Peter Gilman

Phillips:

This is Jon Phillips. I’m interviewing Dr. Peter Gilman from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Today is October 22nd. And let’s just jump right in. So, I saw that you were born in Hartford, Connecticut.

Gilman:

That is correct.

Phillips:

And did you grow up there?

Gilman:

No. But not far from there. I grew up in Storrs, which is the University of Connecticut campus. My father was a physician, the first head of the health service at UConn.

Phillips:

What was it like growing up around there?

Gilman:

Oh, it was nice. In those days—it still is pretty rural, actually. I don’t know if you’ve been to UConn, but the eastern part of the state is the least populated part. I had to bus ten miles to go to high school. I was the last class that graduated from that high school, and then they built one in Storrs, where everybody went after that. But grew up around university kids, largely. It was a good place to grow up, no question about it.

Phillips:

What were your interests as a kid? Were you already interested in science growing up?

Gilman:

I don’t think I can claim that. I liked—well, I did start school when I was five. I think I was driving my mother crazy. [laugh] In those days, what you could do—I suppose you still can—you couldn’t start in first grade in public school until you were six, but if you went to private school, which a number of us did, at five, and finished first grade successfully, then you could take second grade at six. So, I had a year ahead. And there were a number of other guys in my class that did the same thing. But I’m the youngest of four, and my next oldest was already in college when I was still in grammar school. So, it’s really a different—I mean, the three of them were much closer together than I am. So largely I was growing up alone in the house with my parents. I was outdoors a lot. I can’t say I was strongly interested in science at that age. I was interested in being outdoors a lot, and I was interested in baseball. I liked to play baseball. I wasn’t that good at it, but—

Phillips:

[laugh]

Gilman:

[laugh] And when I first got interested in science—well, I think in late grammar school, I showed a lot of aptitude for spatial visualization. I was sort of off the charts on that. I have a grandson now who’s the same way. [laugh] Anyway, so it wasn’t really until high school I really started to get into it. And I had a physics teacher in high school who was very good, and that got me going on that. And I always did well in math. We even got a little calculus my senior year. Way back then, that was not as common as it is now. Then I went to college, and I thought I was going to major in math, but [laugh] the first abstract mathematics class I walked into, I realized within one lecture this wasn’t for me. [laugh] So I switched to physics. [laugh]

Phillips:

You said your dad was a physician on the faculty at UConn?

Gilman:

Well, he wasn’t actually a faculty member; he was the head of the health service, so I suppose you could say he was staff. But then when I was in grammar school, he had to make a choice. They had built a big, new health center, and he had to either—he was allowed to have private patients back before that, to supplement his income, and they told him, “Well, you have to either work for the university full-time or you have to leave.” So, after 19 years, he left, in his late ‘40s, and had to start a new practice in town. I’ve reflected on that, and it was quite a brave thing to do. He practiced until he was 80, though. [laugh]

Phillips:

Wow. That is impressive.

Gilman:

Yeah. In the last few years, he made less money than his nurse did in the office. [laugh] My theory was that he did it to get out of the house so that my mother wasn’t bugging him all the time. [laugh] Anyway.

Phillips:

What did your mom do? Was she a homemaker, or did she have a career?

Gilman:

Well, she was a nurse, but after they got married, she worked a little bit in the infirmary there, but pretty much stopped because there were four kids to raise. And you know—so.

Phillips:

You pretty much expected all along that you would be going on to college?

Gilman:

Oh, yeah. I mean, that was—I mean not—they wouldn’t say where. My two brothers and my father and I are all Harvard graduates. In fact, I have an uncle who was, too, so it runs in the family. But yeah. In fact, that was the whole ambiance, because you know, most faculty children, that was expected. And in those days, you could get into Harvard or Brown or Yale or any of the Ivies. We had kids in my class, top ten, that went to several—Harvard, Cornell, Brown, Yale. And more than one went to MIT.I don’t think that happens now. It’s much harder to get in. [laugh]

Phillips:

Was Harvard your first choice, and did you apply to other schools?

Gilman:

I did. I applied to Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell. Got into all of them. I was turned off by Cornell because in those days, ROTC was required the first two years, and I wasn’t about to do that. Princeton—I’m not sure I really understood at the time, but it felt different. It’s, in a lot of ways, the most southern of the Ivy League schools in terms of culture, and I didn’t care for it that much. Plus, even though there was no pressure from the family, I already identified with Harvard, anyway. We all had good records in high school, but I finished with the lowest rank of the four of us, and I was determined in college I was going to beat them all, and I did. [laugh]

Phillips:

Motivation. [laugh]

Gilman:

Yeah, right. [laugh]

Phillips:

So, you went in expecting to study math and decided physics is the way to go?

Gilman:

Yeah. I mean, I wasn’t strong about it, but I just figured, well, that’s what I know the best. But I think what I was really interested in was applied math. You know, calculus. I liked calculus. But in pure math, you don’t spend much time on calculus. That’s not the subject. It’s abstract algebra. It’s topology. It’s all those things. It struck me as not only impractical but incomprehensible. I mean, I like to read English texts, not always symbols. [laugh]

Phillips:

What did you want to do with a physics degree or an applied math degree going in?

Gilman:

Well, going in, I don’t think I knew, although I had had one experience—see, my oldest brother went to MIT for graduate school in meteorology. I was well aware of that. And when I was 13, I think it was, we had a period where we had major hurricanes going through southern New England. And he was at home for one of those, and he took me up to the top floor of the house. The house had four stories, one underground and three above. And he opened the windows on the east side away from the wind, so you could hear it and see the wind right in the middle of Hurricane—I think it was Hurricane Carol, 1954. Anyway, that was very impressive, just to hear it, and to experience it. And late in college, I came to the conclusion that I was much more interested in classical physics than I was in quantum physics. And of course, in those days, the whole curriculum was aimed towards going into quantum physics, high energy physics. But I had managed to take a fluid mechanics course in college, and so that—and then I got a little smattering of magnetohydrodynamics in college, as—not as part of that class. I think it was a senior class on thermodynamics. Just a week of it. And that intrigued me. And by then I had decided, well, you know, my brother did well in meteorology; that’s a good field for doing classical physics. I kind of liked the fluid mechanics. So, I applied to MIT and Chicago, I think, and I think UCLA. And I got fellowships at MIT and Chicago. I went to MIT.

Phillips:

And did you already know any of the faculty or anybody there since you had been in Cambridge for a few years?

Gilman:

No. But I knew a colleague of my brother’s, Barry Saltzman, who got his PhD there around the same time. In fact, I worked for him two summers in Hartford as a summer intern or whatever you want to call it. And that sort of reinforced it a bit. So, I got that exposure. But then when I got there, I didn’t know what I was going to do within the subject. And so I did a master’s degree in straight meteorology. And that was OK, but then my thesis advisor, a man named Victor Starr, he at that point in his career—I mentioned this in the Hale Prize lecture—I think he was kind of bored with atmospheric sciences, and so he was looking for other cosmic applications of his own ideas. And he had one student who got interested in galaxies from a dynamical point of view.

About that time, there was a guy over at the Air Force—it was called AFCRL in those days—Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories—doing analysis of sun-spot data. His name was Fred Ward. He was a television weather broadcaster in Boston. He did that, and he also somehow had a government job. Anyway, he had done some work that suggested you could measure angular momentum transport on the sun by correlating longitude and latitude motions of sunspots. And this is exactly what Victor was trying to explain the whole universe with! So anyway, Victor said, “Well, why don’t you look into doing a thesis on the sun?” I had never taken any classes or anything. And I did remember that I had been intrigued by magnetohydrodynamics. And the one thing that was obvious from the beginning was if you’re going to do solar fluid dynamics, you’d better pay attention to magnetic fields.

So anyway, then for solar physics, I never did take a class. There really weren’t any offered at MIT. But I took it upon myself to go up to Harvard, and I actually made an appointment, and sat down with Leo Goldberg, who was the head of the program then, I think, and later became head of Kitt Peak. And he was extremely nice about—he was very encouraging. And so that solidified it enough for me. So, I basically was self-taught. I spent a lot of time in the library. I looked up the old literature, got some books, and then starting to define a thesis. I was going to do it from a meteorological point of view in terms of theory, and in one sense—it was a strength and a weakness. And it was a strength in that I had learned a lot about geophysical fluid dynamics—the effects of rotation and stratification, which was very important.

In those days, at least the typical astrophysicist did not get that training. They knew about convection, but they didn’t know about these other subjects. On the other hand, I didn’t learn squat about spectroscopy or anything like that, so I was at a disadvantage in that regard. But if I’m going to do dynamics, then—so anyway, I did my thesis on baroclinic instability, which is a classical meteorological instability driven by differential heating and that produces differential rotation in a rotating system, in a magnetic field. And that’s the first time that had ever been done, without a doubt. I don’t think a whole lot of people paid much attention to the thesis. Other people got awards for their theses. The great irony of that is that while it wasn’t noticed that much then, it became very relevant about 30 years later [laugh] when the solar tachocline was discovered in the late 1980s. Then, a whole different story. But these papers had been published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 30 years ago. Well, 20 years before that.

Phillips:

So, looking at just the dates on your CV, you got your master’s in ‘66 and your Ph.D. in ‘68?

Gilman:

No, no. That’s not right. Master’s in ‘64, and Ph.D. in ‘66.

Phillips:

That makes sense. I was going to say, it was very impressive to do all of that in two years.

Gilman:

Well, it was a good program. And they don’t even do it this way anymore. It was quite rigorous in terms of testing. The comprehensive exam for MIT in meteorology in those days was—we had four hours of open-book questions, four hours of closed-book questions, we had two 24-hour questions, and we had four interviews—oral interviews.

Phillips:

Wow, that is intense.

Gilman:

Yeah, it was. And at least one faculty member from outside the department had to participate. I got somebody from applied math, a man named Lou Howard. Anyway, I remember to this day that the message from the graduate advisor after I went through all that was—he said something like, “Well, despite very mediocre orals, we’re very satisfied.” [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Gilman:

And it’s true; I didn’t do that well on the orals. I wasn’t that great at thinking at the blackboard. But I smashed a lot of the questions. I remember one of the questions was to calculate the normal modes of a swimming pool with sloping bottom, and I knew right away what he was talking about was a shallow water system, which ironically is what I’ve spent most of my time on [laugh] in recent years. And I think I nailed that one completely. Then I had another question—I remember this stuff so well—I had another question from my own advisor who, he was kind of a softball, but he—he loved to figure out ways with which to apply his concepts about angular momentum transport to all different systems. And we had actually talked about this problem, and I didn’t know he was going to put it on the test, but he said, “Calculate the torque on the earth from a mountain range that has curves in it due to the gravity.”

Phillips:

Interesting.

Gilman:

Yeah, yeah. That was a 24-hour question. And I figured it out. [laugh] It is doable. [laugh] But you can see this one didn’t have anything to do with meteorology. But that’s the way he was.

Phillips:

And so you said your Ph.D. was funded by a fellowship that you obtained?

Gilman:

Yes. I had two years of Ford Foundation fellowships, and then I had two years of NASA—what do they call them? They were like fellowships—traineeship, I think it was? Decided by the department. They gave the money to the department, and then the department chair parsed it out according to who he thought should get it. So, I was on support all four years.

Phillips:

And were there teaching obligations with that?

Gilman:

No, none. There were a few people who did teaching, but I didn’t—to teach, you would have had to have had—well, for example, they had the synoptic lab in those days, which was like four afternoons a week, which I suffered through. But you had to have had the background for that. So, the guy who taught that had been in the Air Force and had done forecasting. And so, he was well-versed in all the details of that. I was one of his victims. [laugh]

Phillips:

You said that Victor Starr was sort of pushing for this much broader application?

Gilman:

Yes.

Phillips:

Were you the only one working on solar dynamics at the time?

