar rotation, but measurements made at noon do not (Stur-
rock et al.,2012; Sturrock, Steinitz, and Fischbach, 2017). Our proposed interpretation is
that neutrinos stimulate beta decay and the decay products travel preferentially in the same
direction as the incoming neutrino. Neutrinos detected at midnight are traveling vertically
upward, so we can infer that they originate in the Sun, traveling through the Earth before
being detected. Measurements made at noon must be due to neutrinos traveling toward the
Sun: these can only be cosmic neutrinos. The flux of cosmic neutrinos appears to be much
higher than current cosmological theory leads one to expect, leading to the intriguing possi-
bility that cosmic neutrinos may account for the enigmatic “dark matter.”
To use a Shakespeare expression, would it not be “wondrous strange” if we were to learn
that measurements made by a geologist by means of an inexpensive experiment in a small
shed in the yard of his institute offer an answer to an outstanding cosmological problem –
the nature of dark matter?
9. Other Interests
I was trained at Cambridge University as a proper, well-behaved, law-abiding scientist. How-
ever, as I mentioned in Section 1, and event occurred in 1948 that shook me out of that
comfort zone. I saw what appeared to be a flying saucer! I have told the story of this event
and its influence upon me in my memoirs A Tale of Two Sciences (Sturrock, 2009). A more
cautious scientist would have found a way to forget this disturbing and unwelcome experi-
ence, but – for better or for worse or for both – I did not. When the Condon Report (Condon
and Gillmor, 1969) was published, I went through it with the proverbial fine-toothed comb
and was very concerned at what I found.
That book is often referred to as the work of a Condon Committee,buttherewasno
committee. There was a small staff who were doing the best they could with a very difficult
problem, and there was a headstrong director who appeared to have no interest in the work of
his staff, and who wrote a summary that bears no relation to the case studies and summaries
prepared by his staff. I took the trouble to write an article setting out my analysis of the
Report. Since the Report itself had received widespread attention in news media and in
scientific journals, I naively assumed that there would be no difficulty in getting my analysis
published. I submitted it to five journals: each journal sent me a rejection letter almost by

The Life and Times of a Dissident Scientist Page 29 of 40 147
Figure 11 Five astronomers at a
meeting of the Society for
Scientific Exploration at the
University of Virginia, in 1985:
(from left to right) Peter, Henry
Bauer, Yervant Terzian, Larry
Fredrick, Charlie Tolbert.
return post. There obviously was (and is) something about this topic that makes it anathema
to most scientists and most editors.
With the approval of the Council of the American Astronomical Society, I carried out
a survey of the AAS membership. I found that, when promised anonymity, most Members
were quite open-minded about the UFO problem, and over sixty submitted accounts of ob-
servations that might be related to that topic (Sturrock, 1994c,1994d,1994e). Again, no
journal editor had any interest in an article that takes the topic seriously.
In 1978, Professor Robert Jahn, Dean of the School of Engineering at Princeton Univer-
sity, spent a few months at Stanford and gave several seminars. His final lecture attracted
my attention – it was on research at Princeton on psychic phenomena! Needless to say, Jahn
had as much trouble getting his unusual research published as I did. We agreed that there
was a need for a journal in which scientists could publish research on what we referred to
as “anomalous phenomena,” and that the journal should be published by a new society. Sev-
eral astronomers (some shown in Figure 11) played an early role in the formation of what
became the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE). I served as President for about twenty
years, and Jahn served as Vice President for even longer.
In 1996, I received a telephone call from Mr Henry Diamond, a lawyer who was “right-
hand man” to Laurance Rockefeller. Mr Rockefeller would like to meet me – could I travel
to New York to have lunch with Mr Rockefeller? Of course I could and did. Mr Rockefeller
wanted to know what could be done to learn more about the UFO problem. My very positive
experience with the Skylab Workshops in 1976 to 1977 led me to suggest a similar procedure
for this very different problem. To my surprise, it was not at all difficult to get scientists to
agree to serve on a review panel. We had an excellent ten-member panel to review material
presented by eight experienced investigators (shown in Figure 12). The proceedings were
subsequently published by Warner Books (Sturrock, 1999b).
A news release on the Rockefeller study received such wide attention (radio and TV as
well as print) that I expected to receive invitations to speak on this study at universities. I
received one phone call inviting me to speak at a California university, and I agreed to do so.
