 My first physics course was a senior in high school and it was taught by a chemistry teacher and he only took us in the lab once and then wired up a diagram with a light bulb in it and we warned him not to turn the switch on because he thought he had it wired in parallel and it was in series. He turned it on and the light bulb blew up and after that it was all just lectures with equations. So that was a fun introduction and I realized at that time I needed to learn as much from other students sometimes as from the teachers. But then I majored in physics in college a small four-year Catholic college in the Cincinnati area now called Thomas Moore College and when I was a sophomore there majoring in physics I got to work on an NSF grant and I worked on it sophomore, junior, senior year and really kind of learned what research was in doing that. So that was a side job but I did get paid for it and could help pay tuition with that and eventually wrote a paper on studying crystals with magnetic fields and learning what the fields were inside the crystal. So that was pretty important to me and then I went from there to a large university in University of Illinois and majored there in physics and eventually worked with I was the first student of Professor Chang there who himself had been a student of Julian Schwinger who was a Nobel Laureate at Harvard so I'm kind of the academic grandson of Schwinger and Dr. Chang helped me learn physics all the way up through quantum field theory and I did my Ph.D. in quantum field theory studying particle physics and then finished my Ph.D. and continued to do research in elementary particles so protons, neutrons, electrons those come from the sun also in the solar wind and got interested in astronomy and started teaching astronomy that's an example where I'd never had an astronomy course but I was teaching it so I had to learn it and was using a planetarium and an observatory with a 16 inch telescope so that was great fun and got me very interested in astronomical observations and thinking of the earth as a planet just like any other planet thinking of the whole earth and thinking of the ocean where I lived and then after doing that I went to Boulder, Colorado where I worked at the Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and started doing climate research so that was my first publications in climate and I looked at what we were calling ice caps at that time so the planets have ice caps near the north and south pole and what would happen if the sun changed if the sun cools off a little bit the ice cap grows if it brightens up the ice cap shrinks a bit and our ice caps stable when the sun is changing we knew already then the sun wasn't a constant and we found that big ice caps and small ice caps are not stable ones in between can be stable like the last ice age the ice cap was coming down into Wisconsin and New York and so on so it can be stable and last a very long time but when you have only a small ice cap like Greenland for example it's not stable so when it starts to melt it's likely to keep melting until it's completely gone so that was a paper in the late 1970s and I went from Boulder to Goddard at that time, 1979 and I've been here since doing space missions and observations to improve our forecasts of climate