Rothman was born in
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, and attended
Central High School. He attended the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science (now
University of the Sciences) from 1936 to 1938, where he majored in chemistry. From 1943 to 1944 he studied at
Oregon State University, where he received a
bachelor's degree in
electrical engineering. He served in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946, becoming a sergeant in the Signal Corps. After the war Rothman returned to Philadelphia to study at the
University of Pennsylvania, where he received an M.S. in 1948 and a Ph.D. in
physics in 1952. Rothman died at
Wyncote, in 2001, of
heart failure, from complications due to
diabetes and
Parkinson's disease. His complete science fiction stories were published posthumously in 2004 by
Wildside Press with the title
Heavy Planet and Other Science Fiction Stories edited by Darrell Schweitzer and Lee Weinstein. In 1950, Rothman married psychotherapist Doris Weiss, a marriage that ended in divorce in 1973. His second marriage was to epidemiologist
Anita K. Bahn, who died in 1980, the year they officially married. The following year he married Miriam Mednick, a social worker, to whom he remained married until his death. Milton Rothman's son is physicist and science fiction writer
Tony Rothman. His daughter, Lynne Lyon, LCSW, is an Attachment Therapist, and founder of the Attach-China-International Parent's Network.
Professional career After receiving his doctorate, Rothman had hoped to work at
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but was denied security clearance due to correspondence with fellow science-fiction fan and future mathematician
Chandler Davis that had been intercepted by the FBI a dozen years earlier. As a result, he spent the next seven years investigating nuclear energy at the
Bartol Research Foundation in
Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. In 1959 he joined the newly created
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (formerly
Project Matterhorn), which was concerned with creating controlled nuclear fusion. In his book ''A Physicist's Guide to Skepticism'' (1988) Rothman applied the
laws of physics to
paranormal and
pseudoscientific claims to show why they are, in fact, impossible. He wrote that proponents of pseudoscience like to claim "Anything's possible" but this claim is false as there are things which are logically impossible as they are self-contradictory and physically impossible because they violate well-established laws. ==Publications==