Gilman:

At that time. But he had a couple of other students later. I think I’m the only one ever to stick. That is to say; my whole career has had that as a theme. The others worked on it for a while and then moved on to other things. There were two others. But he had others—well, one guy—I forgot if he actually did a thesis—there were two guys, I think, that did—well, one guy did one on radio astronomy of some kind, but I’m not sure how—what it had to do with Victor. But then there was one guy who did something on galaxies, but it might not have been his thesis. I’ve forgotten. But he [Victor] kept pecking away at it. It wasn’t too many years after I left that he retired. But he wrote a very nice little book, Physics of Negative Viscosity Phenomena, in which he encapsulates his sort of philosophy. That’s the only book he ever wrote. And it is still cited occasionally, but it’s—he was really a philosopher of science, I would say. He wasn’t into big model calculations. He actually historically had done an awful lot with analyzing observations of the general circulation of the atmosphere. He was world-famous for that. He had all these monstrous project reports. I worked on some of them. But this is all the concept stuff.

Phillips:

And while you were there, were you able just to focus on this specific project, or did you work with other people on other projects?

Gilman:

I did. Not on projects so much as—in the summer of ‘64, after I passed the exams, I decided it would be good to do something else for a little while. And a famous oceanographer there, Henry Stommel, was looking for a pair of hands on an oceanographic cruise. So, I went to the Indian Ocean for the summer. It was sort of a life-affecting experience, both good and bad. The good was I got to see some incredible things. The bad was it reinforced my realization that I was very prone to sea sickness.

Phillips:

Oh, no. [laugh]

Gilman:

And we were 34 days. [laugh] So I was taking seasickness medicine the whole time, and developed very peculiar eating habits, because I was—I ate tons of peanut butter. I just found that would stick with me. And the food was dreadful on that boat. It was a converted minesweeper. And the Indian Ocean, parts of it can be very rough. And I had a berth way up front. And what you had to do lying on this berth—the front end of the ship went up and down like 20 feet, and slammed into the waves, and came up, so you basically had to sleep spread-eagled on your stomach with your feet and your arms hooked into the corners to hang on. [laugh]

Phillips:

Does not sound like a fun trip.

Gilman:

No. Well, but it was interesting, and I’m glad I survived it. Stommel was a great guy. He was very sympathetic. It was interesting to watch the dynamics of it, because he was not the head of this cruise; he was a guest, sort of. It was run out of Scripps Institution in California, and the guy who was head of it—Warren Wooster—had some nutty ideas about the daily schedule—I mean, can you imagine this? He had a schedule for eight hours on, eight hours off. Try that. I said, “I can do 12 hours on and 12 hours off. I can’t do eight hours on, eight hours off. No chance.”

Phillips:

That would be two thirds of a day or—

Gilman:

Oh, yeah.

Phillips:

Yeah, no, it’s—

Gilman:

So, I ended up doing water chemistry for some professor in California [laugh] and taking samples. But there were fascinating things to see, because you—at night-time, all these fish would be jumping, and some of them would land on the ship. They were jumping out of the water to escape the squid that came up to the surface at night to eat them. And so it was just a wild place. And then the surface temperature of the water on the equator was like 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Phillips:

Really!

Gilman:

Yeah. Upwelling from the bottom. It’s a very well-known phenomena. And you’d sail across the border between the cold water and the warm water, and the water temperature would change like 25 degrees in the space of a mile. It was just wild. So, it’s an unforgettable experience, but it also cured me of any thought of doing [laugh] sea-going oceanography. [laugh]

Phillips:

So, you finished your thesis at MIT.

Gilman:

Right.

Phillips:

And from what I saw from your Hale lecture slides, there were some interesting reactions to it.

Gilman:

Oh, yeah. Charney in particular—Jule Charney.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Gilman:

I remember it extremely well. It was traditional that the new Ph.D. student would give a seminar after—it wasn’t part of the exam but give a seminar after the thesis. And at MIT and Harvard and Woods Hole in those days—they still do, I think—have a joint seminar series that rotates around among the three institutions. And I gave it at MIT. And it was reasonably well-attended, but Charney sat right in the front row. And there were the usual sort of questions, but it was a relatively unfamiliar subject to them. He was very polite about it, but he said, “You know, if it had been me, I would have done this other problem—done the convection problem, not the baroclinic instability problem.” At the time, I thought, “Oh.” [laugh] But I forged ahead. But then after I finished publishing all my thesis stuff and a bit more, I said, “All right, I’ll take Charney’s advice. [laugh] I will work on the convection problem.” Which I did, for about 20 years. Then came along all the helioseismic results, and discovery of the tachocline. I said, “All, right. That’s it. I’ve done that. I’m going to go back to—” Because now I can see how this would—how this might all pay off. And there was no doubt it was the right thing to do, because there had been a long string of papers now, on this whole subject.

I like to think we sort of dominate the field here at HAO, between me and Mausumi, particularly in—and Matthias Rempel who worked on it a bit at one time. But we’re the two principal ones, so—and I don’t regret doing the convection problem. In fact, I did the first full 3D MHD convection dynamo calculation for the sun. It has never been done. It was the first, no question about it. It was a spectacular failure in some ways, because the—there’s a classic observation of the sun, which is a so-called butterfly diagram. Do you know about this?

Phillips:

Yes.

Gilman:

Yeah. Anyway, all dynamo models try to reproduce that. Well, mine produce butterfly diagrams, but they all lean the wrong way. And it’s because of the combination of the differential rotations the model wanted to produce and the so-called alpha affect that the model was producing. It made perfect sense from the point of view of dynamo theory—it was correct—but it was also saying that that can’t be what the sun is actually doing. And that’s one of the things that led to the whole focus on solar dynamo going to the bottom of the convection zone, where you had this thin layer. Then it’s a whole different story. So, it was worth doing, no question.

Phillips:

You mentioned your thesis’s publication. But that also took a little while, right?

Gilman:

I had three papers in ‘67, and then another couple in ‘68, ‘69. I found some things subsequent to the thesis, analytical kinds of things. And now I actually did—I developed something called a Rossby-wave dynamo. It was published in Science and also in Solar Physics in ‘68 and ‘69, which again has also been picked up again on recently but languished for many years. [laugh]

Phillips:

You said in the slides—and since I only saw the slides, I’m only getting a very summarized version—but that your thesis, the papers based on your thesis, had to be rescued by Ed Lorenz.

Gilman:

Yes. That’s true. I don’t remember why I did it, but anyway, the first papers from my Ph.D. thesis we submitted to a Scandinavian journal called Tellus, which is pretty widely known. And the review came back—it was a devastating review, a very haughty review. And it said there was no permanent value in this, et cetera, et cetera. I think I may have talked to Victor about it, and he said—at the time, Ed Lorenz was the chief editor of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, and apparently Ed told Victor—or me directly; I’m not sure—go ahead and just put it there.

Phillips:

Pause this, yeah. [break in audio] OK.

Gilman:

Yeah. He said, “Well, why don’t you send them to me?” Because he knew the thesis. And I think he actually reviewed it himself. I’m not sure he sent it out. But anyway, then I was able to publish the whole thesis in three successive articles in the same issue of the journal. So, that really—[laugh]—but the great thing about it was—see, I figured out that it had to have been Hannes Alfvén. Why did I figure that out? In all the reading I had done as a graduate student, I had run across a paper by Cowling, who was a very famous name in the business—MHD—who was critiquing a paper by Hannes Alfvén. Hannes Alfvén had a nutty idea about sunspots coming from toroidal rings that propagate out from the core of the sun to the surface. Something like that; I’ve forgotten the details. And Cowling, who was a giant in the business, didn’t win the Nobel Prize, and Alfvén did, but no one—anyway, he gave devastating criticism of this. And some of the words he used in the article were virtually identical to what showed up in my review, with the papers. So, I thought, “This guy just took this and just—’I’m going to hit somebody with this.’” [laugh]

Phillips:

You were the target.

Gilman:

Yeah, I was the target. [laugh]

Phillips:

So, you published [your thesis] successfully. And then right after MIT, you went to University of Colorado?

Gilman:

That’s right. When I got my Ph.D., they gave me a postdoc. I had the full intention of staying there for at least a year. Victor Starr had the money. And then, kind of out of the blue, I get a phone call from CU, a man named Julie London who was the chair of the department then. I must have given a seminar or something. Maybe—I was out here as a graduate student the summer of ‘65 and I may have given a talk then, and they may have seen it. But anyway, they called up and asked me if I was interested in a faculty position. You know, those days—these days, nobody gets a faculty position straight out of graduate school, I don’t think.

Phillips:

No. [laugh]

Gilman:

And so everything changed. I wasn’t about to turn that down. You know, tenure track, the whole bit. In those days, CU was one of the universities that had gotten a big NSF grant, a Centers of Excellence grant to improve the science faculty. And so I was a beneficiary of that. So, then I got married, and we came out there, and then—

Phillips:

And where did you meet your wife?

Gilman:

Where did I meet her?

Phillips:

Mmhmm.

Gilman:

Oh, as a graduate student, late graduate student, living in Cambridge. And she was there as a—now, that’s my first wife. I’ve been married twice. Yeah, she had just graduated from Gettysburg College and was up there—I forgot what she was doing. But anyway—and you know, it was something of a culture shock coming out here to live here.

Phillips:

I can imagine.

Gilman:

Because in those days, there was a lot of difference. I mean, Boulder was not the town that it is now.

Phillips:

Even still, it’s not Cambridge. [laugh]

Gilman:

No, it’s not, but it’s a—[laugh]—I mean, it’s a much more sophisticated—when I came here in the ‘60s, well, the whole town was dry except for certain enclaves. That finally got eliminated in the early ‘70s. But for a restaurant or entertainment, you went to someplace where they had go-go girls, and they had—it was called the Lamp Post, I think? There was an Italian restaurant out east, and there was a Red Lion Inn, and there wasn’t much else.

Phillips:

Do you know why it was dry? Was there a particular—?

Gilman:

Oh, historical origins, I guess. I don’t know in detail. But anyway, that got voted out. Because you had weird things happen. You had these little enclaves that were not dry, where all the liquor stores were. And you could buy the liquor and take it into the dry areas. [laugh] Boulder’s a very odd place that way. Just even driving out there—just a totally different ambiance than what I was used to.

Phillips:

Very much so.

Gilman:

I wouldn’t go back now. Mainly because of the climate. I mean, there’s no humidity. It’s not desert.

Phillips:

I’m still not well-adjusted to that coming from Baltimore.

Gilman:

Oh, sure. Of course. No, I wouldn’t trade the—I do miss the ocean, but we try to get to the ocean once a year. But no, you’re right, it’s not Cambridge. [laugh]

Phillips:

And the department at CU was the Department of Astro-Geophysics?

Gilman:

Right.

Phillips:

Which I imagine would have been a little bit—you maybe would have melded a little bit better there than in a meteorology department?

Gilman:

Oh, yeah. Oh, there’s no question about that. And that’s one of the reasons they hired me was because they knew I had both. It was a pretty unique department, kind of an odd department, really. They had plasma physics. They had various kinds of atmospheric sciences. It doesn’t exist anymore. Long after I left, they reworked the whole thing. There’s an astrophysical and planetary sciences department now, and then there’s an Atmospheric Sciences program over at the engineering school. So that’s all split.

Phillips:

And so when you were there, it was a tenure-track position?

Gilman:

Yeah.

Phillips:

Did you have teaching responsibilities in that one?

Gilman:

Oh, yeah. And I learned that—I began to feel that—I wasn’t sure how long I would take this, because it—I didn’t not enjoy teaching, but the first time you teach, it’s very hard. The second time you teach the same thing, it’s OK. The third time, you’re bored to death. [laugh] And so I couldn’t—plus, I felt that I was on a track where I didn’t get a sense that I could stand out, really. And that it was going to be a progression, probably quite safe. And the pay wasn’t that good. I went to NCAR, and within like two years, I had doubled my salary.

Phillips:

Wow.

Gilman:

Yeah. But see, I became the head of the Advanced Study Program at NCAR at the age of 29. [laugh] And pretty heady stuff. And that’s what doubled my salary. So, I was in charge of all the postdocs that came, basically, and the graduate assistants—graduate fellowship students, and summer undergraduates that were—we had summer colloquia, that sort of thing. And there were a few other things too, but I was on the management committee for the whole lab. So, it was a very interesting experience. In fact, if you look at my career, you’ll see I sort of bounced back and forth between management and science. I haven’t done any management now for, what—what’s this, two-thousand…well, really since 1995, since I stepped down as associate director. I was a section head, but that’s pretty minor. Anyway, yeah, I was in management for like 13 years, one thing or another. Six years as associate director of NCAR.

