Editing Appendix/CGH/WhatIsReal (section)

==Yale, Columbia, and the GISS==

From 1978 - 1980 I held a ''J. Willard Gibbs Instructorship'' in the Astronomy Department at Yale University.  At the time, Yale operated only a very meager computer system to support research, so I sought additional resources in the New England area.  Leon Lucy &#8212; on the Astronomy faculty at Columbia University &#8212; shared my interest in using computational-science techniques to simulate star formation processes.  During a brief visit with him at Columbia, Lucy suggested that I contact Richard Stothers at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies to see if I might be granted access to their computing facilities.  I followed up on this recommendation and, shortly thereafter, received a pair of type-written letters from Richard Stothers stating, in part, the following &hellip;
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[6 December 1978]:&nbsp; "In answer to your recent request for computer time at the <font color="orange">Institute for Space Studies</font>, I think we can grant it.  Your thesis work, as described in your letter and in a conversation that I had with Leon Lucy, is of considerable interest to us here &hellip;"

[24 January 1979]:&nbsp; "When you intend to come to the Institute for Space Studies for the first time, contact me or <font color="orange">Patrick Thaddeus</font> in advance by phone &hellip;"
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The return address on both of these letters from Stothers reads, '''Institute for Space Studies, 2880 Broadway, New York, N. Y. 10025.'''  This address is associated with the corner of Broadway and W. 112th Street.  It is therefore no surprise that a warm smile broke out across my face when I read the first paragraph of chapter 9 (p. 193) in Adam Becker's "What Is Real?" book.  It reads:  "It was the Summer of Love [1967] in New York City, and John Clauser was cooped up in a room at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies on 112th Street &hellip; Clauser, a physics graduate student at Columbia, was attempting to measure the recently discovered cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation &hellip; Clauser and his graduate advisor, Patrick Thaddeus, were intent on being the next to hear the beginning of the universe &hellip;"

It was fun to find out that John Clauser first became aware of J. S. Bell's theoretical prediction regarding quantum measurements ''in the same building'' &#8212; albeit a dozen years earlier &#8212; as the one where I had carried out some of my computational simulations early in my professional career.  And, although I knew that Pat Thaddeus had been using radio telescopes mounted on the top of buildings in Manhattan to study the properties of interstellar gas clouds, this excerpt from Becker's chapter 9 makes it clear that it was Thaddeus' desire to study the CMB that initially drove him to construct his Manhattan-based radio-frequency detectors.

I should add that I am sincerely grateful to [names withheld] for allowing me to spend a night or two with them in their compact Manhattan apartment the several different times that I was using the GISS computing resources.  (Otherwise the "gift" of computing time at GISS would have been unaffordable to me.)  [Name withheld's] and my time as UCSC graduate students had overlapped and he was in a postdoctoral position in the Columbia University astronomy department while I was at Yale.  [Name withheld] went on to have a successful academic career in astronomy.