Frankly, I had a Blast - playing with all those accelerators and accessories. Mental + occasionally meticulous mechanical work - as Good as you could manage.
[cliche]I'd have done it for free, if I had some other stipend..[/]

We 'made' not a single shrink-wrapped dazzling new toy for the masses.
Was The World made better, for my Efforts? Let me count the ways:

1) Every $$ to moi was one Less that could have bought a new Plutonium fab or.. fle$hed-out the Star Warz fantasy of a sci pig-iggerant Popular canceller of, as many human-related programs as could be ridiculed/quashed.

1A) After Oct '57, with that beeep--beeep--beeep receivable on any Ham radio, from Up in the Sky: less Questioning {Do we Need this science-stuff much?} .^.. Won One Against the Gipper. Loved That.

2) The Interesting work kept my brain from devolution into a self-promoting Suited machine-cog, 'sworn' to Up the Corporation during all waking hours (thus having to suffer not merely the abasement of doing some worthless thing - but the dissonance of maintaining the pretense that I 'thought' it was Worth something.)

3) Had I done 2: no telling when the jelloware would have curdled. Why, I might have disin'corporated' some entire echelon, a floor-full? of fellow-prof-Liars along within some Final act >>[*]<< of desperation ... say.
(I mean.. we never Really Know of what we are capable, given sufficient provocation ... now Do We?)

ie. so Yeah.. leave. 'em. alone. in academia.



Some may have an even more capable-of-being Disturbed mind than this particular one. And be a lot more lethal in their choreography of a Memorable Denouement.

(This kultur drives sane people nutzo, at an accelerating Rate - I have observed. Maybe homo-sap simply cannot abide unremitting 24/7 Lying -?- it's a thought; let's let some academics Test it?)