Going from the University of Manitoba to the University of California, Berkeley was, for David, as it would have been for anyone in the late 1940s, when he arrived on the Berkeley campus, “a bit of a culture shock.”
Then, as today, Berkeley was very much a center of intellectual activity in the U.S. This was especially true in the Department of Physics. And the crown jewel of the Physics department was the Lawrence Laboratory (later the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), where David would work.
The Lawrence Lab was founded in 1931 by Berkeley professor Ernest Lawrence, the physicist responsible for the invention of the cyclotron. In the late 1920s, seeking to build a compact particle accelerator for use in high-energy physics, Lawrence devised a circular chamber that used electromagnetic fields for confinement. The ‘cyclotron’ took advantage of its circular design, in which particles cross the accelerating field repeatedly, to maximize the energy output. Lawrence would later win a Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention.
Lawrence was an advocate of “Big Science” and, by the end of the decade, had assembled a large team of top physicists. Following the outbreak of World War II, he and his group focused their attention on military research. In 1942, they started working with the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bomb. Lawrence’s friend Robert Oppenheimer led the work conducted at the newly launched Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Lawrence himself stayed in Berkeley and worked out a means for electromagnetic enrichment of uranium, an integral part of the successful completion of the weapon.
After the end of the war, many of the scientists who had worked at Los Alamos and contributed to the development of the atomic bomb moved to Berkeley, where they continued their nuclear research while also teaching in the department. It was the beginning of the Cold War, with growing tensions and an escalating arms race between Western powers and the Eastern bloc, and the Berkeley campus became a focus of ongoing debate about the development of nuclear weapons.
Such was the backdrop when David began his graduate career in 1949—though, as he explains, Cold War concerns weren’t top of mind for him and other students. “Among the senior staff, it was very political. Many were against the idea of always making bigger and better bombs. As students, we watched and listened, but we didn’t get involved. We were too busy.”
To be sure, the students faced intense pressure on the academic front. “It was high stakes,” David says. “Berkeley was a world center of particle physics and there was a sense that the most important advances in the field were happening all around us.” Even today, 75 years later, the word he uses most often in describing his graduate school days is “fear … F-E-A-R.” Students in the Physics program were endlessly afraid of failing exams, of washing out, of not measuring up. David recalls a friend in the department succumbing to the pressure during an exam. “He got so scared, he cracked up and had to be carried out and sent home,” David says.
In his early semesters at Berkeley, David enrolled in a host of graduate-level courses, including courses on electricity and magnetism, which reinforced his lifelong interest in these topics. He found, though, that because his undergraduate training in these areas was often lacking, he was struggling to keep up with the work. He sat down one day with his graduate advisor and explained that he didn’t feel prepared. In response, his advisor suggested he re-take the undergraduate physics classes. So, for the next couple of years. David simultaneously pursued undergraduate and graduate courses of study at Berkeley.
This was, he says now with characteristic understatement, “hard work.” In fact, it added several years to his graduate career. But he was determined to see the program through—to avoid becoming one of the many graduate students who left before completing the PhD. “I wanted to make sure I got there,” he says.
Fortunately, he had support. Not least was his thesis advisor: Professor Burton J. Moyer, a high-energy physicist in Ernest Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory who discovered the neutral pi meson. “My thesis advisor was a gem,” David says. A devoted educator as well as a brilliant scientist, Moyer encouraged David in his studies and proved a kindly and compassionate presence in an otherwise severe academic environment. “He should have kicked me out,” David says now with a laugh, “but instead, he took me under his wing. He put his arm around my shoulder and said, ‘let’s do this.’”
David wasn’t the only one Moyer helped. Moyer advised a handful of graduate students working on their theses and made sure each of them had a thorough understanding of the relevant material. “What he did was, he held seminars several times a week with a small group of us and we worked through the details of our thesis work, the physics of it,” David says. “We all had doctoral theses related to each other’s. He taught us what we were supposed to know and made sure it got into our heads.”
Moyer and Edward Teller had suggested David’s thesis topic: “Bremsstrahlung from Proton Bombardment of Nuclei.” This proved an excellent fit. The work fell squarely in high-energy physics and was in some ways related to Moyer’s own research, but it also involved magnetism, a longstanding interest of David’s from his crystal set radio days. The research thus allowed him— indeed, demanded of him—that he immerse himself in the technology of strong magnets: of how to design and build the magnets to meet his specific needs (“pair production”). The knowledge and experience he gained from this would serve him well in the coming years.