However, the next day I received a second phone call requesting that I still visit, but speak
on a different topic! The topic was – and remains – anathema in universities.
As explained in my memoirs A Tale of Two Sciences, my involvement with SSE opened
my eyes to many topics that are unknown to most scientists (Sturrock, 2009). In an attempt
to bring the attention of my fellow-scientists to topics that I have found fascinating, I have
described fourteen of them in a recent book (Sturrock, 2015). Two are intriguing atmo-
spheric phenomena: the puzzle of ball lightning (Barry, 1981; Singer, 1971; and Stenhoff,

147 Page 30 of 40 P.A. Sturrock
Figure 12 Participants in the UFO Panel Review at Pocantioco, New York, October 1997. From left to right:
Thomas Holzer, Von Eshleman, Mark Rodeghier, John Schuessler, Jay Melosh, Randy (J.R.) Jokipii, Harold
Puthoff, David Pritchard, Peter, Charles Tolbert, Francois Louange, Laurance Rockefeller, Jean-Jacques Ve-
lasco, Illobrand von Ludwiger, Henry Diamond, Marsha Sims, Jacques Vallee, Bernard Haisch, Bernard
Veyret, Richard Haines, Michael Swords, James Papike, Guenther Reitz, and Erling Strand.
1999) and the catastrophic explosion that occurred at Tunguska in Siberia in 1908 (Rubtsov,
2009). Concerning ball lightning, David Finkelstein once remarked, “We should be able to
deal with it at least qualitatively, from fundamental principles. But we can’t, and it’s getting
embarrassing” (Finkelstein, 1972). Concerning Tunguska, the Russian scientist Victor Zhu-
ravlev had this to say: “The main distinctive feature of the contemporary stage of Tunguska
investigations is the wide gap between the concrete results of expeditions which crossed
the Siberian taiga, were digging in Tunguska soil and peat, measuring thousands of leveled
trees, questioning eyewitnesses about the phenomenon, and, on the other hand, the theoreti-
cians who are building computer models of the phenomenon” (Rubtsov, 2009). Since no one
has succeeded in explaining either of these phenomena in terms of conventional physics, I
now suspect that we may need to discover or invent some unconventional physics before we
can arrive at satisfactory explanations (Sturrock, 2016).
When preparing my memoirs, A Tale of Two Sciences, I recalled that as a youth I was
attracted to poetry and attempted to write a few poems. The only one I could remember was
a parody of the famous sonnet that begins “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” This
led me to read the entire sequence of sonnets once more.
I was puzzled. They were without doubt beautiful poems – but what were they all about?
Careful study soon made me aware that they were written not by a young man to a young
lady – as I had assumed – but by a forty-year old man (he hints at his age) to a beautiful
youth. So I stumbled upon the Shakespeare Authorship Question. I assumed – erroneously
– that English scholars would be happy to discuss this intriguing topic with me. Not only
did they not want to discuss it with me, any approach was unceremoniously rebuffed.

The Life and Times of a Dissident Scientist Page 31 of 40 147
Figure 13 Retirement party,
Stanford, 1999. Bottom row:
Martin Walt, Jeff Scargle, Loren
Acton, Gordon Emslie, Rich
Epstein. Second row: Rich
Wolfson, Alan Title, Peter, Taeil
Bai, Dick Hartle, Bob Stern.
Third row: Todd Hoeksema,
Roger Romani, Mal Ruderman,
Ron Bracewell, Cal Quate, Spiro
Antiochos, Phil Scherrer. Fourth
row: Ron Moore, Bob Wagoner,
VonEshleman(?),George
Roumeliotis, Frank Drake, Colin
Roald, Don Goldsmith. Top row:
Jim Klimchuk, Guenther Walther,
Vahe Petrosian.
Intrigued, I began to look into that topic. Many books have been written by independent
scholars (as they refer to themselves), arguing against the establishment candidate, William
Shakspere (as he himself spelled his name) of Stratford-upon-Avon. Many advocate another
author – the current favorite being Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
However, what I could see of the debate I found highly unsatisfactory. Establishment
scholars begin with the conviction that the author was Shakespeare, and interpret all evi-
dence on the basis of that assumption. Independent scholars have good reasons to doubt the
conventional assumption, but there is no forum, frequented by both sides, where the issues
can be delineated and debated.
