Trained at MIT as a particle physicist, Michael Riordan did his Ph.D. thesis in the series of MIT-SLAC deep inelastic scattering experiments that gave evidence for the existence of quarks and led to the 1990 Nobel prize in physics. Drawing on this experience, he wrote a general book entitled "The Hunting of the Quark" that went on to win the 1988 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award and served as a springboard to a new career as science writer and historian of twentieth century physics. Riordan will recount the long and winding road that led from one avocation
to the other.