Phillips:

So, when you first came over to NCAR, you kept an affiliation with CU, right?

Gilman:

I did. Yeah.

Phillips:

And that stayed all the way?

Gilman:

It stayed and—not terribly active, but I sat on thesis committees, and I think I even had—yeah, let’s see—yeah, I had at least one or two thesis students who were—Gary Glatzmaier, I don’t know if you’ve run across that name, but he was one of my students who got into the dynamo business and went off to Santa Cruz. He’s a member of the National Academy of Sciences now. But I haven’t been active at CU in quite a while.

Phillips:

When you made the transition, did you basically keep the same project going, or did your focus change?

Gilman:

Well, yeah, if you look at the early record, the years I was at CU, I was doing a variety of things. I had some Air Force money, but I was doing fluid mechanics, MHD of various kinds, all with kind of a solar connection, but not necessarily really close. When I got to NCAR is really when I started focusing on the convection problem, and so that’s what I was doing. But then I was head of ASP, so I didn’t get full time. And we went through some terribly stressful times at NCAR, and I was right in the middle of it. The then-director of NCAR asked me to take leave from that position to help him deal with all the problems that were occurring. So that knocked me out for a year. But it also turned out to be a very fortunate thing for me, because they completely revamped the appointment system here during that time, and everybody got a report card on their leadership and about their science and all that stuff. And because of where I was sitting and what I was doing, I came out very high on that, and so I became a senior scientist at NCAR at quite a young age, about thirty…what was it? Thirty-three, I think?

Phillips:

Wow.

Gilman:

And I was probably the youngest one ever to get it, and it won’t ever happen again. I well recognize I was damn lucky. [laugh]

Phillips:

But it’s not just luck. So, when you were the head of the Advanced Study Program, you just said you were overseeing all of the postdocs at NCAR. Were you able to sort of guide research in certain directions?

Gilman:

Well, we prided ourselves on telling the postdocs they could pick any topic they wanted to. These were unrestricted. This was not like being on somebody’s grant. And it worked extremely well. They were very tight, because in those days, it was only one year. There was no second year. It changed later, so the second year is common now. But in those days—but a very high percentage of them stuck. And then while I was head of ASP, it was a period of time when physics—people with Ph.D.’s in physics were having a very hard time finding jobs in the field. And so what we discovered was all these physicists started to apply to switch fields into atmospheric sciences. They were applying for ASP postdocs, but they didn’t have any background in the subject. So, one of the first things I did to really kind of put my name on the map, management-wise, is convince the management that, “Well, we’ve got to do something about these people.”

So, we got some extra money. The director found it somehow, anyway. We picked I think it was five of them, and in a year, we sent them off to the University of Chicago for a semester—they were on a quarter system—for a quarter. Take classes. Whatever they wanted. I went there and we worked out an agreement and then they came back here for the rest of their postdoc. Four out of those five stuck in the field. Four out of those five! And some of them became fairly distinguished. And that kind of started a process. After that, we didn’t send them to Chicago, but they came. We had a number of people come from physics who were switching, and some of them even at faculty level were switching.

Phillips:

Oh, wow.

Gilman:

And did well. Did well. Yeah, it was a very successful program. Not big, but—and then as physics funding got better, then we didn’t see as many of them. But a lot of them really stuck. We had some very bright people.

Phillips:

So, then your term as chairman of the Advanced Study Program ended in ‘75. Is that right?

Gilman:

Right. It was an appointment without term, but I decided it was time to go back to doing science full time. And that’s when I came to HAO. And then except for my time as associate director of NCAR, I’ve been at HAO ever since.

Phillips:

I saw in addition to your management work, you served on a number of committees and working groups starting around this time, right?

Gilman:

Yeah.

Phillips:

With NASA, with the National Academies.

Gilman:

Yes, right. Yeah, I had the sort of the usual—I wouldn’t say large numbers. I think in that realm, my most significant role was I was the first chair of the Solar Observatory Council of AURA, which was—in those days, they had just what they called the Observatories Council, which was community representation to oversee the ground-based astronomy observatories. And I was asked to join that. But then they decided to split off solar because it really is fairly distinct. And so they had a Solar Observatory Council, so I was the first chair of that. And in those days, we were working on trying to get a much bigger solar telescope than we had. That was what has become the DKIST. You must have run into that name. So, I had a lot to do with working on that. It took a long time, but all through those years, both as head of the Solar Observatory Council, and I was subsequently to that elected to the AURA board twice—so all together, I think I served about a decade in that realm. And that was a different sort of experience. I think I contributed. It was interesting. They travel a lot. They like to have their meetings all over the world. [laugh] So I got to Chile and a few other places. Europe.

Phillips:

Sounds like fun.

Gilman:

Yeah, yeah.

Phillips:

You said you were at HAO starting in ‘75?

Gilman:

Right.

Phillips:

And at this point, your research is still in magnetohydrodynamics and the dynamo models?

Gilman:

Yes.

Phillips:

I know when you get to the ‘90s, there are issues, but between when you started at HOA and that point, how did it develop?

Gilman:

Well, I decided I was going to have to buckle down and do some big calculations. And I was fortunate enough to have a programmer assigned to me, who could help—I mean, I did the numerics. I worked out what I was going to do. I didn’t originate them, but I decided what—and then he did the programming. His name was Jack Miller. And that took a few years to get it going. The first major paper out of that came in—I think it was ‘81. But in the ‘70s, I was already doing spherical convection calculations. Not dynamo calculations, but—I think he was programming for me, then, too, I’m pretty sure. Publishing in a fairly obscure journal—the Geophysical & Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics. I don’t know if you’ve run across it. It’s a publisher’s journal as opposed to a professional society journal. But it survived. Still—very expensive to subscribe to—like 5,000 bucks a year or something. No page charges, though.

Anyway, yeah, so that’s where I was doing it. But at some point, I decided that I ought to—well, the problem—having gotten that spectacular failure, and it was not at all obvious how you got around that—what was missing from the models that if you incorporated it—in fact, I had correspondence with T.G. Cowling about it, and he gave me some advice, which turned out to be pretty good. Because I wasn’t even getting dynamo cycles initially. I was getting dynamo action, no question about it, but it wasn’t reversing. And it’s a question of the relative strength of the differential rotation in the convection of the model. And you can change that by changing other parameters that you have to choose. And so I did that, and it worked, but that’s when it gave the butterfly diagram going the wrong direction. And there was a revolution, basically, in that whole subject, in the ‘80s, because of the advent of helioseismology. Because all of the dynamo models that had been built up to that point assumed that the angular velocity increased inwards. You needed that in order to get the right butterfly diagram. The models, dynamical models, weren’t producing that. And then when helioseismology gave us the results, the results said it wasn’t there. So, you had to have a different mechanism. That’s when everybody sort of went to the bottom of the convection zone. [laugh]

Phillips:

And this was still a few years before the tachocline was discovered?

Gilman:

Yes, but we didn’t know what was wrong until the tachocline—until we really had the helioseismic measurements, it was—let’s see, when was that? ‘86? Something like that? There was another thing I was on, which was the GONG Scientific Advisory Committee. Most people know what GONG is—Global Oscillations Network?

Phillips:

Oh, yes.

Gilman:

Yeah. Anyway, I was on that from the beginning, along with a bunch of other people. Their results really started to come online around ‘86 or so. Around the same time as the NASA experiment—what was it called? I know this, SDO… no, that’s the other one. Oh—SOHO. SOHO. And those two both together said that you get this profile of differential rotation, which is close—which is actually not that far from what the models were saying. That is to say the dynamical models, but very far from what was assumed in dynamo theory. So, yeah, it was considered a big paradox in those days, and that’s when everybody moved to do the bottom part.

Phillips:

And at this time also, I’m just curious—obviously computers are evolving very rapidly.

Gilman:

Yeah.

Phillips:

You said you had one guy programming for you.

Gilman:

Right.

Phillips:

Was that just sort of the way you operated going forward?

Gilman:

Up to a point, yes. Until, let’s see—yeah. See, I got into management as the director of HAO and then associate director in the late ‘80s. And so the big calculations stopped. And in fact, my programmer was no longer here. In fact, I had to lay him off, which was—[laugh]

Phillips:

That’s unfortunate.

Gilman:

Yeah. But not because of the lack of work for me, but because we had a budget crunch, and I was the director of the observatory, and we had other priorities. So anyway, he never spoke to me after that, unfortunately. But tough as it was, it was the right decision. Anyway. So, I got out of that business. But I got out of it also scientifically, because I said, “I don’t see how to get to the place we need to be.” And in fact, I have to tell you that people who kept working on it, like there’s a big group over at CU—led by Juri Toomre —they’ve never solved it, in my opinion. Never. They kept adding resolution and other various effects, and they’re using enormous amounts of computer time. It has never really worked. I mean, they get cycles. They either don’t move or whatever. You don’t get things when you—whereas the so-called mean field dynamo models, which have proceeded along, have done far better. But they are simpler, and there is not a lot of overlap between exactly what the big 3-D models are doing and what the mean field models are doing. So that problem is not fundamentally solved in any complete sense at this point.

Phillips:

So, when you were director of HAO, and then later assistant director of NCAR.

Gilman:

Associate, yeah.

Phillips:

Associate director, excuse me. You mentioned a big budget crunch.

Gilman:

That was in the ‘70s.

Phillips:

Or ‘70s, rather.

Gilman:

Yeah.

Phillips:

What was behind it?

Gilman:

Yeah, well, there was—it started with a—see, in the early days of NCAR, the money was pretty flush. It was a new institution, and these were good times for budgeting in science, NSF. So, the budget was increasing pretty fast. And I think what happened was that not all the appointments that were made were of stellar quality, and that caught up with us in the ‘70s. There was something called a Joint Evaluation Committee that came in. They weren’t actually doing a scientific evaluation, but they ended up saying some things which had enormous impact. And there was one sentence in the great review that said something like, “Well, given all the money they’ve had, blah blah blah, that we would have thought the scientific staff would have been more distinguished than it was.”

Phillips:

Oh, wow.

Gilman:

And that just, you know, completely changed things. And the management changed. There were a whole bunch of directors that got pushed out. Fortunately, I wasn’t one of them. [laugh] Probably in some sense too young; not enough of a track record. [laugh] Anyway, so that—and then it was followed by a budget cut. We had a guy at the NSF who was a retired admiral, who was in charge of that whole directorate of the NSF. He was a very tough guy. And the Observatory had to lay off people. All parts of NCAR. They eliminated a whole division, the chemistry division.

Phillips:

Oh, wow.

Gilman:

Oh, yeah, it was a big deal. We survived it. And there have been times since, but nothing quite that big.

Phillips:

Was HAO relatively well-insulated from—?

Gilman:

No, no, they took a cut. Yeah. There were several people who left, had to leave. Several scientists and others. Yeah. And sporadically, these have continued. I mean, HAO is distinctly smaller than it was as a fraction of the NCAR budget in those days. So, it was—and there has also been a history where—HAO was in this peculiar position being in NCAR. There’s a long history—I don’t know if you know that history, but anyway—

Phillips:

A bit. Yeah.

Gilman:

—it predates NCAR. Walt Roberts founded the Observatory in 1940, approximately—’41—at Climax, and then came down to Boulder after the war. And then they finally asked him if he would be willing to be director of NCAR, and he said, “Well, I will on at least one condition, which is that HAO joins it.” Because he’d have to scrape to—he paid the payroll, sometimes, in the ‘50s.

Phillips:

Oh, wow.

Gilman:

Oh, yeah. It was part of CU in those days. In fact, it was originally part of Harvard.

Phillips:

Right, right.

Gilman:

Anyway, he got that, but then—and we had always paid some attention to the terrestrial connection, but there was not a lot of overlap. And so about every decade, some meteorologist would say, “Why is HAO in NCAR?” And so they’d go through this, and they had blue ribbon committees to review it, and then they would come out with some report, and they’d say, “Well, it’s a treasure, and it’s entrusted to UCAR” and it would stay. A lot of that stuff has eroded away, and it doesn’t get the same standing anymore. Now, with NSO in town, and they’ve got this huge telescope they’re building, it makes HAO sort of eclipsed, if I may use [laugh] that term, to some degree.

