Robert L. Carroll
Robert Carroll was relaxing. To an observer it might have appeared that he was working: he was bent over a microscope, pecking away at a fist-sized rock with a tiny pick called a pin vise — a pen-sized tool with a needle-sharp pin clamped into one end. As a graduate student at Harvard in 1961, Carroll’s day had been filled with meetings, lectures and seminars and there was nothing he...