Carl Wieman

Zierler:

OK. This is David Zierler, oral historian for the American Institute of Physics. It is October 1st, 2020. I’m so happy to be here with Professor Carl Wieman. Carl, thank you so much for joining me today.

Wieman:

Oh, you’re welcome. [laugh]

Zierler:

All right, so to start, would you please tell me your title and institutional affiliation?

Wieman:

OK. That’s surprisingly painful.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Wieman:

I’m a professor at Stanford University, but I’m actually a professor in both the department of physics, the Graduate School of Education, and then I hold the DRC endowed chair actually in engineering.

Zierler:

Now, when you came to Stanford, did you have all of those appointments from the beginning, or you sort of collected these along the years?

Wieman:

[laugh] The provost wanted me to be joint between physics and education, which was OK with me. And then they added this extra endowed chair from [laugh] somebody in engineering [laugh].

Zierler:

Now, does this affect your teaching schedule or the kinds of graduate students you take on at all?

Wieman:

The fact that I’m joint between physics and education does. So each year I teach a course that’s officially a physics course, and one officially an education course, although my education course is on science teaching and learning, and has graduate students from lots of sciences and engineering departments and [laugh] even medicine. But, yeah, that’s officially the way things are laid out. And then I can take graduate students from either physics or School of Education, and I have postdocs also from both areas.

Zierler:

Now, are the School of Education graduate students you have, do they have a physics component to their graduate research?

Wieman:

For, not any special reason, but just the way things have worked out, all of my official Ph. D. graduate students,—no, I have to correct that. [laugh] I was going to say they’ve all been from education. Actually, one of them’ s been from mechanical engineering. And then I’ve had partly supervised some other grad students in engineering and chemistry, but primarily my grad students have been from the School of Education. They’ve done a variety of things, but they all have technical backgrounds. Two of them, I guess, had master’s degrees: one in computer science, one in electrical engineering. Another had a degree in biology, and he taught high school science. And so they all come in with technical backgrounds, and they’re studying learning in technical fields, not just physics. I’ve kind of expanded beyond physics. I still do some research in physics education, and most of my postdocs have physics backgrounds and work in physics education research. But I’ve supervised research and produced a recent PhD, in teaching and learning mechanical engineering, and expertise in mechanical engineering. I have been doing a lot of work now in medicine because it turns out the stuff we’ve learned in the research, starting with physics expertise but expanding out actually applies very directly to medical education. We can just take things and just plop them over, and we see they work quite well. So, right now, my general field of research is expertise in science and engineering, looking broadly at how experts think, and how you best teach and measure how well a person’s thinking like an expert. I mean a skilled practitioner in the subject, such as a physics faculty member or a good doctor.

Zierler:

Well, Carl, we’ll certainly return to the way your research agenda has evolved over the course of your career. But, for now, I want to go all the way back to the beginning. Let’s start with your parents. Tell me a little bit about them and where they’re from.

Wieman:

[laugh] My parents are a funny subject. My parents were kind of—the best way to describe them is they were hippies 30 or 40 years before hippies

Zierler:

[laugh]

Wieman:

—started. So, they came from good upper middle-class backgrounds. My grandfather was a fairly prominent theologian professor at University of Chicago. My mother’s father was a high-level engineer for the Baldwin Locomotive Company in Philadelphia, but they both had what sounded to me like fairly dysfunctional families. They got married and loaded up this old car with all their possessions, and drove across the country to the wilds of Oregon. They were actually living out in the woods in a tent [laugh] and then eventually moved into a cabin they built on homesteaded land, [laugh] deep in the woods of Oregon. My father worked in lumbermills a long time. My mother first raised kids. Once we got old enough to be in school most the time, she started working as a child welfare social worker for the state of Oregon, and then got her master’s degree in that and continued in that career then until they both retired.

Zierler:

Carl, where did your parents meet?

Wieman:

They met, let’s see, my mother’s college roommate was the sister of my father, and she introduced them. My mother went to Antioch College, which is now a wildly crazy liberal place, falling apart. Back then it was just a reasonably liberal college. [laugh].

Zierler:

Carl, where were you born?