Phillips:

Has that been at least mitigated by just the increasing significance of solar-terrestrial interactions in the research more broadly?

Gilman:

To some degree, I think there’s more attention paid to—well, space weather has become a big subject, and the underpinnings of space weather are important. If you’re going to forecast anything, you gotta know. So that is true. But as you’ve surely discovered, there’s a huge concentration of people in Boulder, in various places—

Phillips:

Yes.

Gilman:

Yeah. You’ve been over to NOAA, so you know about that.

Phillips:

Yep, been to NOAA. I haven’t been to the National Solar Observatory.

Gilman:

Oh, you haven’t?

Phillips:

Not yet, no.

Gilman:

Ah. Well, some of their great people have long since retired. They’re not even there. They never came from Tucson. You know, NSO has only been here for about four or five years.

Phillips:

Right.

Gilman:

So, yeah. Yeah, I would think there would be people over there.

Phillips:

They’re on the list to do.

Gilman:

Yeah, OK. But people like Jack Harvey, who built the major instrumentation, he’s not here in Boulder. He retired in Tucson. So yeah. But NSO is—and that telescope is a very big deal. It’s totally the opposite end of the space spectrum from what I’m interested in. It’s not global at all. But it is by far the world’s most powerful solar telescope, no doubt about it.

Phillips:

So then going back, you mentioned a little bit ago sort of this paradox—

Gilman:

Yeah.

Phillips:

And I saw it again in your Hale lecture slides. And so there were a couple of paradoxes that you saw—

Gilman:

Yes, yes.

Phillips:

—sort of standing in the way of the further development of dynamo theory.

Gilman:

Right, right.

Phillips:

Can you elaborate on those a little bit more?

Gilman:

Well, the big one was the contradiction between what the models were saying should be the differential rotation, and the differential rotation observed, which is not quite the same, but close, and what the dynamo models seem to need. And so that led to—well, it helped enormously to have—what really cracked that, to some degree, is the recognition that meridional circulation of the sun was an important factor, and the early dynamo models didn’t have it. We know it exists. You can see it at the surface. It’s flowing towards the poles, which it must return somewhere underneath. And in those models, it is the speed of the meridional flow towards the equator, at the bottom, which is determining the period of the dynamo. That’s what it is. And that works very well. In fact, for the velocities we see at the surface and then we can project should be at the bottom, the numbers work out about right. In other words, the period of the dynamo is—the solar dynamo is about 11 years, and that’s—that gives you—that’s a plausible number in terms of meridional circulation strength. So that’s pretty much been resolved. But there are other details that haven’t. I forgot what the second paradox was. Maybe you wrote it down. Yeah, I think there were two.

Phillips:

There were two in your slide. I didn’t write down the second one. But you described at least your path forward with sort of the arrival of Mausumi Dikpati.

Gilman:

Yeah, yeah.

Phillips:

How did she get there, and what was your relationship?

Gilman:

Oh, well, she came on a postdoc, not to work on this problem. She was already working on dynamo theory. She had done that with her advisor in India. And we were impressed—she came and gave a seminar, and we were impressed by her, so we got her on a postdoc. And then while she was here, she decided she wanted to do something different in addition to what she was doing. So, I introduced her to the whole problem of global instabilities in the tachocline. And that’s how she got into it. I had already published a paper in ‘97, and then she got into it. And she’s really a whiz on the applied mathematics, the numerics. And so once she got going, there’s no stopping her. And that has progressed over the years, over almost 25 years now, and has been extremely productive.

Phillips:

I saw on both of your CVs that you have obviously collaborated extensively over that period.

Gilman:

Oh, yes. Right. Not as much now, because she needed to be more on her own, and my being more senior than her, it was not always an advantage. That is to say, somebody would say, “Well, isn’t she just doing what Peter things should be done?” Which was never really true, but she got stuck with that. So, we were careful not to do too much together. She’s now a senior scientist herself, so that’s less of an issue, I would say. And I don’t know if she told you—must have told you—she just landed this whole grant from NASA.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Gilman:

A million bucks.

Phillips:

She was very excited about that.

Gilman:

Well, she should be. It has been a struggle. It’s a pioneering business, and it’s a great sign that the community has seen that this is important, and that they’re willing to accept putting money into it. Really, really big deal.

Phillips:

It seems like, again, looking at your publications, talking with Mausumi, that as you start moving forward into the late ‘90s, early 2000s, you start moving into prediction as well.

Gilman:

Yes. Now, first in the dynamo realm, and that was really hers. She kind of invited me into it. With my meteorological background, I knew about issues related to prediction as opposed to just simulation and basic theory. But as I remember it, it was her idea to try a prediction with the model. And she worked out the scheme for how you would use the data observed at the surface to drive that. That’s a huge subject now in all of meteorology, so-called data assimilation, which is what all the models do to drive forecast models. And so she was the pioneer in doing that. And then she got into data assimilation theory, applying it—she must have talked to you about this.

Phillips:

Yes.

Gilman:

But then now, of course, what she just got this grant for is for predicting seasons of the sun. You don’t have to have a dynamo model for that, which is one of the great beauties of it. Because it’s a shorter-term prediction. You start with a toroidal field that already exists, and you’re only talking about predicting for a year or two ahead. But compared to what’s done now for space weather, that’s a long time. That’s a long time.

Phillips:

Yeah.

Gilman:

And meteorological forecasts, synoptic weather patterns, the skill—it goes out to about two weeks. What’s two weeks? That’s 14 earth rotations. What is 14 sun rotations? That’s a little over a year. So, it scales in that sense, in the same ballpark. So, what’s going on now should be able to tell you something about what’s going on a year from now.

Phillips:

When I was speaking with Terry Onsager at NOAA, yeah, it’s currently on the order of like a week, right?

Gilman:

Oh, at the most. It depends on what you’re trying to forecast. But we have these—those so-called bursty periods on the sun, the period of months where it’s very active, and then it quiets down, then it comes up again. And these things—if you look at a plot, within a solar cycle, there’s big variations there. And we think it’s coherent—that is to say that it’s coming from something dynamical, global, at the base. And that’s the whole concept behind what we’re doing. But that then becomes a tachocline modeling problem. If you can connect what’s going on in the tachocline to what you observe at the surface, that’s what she’s going to be focused on. And I’ll help out in various ways, but it’s her baby. [laugh] I can’t do the things that she can do [laugh] in terms of numerics and non-linear calculations.

Phillips:

It’s very impressive, what she’s doing. I read through a number of the papers, and back in ‘05, ‘06, you and she applied this model to sort of retroactively predict the peaks of eight solar cycles.

Gilman:

Right, yes.

Phillips:

That was obviously sort of a—

Gilman:

It was the first shot at it.

Phillips:

Yeah. And it seemed to work.

Gilman:

Yes. As far as hindcasting, that’s reproducing… and then it didn’t work so well. But we’ve got to be careful about that, because we—she did a very simple version of this, where we didn’t take account differences between hemispheres and some other things, and time variations in meridional circulation. We know the meridional circulation varies by a factor of two in amplitude in ways that are not really predictable at the present time. And sometimes you get a second reverse cell at high latitude, and sometimes you don’t. But it was partially successful. I don’t know exactly what she told you about that—

Phillips:

There were the two elements that did—

Gilman:

Yes. In terms of predicting which hemisphere was going to be peaking first, got that right. And in terms of the timing of a new cycle, got that right. But the overall amplitude on the cycle wasn’t right. But that was a calculation which assumed the two hemispheres were the same. One of the curious things about the sun is you can get a difference in peak timing up to three years between the two hemispheres. So if you’re doing a traditional measure of sunspot number, but it’s usually integrated over the whole sun, and so you’re smushing it together at two different cycles that are somewhat out of phase, well, that tends to give you a broad, flat maximum, and a lower maximum. If you can adjust what the sun is doing to synchronize them, then it would be higher. I’m sure that’s a large part of it.

Phillips:

What I’m really curious about is before—so the solar cycle 24 was well underway—before any of this was sort of validated, that prediction was obviously at significant odds with other predictions.

Gilman:

Yes.

Phillips:

So how were those sort of predictions negotiated? What sort of conversations were taking place as far as advising space weather forecasting as a result?

Phillips:

Well, we were not trying to do an operational forecast, but it was noticed. In fact, it rattled a lot of cages when we came out with this prediction that the cycle 24 was going to be a big one, because NASA pays a lot of attention to that in terms of satellites, in terms of astronauts. And it scared some people. It didn’t turn out to be quite like that. But if you look at—there are papers—I don’t know if you’ve run across any, but there are papers which summarize all of the predictions of the next solar cycle. The fellow to check with is at NASA. His name is Pesnell. And he’s got a paper—I think it’s in Solar Physics; I’m not sure—where at a certain point in time, he summarized all the predictions for cycle 24. And there’s an enormous range. And they were all different kinds. Some of them were various kinds of statistical methods. There are dynamo calculations. They used geomagnetic indices. The number of methods must be a dozen. And a lot of them don’t have a lot of physics in them, but you get a range from very high cycles to very low cycles. There is not a convergence on—in other words, the scatter is big. Really big. Plus, once a cycle, NASA and I guess NOAA—I’m not sure if NSF is involved or not—but they convene a committee—I don’t know if Mausumi told you about this?

Phillips:

A little, but—

Gilman:

Cycle 24 prediction panel would have been convened a few years before cycle 24 was expected to start. And she was on that panel, then. It was pretty contentious. So, they argue out what they think is the—it’s sort of like they’re trying to make a consensus forecast out of all the various inputs. And so there was a lot—and in that panel was the first time anyone had ever done a dynamo-based prediction, which was hers, to talk about. And then that panel among its recommendations said that dynamo-based predictions should be encouraged. This time, there has already been a cycle 25 panel convened, and I don’t know what they came up with exactly, but there wasn’t a whole lot more done on dynamo-based prediction, I suppose in some cases discouraged by the not getting the cycle peak right. But I think also the priorities shifted, and she was a bit constrained on what she could work on. And that was unfortunate, because I think if you had redone the calculation with the two separate hemispheres and getting the timing and all that stuff, it might have been a different story.

Phillips:

And with the potential alarm that NASA—obviously you said it wasn’t an operational forecast—

Gilman:

No.

Phillips:

—but it did still inform—

Gilman:

Oh, yeah.

Phillips:

—perception. Did NASA reach out to you or Mausumi to continue following up on it?

Gilman:

Not specifically that I recall. It was the usual sort of NASA competitions that they have for money. I’m sure she had at least one proposal in there. She got some money, but she went through a dry period for a few years. I don’t know if she talked to you about that.

Phillips:

Not much.

Gilman:

Probably doesn’t want to talk about it. But that drought has just ended. [laugh]

Phillips:

Yeah, a million-dollar grant is a lot. [laugh]

Gilman:

[laugh] That’s right. Now, I’m expecting big things out of this.

Phillips:

She walked me through sort of the process she’s going through for cycle 25, and it sounds very interesting.

Gilman:

Yeah, yeah. And I think she’s way out in front in terms of who can do this. There are other people working on the whole problem of instabilities in the tachocline. They tend to focus on neutral waves, rather than on instabilities. And hardly any of it is non-linear. But if you’re going to do amplitudes, you have to do it non-linear. You have to have a mechanism for determining amplitude. Linear wave theory never gives you that. And it’s a different style of work, and not everybody who does linear theory can do that. But she can.

Phillips:

Are you working with her on the cycle 25 predictions, still?

Gilman:

Well, we talk, every day, scientifically. I’m not an official co-I on this grant, but I’m sure I’ll be involved at some level. And we have published the 2018 papers—I don’t know if she—she must have mentioned those to you. And actually one on the—well, there’s three of them, actually—one in Nature and two in Astrophysical Journal. And the two in the ApJ, I’m a coauthor on both of those. One of those was after phase velocities of Rossby waves from the model, and the other was just doing simulations of bursty seasons without any prediction element. I think particularly that one paper probably had an impact on the panel that decided who was going to get the money. We finally broke through.

Phillips:

The cycle 24 predictions were around 2006, and 2006 was also the year that you got the Hale Prize.

Gilman:

That’s true. And you saw in the slides, I talked a lot about that at the time.

Phillips:

Yeah. And one of the things that I thought was very interesting also in the slides was you connected sort of your own intellectual genealogy to the Hale Prize, and Hale Prize recipients over time.

