In 1974/75, I spent a sabbatical year with Professor Vince Jaccarino and Dr. Alan King at the University of California in Santa Barbara to get a taste of nuclear magnetic resonance. We solved a specific problem on the bicritical point of MnF2, their home-base material. We traded experience, NMR, and critical phenomena.

End of the sixties, Keith Blazey interested me to work on GdAlO3, an antiferromagnet on which he had done optic experiments. This started a fruitful cooperation on magnetic phase diagrams, which eventually brought me into the field of critical phenomena.

Scientific fraud, plagiarism, and ghost writing are increasingly being reported in the news media, creating the impression that misconduct has become a widespread and omnipresent evil in scientific research.

In summer 1961, Rose-Marie Egger became my wife, and her stabilizing influence has kept me on an even keel ever since. Our honeymoon trip led us to the United States where I spent two post-doc years working on thermal conductivity of type-II superconductors and metals in the group of Professor Bernie Serin at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.

Battletar' took a while to kinda permeate out into pop culture generally. It hit first with the science-fiction fan community, then the critics, and then it kind of went to the general population.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

One hardly knows where, in the history of science, to look for an important movement that had its effective start in so pure and simple an accident as that which led to the building of the great Washington telescope, and went on to the discovery of the satellites of Mars.