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I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

Harvard is the home of American ideas.

When I arrived at Harvard, I wanted to design a course in political theory that would have interested me, back when I was started out, in a way that the standard things didn't.

Ideas shape the course of history.

At Harvard College, I discovered political philosophy as a way of life.

Perhaps I was always intensely curious, but my Columbia education gave me a framework and a perspective to investigate new things - things that could be put into a historical and philosophical lineage.

Following graduation from high school in 1948, I attended Harvard University where I became a physics major. Having grown up in a small town, I found Harvard to be an enormously enriching experience. Students in my class came from all walks of life and from a great variety of geographical locations.

I had studied at Harvard and MIT astronomy and a lot about the heavens and the star system and so forth.

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.

I came to graduate school at Harvard University in 1954. My thesis supervisor, Julian Schwinger, had about a dozen doctoral students at a time. Getting his ear was as difficult as it was rewarding. I called my thesis 'The Vector Meson in Elementary Particle Decays', and it showed an early commitment to an electroweak synthesis.