Serendipitous meanderings and adventures with molecular beams

This is the story of a native-born American who came as a postdoc to the country of his parents, Germany. There, by good fortune, he could participate in the revival and the rebuilding of the physical sciences following the ravishments of the Second World War, becoming at the age of 38, the director of a Max-Planck-Institut in Gottingen. Working under nearly ideal conditions, he carried out basic research using molecular beams. Aided by many active, youthfully impulsive, yet perceptive and imaginative, students and experienced knowledgeable guest scientists from many countries, he enjoyed exciting adventures into unknown landscapes in the fields of molecular gas-phase interactions and solid-surface phenomena and, most recently, in the realms of quantum liquids and solids.