Big thinker

After learning in October 1980 that he would receive a Nobel Prize, James Cronin, SM’53, PhD’55, hung up the phone and went about his day. The UChicago physics professor was taking his colleague Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar’s course on general relativity that morning, and instructed his secretary to hold his calls. “It was certainly a great honor to receive the Nobel Prize, … but one should not let that fact go to one’s head,” he wrote in 2014.