Autobiography of Wattenberg, focusing on his life as a physicist. He discusses the events and individuals that influenced his choice of career during childhood; early jobs in applied physics; graduate school at Columbia while working; his experiences during the years of the Second World War including work with Enrico Fermi on uranium fission and their experiments at the newly-established Argonne National Laboratory; his interest in history; instrumentation in optics and particle detectors, and radioactive sources; nuclear reactors; and particle physics.