For Swarthmore's 5th winner, no peace or quiet

0 Comments | Philadelphia Inquirer, The, October, 2006 | by Tom Avril

For a school with just a few hundred graduates every year, Swarthmore College is on a bit of a roll. John C. Mather, Class of 1968, yesterday shared the Nobel Prize in physics - the fifth Swarthmore grad to win a Nobel, all of them since 1972. Mather, 60, a Virginia native who grew up in rural northwestern New Jersey, said he chose Swarthmore over Harvard and other big schools in part because of the "nice feel" of its quiet campus.

"Swarthmore was a good place to study, and it was respectable to be a nerd, before the term was coined," he wrote in "Humble Arrogance," one of a collection of alumni essays published in a 2004 book, The Meaning of Swarthmore. Mather, who works for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, had little peace and quiet yesterday. He was woken by the...