My senior year physics teacher in high school was a PhD student at Princeton who was doing teaching waiting to get back to his doctoral thesis research. Appare

My senior year physics teacher in high school was a PhD student at Princeton who was doing teaching waiting to get back to his doctoral thesis research. Apparently, his work was with the Plasma Lab, primarily the Tokamak they had. Someone at some point had dropped a wrench or something on the bus bars of the capacitor bank used to power it - and, well, that was that. So he couldn't continue his studies until it was repaired. In the meantime, he taught us. Strange guy, but insanely intelligent, and fun to talk with. He always stressed the importance of "doing the experiment" - so we were always doing a practical experiments as a group to show how what we were shown and learned in class actually worked (within margins of error of course). I learned a ton in that class. After I graduated, I think he taught there one more year, then a few years later I looked him up, and he was back at Princeton, but was now working on something having to do with Materials science; I'm not sure what he's up to today, though - that was a couple decades ago. He wasn't much older than us at the time; late 20s or so.