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D.B. Rubin 607earlier). Wheeler was a fabulous teacher, truly inspirational. Within the firstweek, he presented various “paradoxes” generated by special relativity, introducedthe basics of quantum mechanics, gave homework problems designed tostimulate intuitive but precise thinking (e.g., estimate — by careful reasoning— how far a wild goose can fly), pointed out errors in our current text (e.g.,coherent light cannot be created — it can — lasers were invented about a yearafter this edition was published), and many other features of scientific thinkingthat are critically important but often nearly absent from some people’sstatistical thinking, either because they do not have the requisite mathematicalbackground (and sometimes appear to think that algorithmic thinking is asubstitute) or because they are still enamored with thoughtless mathematicalmanipulations, or perhaps some other reason.In any case, my physics lessons from Anspaugh and Wheeler were crucial tomy thinking, especially the naturalness of two closely related messages: Timemarches on, and despite more recent “back to the future” movies, we cannotgo back in time, which leads directly to the second message — in any scientificproblem, there will always exist missing data, the “observer effect” (intuitivelyrelated to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, but different). That is, youcannot precisely measure both position and momentum at the same point intime, say t, because the physical act of measuring one of them at t affects theother’s value after t; this is just like the fact that you cannot go back in timeto give the other treatment in a causal inference problem, and the choice ofnotation and problem formulation should reflect these facts. All of statisticsshould be formulated as missing data problems (my view since about 1970,although not everyone’s).But like many kids of that age, I was torn by competing demands abouthow to grow up, as well as larger social issues of that time, such as our involvementin Vietnam. And Wheeler took a leave of absence, I think to visitTexas Austin in my second year, so I switched fields. My exact reasoning fromthat time is a bit fuzzy, and although I continued to take some more advancedphysics courses, I switched from Physics to Psychology towards the end of mysecond year, where my mathematical and scientific background seemed bothrare and appreciated, whereas in math and physics, at least in my cohort,both skill sets were good, especially so in physics, but not rare. This decisionwas an immature one (not sure what a mature one would have been), but afine decision because it introduced me to some new ways of thinking as wellas to new fabulous academic mentors.First, there was a wonderful Psychologist, Silvan Tomkins, author of thethree volume “Affect, Imagery, Consciousness,” who introduced me to SigmundFreud’s work, and other philosopher/psychologists on whose work hisown book built. I was amazed that interpreting dreams of strangers actuallyworked much of the time; if I asked the right questions about their dreams,I could quite often tell things about strangers such as recondite fears or aspirations!There may really exist a “collective unconscious” to use Jung’s phrase.In any case, I developed a new respect for psychology, including for their neat