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"I felt that he had destroyed my life," says Morris. It left him for the next few years reeling: he remembers in a coffee shop in Berkeley with Daniel Friedan, a fellow Princeton exile and the son of the feminist icon Betty and commiserating about the frustrating time they had from East.

"I'm talking about all these problems I had with Kuhn, which is a constant refrain was, and he tells me about all the problems he had in the Department of applied physics," recalls Morris. "He said, you know, ' she just could not appreciate me. I had discovered a new kind of Physics! " And I thought, ' Oh, no. This looks bad. This looks very, very, very bad. This is not going to turn out good. We go both to the nuthouse. " ”

Of course, they're not. Friedan would go on to win a Macarthur Fellowship, and be recognized for his pioneering work on string theory. Morris, meanwhile, left academia once and for all to make a movie about a pet cemetery, called "Gates of heaven," which became a cult classic, and Roger Ebert described as one of the 10 greatest films ever made.