- When he was planning to go to the USA for the first time, he had purchased a ticket for the Andrea Doria, an ocean liner that collided with another vessel and killed around 50 passengers off the coast of Nantucket. His father insisted he take an earlier voyage on a different ship.
- As a teenager during WWII, he hid from the Nazis and their collaborators in a remote farmhouse, mountain caves, and an empty underground fuel container.
- He was an eminent physicist and a trilobite expert. He went to the University of Chicago as a research associate on a Fulbright scholarship, and conducted experiments that set the stage for the discovery of "strange" quarks, one of the fundamental building blocks of matter. His work focused on hyperons and mesons, as well as cosmic rays. He became a full professor of physics in 1965, and retired as an emeritus professor in 1999.
- In his free time, he traveled across Europe, Africa, and Canada collecting trilobite fossils. He discovered two new trilobite species, and wrote a book, "Trilobites", aimed at general audiences.
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