From the time that I first developed the Basin procedure, I thought it might offer a way
to facilitate the evaluation of a wide range of problems – not just problems of science. I
therefore became interested in applying the Basin procedure to the Shakespeare Authorship
Question. The result could have been written in the form of a long scientific review article,
but where would that be published? Furthermore, I was interested in sharing my ideas with
the general public, which required that I explain the Basin procedure in very simple terms.
As a result, I developed what I had to say in the form of a dialog involving four participants
– an engineer, a statistician, a novelist, and an English professor (Sturrock, 2013). It was
fun to write. It got the attention of (and an award from) the independent scholars, but no
attention (and no award) from the establishment scholars.
10. Reflections
After several changes in interests and outlook, I find that solar physics is a good place to
be. A group photograph taken on the occasion of my retirement as professor is shown in
Figure 13. Solar physics is a mature field and has many intriguing questions that can be
addressed in a variety of ways – theoretically, by computer modeling, by new observations,
or by new analyses of old observations. Also it is enriched by being linked to several other
disciplines – to other areas of astronomy and astrophysics and to several areas of physics.
Solar physics is a large community, but not so large as to be overwhelming. We may look
on the Sun as a laboratory. Although we cannot adjust the Sun to suit our wishes, we can
examine its intricate structure and follow its often-surprising variations. We probably obtain

147 Page 32 of 40 P.A. Sturrock
more detailed measurements in the radio, visible, X-ray, and gamma-ray bands from the Sun
than from any other astronomical source.
Once we understand the response of beta-decay nuclei to solar neutrinos, we shall be able
to explore the possibility that the same simple device can detect both cosmic neutrinos and
supernova neutrinos. There will of course be big differences: cosmic neutrinos presumably
have much lower energy and supernova neutrinos certainly have much higher energy. There
is much to learn, but statistically significant observations now being made seem to open up
a rich new field of neutrino astronomy, beginning – as has often been the case – with the
solar subdiscipline.
What are my views concerning the wider scientific enterprise? Although I began my
career as a theorist, I am now of the opinion that scientists – physicists in particular – tend
to take theory too seriously. Eddington is reputed to have remarked, “Do not accept an
observation until it has been confirmed by theory.” For better or for worse, there is something
to this remark. I fully expect that beta-decay variability will be accepted only after it has been
explained theoretically.
We now know that Lord Kelvin took theory too seriously when he argued that the Sun
cannot cause magnetic storms (Kelvin, 1892). He made a theoretical calculation of the re-
quired magnetic field strength at the Sun and found it to be impossibly high. However, his
calculation was based on the assumption (which seemed eminently reasonable at the time)
that interplanetary space is a vacuum. Had he listed the assumptions he was making, some
renegade physicist might have wondered whether that assumption should have been ques-
tioned. We also know that Albert Michelson made a mistake when he argued (in 1984)
that “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been
discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being
supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote” (Barrow, 1998).
Maurice F.C. Allais, who received a Nobel Prize for economics but had a keen interest in
physics, took a more cautious view concerning theoretical physics, writing “My philosophy
is that all theories are conditional and will eventually disappear”.
Theoretical arguments are highly likely to be invoked by experts in some field in response
to a proposal from a non-expert. Charlie Townes, inventor of the maser and co-inventor of
the laser, once wrote, “People in well-developed fields tend to be conservative, particularly
with regard to ideas from outsiders. As experts, they have a feeling they understand the field
well, and often do not much care for interlopers” (Townes, 1999). Having been an interloper
in more than one field, and currently being an interloper in nuclear physics, I can attest
to the veracity of this remark. In the current era of large projects, large budgets, and large
consortia, a lone scientist must expect to find himself perceived as an interloper. Any time
we are tempted to say to an interloper “That can’t happen, because...”, it might be good
to reflect on the assumptions we are making and consider the possibility that one of our
assumptions may be wrong.
Although an interloper is likely to be ignorant of the field into which they have wandered,
this ignorance can be an advantage. Hanbury Brown (co-discoverer of the Hanbury-Brown–
Twiss effect (Hanbury Brown and Twiss, 1956) once remarked, “Ignorance is sometimes
bliss in scientific research” (Hanbury Brown, 1991).
