 I've often been asked whether, if I had to do all over again, I would be a physicist. Of course I would be a physicist. It uses my skills at mathematics. It makes contact with the world. It helps me feel that I understand how the world works. When I was about eight years old, I used to read everything that came through the house, including comic books. That image from a science comic book particularly stuck with me over the years. This was an image of an atom. At the center there was a proton and going around the proton, an electron, round and around. There's the electron. This electron however was peculiar, different from other electrons, because it had on it little people. These little people had their own lives, their own things that they did. My later scientific work was based upon an image entirely similar to this in which what happened on one scale of length was reproduced on a smaller scale and on another scale yet this formed the basis for my science. As I look back at my life in science, I can see that it divides naturally into three periods. There's a period of acquiring skills and techniques followed by a brief period of transcendental creativity followed by 45 years of work to maintain worthwhile creativity in the face of changing biology within me, trying to be charming, not me. When I think back at the period in which I was being educated, I see no tremendous evidence of creativity. I think of my parents who fought themselves to get away from poverty and insisted that I too work hard and try to accomplish things, especially the things that they couldn't accomplish in life. After being at Harvard, after three years of postdoc, after two years of being a professor, I'd finally learned enough to do the rudiments of my profession myself, my own problem, my own thing. I went off to Cambridge in England. Is there a photo from the time in which I was full of, fullest of achievement? This is probably the closest. This looks like me from roughly then. I had a beard, it was a face transition, grew a beard and I try to look distinguished. I studied a problem which had come up, how do face transitions occur? A face transition is like change from gas to liquid. It's a change in the behavior of matter in which the matter all acts cooperatively to go from one situation to another. I was interested in face transitions particularly because they represented a situation in which what happens at a small scale produces effects at a very large scale and the relationship between the little and the big is essential to understanding the world around us. After I had done a long and hard calculation in which I worked out in vast detail what was going on inside of a face transition, I put that aside for a little bit and started to think about other things. Then all of a sudden a vision, a flash came to me, I don't know where it came from, in which the work that I had, the hard work that I had put in all came together and I saw how face transitions worked, how the little and the big related to one another. I was thrilled, I told other people about it and they seemed thrilled and of course that made me even more thrilled. It was a wonderful, wonderful, inexplicable time. I was 30 years old, I had accomplished something which was brilliant, inexplicably brilliant and then I had to face a problem faced by many, many theoretical physicists. What do you do after the act of brilliance? Regal physicists become less creative after they're 30 years old. One could go give up, do something else entirely, but I love physics and I didn't want to do that. So instead I formed the goal of using my physics in a large variety of different kinds of endeavors. I started out by working for three or four years on the construction of computer models which describe how cities develop and which would help one make choices between different public policies that one might apply to cities. After that brief period, I was starting to work on dynamical systems. That's the behavior of things in time, particularly how they can go in an orderly fashion or perhaps become altogether chaotic. The next section of my life I started working on fluids because they did this change from orderly into chaotic behavior and change in a tiny region of the fluid could build itself up and make for a change through the whole thing. I worked with experimentalists, people who were actually working with fluids. Oh there's a drop coming down, oh my gosh, did you just do it again and again? So in these decades, instead of being a soul actor inventing the whole world myself, I worked with other people and helped them reach out to invent themselves and I felt useful by being helpful to my colleagues and to the world of physics at the launch. That's wonderful, that's wonderful. Look at the wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle. Now that I'm almost 75 and I'm looking back at my career in physics, I have to ask myself, did something bad happen to me when I was 30 years old? Is this change from being wonderfully creative to being a helper? Is that a bad thing? It didn't seem like a bad thing to me at any time. I have always been enthusiastic about what I've been doing. Loving the big or the little pieces of creation that I did, I think it can be traced back to my parents. My parents made me have joy in hard work, joy in the accomplishment that comes from hard work and the last 45 years have given me that joy, different from transcendental creativity of the time I was 30 years old, but no less pleasurable.