The physicist and his father

Leonard Susskind has come a long way for a working-class kid from the Bronx, N.Y., said Helena de Bertodano in The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.). The Stanford professor is now known as one of the world’s greatest physicists, a pioneer of string theory, and the author of several best-selling popular-science books. But when Susskind, 73, first told his parents he wasn’t going into the family plumbing business, they were appalled. “My father was a tough guy,” he says with a chuckle. “He said, ‘What do you want to be, a ballet dancer?’ I said, ‘No, I want to be a physicist.’ He said, ‘You ain’t going to work in no drugstore.’ I said, ‘No, not a pharmacist, a physicist.’ He said, ‘What’s a physicist?’ I said, ‘Like Einstein.’ From that moment he got it. My mother was crying and saying, ‘We’re going to be broke,’ and he just looked at her and said, ‘Shut up—he’s going to be Einstein.’” Susskind’s father died in 1978, but he still feels his influence. “He tried to learn physics and some mathematics. He struggled. He worked at it until he died. And of course I wasn’t really around to guide him. Ever since, I’ve always felt, when I was teaching people, that I was really teaching physics to my father.”

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