the window or signaled through the window to catch Wheeler's attention. As it happened, Wheeler had just taken the floor. It had just become his turn to speak. He interrupted his speech, walked over to the window, opened it, took from me this large graph, carried it back and pasted it on the blackboard for all to see. And then, at that moment, according to the reports of those who were there, Oppenheimer suddenly decided, 'This does look encouraging. I think they've really got something. It looks like it's going to work after all.'" In the fall of 1952, Ford left project Matterhorn and spent the next six months completing his graduate dissertation on the collective model of the nucleus. After defending his dissertation in the spring of 1953, and after spending that summer working in Los Alamos, he took up a post-doctoral research appointment at Indiana University, beginning that fall. Ford furthered his professional education in two subsequent leaves of absence: in 1955–56 at the Max Planck Institut in Göttingen, Germany, mentored by Werner Heisenberg and supported by a Fulbright Fellowship; and in 1961–62 at Imperial College, London and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, mentored by Abdus Salam, Herman Feshbach, and Victor Weisskopf and supported by a National Science Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship. It was during this second leave that Ford wrote his first book, The World of Elementary Particles. In 1964, Ford took a job as professor and department chair at the newly opened University of California, Irvine, setting up the Physics Department there for its opening in the fall of 1965. Cessation of Weapons Work In the summer of 1968, influenced by his opposition to the Vietnam War, Ford announced at a talk in Cloudcroft, NM that he would no longer do weapons work or other secret work. Research, Teaching, Administration, and Writing Ford's principal research was in the theory of nuclear structure, with some work in particle and mathematical physics. He exploited the nuclear shell model and the collective, or unified, model, and also worked extensively on muonic atoms. His first paper, co-authored with David Bohm in 1950, used data from low-energy neutron scattering to give evidence for the transparency of nuclei to neutrons. A 1953 paper showed how regularities in the energies of the first excited states of even-even nuclei can be interpreted in terms of the deformations of these nuclei. Later papers analyzed muonic-atom data