Also, George Gamow's work is exemplary in making complex ideas understandable.

See, for example:

>One, Two, Three... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science (1947)

https://www.amazon.com/One-Two-Three-Infinity-Speculations/d...

PDF: https://archive.org/details/OneTwoThreeInfinity_158

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>Thirty Years that Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory (1966)

https://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Years-that-Shook-Physics/dp/04...

PDF: https://archive.org/details/ThirtyYearsThatShookPhysics-TheB...

I suppose, but unless he felt a true calling to become a theoretical physicist, as is partly outlined in this piece, his decision was clearly right, for the previous golden age of physics was well over by late '50s, and progress since then has been minimal compared to the Thirty Years that Shook Physics (quantum theory: https://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Years-that-Shook-Physics/dp/04...), General Relatively (still our best theory of gravity), and the revelations of the secrets of the nucleus. Maybe also Feynman and company's development of the first quantum field theory.

There were of course a lot of things of smaller scope to be done, and the unification of EM and the weak nuclear force was in the future, as well as the imperfect Standard Model that adds the strong nuclear force, and we still haven't unified gravity and the other three fundamental forces, but programming was wide open, and what you could do was rapidly improving as the machines were rapidly becoming faster and bigger. ADDED: For example, the Electrologica X1 he did his Ph.D. thesis on was solid state, as in completely transistorized (no vacuum tubes) and had magnetic core memory, both major advances in the '50s.

Heck, my calling was science, and I was strongly on that track as of 1968, but computers nonetheless gained a lot of my attention starting in the mid-late '70s, as they did for Feynman starting with the Manhattan Project when "computers" were the operators of 10 digit electromechanical scientific calculators.