Richard Wilson

Sopka:

This is Katherine Sopka speaking. I’m visiting today, the 10th of February, 1977, with Professor Richard Wilson in his office in the Lyman Laboratory of Physics. In the interest of compiling a history of the physics department in recent decades, Professor Wilson has kindly consented to share with me today his recollections and perspective on developments in physics at Harvard since he first came here more than 20 years ago. Professor Wilson, perhaps we can best begin by asking you about your pre-Harvard background and about the circumstances surrounding you coming to Harvard in 1955.

Wilson:

Yes, I was educated in England doing high school during the Second World War, and began Oxford just at the tail end of the Second World War. I was lucky in one sense because I was just finishing my undergraduate work and the Army didn’t want anybody and I was more or less directed to go on to take a PhD instead of being directed to go into the Army. And this, for English purposes, this was equivalent to military service, which was very useful in later time. So I started studying for the PhD or DPhil as we have it in Oxford, in 1946, about a year after the end of the second World War. And I was interested in that time in nuclear physics though it wasn’t the strongest part of Oxford lab, and at that time the highest energy available was from radioactive sources. I worked with radioactive thorium, and then I used the first radioactive source ever to come out of a Harwell reactor which was built a little while later. So it was always coming to the United States was clearly the only possible thing for a European physicist to do, to at least visit. My father always said that way back. The Bell labs and RCA labs were brilliant places to be. So when the opportunity of the PhD was over I started looking around to visit, and the place that came up was Rochester, which I’d never really heard about before, except I was told by my thesis advisor, Hans Habon [?] that Vicky Weisskopf had been there and a lot of good people had been there, Lidar Bridge [?] had been there, and they had a cyclotron just being finished and Burton [?] asked if I’d like to spend some time there. So I did so. So a year after my PhD I went out to Rochester for a year. Then I met Panofsky at Rochester when he was visiting and went out to work with him for a year at Stanford, and where I got married to my wife, the sister of Panofsky’s wife, and then went back home to England in 1951 — no, 1952 — with the intention of staying in England. But I found England was by no means as excited about what was going on in America as I thought ought to be. And to some extent, the fact that I’d been away from England for two years meant that I started on the bottom of the ladder again. And after a couple of years I looked around to leaving England, particularly since I hadn’t found a permanent job or even a continuing one, one which was guaranteed to continue. And so an offer of a job came from Harvard because Professor Ramsey was visiting Oxford. Actually, Harvard would not have been my preferred choice, but after some consideration I decided to come here and came here in 1955. I’d been working before at Rochester. I’d worked with their cyclotron studying with mesons the first experiment in captured pi mesons in deuterium, which gave us the spin of the pi meson. Worked a little bit with the electron lineac at Stanford — it wasn’t terribly fruitful. Actually just beginning. And back in Oxford I worked by that time, with a cyclotron at Harwell, which was 20 miles away. So I came to a very equivalent machine here from Harwell. So when I came here I didn’t know many of the faculty. In fact, I’d met Norman Ramsey, I had met Professor Bainbridge before when he visited Harwell when I was a graduate student. The time I was in Rochester, I spent one day visiting Harvard and I met Professor Strauch, Professor Van Vleck. And the faculty knew me a little more because — well they knew my wife’s family. My wife being the daughter of Professor Dumon of Caltech. This was rather amusing because when I first arrived in Harvard Physics Department, Van Vleck introduced me at a luncheon meeting as Jesse Dumon’s son-in-law. I didn’t really feel I’d arrived on the Harvard faculty until about four years later when one of Jesse Durmon’s visits to us, I took him into the lunch at Harvard and Van Vleck introduced him as Dick Wilson’s father-in-law.

Sopka:

Very good. I didn’t realize that.