Gilman:

Yes, yes.

Phillips:

I wonder if you could just say something about how you see yourself in that particular lineage.

Gilman:

You mean compared to other Hale Prize winners?

Phillips:

Yeah, well, and just the development of—I mean, you trace your own sort of field back several decades.

Gilman:

Yes. Well, as I think I mentioned early in this interview, my training gave me a big advantage in certain ways. It was kind of fortunate in the sense of being in the right place at the right time to do that. Knowing how predictions are made and how models are developed has stuck with me. Even if I’m not doing it myself, technically, I can advise people how to do it. Because prediction is a relatively foreign topic in astrophysics and even in solar, compared to what it is in meteorology and even oceanography. I mean, I participated in a forecasting contest as a graduate student, and that was standard that you did that. So, you got a feel for what it meant to have a consensus forecast, and how each person contributed in some way and what their thought processes were.

And we’ve had a significant disadvantage in solar in the following sense: a lot of people don’t want to go anywhere near predictions. Not only that; they look down on it. And that wasn’t the case in meteorology, because for practical reasons, we had to make those predictions. And so it was a very favorable ambience for advancing prediction science. Mausumi had to break through that in solar and solar-terrestrial. And we’re getting there, in terms of space weather prediction, but it has been harder. Because particularly in Europe for some reason, they, you know, you talk about, “Oh, I’m not doing prediction. I’m not doing prediction.” They can do simulation, but they won’t do prediction. And of course, to me, a verification of prediction is how you test the physics of what you’ve done. [laugh] And that scares a lot of people. [laugh]

Phillips:

Do you think that sort of the distaste for prediction, is it from sort of a bias against applied science?

Gilman:

Yeah, could be in part. Plus, the history of prediction of solar cycles in particular is pretty checkered. I mean, if you look back it and look at all the people who worked on it and so on, a lot of the stuff was—you know, it wasn’t terribly scientific. It was correlation analysis, but even that wasn’t at a particularly sophisticated level. And very little of it was physics-informed or somewhat even based. So, that’s a very different mindset than doing numerical simulations of convection or whatever. So, a lot of people tend to just stay away from it and look down on it.

Phillips:

I’ve also noticed, not just with the 2006 backwards-looking eight solar cycles, but I’ve seen other examples of you and others fitting predictions to historical data—

Gilman:

Yes.

Phillips:

—sort of the hindcasting, as you said. How is that seen? It strikes me as a very, very interesting approach.

Gilman:

I think people are sort of neutral on that. But that’s what you have to do. Meteorologists do that all the time. Now they do all this ensemble forecasting where they start with somewhat different initial conditions and do a whole family—if you watch on TV, the hurricane forecasts, that’s what you’re seeing, is a whole ensemble. It’s very expensive computationally, but it really gives you a feel for what the probabilities are. And then you have different models that are essentially independent, and then you compare the different models in the same realm from more or less the same data. But it is a realm that people from traditional astrophysics are just not trained to do. And no one is probably going to make a prediction about how a galaxy evolves, because they can’t verify it anyway. [laugh] But solar cycles are sort of in between. They’re on a long enough time scale that it takes most of a person’s career to do two or three predictions. [laugh]

Phillips:

And now we have several cycles of very, very good data.

Gilman:

Yes, yes. And we know a lot more about the dynamics of the sun inside. I mean, that was crucial. We couldn’t have done any of this stuff without helioseismology. No question.

Phillips:

This is kind of an open-ended question, but the Hale Prize itself was sort of a—I don’t want to say a capstone, but it was sort of an encapsulation of a very successful career.

Gilman:

I think that’s a fair statement. Obviously, I was pleased. It was a recognition that someone who came with my career track, which was unusual even for solar physics, could get to the top of the profession and be generally accepted in what I did. Well, if you look at sort of the overall philosophy that I’ve had doing science, from a very early age, I said to myself, “OK, I don’t know if what I’m doing is going to apply in detail, but I’m going to try to make sure that what I am doing is rigorous, and so it stands on its own, even if the assumptions aren’t exactly satisfying to some.” So, I developed an attitude that, “Well, what I’m doing is I’m doing analogs to the solar problem, not approximations.” In other words, it’s completely self-contained and you could in principle build it and make it work that way, because the physics is all correct in that sense. But then you learn things from that.

Then, of course, how much does that carry over to the real sun, which is actually working in a different realm? Because you know, the Reynolds numbers are extremely high, and it’s all turbulent, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But if you understand this simpler but still very complex system, you’ve made an advance. And it stands on its own. Because you can get some very elaborate theories which you end up having to throw away, because they don’t really solve anything that’s real. [Laugh] If there’s a philosophical point I would make, if you look at all the papers I’ve written, they all have that trait, I would say. Some of them ended up not being very important, and nobody else picked up on them, but some of them did.

Phillips:

You lay out a very good narrative of solar physics up to 2006 when you got the award. Where has it been going since?

Gilman:

Increasingly over time I would say that the concept of trying to do solar predictions has become more and more acceptable. It has taken time, and there have been setbacks. But if you look at meteorology, they had their setbacks, too. But it will come because the community is more accepting of that now. And I suppose for some of them, it’s a threat, because a lot of what they’ve been doing might just get—gone. But it’s coming. It’s coming.

Phillips:

Do you think there’s a concern that there will be increasing emphasis on research that can be operationalized in things like space weather?

Gilman:

I think there may be an opposite concern, which is that there will be maybe—well, some people may feel a lot of pressure to shift what they’ve done. But some people will find themselves wondering, “OK, is what I’m doing any more relevant?” That’s always a concern. Although what NSO is doing is in a different direction, I mean, everything is focused on the DKIST. And it’s not clear to me that’s going to help with prediction, because it’s totally at the opposite end of the spatial spectrum and time spectrum. All very short time scale stuff. You’re going to learn fundamental plasma physics there in the solar context, but whether it actually helps make better solar cycle predictions, I doubt it. Maybe they won’t admit that, but—[laugh]

Phillips:

So, the Hale Prize, you get in 2006. In 2009, you officially retire. Is that right?

Gilman:

Yeah, that’s about right. I took phased retirement here. There was a program developed where it encouraged people to in stages go off the payroll, and in return for that, you got access to your retirement funds while you were still employed. And I was the first, actually, under that program, to do it, for all of NCAR. And did it not because I wanted to stop doing science, but I’d rather see the money spent on younger scientists. In fact, I specifically mentioned two here—Mausumi was one of them—and that I would still be involved. And I’m somewhat unusual in that I’ve been in almost every working day since. I haven’t been paid a dime in ten years.

Phillips:

Your publication rate doesn’t seem to have dropped any.

Gilman:

Not too—yeah. If I can get one decent publication a year, I’m reasonably satisfied. And what is a little different is that if you look at those, almost all of those publications, I’ve done the calculation from the beginning to the end myself. And I know enough tech to be able to do a manuscript. I know enough IDL to be able to do a graph. [laugh] I’ve sort of lost the PowerPoint, because I don’t give talks. I could probably get it back. And what else? I know enough numerics to be able to do simple calculation. I know enough Fortran 95 to be able to do a program. But my programs are tiny compared to what Mausumi does. Tiny.

Phillips:

When did you start doing your own programming?

Gilman:

Oh, very late. I literally taught myself the rudiments of Fortran 95 after I retired. Literally. Because I had programming help, and then I was in management and I couldn’t do it. And then I worked collaboratively with other people who did the programming. Mausumi does that. Peter Fox was involved in some of the early days since I came back from doing management. But it was only when I—I actually literally went to the CU bookstore and bought a manual on Fortran 95 and taught myself enough of it. Taught by doing, basically. And I’ve always known enough to be able to choose what numerical algorithms I wanted to use. I could do that. But big calculations on parallel computers? Forget it.

Phillips:

What are the computing resources like here at NCAR?

Gilman:

Well, they’re quite good, I think. Because have access—you know, NCAR has a supercomputing division, basically. And they’re there for the universities, too. Mausumi’s on the biggest—all that circuitry is up in Wyoming now, if you knew that.

Phillips:

Oh, I did not know that.

Gilman:

Yeah. Because power’s cheaper up there.

Phillips:

Makes sense.

Gilman:

They’ve had a facility up there for now at least a decade, and so any new supercomputer goes up there.

Phillips:

And you may not know this, but does NCAR own the facility in Wyoming, or is it contracted out?

Gilman:

Let’s see. I think it’s a UCAR building, but it’s of course paid for by the Science Foundation.

Phillips:

Right.

Gilman:

Now, Wyoming has some stake in it, because they put up a lot of money. I don’t know exactly what the legal ownership is, but Wyoming was hoping to—the state was hoping to get more high-tech industry in Wyoming, so they got together—I don’t know where the idea actually originated, but—so now, down here, up in the mesa, none of the supercomputing is actually done there. The storage—and I’m not even sure where the storage is anymore—there are other things done there. And I couldn’t tell you anymore exactly what they are, but—[laugh]—and I think it has worked out. I think it has worked out. I think when they got the next—the last generation of supercomputer there, it was something like number five in the world or something, in terms of—

Phillips:

Oh, wow.

Gilman:

See, the history of NCAR and supercomputing is huge. I mean, we had the first serial—we had serial 3 Cray-1 here, which was the first operational machine that was actually sold to an operator. And we’ve had ones before that from CDC and after that, and then they got—IBM got into the business with parallel computing systems, so that’s what they’ve been ever since. But the latest one I think is a different—I think it’s SGI. They change vendors according to who’s offering the best. But NCAR gets a fraction of—I think it’s like 40% of the machine. And then that’s allocated out to the various labs. So, HAO gets a piece, but it’s a smaller piece than—I mean, the climate lab, the mesoscale/microscale meteorology, they get bigger amounts, because they have these massive calculations that they do.

Phillips:

That makes sense.

Gilman:

We have some that are in that realm, but the aggregate is not as big.

Phillips:

What direction has your work been going since retirement, and where do you see it going forward?

Gilman:

My own?

Phillips:

Yeah, your own.

Gilman:

Well [laugh] you know, I’m at a point where—the problem I’m working on right now, which is in this grand line of things, has been very frustrating. I can’t recall another time where I’ve been basically spinning my wheels on a problem for a year and not being able to get answers that I believe. I’ve learned—the so-called shooting method—I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, but anyway, it’s a relatively simple method to program, to do calculations of the type that I do, but it’s not giving the right answers that I know. And so I am frustrated by that. The thought has occurred to me—“Have I written my last paper?” [laugh] I did—the most recent papers I’ve published, there’s two in the list in 2018 in magnetic buoyancy instability, which I’m actually quite pleased with. And I did all that calculation from the beginning to end myself. But it came down to basically solving a quartic equation very precisely.

And I wish I had more problems like that, where it really cracked open. Even that one has an origin back in the early ‘70s. I published a paper on magnetic buoyancy instability in 1970, which still gets cited. One of the things I’m kind of proud of is you go back in my publication list, and you can identify a lot of papers that still get cited. That’s one of them. And in some papers, another field has picked up on it. For example, I was the first to develop—called the Ekman-Hartmann boundary layer—by combining rotation of magnetic fields. And that was one paper. And around 1970, ‘69, I think, in Physics of Fluids, and the geoscientists picked up on it for the earth’s interior. And they are well aware of Ekman-Hartmann boundary layers now. So, I see references, and I see citations to that work.

Phillips:

Have there been other sort of geophysics interactions with your work?

Gilman:

Yes. The ApJ letter that I published where I published the first MHD shallow water equations as a basic derivation, they’ve also picked up on, not only in geosciences, but in applied mathematics and computational physics. They like that system as a test bed for doing numerics in MHD. So, I’ve seen a lot of that. If I had to guess which paper of mine 50 years from now will end up with the most citations and will still be cited, it’s that paper in the ApJ—ApJ Letters. And it’s only about four pages long. [laugh] And of course, that was the basis for what Mausumi’s doing, all of models—they’re all shallow water models. And so that one has really, really stuck. That was a case where I knew there had to be an answer, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I kept putting it aside, and picking it up, putting it aside. And then suddenly one day it came to me. It all came down to how you treat the shallow water equivalent of the divergence of B=0—no magnetic monopoles equals zero. And then I saw it, basically, that the—it’s the horizontal divergence of the total flux, not the field itself. And since you have a variable thickness, it’s the thickness multiplied by the field. And once I realized that, then everything follows. As I said, I really think that long after I’m gone, if you looked to see what papers of mine are cited, that will be one, for sure.

