诺贝尔大师尼克拉斯洛布姆伯根自传.docxVIP

诺贝尔大师尼克拉斯布洛姆伯根自传My parents, Auke Bloembergen and Sophia Maria Quint, had four sons and two daughters. I am the second child, born on March 11, 1920, in Dordrecht, the Netherlands. My father, a chemical engineer, was an executive in a chemical fertilizer company. My mother, who had an advanced degree to teach French, devoted all her energies to rearing a large family. 　Before I entered grade school1, the family moved to Bilthoven, a residential suburb of Utrecht. We were brought up in the Protestant work ethic2. At the age of twelve I entered the municipal3 gymnasium4 in Utrecht, founded as a Latin school in 1474. Nearly all the teachers held Ph.D. degrees. The rigid curriculum emphasized the humanities: Latin, Greek, French, German, English, Dutch, history and mathematics. My preference for science became evident only in the last years of secondary school, where the basics of physics and chemistry were well taught. The choice of physics was probably based on the fact that I found it the most difficult and challenging subject, and I still do to this day. My maternal5 grandfather was a high school principal with a Ph.D. in mathematical physics. So there may be some hereditary6 factor as well. I am ever more intrigued by the correspondence between mathematics and physical facts. The adaptability of mathematics to the description of physical phenomena is uncanny1. 　Professor L. S. Ornstein taught the undergraduate physics course when I entered the University of Utrecht in 1938. He permitted me and my partner in the undergraduate lab, J. C. Kluyver to skip some lab routines and instead assist a graduate student, G. A. W. Rutgers, in a Ph.D. research project. 　After the German occupation of Holland in May 1940, the Hitler regime removed Ornstein from the university in 1941. I made the best possible use of the continental academic system, which relied heavily on independent studies.Just before the Nazis closed the university completely in 1943, I managed to obtain the degr