My Dad [Philip Rosten/Rosenblum] had a way of downplaying anything good or great that he did. When he volunteered for the USA Air Force, he could have said it was for patriotic motives. But instead he said, "Well, everyone was getting drafted." I realized that joining the Air Force had a significant effect on his life. For he had just got his master's degree from Cal Tech. So when he got to the Air Force, they must have seen that had someone they could use. So they put him into the development of the top secret B-29. Then he was sent to fight for the war in Europe. But after the war, he developed the first Infra Red telescope. The the army base where he made that the focus of Senator McCarthy who had noticed that there were hidden communists in the USA government [like nowadays.] So when my Dad came to work on Monday morning, the whole place was empty, except for Berny Marcus, his friend. All the others were fired. So even though it was just window dressing because all the workers were back at work in a couple of days, still my dad and Marcus had been offered to work on a new government project--the top secret U-2 airplane. So he and Berny came to California. [They were flown out every Monday morning to Area 51, and came back home on Friday. [That is how it came about that I was born in California.] Then that was finished and there was apparently some other project at Hycon Corporation. But after that was finished, my dad invented a new kind of xerox machine called the "copymate machine." But that was the first time he was working in a private capacity. That lasted for five years, and then the USA government came calling again. They wanted him to put his infra-red kind telescope onto satellites that would spy on the USSR. So they got a constellation of satellites into space for that, and then asked my dad to work on laser communication between satellites for SDI (Star Wars).
And that is when the whole incident when the KGB started stealing the documents from TRW corporation where my dad was working. [That was made into a movie.] But my dad quit there, and started working for himself. He sold our house, and made a tidy sum, and started investing with that.
[I am not saying he stopped because of the KGB. Rather it seemed to me, that he was going to quit even before that was revealed. He told me that better experts were up and coming from the universities and that his areas of experience were no longer needed.]
When my dad was making his invention, the copymate machine in Newport Beach, we went to Temple Sharon in a nearby city. Then we moved when he started work on SDI, and I started going to Temple Israel in Hollywood. Then when I graduated from high school, I decided to go to a very great Litvak yeshiva, Shar Yashuv in NY. [My motivation was mainly philosophical. I had spent a lot of time studying Plato, Dante, Spinoza, and Chinese philosophy. To go and learn Torah seemed to me to be the natural next step.] Shar Yashuv had a beginners program, but rapidly advanced to deep "Lumdus" learning. [So my first year there was sort of confusing, but the second year in when we started on Hulin and the third year was for Ketuboth. In the middle of the fourth year, I decided to go to the Mir in NY. That is where I discovered a second kind of deep learning that you see in books of Rav Haim of Brisk and Rav Shach. It is very different from the type done in Shar Yashuv which was more analytic. [Kind of like G.E. Moore in philosophy.] The type of Rav Shach is more "global". [Sort of like Hegel.]
So my education in Physics was delayed by some years and I am finding it hard to catch up.