Phillips:

Even more recently, I looked up those articles that you mentioned. So, in 2017, you endowed a fund at MIT—

Gilman:

Oh, yeah.

Phillips:

—for exoplanet research.

Gilman:

Yes.

Phillips:

So why exoplanet research? It’s obviously very timely right now, but what was your interest in that?

Gilman:

Ah! OK. It’s because—well, it was partly a throwback to Victor Starr, who in my day there, as a student, was expanding beyond the traditional field. And when I learned that MIT—see, some years after that, the meteorology department was merged with the earth sciences department to become what is now EAPS—Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. When I learned that they had gotten into the exoplanet business, I thought that’s what Starr would really be excited about, that they had really branched out in this way. So, I said, “Hmm. I’d like to encourage them.” So, I approached them, and of course they were excited. And so I gave some money, first for the telescope that they built, which is now operational—it’s in the Canary Islands—to detect earthlike exoplanets. And then they got past that phase, so I said “OK, what other thing can I do?” So we established this research and education fund, which I’m still putting into, which they will use for—I wanted it to be MIT-centric, that is to say, where it would support what’s going on there and in the Boston community, which has got a lot of exoplanet people in various places—Harvard and others. But I wanted it to be a way for MIT to make an even bigger splash in that subject. So, it’s to help support students and conferences to be held there. So that’s how I got into it.

Phillips:

You said it was inspired at least in part by Victor Starr. Do you have sort of, from that point forward, like a broader sort of cosmological interest beyond just sort of earth-sun?

Gilman:

Well, not necessarily. Actually, there was another origin of the idea of exoplanet, which was HAO made the first full measurement of a transit of a planet across—

Phillips:

Oh, I didn’t realize that.

Gilman:

Yes. Tim Brown, who was here then, and he had a student named Charbonneau, David Charbonneau, who’s now a full professor at Harvard. It was an outgrowth of his—well, Tim was an incredibly creative guy. He’s back in Boulder now. I don’t know if you’ve run across anybody of that name, but he left HAO—he did not like the direction that was being taken by the director of NCAR at that time, and he had some real run-ins with Tim Killeen, who was the director then. But Tim—I was in significant measure responsible for Tim being hired here, for a completely different purpose. He’s really in many ways the discoverer of the tachocline, for the—with the Fourier tachometer, which was built to be operated at NSO in Tucson. And it formed the basis for the major—both the GONG Network and the instrument in SOHO that really went—but Tim is in large measure the discoverer of the tachocline. He didn’t get full credit for it, because there was a guy at Cal Tech, Ken Libbrecht, who kind of hogged the publicity about it. But—and there was some friction there, as you might imagine.

But he was looking for tenure at Cal Tech, which he got. Well, Tim—I don’t remember exactly when he got into it, but he was the real originator of the successful measurement of the transit of a planet across—where you look at the light curve, and it dips, as it goes across. And that was done in the parking lot over there in Foothills Laboratory, which is another—literally. HAO funded an expensive camera for him to—now, he built the damn telescope in his garage, believe it or not, but as a HAO employee. And so he did it. And he was almost scooped by a rather infamous character in exoplanets, the guy who was a professor at Berkeley. What was his name? I’ve forgotten. Anyway, who has since totally crashed because he was fired by them for sexual harassment. It’s a notorious case out there. But what happened was that this guy knew that Tim had made these measurements. He had a partial measurement of a transit. And so he raced to publish and he raced to publicize. And this caused quite a furor. Tim’s mother was—I think it was his mother—was dying at that time, and so he was preoccupied with that. And this guy stole it, basically. Not his data, but his—claimed credit when he knew—and he could only claim it for a partial, because he knew Tim had the full thing. OK? So, he did it. Well, Tim wasn’t going to stand for that, and he wrote a letter to I think the whole exoplanet community. And this guy got clobbered out there. [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Gilman:

And then Dave Charbonneau was Tim’s graduate student. He was a Harvard Ph.D. getting his degree, but he was Tim’s graduate student. And he was actually I think the first author on the paper that was published, but Tim was like second. There were a bunch of them. I mean, that thing has thousands of citations. Thousands.

Phillips:

Is that the ‘92 paper, or is it an earlier one?

Gilman:

Oh gosh, when was it? Oh, I think it’s later than that. No, because the first discovery by Swiss scientists was ‘96.(they won the Nobel for it)

Phillips:

Oh, OK.

Gilman:

No, I forgot exactly what year that was. You can look it up. And Dave is now a full professor at Harvard. There’s a great story to tell about that, because when he came out here to do his Ph.D. with Tim, everybody at Harvard said, “Why are you going to HAO? You’ve got everything you need here.” He said—and Tim loves to quote this—“It’s more interesting out there.”

Phillips:

[laugh]

Gilman:

Talk to Tim. [laugh] You can imagine that a lot of Harvard people were scratching their heads. Well, of course he ended up as a full professor at Harvard. [laugh] So that’s another thread to my motivation to support at MIT, because they have—I don’t know if you know that field at all, but Sara Seager is there. She has been a big person in this field. And then they hired this young guy, Julien de Wit, who was a crackerjack instrument builder. So that’s what sort of got me—those two things really got me to make that connection. And I wanted to reinforce it—MIT reaching out into this business. So that’s why I’m motivated to do it.

Phillips:

Great. We’ve covered many years and a lot of ground. Is there anything that stands out that we didn’t address that you would like to—?

Gilman:

Oh, I don’t know. I made a list. I mean, some time ago, at least ten years ago, I was asked to make a list, believe it or not, of firsts for me, in research. It was for an Australian proposal which failed, but anyway. And then I couldn’t find the list, but I made a new one, basically. This is strutting my own ego a bit, but never mind. I was the first to do baroclinic instability in a toroidal field. I was the first to do a Rossby wave dynamo. I was the first to really do magnetic buoyancy instability, which I recently revisited. I was the first with the Ekman-Hartmann boundary layer. I was the first really to do fine amplitude convection in a rotating spherical shell. There were others who did more analytical theories, but they couldn’t tell you really much about amplitudes. First to do convectively driven dynamo in a rotating spherical shell. There’s no doubt about that. First to do the MHD shallow water equations. I just mentioned that. First really to do two- dimensional and shallow water MHD instability, which is the basis for all the work Mausumi is doing now. I think first to do rising flux tubes under the influence of Coriolis forces. Where does the flux come out? Well, if it’s strongly rotating, it’s going to come out parallel to the axis rotation. So, we know the Sun can’t be in a strongly rotating state, because it comes out at low latitudes. If you took it from the bottom of the convection zone at the equator, take it straight out, parallel to the rotation axis, it would come out near 55 degrees, but it doesn’t. So, it has to bend over. So that—that’s—those are the ones that I would mention. And then what I mentioned to you earlier about my feeling good about the fact that a number of these papers have persisted in their citations—not large numbers, but the field isn’t large—but have persisted in the citations. So that’s kind of where—

Phillips:

We touched on this a little bit, but do you think that all those firsts are at least in part due to sort of your very unique background and approach?

Gilman:

A lot of it is. Having that training in geophysical fluid dynamics, you can identify—well, certainly the shallow water stuff, the convection stuff. Although there are others doing convection that came from astrophysics and baroclinic instability for sure. Even the Ekman-Hartmann layer, Ekman layer was my graduate training, and seeing how it generalized to include a magnetic field. And Hartmann layer came up—that has been known for a long time, but I was teaching—I taught an MHD course at CU during the late ‘60s, and I ran across it there. So that’s when I really said, “Oh, I can do this. I can do this problem.”

Phillips:

You said some of these have been cited many, many times going forward. They were influential.

Gilman:

Yeah.

Phillips:

Are there more people now coming from similar backgrounds to yours?

Gilman:

No.

Phillips:

Or is it still—?

Gilman:

I would say no. Not really. Well, some of them get the more—for example, at CU, you will get training in that subject in general. But it’s not common. And so you can’t really say that there’s a—and I don’t know of any current Ph.D. students at MIT, for example, that are doing this class of work. So, it hasn’t really, in that sense. But it’s gonna happen, sooner or later. And it’s interesting, because the whole concept of Rossby waves in astrophysics has really blossomed. If you look at papers on accretion disks, you will find Rossby mentioned. You will find Rossby waves in that context. So, in that sense—and they’ve had to learn it on their own, I think, to a large degree. The geometry may be different, the physics may be different, but it’s fundamentally there. In fact, there was a symposium at MIT two years ago celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jule Charney and Ed Lorenz, who were both my professors at MIT. And I went to that. I didn’t give a talk in it formally at least, but I made a point to point out to everybody assembled there that Rossby waves are in astrophysics in a big way. I mentioned specifically accretion disks and obviously stars—stellar interiors. And there are measurements of Rossby waves now. Still some argument about it, but—for the sun. So, it is becoming established as a field. And if it’s in the sun, it’s in stars.

Phillips:

So now you’re seeing more links not only between geophysics and heliophysics, but then heliophysics and astrophysics.

Gilman:

Yes, for sure.

Phillips:

Interesting.

Gilman:

Yeah, that was a very interesting symposium. I managed to tell a few tales about—in fact, that’s one thing I should mention to you. Because I was an undergraduate at Harvard, and in my senior year, I was deciding where to go to graduate school. And at that time, they did geophysical fluid dynamics there, and they had a few professors, but they really looked down their noses at MIT in this. Richard Goody was there. I don’t know if you’ve run across that name. In atmospheric radiation. Allan Robinson, who was a very young guy then. The giant in applied mathematics in those days was a man named George Carrier at Harvard, who was famous not so much in geosciences, but a lot of things. So, I went as a senior, majoring in physics—I went over to there and introduced myself to these guys and talked to them about getting into this field. And I can remember so clearly talking to Richard Goody, who was a new Harvard professor in those days, and saying, “Well, I was considering also MIT.” And he said, “Well, you know, they have Charney, but the rest of those guys down there are a bunch of plumbers.”

Phillips:

[laugh]

Gilman:

He was talking about Ed Lorenz, who subsequently won the Crafoord Prize, won everything but the Nobel. In fact at this symposium two years ago, one of the things they said was, “Is there somebody who should have gotten the Nobel Prize who didn’t? And everybody said, “Lorenz.” You know, for chaos theory.

Phillips:

Right.

Gilman:

And this is what Goody was saying about him. Well, that convinced me—and I also went and sat in on a seminar at Harvard with Allan Robinson, sitting in the front row. And in those days, you were allowed to smoke in a seminar. He was smoking a cigar. And all of his graduate students are lined up like this in the front row, smoking their cigars.

Phillips:

[laugh]

Gilman:

[laugh] And I said, “This is not for me.” [laugh]

Phillips:

Wow.

Gilman:

I encountered Allan Robinson much later when I was—I was actually chair of the NSF supercomputing advisory panel in the late ‘80s, and that’s when Eric Block was the director of the NSF. He was a tough character. Anyway, Allan was on that committee. And I told him what my impression—he kind of chuckled about it. And I actually got to know Goody a little bit much later, when he was already retired. There was an AGU meeting in San Francisco where he was, and one of the other graduate students with me at MIT knew him very well and got him to come to an after-party after a big deal there. And he was there, and we chatted for a long time. He was much more mellow then. But I couldn’t resist telling this story at the Charney-Lorenz Symposium about my experience as an undergraduate and graduate. And people just burst out laughing, because they knew exactly what I was talking about. In fact, I had people—I had another graduate student named John Gille who spoke to me about it afterwards, said he called up his daughter, who is an endowed professor at Scripps, and told her this story, because he was so [laugh]—he was one of Goody’s students! So, he knew exactly what I was talking about. [laugh]

Phillips:

I assume that the MIT community knew his opinion.

Gilman:

I think they must have.

Phillips:

Do you have any sense of the reciprocal view?

