I had an agenda. It was a very smooth transition.

In many places where you have these kinds of people – very strong, very confident people – the atmosphere is frenetic and tense and unpleasant.

It was a marriage of convenience. Everybody recognized it as that, but we didn’t think it was an extraordinary thing. The lab was a very nice place.

It’s a difficult question of relations between people.

Postdocs are needed to build a modern research team; you want to bring in people with different backgrounds and different skills.

The notion of graduate students as colleagues rather than students is a more modern notion, I think – across the country, in many different fields.

When the first computers started to come in, we tried to digitalize the seismological equipment.

You travel across the country, you visit departments, you give talks, you talk about the work at your laboratory – what’s going on, what the opportunities are there – you talk about your own research.

For my own personal growth I had to set out on my own.

Gutenberg and Richter were very great men.