Another Lifeline
Professor Moyer played a pivotal role in helping David through the graduate program, and helping him learn to think like a physicist. But what really saved his life, he says, was meeting Vivian. Vivian was a brilliant Berkeley graduate student in mathematics, and he and she had a class together. They became friendly in class and grew closer as the semester continued, eventually spending most of their time together.
On the rare free evening or weekend when they weren’t studying or otherwise working, the young couple would socialize with a group of friends—“a gang of graduate students,” he says, echoing the language he uses to describe his childhood friends on the streets of Winnipeg. Escaping the labs and the library in Berkeley, they would trek across the bay to enjoy a variety of spots in San Francisco. David recalls, for example, an Italian beer joint called the Bocci Ball—literally a bocci court ringed by a bar. “We hung out at the Bocci Ball, and we often went to the opera,” he says. The latter was expensive, of course, so they would volunteer to work as ushers so they could attend for free.
Even more important, though, was the support David and Vivian gave each other. David was still struggling with feeling underprepared for the Physics PhD program at Berkeley. Vivian was grappling with difficulties of her own. (She got caught up in security clearance problems, David says. Her graduate supervisor was revealed to be a member of the Communist party and, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, at the height of the Second Red Scare in the US, simply working with him as an academic advisee was enough to cause turmoil in her life.) Together, David and Vivian found the strength to continue in the face of adversity. “We clung to each other for dear life. She was having her troubles, and I was having mine. We saved each other’s life.”
In the end, David and Vivian didn’t stay together, but he credits her with helping him through one of the most challenging periods of his life.
The Journey Continues
David earned his PhD in Experimental Nuclear Physics in about 1955. It was the culmination of years of hard work and struggle, of fighting to overcome feelings of inadequacy and accepting support from those who were best able to provide it. There were undoubtedly times when he was certain he wouldn’t get there, but he persevered and ultimately achieved what he had set out to do.
Of course, as many will know, finishing a PhD is only the beginning. In some ways, finding your feet in the job market and the broader science ecosystem—figuring out who you want to be as a researcher, how and where you would like to make your impact—can be just as challenging.
David’s postdoctoral journey began even before he graduated. In about 1954, he traveled to Miami Beach, Fla. to visit with his parents, who were vacationing there. His plan, he says, was to spend a week or two enjoying the sun and sand while beginning to write his dissertation. Of course, as so often happens in life, events unfolded rather differently than he had imagined.
One afternoon, maybe two or three days into his visit, David wandered over to the University of Miami in Coral Gables, where he met with faculty from the Department of Physics. Impressed by his background, and intrigued by his dissertation topic, the faculty asked him to give a talk. He did, and they subsequently offered him a job. He had always been a good speaker, he says.
David and Vivian moved to Florida and he started a job as an assistant professor in physics, teaching and conducting research—and in his spare time, continuing writing his dissertation— for a salary of four thousand dollars for the academic year. (“Coral Gables was hot,” he says. “And on my kind of salary you couldn’t afford an air-conditioned apartment there. But you could live. We are talking about 1955.”) He mostly enjoyed the work but, once again, he felt underprepared.
“I really didn’t understand physics as much as I should to be able to teach it,” he says now. “But in teaching it, I began to understand it better.”
After his stint with the University of Miami, he and Vivian moved to Quebec City, where the climate was cooler (Vivian had never liked the heat in Florida), and he took a job with the Defense Research Board of Canada. The Cold War was by now in full swing and military money was pouring into the research arena—in this case, into the development of infrared guided missiles, a new technology in the mid-1950s. David was part of a cadre of physicists enlisted to optimize the design and manufacture of the associated technologies. “For a year and a half, I did guided-missile infrared physics,” he says. “I liked the work. It was far from what I had been trained to do, but it was a good experience.”
Next up was a postdoctoral fellowship in the University of Rochester Department of Physics. This job was much more in line with his graduate studies. His duties at Rochester mostly involved working with the cyclotron at the university, conducting special magnets studies, and contributing to a variety of particle physics studies.
It was here where, after seven years together, Vivian decided to go back to her old life in California. Later, she established herself as a respected mathematician and devoted herself to developing high school textbooks, under the name Vivian Groza.
And that wasn’t the only change. David’s position at the university, as is often the case with postodoctoral fellowships, would last only about a year. As it turned out, his next adventure was just around the corner.