Gilman:

Oh, I think they would have thought he was a snob; you know? Now, Charney was kind of the bridge, because he was very highly thought-of by Goody. And we actually went to the memorial service for Charney after he died, and Richard Goody was in charge of that. And I think I stood up and told stories about my interactions with Charney there. I don’t think I told the story about Goody, since he was chairing that. [laugh] But I think I did tell about the fact—what Charney said to me at my Ph.D. thesis seminar, at the time. And that was one motivating factor in wanting to go back and participate in that. It was a smashing success. If you were interested in looking at that, they recorded the whole thing, and it’s—if you go to the Charney-Lorenz symposium, I’m sure you can get websites there that you can get all that stuff. And there were historians of science who were there.

Phillips:

The memorial was at MIT?

Gilman:

Yes, it was. Well, the memorial was at MIT, and this Charney-Lorenz Symposium was at MIT also. So, they’ve probably got both of them. And in fact, that makes it a Leo Goldberg connection, because at that—well, no, there was another event. That’s right; I’m sorry. I’m mixing two together. The Green Building at MIT—I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but it was built while I was a graduate student. It’s a famous building. It’s an I.M. Pei building.

Phillips:

Oh, yes, OK.

Gilman:

Just as NCAR is. The NCAR Mesa Lab is. And they had a celebration of the opening of that building, where they had a bunch of talks. And as a graduate student, they knew I was doing solar physics, and they got Leo Goldberg to give a talk at that thing. And so I was his graduate student—not mentor, but supporter. They assigned a graduate student to each of the speakers. Anything they wanted the graduate student was to get it. And I had Goldberg. [laugh] In fact, there’s a book—I have it here—where is it? On that symposium? I’ve got it here somewhere. [pause] Don’t see it there. I grabbed it, because it was thrown away by somebody. It’s gotta be here somewhere. There was a book specific to that symposium, and Goldberg gave a talk there. [pause] Let’s see. I know I’ve got it. [laugh] It’s not—I don’t—I haven’t looked at it in a long time. But he’s in there. You know, all these people gave talks. It was quite a big deal. I don’t remember exactly what Goldberg said, but—it’s up here somewhere. [pause] No. Hmm. I know I’ve got it, but I don’t see it. I’ve looked a long time. Anyway, it’s—you could probably find it, if you really wanted to.

Phillips:

I think I’ve got enough to dig it up.

Gilman:

Yeah, you can probably dig it up. Yeah, this book—kind of idiosyncratic, but very Victor Starr.

Phillips:

Those are the most fun.

Gilman:

[laugh] You would enjoy reading that book, because it’s pretty easy reading. He had this very philosophical point of view. He liked to discourse on things. And he wrote a famous essay and compendium of meteorology which was produced in the early 1950s on the general circulation of the earth’s atmosphere. That’s before he got into the sun and other things. But mostly words. I mean, he was really a scientific philosopher.

Phillips:

I’m going to look for Starr. He sounds like a very fascinating character.

Gilman:

Yeah, he was. Well, they all were. I was very fortunate with the four professors that I had—Charney, Lorenz, Phillips, and Starr. Each different, each with their own perspective to bring and their own style of work. I was there when Lorenz was doing his experiments. He had this computer that was about the size of—a little bigger than this desk. And it was punched paper that came—punched.

Phillips:

Was he doing his own punch cards?

Gilman:

It wasn’t cards. It wasn’t even cards. It was tape.

Phillips:

Oh, wow.

Gilman:

It was paper tape. And people used to joke about how this thing that was sitting there was an extension of his brain.

Phillips:

[laugh] Well—

Gilman:

In those days—

Phillips:

Yeah, Vannevar Bush talked about that with his Memerx machine being sort of—

Gilman:

Oh, I believe it.

Phillips:

Yeah, it’s the same.

Gilman:

Oh, yeah. I mean, he was a true giant—Lorenz—and the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet. And oh, I’ve always been grateful to him [laugh] for salvaging my thesis.

Phillips:

That’s not always the combination you see—both brilliant scientist and good advisor, good mentor, good person.

Gilman:

[laugh] No, no. Yeah, yeah. For just your own enjoyment, find some of the talks given about Lorenz particularly. Charney also, but particularly Lorenz, there. Some of the giants in the field who were still around came and talked. Joe Pedlosky, for example, who was at Woods Hole—Retired, also, and older than I am—talked and gave a very good talk. There were a number of good talks there. Yeah, Phillips just died. He’s the last. He just died in the last year.

Phillips:

Oh, wow.

Gilman:

Yeah, we actually went and visited him, my wife and I, about five or six years ago, in retirement.

Phillips:

Was he still living in Cambridge, or—?

Gilman:

No, no. Well, he’s a really interesting story, because he gave up a tenured professorship at MIT—

Phillips:

Oh, wow.

Gilman:

—to go and work in Washington at the National Weather Service.

Phillips:

Wow.

Gilman:

In fact, that’s another tidbit of mine, because when I was a graduate student, he tried to talk me into—he said, “You ought to go to NMC and straighten out how they do their models.” Well, I wasn’t interested, really, and I took a different path. But as I wrote in his—they put up websites where you can write something about him. And I remember this very clearly. And he—evidently he didn’t—well, I think he did convince one graduate student, a fellow named John Stackpole to go there and do that. But in the end, he probably decided, “If I’m going to get this done, I’ve got to go there myself.” And he did. He left MIT. In his 50s!

Phillips:

Wow.

Gilman:

And went there. And he was a giant, instantly, there. And everybody loved him. And he was really rigorous. But he was still a nice guy. I mean, he wasn’t highly critical. And they had a model called—they had the acronym—what was it? N-G-M, I think it was? Is that right? And it became known as Norm’s Great Model. [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Gilman:

And he stayed there like 14 years until he retired from that. And he started out at Princeton, in the early days, with John von Neumann. Surely, you’ve heard of von Neumann?

Phillips:

Oh, of course. Yes. [laugh]

Gilman:

He was one of the young guys there, doing programming, and Charney was one of the big shots there. And MIT took on both Charney and Phillips, Charney as a full professor and Phillips as an assistant professor, after the Princeton group kind of broke up. So that’s how he got there. He was an excellent teacher. I mean, really. He really taught me how to be rigorous in dynamic meteorology. No question. Charney was very disorganized as a teacher. A lot of insights, but it was just sort of chaotic. And Lorenz was so easy on his students that—I mean, he’d lecture in this monotone. I almost wondered after the fact whether he was autistic. I don’t think so, but you know, there’s an autism spectrum that’s huge. And he had this sort of monotone voice. But when he came and gave a talk here at NCAR, the place was always packed. And he would come here summers every year—

Phillips:

Oh wow.

Gilman:

—for many years. Because he liked the mountains. He liked to hike.

Phillips:

Can’t blame him. [laugh]

Gilman:

No. I would see him almost every year. He was a giant. And Charney was in his own way, but if you had to pick between them in terms of the impact on the field, certainly in terms of prediction, it was Lorenz, hugely. You know the old butterfly wings. You know all that stuff. You’ve probably read the book. Who’s the guy who wrote the book on chaos?

Phillips:

Oh. Gleick?

Gilman:

Yeah. [laugh] We always used to laugh, because once the applied mathematicians got a hold of this thing about a decade later, they’d say, “Well, we didn’t know about this, because he published in this obscure journal called the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences.”

Phillips:

[laugh]

Gilman:

That’s where all the papers were. He was writing those papers and publishing them while I was there at a graduate student.

Phillips:

Wow.

Gilman:

So, we saw it in real time.

Phillips:

[laugh]

Gilman:

In real time.

Phillips:

Was there any sense at the time that these would go on to be transformational?

Gilman:

I don’t know. It was known to be unusual. I think my skepticism about it was, “Well, these equations are so stripped-down that can you—?” How well do they generalize as you get more degrees of freedom in the system? But he did a lot of that himself, too. He did physics formulations, too. I mean, his formulation of what’s called available potential energy in the atmosphere was completely different. And he wrote this famous monograph on the general circulation of the atmosphere. It was published by the WMO, of all organizations, in the late ‘60s. In fact, [laugh] that’s another story I tell about myself. My master’s thesis was on calculating the mean meridional circulation of the southern hemisphere. And what you did in those days was you worked from what you knew of observations and what you didn’t know. And meridional circulation was notoriously hard to measure because you had to take a lot of averages and—it’s a weak flow, but it’s there. And so I spent, I don’t know, a year doing this thesis with a particular calculation, meridional circulation in the Southern Hemisphere.. And using the eddy momentum transport and calculating meridional flow as a residual to balance momentum transport. Well sometime after that, after Lorenz wrote this monologue—here it is, right here. There it is. And there’s a part of it he—see these calculations here? He used the same method that I used in my master’s thesis. And I spent, I don’t know, at least a semester if not more, and he somewhat sheepishly told me he did it in a day.

Phillips:

[laugh]

Gilman:

[laugh] But he wasn’t criticizing, you know? But he was—he did the calculation himself, from the beginning to the end. But it was the same method, basically. [laugh] And I always took that—I mean, here was a guy who was certifiably a genius. And so I said, “Well, if I’m 1% of—” [laugh]

Phillips:

You’re doing the same work he did.

Gilman:

Right.

Phillips:

I mean, he’s doing it a little faster, maybe. [laugh]

Gilman:

And I did it ahead of him actually, but he did it—and he did it to put it in the book, basically. He wanted to do a unified calculation of this. And he certainly gave appropriate credit to what I had done.

Phillips:

That’s very cool.

Gilman:

But it was—yeah. [laugh] And that’s another reason why I give money to MIT. I didn’t have that favorable an experience at Harvard at physics. I didn’t really connect to any of the physics professors, really. My advisor was OK, but he was kind of on the sideline. But at MIT, oh, gosh. I mean, you know, we got invited to their houses. Lorenz was great that way. Starr was very sort of secluded or introverted and didn’t really socialize with students much. But he was very friendly in the building, no question. And Phillips was—you know, they were very approachable. Even Charney was. So, it was—I related to that experience, and I just wanted to reinforce their breaking out of the traditional mold. Now I’m actually going through a thought process where I’m thinking, “Well, I got all this benefit from that traditional training. Maybe I should do something for them, too.” So, I’m contemplating that now.

Phillips:

That would make sense, yeah, to bolster coming from that background that you took advantage of..

Gilman:

Now, they have something called the Lorenz Center there, which focuses on climate studies. And they have no endowment, no money. Zero. I know the professor there, Kerry Emanuel . He was a student there also, went away for a while and came back, and he now has an endowed chair. He is one of the two heads of that. I haven’t had a conversation about it. They have their own development person in the department, and so I have a lot of contact with her. So, I’ve opened the conversation a little bit. I expect I’ll hear from Kerry at some point and say, “Oh, would you like to do it?” [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Gilman:

It’s also a way of getting my own name—I insist on having my name on it.

Phillips:

Why not? That’s how these things generally work.

Gilman:

And they have rules about that. You know, “You can have a named fund if you give this much money.” That’s what it has come down to. I think the number is $75,000. So, I’ve given more than that, so, you know, my name is on it. [laugh]

Phillips:

And if it draws more attention to the path that you took and the work you’ve done—

Gilman:

Yeah. And they’ve done—you saw the articles, I guess. There were two of them. And I was at pains to—the story was more or less the same as what was in the Hale Prize lecture. Same thing. But it was in the MIT context. Anything else you want to ask me?

Phillips:

I think we covered all the questions that I had for you in advance. These last anecdotes have been great, so if you have any more that come to mind, please, I would love to hear them. Oh! I do actually—the one thing I meant to ask you that I didn’t—your oldest brother, who went to MIT in meteorology before you—

Gilman:

Correct.

Phillips:

—what did he go on to do? And then was there any—a family—like when you got there, did people still—?

Gilman:

Oh, they knew who I was, yeah. In fact, I can tell you a few stories about that, because yeah, Don got his Ph.D. nine years ahead of me. And his thesis advisor was a man named Hurd Willet who oddly enough did solar influences on the weather. But it was all statistical. And he was kind of a fanatic. I mean, he was just very sort of single-minded about it. And most people were pretty skeptical, including my brother. But what he did, after he got his degree, he went to Washington, and he went to work for a man named Jerry Nemias, who at that time was the head of the long-range forecasting part of what was called the Weather Bureau in those days. And he eventually succeeded him as the head of that group. So, he was involved in forecasting—seasonal forecasting, that sort of thing. He was very cautious, probably too cautious, and didn’t publish much. But I think everybody had a high regard for him. And he retired quite early, because he ended up under a guy he couldn’t stand. This guy was legendary. And it was affecting his health. So, he retired in his late ‘50s. He’s still living. He’s 88. Doesn’t do science, but he’s sharp as a tack. He has some physical limitations, but mentally, he’s great. We just—his birthday is on October 15th, so we always call him up on his birthday and have a long conversation. He’s very into political observing of what’s going on, and of course appalled by who we have as President..

