He was a tenured professor that ran large observatories. He was always more interested in what I could do technically than in whether I approved of him or not. I don't think he paid any attention to my comment about the whale, although he did give me good comments on my thesis.

I did include quotes from "Moby Dick" at the tops of some of the chapters, including "...I hold that the Whale is a fish [not an animal]..." whcih I had at the top of a chapter which was the quantum theory of the SIS device I was working with. So there were whale quotes in there for him :)