Wilson:

So I think to the extent that Harvard does have a style, and in some sense it’s a conservative style, in the best sense of the word conservative, its people don’t interfere with anybody else. It always has seemed to me, some sort of quibbles in other departments, and indeed, the incipient things in this department, I can see people not entirely agree with each other, but the amount of acceptance and respect everyone has for each other, it makes an extremely pleasant place to be around. I think that from other places one’s visited, the tensions are much more obvious. When you get bright people, each with strong wills and strong views, tensions are normal. But they don’t seem to occur very much here. I think that if there’s any style, that it’s that, and it’s interesting to try and understand why. I think it became a habit for one or two particularly good people and particularly nice people from when I came here. Because Professor Street, whom I’d never met before and never really heard much about his work, I think he has contributed very much to that atmosphere. I still do. In a sense, that’s the style one can come across very strongly. At the same time, it’s a style, although people accept each other, there is not as much cooperation with people here as I’ve seen in other places. On big projects there was the cooperation for the cyclotron and then the electron accelerator. But that rather went to pieces, and I don’t see that on anything, either in the physics department or in the engineering department, at the moment. And I regard that as a weakness, particularly for experimental subjects because it means we won’t have any big facilities in the area. When I first came here, it clearly had been the cooperation, or there was, on planning the electron accelerator. That time there was cooperation with MIT. I suppose the primary movers in that cooperation were Street and Ramsey, and from MIT there was Livingston, and probably Zacharias at MIT I would have thought was the dominant person responsible for that cooperation and anyone directly concerned with the accelerator himself. But that was more or less around the electron accelerator — what really broke the cooperation between Harvard and MIT was the hydrogen bubble chamber catastrophe. Well, on questions of what to do thereafter, it was a split on institutional lines, which we’d not really had before. I mean, we’d had agreements to differ on institutional lines, and say this is your preserve, this is our preserve. It’s just simpler to keep it that way. But on this occasion there was a real split which was never really recovered from, and I think was the source of the failure; I mean the end of the electron accelerator and the failure to do any — to get really fundamental things thereafter. Probably the failure to keep it going for synchrotron radiation which was associated with that.

Sopka:

You mean you think the demise of the local activity was as much attributable to difficulties in the workings of a group as to the mechanical limitations, or electromagnetic limitations of the equipment itself, that it had just been outclassed or outstripped by other machines elsewhere?

Wilson:

Well, that’s partially — I think the first crucial thing to keep the electron accelerator now with that energy, we’d have to be doing new things with it. And we did in fact propose 15 years ago to build a colliding beam, and we got some degree of unanimity on that and it was proposed by us Harvard primarily. But we didn’t. And that was not so much an internal split. But of course we had a big battle with other people and who also wants to build a colliding beam out on the West Coast. It resulted in for some years neither of us building one. Which was the worst resolution of that battle. But it’s typical of government bureaucracy: two people want something and they say neither of you shall have it. Really, give it to one. But then there were various things could have been done afterwards, but particularly after the explosion of the bubble chamber everyone was extremely sensitive on his own interests. A lot of people were thinking of moving their interests elsewhere and not really supporting the accelerator as a base for activities. And when there came a question of transferring the activities to synchrotron radiation, which is very interesting but not high energy physics, or direct interest to me, there was not enough support among the physics faculty or of MIT to really say look, this is what we want. So when it came to asking for money in the government, we were weak. And I think that was a not only a local tragedy, but a national tragedy because it basically, we pulled down the machine for a million dollars; it cost a million dollars to pull down. And righ now Brookhaven is starting building something similar which with a full cost of $20 million, which is just a national waste of money. However, that was, I think we did put the proposal into the government. One of my feelings is we should have, could have been stronger locally. And that part, I suppose, is the other part of the coin from everybody letting everybody else do his own thing, that when it comes to having complete group support for a big project it isn’t always there because it’s “well, that’s your thing, you do it.” Just say, “Look, this is important to all of us that this goes ahead.” And I think we missed out on that. I think that’s one of the problems of experimental physics. We’ve been missing out on things like that. I think I came here, really, one of the reasons for coming here was the existence of the cyclotron which was similar to the one I’d been working on at Harwell, almost the same size, which I could do work with. But then the plans for the electron accelerator were the reasons I really came here. The idea of being able to do work at home was what I wanted to do, and I’d be working with [???] And the first six or seven years I was here I basically didn’t do any experiments anywhere but at Harvard. As a matter of fact, basically the last 15. This was, I think, the choice, even though some of the more exciting physics was to be done at the cosmotron at Brookhaven. I decided the physics here was interesting enough, and I just preferred to sit down and work on the local things and that was convenient. I think a more satisfying way of working.

