Tom Clifford

A Day in the Life of a Rocket Scientist Tom Clifford

Publisher Marketing: The book is a photo gallery-images from the life of a geek rocket scientist. I concentrate on myself mostly, but I also include images with relatives to document fun family events. These images are in no particular order and are not arranged by activity. The time spans are from early 1940s (scanned black and white film) through early 2015 (digital). Each image is composed and captioned to identify the moment. There are major unfortunate gaps in the record related to technology, timing, and problematic kids' activity coverage. I would love to have retained images of me keeping three kids' swings, swinging without getting kicked in the face or diving to catch a bailing-out toddler. Image quality is iffy in spots-all the author's fault, not the publisher's. Note also that I have always been irked by the popular impression that geeks and nerds have no life beyond boiling lab beakers and chalk-boarded equations. Wrong. In this book, I call myself a rocket scientist only as a stereotype catchphrase. I did only engineering chores in four aerospace firms surrounded by real scientists, who were themselves fully functional, fun-loving folks. Just because we were good at arithmetic did not doom us to boredom.