The article that presents the final solution of a problem may give no insight into the way
the solution was arrived at. A notable exception is the discovery of the structure of DNA,
which has been described in detail by James Watson (Watson, 1996). Francis Crick wrote,
“What, then, do Jim Watson and I deserve credit for? If we deserve any credit at all, it is for
persistence and a willingness to discard ideas when they became untenable” (Crick, 1988).
When Linus Pauling’s daughter Linda asked her father how he got so many good ideas,

The Life and Times of a Dissident Scientist Page 33 of 40 147
he replied, “I had many more ideas, and threw away all the bad ones.” It is important to
recognize one’s ignorance – it could be a friend in disguise.
There is no big problem if an individual scientist gets a wrong idea and sticks with it
longer than he should. However, there is a big problem if an entire community gets a wrong
idea and sticks with it longer than it should. This is – in my mind – the sad state of Shake-
speare scholarship, where the entire orthodox establishment subscribes to a doctrine that
may once have been compatible with one or two items of evidence, but is now seriously at
odds with the totality of available evidence.
Such a situation is probably more evident to someone outside of the relevant establish-
ment, as seems to be the case for the Shakespeare Authorship Question. It is not too difficult
for a physicist to review the evidence concerning the identity of Shakespeare, whereas it
would hardly be feasible for a Shakespeare scholar to review the evidence concerning dark
matter or dark energy. On the other hand, a Shakespeare scholar may well be able to arrive
at an informed opinion concerning the debate between evolution and design, for instance
comparing Richard Dawkins’ (1996) broad-brush defense of orthodoxy against the more
finely drawn attacks of insurgents such as Michael Behe (1996,2007) and Stephen Meyer
(2010,2014).
It may be easy to see the need for a paradigm shift in retrospect, but it may not be so easy
to see the need while one is immersed in the everyday details. If I have any basic concern
about the state of the physical sciences, it is that we seem to give insufficient attention to the
possibility that we may not have the right concepts with which to build the next fundamental
theory of physics. We may be good at expounding on what we know, but not so good at
expounding on what we do not know. Richard Feynman, who once remarked, “You see ...
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing,” was unusual.
IamremindedofasceneinthefilmButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,inwhichthe
bandits (handsome and likable in the movie) are being chased by a posse. They decide to
both ride on one horse and head away from the trail, in the hope that the posse will continue
to chase the riderless horse. However, the posse has with it an Indian tracker, known as Lord
Baltimore, who recognizes the attempted deception and leads the posse in the direction taken
by the bandits. Is physics in a situation in which it needs a Lord Baltimore to keep us from
following a false lead and head us in the right direction?
More pertinently, what happens when scientists come across a phenomenon that seems
to be out-of-synch with current theory? Ideally, the community will zero in on that phe-
nomenon since, if it is found to be genuine, it may lead to a revolution in current theory. In
practice, however, the community is likely to decide – with a chuckle – that any phenomenon
that is incompatible with current theory cannot be true and may be safely ignored. As Bev-
eridge (1957, p. 144) remarked, “...newideasare judged in the light of prevailing beliefs.”
(For an example, one may review the exchange between Philip Anderson (1990) and Robert
Jahn (Jahn, Colodner, and Anderson, 1991; Jahn, 1992).) Beveridge (1957, p. 146) also re-
marked, “There is in all of us a psychological tendency to resist new ideas which come from
without, just as there is a psychological resistance to really radical innovations in behavior
or dress,” and Claude Bernard wrote, “Those who believe too firmly in their own theories
are not open to new ideas, and further they make very poor observers.”
Ball lightning is a simple example of a physical phenomenon with impressive evidence
but no acceptable theory. I recently suggested that its explication may need a new concept
(that of a parallel space). It took a month (an unusually long time) for the article to be posted
on arXiv (Sturrock, 2016). It was declined instantly and without review by Nature.
Did I make an error in spending time on electron optics – an interesting area of applied
physics, but with no relevance to fundamental physics? In 1954, when I was in Cambridge,

147 Page 34 of 40 P.A. Sturrock
Martin Ryle – Director of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory – invited me to partic-
ipate in theoretical research related to his radio-astronomy program. Had I done so, I would
have stopped working on electron optics, and I would never have worked on accelerators
and microwave tubes. I may have taken up plasma physics, but I probably would never have
taken much interest in solar physics.