Sopka:

How have things worked out recently? Have you had to —

Wilson:

Well, recently, anyone who’s interested in really either nuclear or high energy physics, has to travel. The silly thing is, having rejected the thought of traveling when I was in my thirties, and now that I am 50 and I find I’m traveling all the time, at a time when it wears me out much more than it ever would have before. But that is just the way life has to be as things have changed.

Sopka:

Where have you been doing your work these days?

Wilson:

Well, let’s see. The high energy physics have been at Fermi lab almost entirely at Batavia near Chicago. And I’ve been doing some nuclear physics at the National Bureau of Standards, and I find it’s better down in Grenoble in France. Once, it’s silly, all the measurements have been done away from here. All we can do here is assemble apparatus and write proposals and make telephone calls. It’s not quite a most satisfying way of doing things. That had a lot of effect, of course, because it means that the graduate students, I suspect — Harvard is a much less attractive place for graduate students to experiment in this sort of field as it used to be because the ideal thing for graduate students is while in your course work to be sort of playing with some equipment before developing to going elsewhere. And now to develop the equipment for the experiments you might be involved with or participating in some experiments of previous students and we can’t do that so much now. We do some computer programming, but they see less of the whole picture. And the attractive place for a graduate student is clearly near where the accelerators are. So the result is the number of good experimental students we get in is really rather small at the moment. I think that’s a pity because the scope of the experimental students in jobs afterwards I think is enormous. Not that they all seem to feel. For example, in experimental high energy physics, every student that goes in you can’t guarantee that he would be able to study experimental high energy physics until he’s retired. But I think it’s unreasonable to expect that. And in fact, I think the more reasonable question to ask is of the people who graduated experimental high energy physics or experimental nuclear physics, do they have a training which is useful in other things? I’ve had four students who moved out, moved away, and all of them regard the training they have in experimental high energy physics absolutely first rate for what they wanted to do. In fact, one has gone into radio therapy and teaching at Mass General Hospital, and he specifically said there is no such possibility to be a PhD in the field in which he’s now working. So the training has to be in something else. The training he’s had stretched his imagination and made him think about the equipment, and he couldn’t have imagined it any better. So, it’s hard to get that across to some incoming students. The standard thing they’re told is the job shortage in experimental physics. That I think is perhaps in the last 20 years. Because when I came here, of the students around, only about one-third were staying on in academic life or field research. But then about the time Sputnik went up, that was 1956 I guess, to about four or five years ago, every student who wanted to could stay on an academic field research. That led an expectation. But it’s not clear to me that they should have stayed on an academic research. I think in fact that was short changing the rest of society. But it led a pattern of thinking of people which I think we’re going to break a little. Well, many of the people in the department were thinking it along my present interests. The cyclotron — It’s interesting because everybody expected that to be closed out by now. It’s still keeping strong. Not pure physics, but almost entirely for medical work. That came up not entirely accidentally. It was intended at the beginning that it might be able to do some radiotherapy work. The first ten years no one got doctors interested. Without doctors being interested there’s no point. But then they spontaneously, the head of neurosurgery and one of the neurosurgeons at MDH, came up about 10 years ago, maybe a little more now, and so he started doing some work with the cyclotron, and now it’s paid almost entirely for medical work. And in fact is one of the cheapest ways of a particular treatments being done much cheaper than surgery for treatments, which is what it’s being used for. So that’s partly because the cyclotron was built and would otherwise be thrown away. I think it’s partly because the cyclotron is close to physics department whereas it’s quite clear that a cyclotron in a hospital would not necessarily have quite the same interest of other people in it. It’s also good to have that cyclotron being there. One or two undergraduate assistants every year, which I think is good for undergraduates to learn these things. I think it’s important to have these things around a university where people can learn. Get some aspects of it. Aspects of what’s going on.

