Math wasn't any easier now than it had been before, and my science courses were also increasingly mathematical in nature. This time I did my homework, my usual routine was to take classes all day with light review and reading between them. OK, there was some socializing, too, I really enjoyed my friends and the intellectual stimulation of ideas and debate. We were students and we talked about everything, current events, philosophy, the issues of the day; "...there was music in the cafes at night, and revolution in the air". And we talked physics. Not just talk either, we scribbled furiously on napkins, covering them with equations and diagrams as we came to grips with the elegant mysteries of the cosmos. The senior students helped the new ones and the new ones helped each other. In those days, the physics/math crowd were just as freaky as the art, lit and psych students, and we loved them too. Only the business majors and the button-down engineers stayed away. They talked about the football team they still didn't have and the cut-rate fraternities they were pledging, but they didn't talk to us. After everyone went home, I stayed behind until they closed the University Center, drinking gallons of coffee and smoking whole packs of Marlboros at a sitting, filling page after page in my legal pads with the Greek letters and arcane symbols which almost describe our Universe.

After 10 at night, I knocked off for the day, and rode down to the local tavern, the Collage Saloon and Cinema, one of the world's great hippie bars, and drank 25 cent drafts 'til midnight. The North Tampa neighborhood which was fast growing around USF had supported student watering holes before, The Wild Boar and Rasputin's were active before my drinking days, both had mysteriously burned down during police raids. The Collage survived and spawned a host of imitators, the Wit's End, Mi Back Yard and the Losers (a genuine rock and roll glitter palace that occasionally hosted some big name acts). The local bands weren't bad either, the Outlaws got their start at the Collage, and I remember fondly two other very heavy three-piece acid rock outfits, now defunct, Albatross and Amnesia.

This was a good time to be an astronomy major, quasars and pulsars had been discovered just a few years earlier, and the recent detection of the 3 degree microwave background radiation was our first verification of the Big Bang theory. I had been, as were many scientists, a partisan of the rival theory, the Steady State theory, which argued that on large scales the universe was uniform, in infinite space and forever in time. No matter where or when you were in the Universe, a look around would show pretty much the same in every direction for as far as one could see. The Big Bang was as scary as it was unexpected, the Universe was evolving, which implied that it had once been created. It had an age and a size and very different pasts and futures. And it was going to die. The evidence is never totally conclusive in astronomy, but you have to go with the best observations available. Not only did this new Universe exhibit some pretty creepy properties, it seemed to be inhabited with exotic and unimaginably violent objects and events at phenomenal distances, it was very different out there than it was here. The cosmos does not have to make sense. There were exciting things going in the other sciences as well, the geologists finally had convinced themselves of the obvious and accepted plate tectonics while the discovery of the structure of DNA a decade earlier was showing us that Life and evolution were even more beautiful as physical phenomena than they had been as divine miracles. Physics had not had any major revelations since the thirties' twin revolutions of relativity and quantum theory, but that was enough high strange to last us at least another century. And it was during this time that my country had it's finest hour, America started sending spacecraft throughout the solar system.

Everyone of my generation will forever remember what they were doing when JFK was shot, and when we landed on the moon. I remember being in the shower, getting ready for a moonwalk date with a new girlfriend when the Eagle landed that afternoon in 1969. I came out, dripping wet with a razor in my hand and lather on my face and sat on the couch to watch the final few minutes of the landing on television. Walter Cronkite was doing the commentary, the voices of the astronauts and mission control were playing in the background, and when the little model the networks were filming to illustrate the action finally touched down, I wept. It was the happiest moment of my life. The walk on the lunar surface was to be later that night, as scheduled, so I made it to my date's place to watch it on the tube. We lasted until the great leap for all mankind and could wait no longer. We made love for hours.