Before becoming a psychotherapist, I had a career as a physicist. My boss in Berkeley, Luis Alvarez, led a group consisting of some twenty physicists, fifteen graduate students, and over 200 technicians who built new experimental equipment. For that work, Luis won the 1968 Nobel Prize in physics for discoveries of new elementary particles.

This was big science in every sense of the word. It bore very little relationship to the romantic stories of the string and sealing wax physics of Rutherford's McGill-Manchester-Cambridge discovery of the atomic nucleus, or to Faraday's wire and batteries discovery of the dynamo in the early nineteenth century.