Sopka:

Do you think it may even be more effective as a training device because there isn’t the high pressure of it’s not a big machine, that there’s a lot of — There’s not the same scheduling and the student can get close to the machine, maybe even try to do things.

Wilson:

Well, it’s not being used that way. It’s not being used as a training device in a PhD sense; used more as a device for people to get some feel for what might happen in the medical field, not in anything else. It’d be used as a testing ground for some equipment for high energy physics, which is useful. It helps. We’re not a complete vacuum as far as beams are concerned for testing. So that helps. I’m more of the feeling that it’s there. It gets constantly to people’s attention that physics is more than elementary particle physics, and it’s more than the pure theory and it’s more than even the few experiments in elementary particle physics. It has a tremendous number of ramifications, some that you would never look at. I think that is important. With the other activity I’ve got in quite recently, of course, is running in conjunction with some from the Kennedy School of Government and Energy Policy Group, which is now...

Sopka:

Timely.

Wilson:

Timely, but its geographical concerned with — It’s one of these interesting Harvard things. We found the ideal geographical location was the tail end of Jefferson.

Sopka:

For doing what?

Wilson:

For this group to sit in.

Sopka:

Oh, I see.

Wilson:

Because it is halfway between the engineering department and the Kennedy School of Government and is convenient. And at the moment it is a place where some economist and engineers and technical people mix. I like the idea of that being close to physics people, because we in fact had a couple of physics undergraduates join in the work also. Absolutely first rate. The term papers they’d write are the sort of thing R.D. Little would charge $50,000 for.

Sopka:

What kinds of questions are these?

Wilson:

Well, it’s questions — the students wrote has been doing with some help from me, at the request of the energy officer of the state of Maine, is the problem and the extent to which one can in the state of Maine do what is called co-generation of electricity. That is to say, combine electricity generating devices and industrial parts. So to get greater efficiency and use of the fuel, which right now, since the fuel is more expensive, it’s more interested in greater efficiency in its use than one used to be. So he wrote a fairly comprehensive paper on this subject, which, in fact, has plugged straight into the political system of the state of Maine. So that it’s a sort of activity which leads to a relationship between technical and non-technical things, which is really quite, I think, important to realize how the technical things can properly get plugged in, because physics in my view shouldn’t be in isolation from the rest of the world.

Sopka:

I should think that would be quite exciting for an undergraduate to be involved in something where he sees an immediate interest in the world.

Wilson:

What they seem to find that interesting — I’ve been giving a course on this. The last four years I’ve been doing half my teaching outside the department. In a certain sense this is one of the great pleasures of Harvard. If you have an idea which is half-way decent, the department chairman always let’s you do it. So that gave me a course in natural science, a natural sciences course in energy environment. And this last year has been a course on past energy systems in the engineering department, which was a graduate level course summarizing our energy systems. But the interesting thing is the students in the energy environment course were writing papers. We were busy discussing energy problems and how soon we were going to run out of energy when the oil embargo came up in 1973. The students were absolutely surprised to the extent the term paper they were writing were immediately seized by the governor of the state of Florida in one case, because it was the only paper on the subject he was interested in that he could find immediately. I don’t know anything about the subject, and they said, well, you know more than the governor of Florida, which is —

Sopka:

Yes, I think that’s fine. I’m encouraged to hear that this kind of activity is going on.

Wilson:

Those are things I’ve been spending a small amount of my time on. I think it’s one of the pleasant things about the department is one gets encouragement for doing it. I mean, there are some times — the encouragement’s always there, but not necessarily the interest.