However, my current research into beta decays (which may become the most significant
of my career) is an outgrowth of my research in solar physics. My entry into solar physics
came from my work in plasma physics, and that in turn was an outgrowth of my work in
electron optics. So a rather curious path has led me to my current absorbing interest. Had I
bypassed plasma physics and solar physics, and jumped right into astrophysics, I may not
have recognized the significance of an anomalous behavior of beta decays. I might have
learned about pulsars a few days earlier than in fact I did, but that would have been no
great advantage. My research on pulsars (a highlight of my career that I dropped too soon)
actually profited from my earlier work on microwave tubes and on plasmas.
Another big advantage of changing fields a few times is that I never became bored with
any one of them. And I am not bored now!
Acknowledgements Due and detailed thanks to everyone who deserves my thanks would double the length
of this memoir, so I can acknowledge only very briefly my debts to my many colleagues, past and present –
teachers, colleagues, and students. Your support has been welcome; your criticism has been salutary. Thanks
are due also to the many taxpayers who have generously but unwittingly supported my research through
several agencies, prominently the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research,
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation. I also thank with
affection my schools Stifford School and Palmer’s School (both now existing in memory only), St. John’s
College, Cambridge, and Stanford University. And I acknowledge with profound gratitude my debt to my
family and friends who made mine a happy life – well worth living. Finally, I express my sincere thanks
to Loren Acton and Mike Wheatland, and an anonymous referee, who reviewed the text and made many
suggestions that improved (including shortening) this essay.
Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest The author declares that he has no conflicts of interest.
Appendix: Aphorisms
These are a few of the aphorisms that I have collected along the way, which I consider to be
relevant to the scientific enterprise.
A.1 Classical Scholars
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin
with doubts, he shall end in certainties. [Francis Bacon]
As the births of living creatures at first are misshapen, so are all innovations, which are
the births of time. [Francis Bacon]
A time will come when our descendants will be amazed that we had no knowledge of
such obvious things. [Seneca]
A.2 Scientists
A theory does not have to explain all of the facts, because some of the facts are wrong.
[Francis Crick]
All the essential ideas in science were born in dramatic conflict between reality and our
attempts at understanding. [Albert Einstein]

The Life and Times of a Dissident Scientist Page 35 of 40 147
Ignorance is sometimes bliss in scientific research. [Robert Hanbury Brown]
What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
[Werner Heisenberg]
It is sometimes considered a paradox that the answer depends not only on the observa-
tions, but on the question; it should be a platitude. [Harold Jeffreys]
But when do anomalies begin? We will argue that certain scientific anomalies are recog-
nized only after they are given compelling explanations within a new conceptual framework.
[Alan Lightman and Owen Gingerich]
One key to progress in science is an eye for contradictions and an insistence that they be
resolved. [Helen Quinn]
What path to explore is important as well as what we notice along the path. And there
are always unturned stones along even well-trodden paths. Discovery awaits those who spot
and take the trouble to turn those stones. [Charles Townes]
A.3 Historians, Philosophers, Sociologists, Etc.
Even within scientific circles today a new discovery may be ignored or opposed if it is revo-
lutionary in principle and made by someone outside approved circles. [William Beveridge]
What we must aim at is honest, objective judgment of the evidence, freeing our minds as
much as possible from opinion not based on fact, and suspend judgment where the evidence
is incomplete. [William Beveridge]
Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, that is, with the recognition that
nature has somehow violated the pre-induced expectations that govern normal science.
[Thomas Kuhn]
Science has its orthodoxy as well as religion. [Article on Heresy, 1959 Encyclopedia
Brittanica]
New ideas should be regarded as precious, and should be carefully nursed, especially if
they seem to be a bit wild. [Karl Popper]
Intolerant dogmatism. . . is one of the main obstacles to science. Indeed, we should not
only keep alternative theories alive by discussing them, but we should systematically look
for new alternatives; and we should be worried whenever a dominant theory becomes too
exclusive. [Karl Popper]
In real life, research is dependent on the human capacity for making predictions that are
wrong, and on the even more human gift for bouncing back again. [Lewis Thomas]
The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it
with similar energy. [Wilfred Trotter]
Faith is a great thing, but it’s doubt that gets you an education. [Mark Twain]
The doctrines which best repay critical examination are those which for the longest pe-
riod have remained unquestioned. [Alfred North Whitehead]
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