but prohibited any experiments that involved nitroglycerin. Growing up, Taylor also showed an interest in billiards. In the afternoons after school he played billiards for almost ten hours a week. He would recall this early interest as his introduction to the mechanics of collisions, relating it to his later work in particle physics. The behavior of the interacting balls on the table and their elastic collisions within the confining framework of the reflector cushions helped him to conceptualize the difficult abstractions of cross sections, neutron scattering, and fission chain reactions. As a child, he developed a passion for music, and would quietly sit for an hour and listen to his favorite songs in the mornings before school. Later, while completing his PhD at Cornell, he noted that while his theoretical physicist peers embraced the classical music piped into their rooms, their experimentalist counterparts would uniformly shut the system off. Taylor attended the American School in Mexico City from elementary school through high school. A gifted student, he finished the fourth through sixth grades in one year. Being an accelerated student, Taylor found himself three years younger than his friends as he entered his teens. Taylor graduated early from high school in 1941 at the age of 15. Not yet meeting the age requirements for American universities, he then attended the Exeter Academy in New Hampshire for one year, where he took Modern Physics from Elbert P. Little. This developed his interest in physics, though he displayed poor academic performance in the course: Little gave Taylor a grade D on his final winter term examination. He quickly brushed this failure off, and soon confirmed that he wanted to be a physicist. Apart from education, he also developed an interest in throwing discus at Exeter. This interest continued into his college career, as he continued to throw discus at Caltech. He enrolled at the California Institute of Technology in 1942 and then spent his second and third years in the Navy V-12 program. This accelerated his schooling and he graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics from Caltech in 1945 at age nineteen. After graduation, he attended the midshipman school at Throgs Neck, in the Bronx, New York, for one year to fulfill his naval active duty requirement. He was discharged in mid-1946, by which time he had been promoted to the rank of lieutenant. He then enrolled in a graduate program