Sopka:

So as far as funding is concerned, have you had to devote much of your energies to securing outside funding? Or has your activities been —

Wilson:

Oh yes. It’s always — I guess that’s one thing Harvard has probably less of than many other places, partly because we’re not together. When I first came here, when there was the cyclotron work, all the funding details were being done by the director of the cyclotron lab, Bill Preston, and there was always enough money for doing what one wanted to do. But now — well, partially I’ve gotten older, of course, but it’s also partially that funding is a lot harder than it once was. I’m basically looking for all the funding myself on all the things. The high energy physics we have has four senior professors. We are joint in that; that’s at least one part of the bit coherence in the department. The only thing actually. And so that gets a lot of the red tape simplified by that. It’s by no means avoided. There is no sort of collective lab funding, and there’s no one in the lab who, you feel, is really constantly going out and beating the drum for funds. I gather that used to be the case in this department at one time when Roger Hickman was younger, not since I was here. But other departments I know the department chairman, other people, do much more beating the drum for funds for the department as a whole than happens here. To that I think I regret about the department. But I suppose it’s partially unavoidable in the way we are all independent of each other.

Sopka:

I’d like to ask you to comment on your view on the relationship between both your own feeling about experiment and theory, and then on a more social level, the interactions within the departments between the experimentalist and the theoreticians, which seem to be a more cohesive group now than certainly — and a larger group than in the past.

Wilson:

That’s right. It’s very interesting how these things can switch, because when I first came, the theory was not a cohesive group. To the extent it was cohesive it was all centered around Julian Schwinger, who had very much his own personal style, and a lot of graduate students. But in a certain sense, he was wearing out his little — exaggerated the word — he was getting older. Hadn’t quite the energy when he was younger that he used to have eight or ten graduate students when he first got here, and it gradually went down. So it’s quite clear that he couldn’t quite be the only focus of the group. And about ten years ago it was a source of concern to us how we could make a more cohesive group with other people. And the fascinating thing to me is the extent with which this has happened, in particular the last three or four years. It’s partly due to success. There is nothing like success. And that we’ve had some very bright students. But the fact they have been working together and pulling together, in a way which ten years ago I was deeply worried about. The interesting thing is I think the inverse has happened in experimental physics which I think is less cohesive now than when we were when we had the electron accelerator and the cyclotron as our major high energy physics activities, that was a cohesive group. The activities of low energy experimental physics tended to be all on one contract with the Navy; that made more cohesion than there is now. But the experimental physics in very non-cohesive now. A lot of problems are arising from that.

Sopka:

Experimental physics, is it tending more to be tied in with applications rather than with fundamental experimental physics associated with theory?

Wilson:

Not really. Not really, no. I suppose the only application stuff we’ve got is for Harvard. And of course, the particulars on the cyclotron. That’s not really the physics department any longer, because the cyclotron is being sufficiently successful; it’s moved out of the physics department. It’s run by an inter-faculty committee of the medical school and— well I’m chairman of the committee representing the faculty of arts and sciences. And the reason for that is it’s now out of the physics department’s hair.

Sopka:

Oh, I see.

Wilson:

And actually it is entirely independent, and that means that if we go bankrupt, the chairman of the physics department doesn’t have to cough up a penny. It’s one less — it’s simplifying red tape on them because we don’t have to worry about departments. They don’t think about it. So in a sense, that’s off on one side, as it should be, administered without department interest. Most research is still extremely pure. More practical stuff in the course of the engineering department. But I’m deeply involved there because the whole engineering department is more theoretical things being done than actual experimental things. The number of people who get out and do anything is going down.

Sopka:

I see. Is this situation that you feel is peculiar to Harvard or is it characteristic of the state of the art and science today?

Wilson:

In a sense I don’t think it’s peculiar to Harvard. One thing that’s peculiar to Harvard now, and that is that theoretical students are good and they can get jobs. I think the theoretical students a lot of other places are not so good and can’t get good jobs. And a theoretical physicist who’s not very good is often a complete drag on the market. An experimental physicist is not. There are many things they can do. Particularly someone who can and has done experiments has a tremendous advantage. So I think there’s a real distinction. So, but at the moment, while we’re ahead of ten years ago, that the theoretical students of which there were at that time appeared to be too many, couldn’t get jobs and were getting lost after they left here, I think was the case, has probably diminished. But I think other places, other institutions, have this problem. Part of the problem is that theoretical students get a PhD, and then a small place like the University of Wyoming wants to upgrade its physics department. And if they’re going to get the research done, they have to put some money in. If they put money into theoretical physics it’s to pencils. And if it’s money to experimental physics, it’s real money. And so they find they can attract a second class theoretical physicist who can’t make it in one of the top twenty much more easily than they can attract an experimental physicist. And that means the students get trained to think — undergraduates come here to graduate school to get trained to think in terms of theoretical things and not in terms of how an experiment lab will be set up or designed.

