What is the biggest obstacle you have faced professionally?

Then you have the clients. The care and feeding of clients is really one of the main obstacles, because you always have a client with some preconceived idea of what a house looks like, and all you want him to do is leave a check and go to Europe for a couple of years. Or leave two checks. But alas, life isn’t simple. If it were, more people would be better architects.

I have generally had few setbacks and few obstacles. I have been very fortunate in that things have been handed to me rather than my going out after them. There are a few roads that I didn’t take that I maybe could have. When I was a graduate student, maybe a second-year graduate student, I worked frequently at the Illinois State Library in Springfield, and one day, the director of that library called me into his office and said, “I have some news to tell you that is still very hush-hush, but I’m resigning from this job. I’m going to the Chicago Historical Society, and I’m going to recommend that you be appointed in my place.

What I’ve got doesn’t hurt. I’ve been lucky. The treatment has been benign. I don’t know if I could concentrate if I was in pain. I’ve never had to stop.

Tony was cautious. He suspected I’d wired the radio telescope up wrong. So we checked on another radio telescope on the site. The thing was pulsing nicely on mine but as we stood by the pen recorder of this other telescope, nothing happened. It was a horrible moment. And suddenly there it was, five minutes later because we had miscalculated when the telescope would see it. If we’d miscalculated by 25 minutes, we’d have all gone home and the story would be different.

The hard part was getting around this, this was a religion among physicists, and in fact even in the Bohr-Einstein debates, and with Schrödinger also, the universal religion was quantum mechanics makes correct predictions, period, no, off the table. What Bell's theorem and in particular our version of it, the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt experimental prediction, showed that either that had to be wrong, nor Einstein's whole legacy had to be wrong. I think at the time people who were critical of doing the experiment didn't realise really what was at stake, that it was that cut and dried between two religious icons, if you will, the field of physics. Since I kind of was the inventor of the CHSH inequality and the CH inequality and all that, I knew exactly what it was all about. But it took a long time for that to filter in.