The early 1960s, when I started my graduate studies at UC Berkeley, were a period of experimental supremacy and theoretical impotence.

My childhood in Arlington, Va., a middle class suburb of Washington, was uneventful. Ours was a very intellectual family, and we were encouraged to read at a very early age.

Actually, I was more or less determined to be a theoretical physicist at the age of thirteen.

My parents met when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. They were both active in the civil-rights movement.

You guys have a great set of coaches here, and the foundation has been started. Berkeley may not have as good a coaches that you guys have here. They are going to be the glue that holds this foundation together.

Since the founding of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, theoretical physics had nurtured an extremely radical tradition.