Sopka:

Oh, yes.

Wilson:

And for the whole field, I think that’s very, very serious. I mean, our undergraduates, although their training tends to be very theoretical (by nature, electro physics is theoretical) they do have the option of contact with a tremendous number of people who are constantly doing things and thinking about things. But that’s not true all over. For example, I get very nervous when I go down to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and see a theoretical physicist trying to decide whether Westinghouse had done an experiment on reactor safety properly or not.

Sopka:

Yes. I can see your point.

Wilson:

That’s what’s happening in the world now. I find it rather dangerous.

Sopka:

So that you feel that the training of an experimental physicist provides him with a valuable background, even if he isn’t able to locate on the site of a large machine and actively pursue a particular line of research that might be close to his own heart.

Wilson:

Yes. If he goes out of the field of research and does something else, I think by the fact that he’d done some experiments, understands data and how it was got and how it might have been got, knows how to ask questions about it, I think is a type of training which is extraordinarily broad in all sorts of other places. Well, a good theoretical physicist automatically gets some of that. But the really good ones don’t go outside the academic world anyway. But what one really worries about, I really worry about is the people who don’t get in the top twenty here. Those theoretical physicists stay — they’ve only kept up with things at Harvard and their PhDs simply by putting blinkers on and ignoring what these other questions which are useful in the outside world.

Sopka:

On the other side of the coin, how do you feel about the significance of theoretical training for experimental physicists?

Wilson:

Oh, well, every experimental physicist has to have theoretical training automatically. Students who get PhDs with experiments with me have much more theoretical training than I have. They understand the theory better than I do, which is important. And with everything I add, they get that. So I’ll be able to design and think very fundamentally about the next experiments. So I think the fact we’ve got to have theoretical training is really there. But it’s partially a question of — I think it’s the mixture. I’d be very upset if we ended up with a split in the department into two departments, theoretical and experimental departments, because I think everyone would lose.

Sopka:

I think it’s certainly where it would lead.

Wilson:

But it’s not — there’s, you know— there’s tendencies that way, and so it sometimes seems simpler. And the students want to go that way. We just last week wrote to the department to reaffirm the whole department, but slightly watered it down. Particularly what happens with theoretical graduate students, they don’t take, some of them want to go through Harvard without taking any course towards [???] experimental physics. And we don’t go along with that. We insist they take one half course. Well that may be a little small. I always refer to it as — (I think it was Wendell Furry’s expression) “that’s a vitamin-free diet.” Actually it’s the wrong way around. I suppose in a sense the theoretic physicists are really the vitamins. But there’s no experimental physicist that would ever dream of going through without taking a course on some of the theoretical physics concepts. It would just be inconceivable.

Sopka:

It isn’t physics, I guess, unless you have large doses of theory.

Wilson:

Well, the theory is that you need to correlate the numbers. I don’t think it’s physics without the experiment, either. I mean, my feeling is physics is basically an experimental subject. It’s observing things in the universe and trying to understand them. The more we look at the discoveries that happen, the more you realize however much one may revere the theoretical physicist, the experimenter is the key. Somebody comes out with a latest Nobel Prize, came from a discovery of two years ago, was a discovery which was immediately chained to the whole of the understanding. Now it fitted very much into theoretical concepts, but the theories weren’t predicting it. They weren’t saying go out and do this measurement in this region in that way and you will find it there. They’re beginning to say that they did, but they certainly weren’t at the time. They were close to saying it, may have been close to saying, but they didn’t have quite the guts to say it. But then when the experiment was there, they fit it rapidly into a framework for them. Which is one of the reasons which, of course, made it an important Nobel Prize experiment. The basic reasons for the experimenters ever looking in those ways didn’t need advanced theory to sort of think you might want to look there. They were all looked for on general principles, which didn’t need any very advanced understanding. So in fact, they were the principles which made us want to add a storage ring to the electron accelerator. So I think it demonstrated that a successful experimenter is in fact doing a lot. The great problem, of course, in being successful in an experiment is often so much luck. Nine-tenths of a Nobel Prize is partly luck.