Phillips:

Yeah, very fertile field for that right now.

Gilman:

Yes, right. In fact, we have to cut it off, because his wife drew a line and said, “You can’t keep talking politics all the time.” [laugh] And they’re both thoroughly disgusted by Trump. Anyway, but he’s still—that’s where he went. And he worked there until he retired. I think he could have published a lot more if he wasn’t so cautious. And I think long-range forecasting blossomed out some more after he retired, because others weren’t as cautious. There was a lot of very good work there, but they were kind of hiding it.

Phillips:

Was that maybe also just sort of institutional culture there at the Weather Bureau?

Gilman:

Oh, I think it was more Donald than it was the culture. I think he was cautious to a fault. But he was the guy who, whenever the new seasonal forecast was made, he—and he prided himself on this—he got on television, got interviewed. Every quarter, he got interviewed for the forecast. Usually the winter forecast. Probably also the summer forecast, because these were the extremes. And he got quite good at it. He took a lot of pride in it. In fact, he would be much better on TV than I would be. [laugh] And they’ve gone way beyond him now, I think, I’m sure. He still has some contacts with them. Not much, but—

Phillips:

Was he surprised that you ended up at least tangentially involved with forecasting for the Sun?

Gilman:

You know, I don’t even know how much he knows about it. We haven’t talked about that particular point much. He knows I’m in solar physics, and he knows I took my meteorological background here. But you know, compared to him, I published 160+ papers, and he might have published three. You know? [laugh]

Phillips:

[laugh]

Gilman:

So, we’re quite different in that sense, but we have a lot of common interests.

Phillips:

What did your other siblings end up doing?

Gilman:

Oh. Well, I’m the youngest of four, and my other two siblings were physicians, as my father was. And they’re all retired. They’re all still living. I have one brother that lives in Denver. He went into pediatrics, pediatric anesthesiology. He was for a number of years the head of the intensive care unit in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital in Denver.

Phillips:

Wow.

Gilman:

And he was also heavily involved in transport of very sick kids. But he also retired very early. He burned out.

Phillips:

That sounds like an extremely intense job.

Gilman:

Yeah. He also retired in his late 50s. And then my sister is in Georgia. She was in pediatrics, and then she went back for a residency in psychiatry, so she was a practicing psychiatrist for a number of years, and just gave that up recently. And probably a good thing. She’s 83.

Phillips:

Oh, wow.

Gilman:

Yeah. My father practiced until he was 80.

Phillips:

Those are very long careers.

Gilman:

They are. They are. Yeah. Oh, yeah, my father—and there are great stories about my father. He was hired at UConn as their first resident physician. And he was told—he was hired by the president directly. He was told by the president, “Now, you have to be married before you get here, because you’re going to be examining co-eds, women—”

Phillips:

[laugh]

Gilman:

That’s how it worked in those days. So, in the space of ten days, he proposed to my mother and they got married!

Phillips:

[laugh]

Gilman:

[laugh] And my brother, older brother, oldest brother appeared ten months later. [laugh]

Phillips:

It sounded like it worked out.

Gilman:

Yeah, it did. Well, they were married for, oh gosh—well, my father lived to be 86, my mother to 80. They died within—I think it was seven months of each other. And they certainly got past their 50th anniversary. And they lived in the same town, Storrs, their whole married life. And in fact, one of the other things we’ve done, mainly me, we’ve endowed a scholarship fund at UConn for nursing students. So, there’s a Ralph and Ruby Gilman scholarship fund at UConn, which has got enough money in it to award close to $5,000 a year in scholarships.

Phillips:

Wow.

Gilman:

And I’ve met some of the students who had it. And I went for the 75th anniversary of the founding of the nursing school, which my father, I learned then, was on the committee to define it, as the lead physician at UConn. So, it was quite a nice—and they gave—they gave awards to descendants of the people considered—75 difference makers. They made a whole history of the nursing school and my father was one of them. So, we got to be there and accept a plaque. [laugh] Yeah, interesting place. Because there were two—I knew the founding head of the nursing school, a woman named Widmer. And I knew her two sons, who were ahead of me in school. And that was a very interesting story. They have given a whole lot of money. There’s a whole Widmer wing on the nursing school. They both had backgrounds in public service, and in the Middle East, in running one of the major schools there, an American school. Yeah, one of her sons was hired by the King of Jordan to start this school in Jordan, and he did. And we saw them both at the 75th anniversary. So, I have that connection, too.

Phillips:

So, you’ve given to MIT and to UConn?

Gilman:

Right.

Phillips:

Any other philanthropic—?

Gilman:

Not at that level. Those are the two. I mean, I don’t have that many resources, but [laugh]—you know, all these years of pension accumulation, I don’t need it. We give quite a bit of money to the family every year, too. So called family dividends, they’re called. And it’s curious—of the four children, two of them are self-employed. Our youngest is a writer, editor, freelance, lives up in Washington state.

Phillips:

Oh, whereabouts?

Gilman:

Oh, East of the Cascades, a little town called Winthrop. Have you heard of it?

Phillips:

I actually don’t know that—before I went back to school for my undergrad, I actually worked as a flight attendant for a couple of years in a Northwest regional airline.

Gilman:

Oh, I see.

Phillips:

So, I know most of the small towns in Washington.

Gilman:

You probably landed planes in Wenatchee, then.

Phillips:

Oh yeah, Wenatchee and Yakima and Spokane and the Tri-Cities. All over the place.

Gilman:

Yeah, she’s north of Wenatchee about 60 miles. She’s almost on the Canadian border. She really likes to be in the outdoors and to be sort of self-sufficient.

Phillips:

If she’s north of Wenatchee, she’s not far enough east that she’s in the desert.

Gilman:

No, no, it’s not desert. It’s on the eastern slopes. And so, she’s at the edge&mdash-- there’s a trail that goes right by her house, where she lives. We haven’t been there to see it, but—yeah. Then our two—both she and our son went to Whitman College.

Phillips:

OK, in Walla Walla?

Gilman:

Yeah. And that was a great thing for them.

Phillips:

It’s a very good school.

Gilman:

Yeah. And she was in the first class that got—they invented a program there called Semester in the West where you take a whole semester off campus, and tour around and meet ranchers and farmers and oilmen and all the various types of people who are there, and focus on issues in the West. And it was a life-changing experience for her. That’s how she got started. Because what she writes about is the environment and Western things. I don’t know if you know the magazine High Country News but—

Phillips:

Sounds familiar.

Gilman:

She got an internship there, and that got her going. So, she’s an environmental journalist, basically, but writing on her own. She writes for the Cornell Living Bird magazine. And there’s a magazine in Canada whose name I can’t remember, where she has been supported. She has written for the California Academy of Sciences. And they’ve sent her places. She has gone to South America to look for the nesting of the—what’s it called? It’s one of these seabirds that nest inland. Little tiny bird. Kestrel? Not Kestrel. I forgot the name of it now. But she has been. And she has been out in the Bering Sea on islands in the north there. The Pribilof Islands—ever heard of them?

Phillips:

Haven’t. [laugh]

Gilman:

You’ll have to look it up.

Phillips:

Pribilof.

Gilman:

Yeah. They were Russian at one time, but they’re a U.S. territory now. But she knows a lot about the birds up there. So, she’s sort of our free spirit in the family. Our son and his wife both work for DOE in renewable energy, so they’re here in Boulder. And then my next-oldest daughter has been—she has had chronic fatigue syndrome for 20 years. And she’s coming out of it now. Apparently—it seems like it’s a hormonal thing, because she’s old enough now—she’s almost 50—and she’s able to do many more things that she couldn’t do.

Phillips:

That’s good. Chronic fatigue is not fun.

Gilman:

No, it’s not. And my oldest daughter has a Ph.D. She’s the only one with a Ph.D. in the family of that generation. And she is the director of the art museum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Phillips:

Oh, wow.

Gilman:

Chazen Art Museum. Before that, she was in Toledo at the Toledo Museum of Art, which is one of the major private museums.

Phillips:

Is her Ph.D. in art history or—?

Gilman:

Art history and curatorial studies at Case Western. So yeah, and she has only been at Madison now—I think it’s a little over two years. It seems to be working out very well. It’s a lovely museum.

Phillips:

I haven’t been there.

Gilman:

They have a collection that’s worth, she said, probably a half-billion dollars.

Phillips:

Wow.

Gilman:

And one of the things she has done is—to open up the museum, she got a café put into it that’s run by the university. And they’ve now expanded their hours to the point where they’re claiming to be, I think, the museum—I don’t know if it’s a private museum or a university museum—with the longest open hours anywhere in the country. She’s trying to make it a real gathering place.

Phillips:

Next time I’m in Madison, I will check it out.

Gilman:

Yeah, you should. It’s a lovely building. It’s a spectacular building. It’s right on the edge of the campus. And it seems to be doing well. In fact, oddly enough, one of my contemporaries at MIT, a graduate student in the department at the same time I was, there was a professor there at Madison in meteorology, and he’s a docent at that museu. And I forget exactly how we made all the connection, but he did meet my daughter and chat with her. I think he may have gone up and introduced himself. I think he knew she was there. In fact, the former president of UCAR, Francis Bretherton, is a retired professor there at Wisconsin. Yeah, he was a ball of fire. Probably the best director we ever had. I think partly because he was very impressed with HAO even though it wasn’t his field.

Phillips:

When was he director?

Gilman:

Oh, back in ‘ 70s—’75 to ‘79. He was both director and president of UCAR, president of the corporation. He came in the aftermath of what I told you about with this great upheaval. The trustees hired him to straighten everything out. He was only 40 years old, I remember.

Phillips:

Wow.

Gilman:

He was an impressive guy. A lot of the meteorologists didn’t like him because he was so tough on them. He was a brilliant man and very insistent on certain priorities and making the university connection. Yeah, he was a remarkable guy. Sometime while he was director, he had a heart attack and had bypass surgery, and he walked up to the NCAR Mesa Lab—have you seen the building?

Phillips:

It’s recognizable from the highway when you drive in.

Gilman:

That’s at 6,000 feet, and Boulder is at 5,400. He walked up there with his wife a week after his bypass surgery! [laugh]

Phillips:

Wow.

Gilman:

He was a legendary character. No, he was a huge guy in all the planning for climate research. There’s something called the Bretherton diagram—it’s Francis Bretherton—which is this diagram he built that makes all the climate connections, all the various physical processes. He led all the big committees, and you know, but he was very good for HAO, because he recognized excellence even though it wasn’t his field.

Phillips:

And he came from a meteorology background?

Gilman:

Yeah, well, more of applied mathematics at Cambridge and Oxford. Cambridge. Yeah, he was a—he got his Ph.D. at Cambridge, and he had a faculty position there, a junior position. Then he went to Johns Hopkins and he became a very young full professor there. That’s where he was hired to become the next NCAR director . We didn’t keep him very long. I mean, he didn’t stay. He decided he was going to go back to doing science and teach. And actually, he had a pact with his wife, who was in psychology, and they alternated in who got the job. That is to say, it was her turn to get a major position, so they would move to where she would be. She got this professorship in Wisconsin. So Wisconsin, no dummies, they hired him as the director of the Suomi Center, which was all the satellite meteorology work done there. So, he took that after Vern Suomi died. And he had that job, I don’t know, 20 years? He’s retired now. I haven’t seen him since, but—

Phillips:

Very astute spousal hire.

Gilman:

Yeah. Oh, yeah. They did well. [laugh] They did very well. [laugh] Anyway. I could probably go on. Something will occur to me.

Phillips:

If we’ve reached the end of what you had sort of at the top of your head ready to go, then we can wrap it up here. But thank you very much.

Gilman:

Yes, I’ve enjoyed it.

Phillips:

It has been a pleasure.

Gilman:

I’ll be interested to see what comes out of that transcript.