I remember reading this big book, The Wonders of Life on Earth, when I was eleven or twelve. It said bird migration was controlled by some kind of internal timer, some kind of clock. Some birds, it explained, use the position of the sun to orient their migration, and the clocks in their heads are…

My parents and Germany: tough times My parents were born and raised in Germany. My mother Hilda was born in 1914 and came from a secular, quite comfortable family in Berlin. Her father, my grandfather, Magnus Sonntag had a pharmacy, which still exists today with the same name and in the same location (Marien-Apotheke, Wilhelmsaue…

J effrey C. Hall was born in Brooklyn, New York, near the end of World War II (in Europe). His parents, fortunately for him, were among rare young adults in the U.S. who achieved college educations during the Depression. Hall’s father used his higher education credentials to become a journalist, his mother a school teacher.…

Early years I was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 19th July 1945. My mother Grace Goldie, after two weeks convalescence, took me back on the train to Berwick-upon-Tweed, England, to re-join my father John Henderson, who was a baker at Bryson’s in Berwick. My mother was born in Edinburgh and my father in Tadcaster, North…

Iwas born on September 12, 1940 in Weidenau/Sieg, Germany. Since 1972 the town has been part of Siegen, a city with currently some 100,000 inhabitants, situated at the southern tip of North Rhine Westphalia. The mountainous area around it is called Siegerland, for centuries home of the iron mining, processing and manufacturing industry. Mining of…

My curriculum vitae has been on my personal page of the University of Lausanne’s website for a long time. Few people had looked at it so far. Suddenly, with the news of the Nobel Prize, it became a worldwide buzz almost overnight. All of this because people found it, let’s say, “unusual”. But why is…

My youth I was born in 1940 in Logan, Utah, USA, a college town of 16,000, nestled in a verdant valley in the Rocky Mountains. My father, David Wynne Thorne, was a professor of soil chemistry at the Utah Agricultural College (since renamed Utah State University). Over his lifetime he had a major impact, through…

R eflecting on my background, it is not at all apparent why my life did not go in other directions, rather than my becoming a physicist, and one dedicated to an academic career and pursuing research on some of the most fundamental problems in nature. My families’ backgrounds are not very well documented, but I…

My father came from a well-off German Jewish family in Berlin with connections to the Rathenau family that had begun the Allgemeine Electrische Gesellschaft (AEG). As a young man he had become an ardent and idealistic communist. After finishing medical school he worked in a communist workers’ hospital as a neurologist in Berlin. My mother…

Niels Ryberg Finsen was born on December 15, 1860, at Thorshavn in the Faroe Islands. His father, Hannes Steingrim Finsen, belonged to an Icelandic family with traditions reaching back to the 10th century, and occupied prominent (from 1871 the highest) positions in the administration of the Faroe Islands. The mother, Johanne Formann, was born in…