Sopka:

Yes, I think that certainly is true. I noticed that you had supervised some 30 PhDs.

Wilson:

Right.

Sopka:

Most of them were during the period when the machines were active. Do you have a group of PhD candidates, working with you now?

Wilson:

At the moment I’ve got two.

Sopka:

On what areas?

Wilson:

Work in high energy physics, and they’ve been working experiments in Chicago. The moment the experiment is over they’ve got several hundred computer tapes of the data and we’re hoping to analyze them. They are spearheading some of the work on that. Maybe, I tend to ask something of my students; more than many others do, many students at other universities. I tend to want the student to learn a lot of different things in experimental physics. First, he’s got to know something about keeping the apparatus working and building it. Preferably build one better himself. Then he’s got to understand something about the data analysis. So he’s got to know several little bits. But some people are willing to let students get by with solely working with data analysis, and I think that returns a very one-sided student.

Sopka:

That doesn’t seem like really being experimental if you don’t get your hands on the equipment.

Wilson:

It isn’t. That’s right. Of course then the bubble chamber experiments were typically that way, because bubble chambers are huge objects. But quite often you didn’t find something like — I’ve never understood that a student gets a PhD thesis with working with a bubble chamber pictures and never has the interest to go and look at the bubble chamber of which the pictures were taken. And those students exist, and they just bemuse me. I just don’t understand them at all. I’ll look at the bubble chamber, even though I’m not interested in taking the pictures. It somehow— the interest in the things is, I guess is — I think it’s clear that those people don’t do as well afterwards.

Sopka:

Well, I think it seems as though it would be indicative of a person’s general intellectual curiosity.

Wilson:

Exactly.

Sopka:

We’re coming to the end of this side of the tape. Shall we continue on to the other?

Wilson:

If you have anything else you think would — not quite sure there’s much else I can talk about of interest for the sort of things. Yes. Another few minutes, I guess. Just go through what the students are doing.

Sopka:

I hate to have you cut off in the middle of a sentence, and I know that this is now —

Wilson:

Yes, well there are 30 students. I think about ten or so of them are on the cyclotron, probably more, with those I worked very closely, of course, because I was in there all the time. But those students not only built the equipment, they also operated the cyclotron. If it went wrong at night time, they’d have to fix it. And they couldn’t always fix it, of course, but we’d have a system. They would call me several times at home at four in the morning and say the cyclotron stopped. And quite often I’d be diagnosing it over the phone while I was in my pajamas. I’d say try this, hit this relay, and whatever it might be. Three times out of four I didn’t have to come in, which was fortunate. But of course, then the whole scale of experiments went up when it went to the electron accelerator. I had more assistants and more engineers. And the people learned not to do things for other labs. But then my students still operate their own equipment, operate the equipment quite a lot, and set things up and try to do a fair amount of the understanding about the fixing of them. But of course, they all worked with computers. It’s interesting. I don’t work that well with the computers myself. They’ve developed high speed computers somewhat since I came here. But, I can help them with their plans. Of course, I think even people who do work with computers find helping students on the computers is exceedingly hard. You can get up a framework, and then you just have to leave the student to himself to figure out a particular way. It’s almost impossible to see visually what he’s doing. It’s not a piece of equipment. So there’s a real change happened in that understanding there. But it’s interesting. I think my students, probably all the students in the physics lab, learned how to use computers. Push computers further than almost anybody else in society. Which perhaps is useful, I think, to learn. I guess that’s all. I can’t think of anything else of interest.

Sopka:

Well, I thank you very much for giving me your time, and the information.