Thanks, Vanamonde and Steve Limpus, for your comments. Following are my responses:

Vanamonde, since you find my bio so fascinating, I'll add some more entertaining tidbits in the form of a list of famous people I've met:

George Gamow: Instrumental in creation of the Expanding Universe concept. While working at Sylvania Research Center in Bayside, New York, in the 1955 - 1965 time frame, Robert M. Bowie, Director of Research, asked me to suggest a guest speaker for an upcoming Sigma Xi (physics honor society) dinner meeting at which staff and spouses would be present. I suggested George Gamow. Bowie told me to write to Gamow and persuade him to come. He wrote back in longhand, accepting my request. I met him at the Long Island Railroad station, drove him to my home in my car, and introduced him to my wife. He showed us a silly parlor trick: He cut a horus (that word keeps cropping up in the darndest places) and stood it on end on top of an empty milk bottle and asked me for a coin. I gave him a nickel, which he placed on top of the torus (there's that word again!) and asked my wife if she could remove the torus !!) in a way that would cause the coin to end up in the bottle. I don't remember what our responses were, but he then used one finger to flick the torus (that word really does keep coming up, doesn't it!) horizontally from the inside. It flew off to the side, and the coin dropped neatly directly into the bottle! We then drove to the Sylvania laboratories, and Bowie and I gave him a tour of the laboratories. That evening, in an elegant restaurant in Manhasset, Long Island, Gamow, Bowie, my wife, and I had dinner at the head table. Then I introduced Gamow to the audience, comprising laboratory staff and spouses. I mentioned his popular Mr. Tompkins books and his latest publication, something about gravitational collapse of dying stars the size of the sun into white dwarfs. I thought it appropriate to explain to this non-astronomically oriented audience that a white dwarf is not a Caucasian human being with a pituitary deficiency. After the dinner, I drove Gamow back into Manhattan and dropped him off at the Pennsylvania Railroad station. Gamow was noted for his sense of humor. When he and graduate student Ralph Alpher were about to publish a paper on nucleosynthesis in the Big Bang, he thought it would be clever to bring Hans Bethe (see next item) into the picture by publishing the article under the collective auther list Alpher, Bethe, Gamow (first three Greek letters, alpha, beta, gamma), which they did. Bethe had nothing to do with it except to allow them to add his name to the list!

Incidentally, Dr. Bowie had an experience I was glad to forego: He was a passenger on the American Airlines Boeing 707 that collided in midair=e with an Eastern Airlines Lockheed Super Constellation over the Bronx. The 707 lost 17 feet off one wing but managed to limp into at-that-time Idlewild Airport, now JFK, airport on Long Island. The Super Constellation crashed and burned.

Hans Bethe: Originator of the Carbon Cycle, which explains the source of energy in some types of stars, altghough not the sun. While at Los Alamos, I started to take a course in electromagnetic theory under him, although I had to drop it when it was time to leave for Bikini. Once, I met him in his office to explore the possibility of moving into his department, the Theoretical Division. I was in the Gadget Division. "Gadget" was the code word used to Los Alamos to refer to the bomb itself. The word "bomb" was a no-no at Los Alamos before the "Little Boy" bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. I told Bethe that I was not a theoretical physicist, so that I might not qualify for his division, but he told me something to the effect that theoreticians aren't all that different from other physicists. As it turned out, I transferred to the Electronics Division when Gadget Division disbanded, and it was in that position that I was selected to go to Bikini as a member of the Los Alamos Field Group for the 1946 atomic bomb tests at Bikiini,.,. But that's another story.

Edward Teller: Developer of the hydrogen bomb: I started to take a course in quantum mechanics at the same time that I started the course in electromagnetic theory under Bethe. I had to drop it when I went to Bikiini. I occasionally asked him questions just after classes adjourned.

Enrico Fermi: I met him in a corridor talking to someone else whom I knew. I joined and became a third memer of the group holding the conversation. No big deal.

Major General Leslie R. Groves: Military director of the Manhattan Project for development of an atomic bomb. He came to Bikini to inspect operations leading up to Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests in which I participated. I explained to him what the electronic instruments that I had developed were supposed to do. I had the distinct impression that he didn't really understand what the cathode ray oscilloscope, part of my instrumentation, was all about. At Los Alamos, I heard that he once raised a ruckus at Oak Ridge about someone having had a funnel made from brass when he could have bought one at a local hardware store made of tin.

Commander Norris E. Bradbury, successor to J. Robert Oppenheimer as Director of the Los Alamos NationalLaborories. I met him, of all places, when we were standing side by side at urinals in a men's rest room on the laboratory ship on the way to Bikiini. We had a brief inconsequential conversation, but for me it was a monumental occasion!

At the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, another part of the Manhattan Project, I met a a Swedish physics graduate studen also on the project. It was she whom I found talking to Fermi at Los Alamos. After the war, she defected to China to assist in development of the Chinese atomic bomb. Last I'd heard, she'd dropped out of all activity to do with bombs and had settled down in China as a farmer on a small farm. I'm surprised that I don't remember her name.

Unfortunately, I never met Galileo, Brahe, Kepler, Copernicus, Newton, or even Einstein. I guess I was underprivileged.

Steve Limpus: I'm impressed by all of the heavy reading you've evidently done on cosmology. It makes miue pale in comparison. It appears to me that these writers don't want to eliminate any possibilities for fear od inadvertantly discarding the one that fits the actual universe. I prefer the Occam's Razor approach because we'll presumably never know the true shape of the unierse.