Q: Where are you originally from?
A: I went to high school near Chicago. Before that I lived in New Jersey for a while.
Q: What were your favorite things to do as a kid?
A: Depends at what age. When I was little, play baseball. When I was older, I played a lot of music, read a lot of books and watched a lot of movies.
Q: What college did you attend for your undergraduate studies?
A: University of Illinois
Q: What graduate school did you attend?
A: Harvard
Q: What made you want to be a physics
professor?
A: I like physics. Why else? I like doing physics research. It's interesting. It gives you a lot of freedom, within certain limits, to do what you want. You get to work on the things you want to study.
Q: How did you end up teaching here at U.Va.?
A: Well, they offered me a job. It's a great place. The students, as you know, are good here. The pay is OK, even though we haven't gotten raises for a while.
Q: What's the best piece of advice you could give your students?
A: To learn to rely on yourself, not to expect to have everything fed to you in a pre-digested form that you just regurgitate.
Q: Do you have any children?
A: I have three kids, ages 9, 7 and 3.
Q: What's the best thing about being a father?
A: The kids, they're great. They're interesting. My oldest daughter is really interested in space. She likes to understand how things work and what makes them up. I try to encourage that kind of thing.
Q: I heard that you toured with a band this past summer. What was that like?
A: Oh yeah, rock-n-roll. I have a friend named Jay Bennett who used to be in a band called Wilco, which was semi-famous, well still is semi-famous. I guess he left Wilco just about a year ago or so. He toured a lot this summer, and for part of it, he needed a bass player. We used to play in a lot of bands together way back when we were young. So he needed a bass player. I had a couple of weeks that I could spare so I came out of retirement and played bass for him. I did a thrilling two-week tour ... It was six guys in a van driving around, being perpetually late, staying up ridiculously late and playing.
Q: May I ask how old you are now?
A: I'm 39 now. I played in bands back when I was young but never did like the tour thing. I just played in bars or at parties, locally. This was my first taste of the real rock-n-roll lifestyle.
Q: Do you like the physics gig better?
A: Yeah, it pays a little better. Playing the music is awesome, but that's only two hours a day. There's a lot of sitting around. Hanging out, to a degree, is a lot of fun, but it's not a lifestyle. It was like rock-n-roll summer camp.
Q: What kind of films are you into?
A: When I was in college, I used to write movie reviews for the Daily Illini, which is the Cav Daily equivalent of Illinois. I wrote a lot of movie reviews and some music reviews.
Q: What's your favorite movie?
A: Well, the sentimental favorite, I guess, has always been the movie, "M*A*S*H."
Q: What's your favorite restaurant in Charlottesville?
A: The brewery downtown is really good ... South Street Brewery. Their beer is good, but their food is really good. Many times brewery food is not so great.
Q: What's the best place you've ever visited?
A: Amsterdam is a great city. I lived in L.A. for a few years, and I really loved L.A. I lived in Boston for a long time, and I really liked Boston. Chicago, where I grew up -- forget the weather -- is also great.
Q: If you could live in any time period, which one would you choose?
A: The '60s seem kind of interesting. I don't really remember the '60s. I was too young. I remember the '70s, and that wasn't so great. The '80s were really awful. The '60s always seemed really interesting. That's where a lot of the music and movies I like came from. A lot changed in that time. Sure, it would be cool to go back to Revolutionary times, but I don't know anything about that. The '60s is close enough that you have some idea of what happened there.
-- Compiled by Laura Good
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