From Stan's CV files: "This degree was not received"

From Stan's CV files: "This degree was not received"

• Feb 05, 2022
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One of the primary sources of information we have about Stan's early career is his own file folder of CV information, recovered and preserved among his papers following his death in 2004.

These include early and later drafts of his personal history, experience, publications and outside recognitions, dating from the middle and late 1970s when he was contemplating career opportunities after Argonne. 

There are also copies of letters to several potential employers in 1978, as well as a photocopy of an employment application form from an earlier period, in 1964, when he came to Argonne from Westinghouse Labs. 

I will come back to the latter in another post. For now, I will focus on the Experience statement from the CV papers. Unlike some of the other pages where there are evolving drafts, there is just one version of this particular page. 

I completed all course work for the Ph.D. at Columbia (1947-1950), and carried out experimental work both there (1948-1951) and at Brookhaven National Lab (1951-1952) in an attempt to measure the type of coupling in β-decay. This degree was not received. 

The rest of the page briefly covers his experience at IBM, Kidde Nuclear and Westinghouse, then gives a summary of his Mossbauer work, which he calls "the major focus of my career since 1960."

The enclosed publication list demonstrates the diversity of these studies. This has left me with a rather broad knowledge of solid-state physics. 

The last paragraph lists several other notable projects, including this one that rings a vague bell and is an intriguing clue for further investigation.

...an (un)feasibility study of γ-ray lasers for the Air Force...

All very interesting but none more so than the factual five words that leave so much unsaid: This degree was not received.