Man earns Ph.D., fulfills dream of being physicist — at 89

By JENNIFER McDERMOTT
Associated Press

EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — An 89-year-old man in Rhode Island has earned his Ph.D. and became a physicist after working toward it for two decades and thinking about it for a lifetime. Manfred Steiner recently successfully defended his dissertation at Brown University in Providence. Steiner cherishes the degree because it’s what he always wanted and he overcame health issues that could have easily derailed his studies. Steiner was a teenager in Vienna when he became inspired to become a physicist after reading about Albert Einstein and Max Planck. But he followed his family’s advice to study medicine. He began taking undergraduate physics classes after he retired.