Author Biography

Alan Giambattista hails from northern New Jersey. His teaching career got an early start when his fourth-grade teacher, Anne Berry, handed the class over to him to teach a few lessons about atoms and molecules. At Brigham Young University, he studied piano performance and physics. After graduate work at Cornell University, he joined the physics faculty and has taught introductory physics there for nearly three decades. Alan still appears in concert regularly as a pianist and harpsichordist. When the long upstate New York winter is finally over, he is eager to get out on Cayuga Lake's waves of blue for Sunday sailboat races. Alan met his wife Marion in a singing group and they have been making beautiful music together ever since. They live in an 1824 parsonage built for an abolitionist minister, which is now surrounded by an organic dairy farm. Besides taking care of the house, cats, and gardens, they love to travel together, especially to Italy. They also love to spoil their adorable grandchildren, Ivy and Leo. Betty McCarthy Richardson teaches at the Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics