School Time in Germany.- Transition to the United States and Undergraduate Life at Princeton University.- Graduate Study and War Work at Caltech.- Work at the University of California Radiation Laboratory.- Military Work at Berkeley and the Loyalty Oath.- Beginnings at Stanford.- Research and Teaching Before SLAC.- Science Advising and Arms Control: The Beginnings.- Establishing SLAC.- Building a Laboratory.- Physics and the Cold War.- Student Unrest at Stanford.- Fixed Target Research at SLAC.- New Facilities¿Colliding Beams.- International High Energy Physics.- Advances in Accelerator-Based High-Energy Physics.- Science and Politics After Retirement.

This volume contains an ¿unsystematic account¿ of my past work; it is not intended to be an autobiography in the conventional meaning of the term. It is not even remotely a scholarly description of the momentous devel- ments in which I was able to participate; rather it is a recital of ¿memorable¿ episodes, borrowing from the ¿compulsory preface¿ of a facetious British 1 history: ¿History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. ¿ Thus this volume suffers from many ¿sins of omission,¿ including full att- bution of deserved credits, but, it is hoped, only few ¿sins of commission. ¿ The author is greatly indebted to his colleagues and his wife, Adele, who kindly reviewed many segments of the manuscript describing shared expe- ences. They are Sidney Drell, Greg Loew, Ed Lofgren, Harvey Lynch, Richard B. Neal, Richard Panofsky, and Burt Richter. But the author, ne- less to say, is responsible for any errors. Because of the multitude of topics into which I was drawn concurrently, a strictly chronological account would prove unreadable. Accordingly the book is divided into chapters, each of which covers a limited period of engagement in a coherent subject matter; an approach clearly again unsystematic but hopefully more conducive to conveying the substance of the work. This account does not include a description of my family life.

Wolfgang K.H. "Pief" Panofsky, a German-American physicist received his bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1938 and obtained his PhD from Caltech in 1942. In the years 1945-1951, Panofsky held an assistant professorship at Berkeley, before permanently establishing himself as a Professor of Physics at Stanford. Between 1961 and 1984, he was the director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.