Professor Brody’s love of tennis, perhaps like Newton’s, was never quite matched by his skill. From fumbling tournaments in high school (“The coach gave up”), he progressed to four years of varsity play at MIT, and for one heady month coached the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania where, for almost all his career, he was a physics professor. His original field, though, was particle and nuclear physics, the result of a boyhood fascination with a little book called “Atoms in Action”; and it was only by a fortuitous piece of topspin, or backspin, or rotation about an axis, that he found himself focusing not on photons and quarks but on relatively massive fluffy yellow balls, bouncing.
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