Milton A. Rothman

Born in Philadelphia on November 30, 1919, Milton A. Rothman became an American nuclear physicist, professor, and science writer whose career connected research, teaching, and public explanation. He studied chemistry before earning a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at Oregon State University, served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II, and later completed master's and doctoral degrees in physics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Professionally, he worked in nuclear and plasma physics, including years at the Bartol Research Foundation and later at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Alongside that scientific work, he wrote books that made physics more approachable for general readers, including The Laws of Physics, and he also wrote skeptical and popular-science essays.

Rothman was deeply involved in science-fiction fandom from a young age and helped found the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, often described as the oldest continuously running science-fiction club in the United States. He published a small but memorable body of fiction, usually under the name Lee Gregor, and his stories were later gathered in Heavy Planet and Other Science Fiction Stories. He died on October 6, 2001, in Wyncote, Pennsylvania.