Wieman:

I was born in Corvallis, Oregon. It’s a small town in Oregon. But it is where Oregon State University is, so it’s different from a lot of small towns in Oregon. But I— —I grew up way back in the woods. It’s a great story of very humble beginnings to Nobel Prize, and I embellish it slightly by not pointing out my grandfather was a very [laugh] well-known professor of theology. I grew up way back in the woods, up to when I was in seventh grade, so my first 12 or 13 years, we were, a long ways from the nearest paved road, and a longer ways from the nearest store, etc., My father worked in cutting down trees and cutting them up into boards.

Zierler:

Was your dad a bit of a rebel in terms of having such a working-class kind of career relative to his background?

Wieman:

Yeah, so both my father and my mother were clearly rebelling against [laugh] their parents and their families. But, it’s funny we never discussed that. I look back and I see it, but these were never things we talked about.

Zierler:

Carl, when did you start to get interested in science, and was your being in the woods, was that part of it for you?

Wieman:

So it was implicitly but not explicitly. By “implicitly”, I mean I would go exploring. I look back at the things I did and think that now parents would, be hysterical about such things. I would go following these little trails and logging roads way back in the hills [laugh], all by myself just going out exploring for the day. I can remember always exploring. I can also remember building things a lot. When you lived in that part of the country [laugh], you didn’t run to the— —the local hardware store or have Amazon or Home Depot. People had to build stuff [laugh] and people had these farms and home sites where they’d have a lot of lumber and metal and stuff, and we’d put stuff together. My father would do that, fixing and building things around the house, and I liked doing that. In my science experiences, the things I always like most is building—figuring out how to design and build experimental apparatus to do things. I this see as actually pretty close follow-on to the kind of things I liked to do as a kid.

Zierler:

Now, were your parents, did they encourage your education? In other words, did they sort of square that circle in terms of their own rebelliousness but their responsibility to give you the best education you could have?

Wieman:

Yes, it is clear when you look at it. I’ve got— three brothers and a sister, and My two brothers have PhDs, one of them in physics, and one in political science, and my sister certainly graduated from college. My youngest brother’s the only one who doesn’t have a college degree, and he’s more successful than any of us, because he went into computer programming. And if you do that, people don’t care what degrees you have[laugh]. He was a very high level [laugh] computer person at Xerox. yes, education was clearly a big deal to my parents. They made special arrangements for my two older brothers to actually go off to boarding school so they could get a better education than at the schools where we—we were way out in the woods. And then when—, I was about to start high school and my sister had just started high school, they actually moved us into Corvallis so we could go to Corvallis schools. They clearly were very concerned about making sure their children were well educated.

Zierler:

And so you went to public schools throughout?

Wieman:

That’s right, yeah.

Zierler:

And were you a standout student, Carl, in math and science in middle school and high school?

Wieman:

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I [laugh] was a very competitive student, and I remember always trying to be the best with the highest grades in the class, get the best grades. My brothers and sister assure me I was always quite obnoxious [laugh] about this, which I can believe.

Zierler:

I wonder if you felt a special talent for physics, even in high school?

Wieman:

, People always talk about talent[laugh]. I just had an article that’s just come out, which you probably got in the APS newsletter, arguing that the whole idea of talent is really a mistake that people in physics make. What they think is talent is educational privilege. [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh]

Wieman:

So I sort of object to use of the term. But let’s say, I was interested in science, and I got, educational privileges [laugh] as a result. I was in the special classes for good math and science students, and so on.

Zierler:

When you were thinking about schools to apply to as an undergraduate, were you thinking specifically about physics programs?

Wieman:

I was certainly thinking about physics but I wasn’t really fixed on that. I mean, to be honest, coming out of high school, the subjects I was most interested in were writing and physics. That’s what I remember saying on my college applications—but without being real committed to anything. It’s kind of funny that, beyond what I just said, I can’t remember anything about the college application and decision [laugh] process, like where I applied to. I mean, it’s funny because I hear people who are so obsessed with this, and they talk about all their experiences from way back then, but - I don’t remember anything about it. [laugh] I did get into MIT. I obviously applied there. [laugh] But where else and what other choice, I don’t remember any of that.

Zierler:

And what was attractive to MIT for—about MIT for you?

Wieman:

I don’t remember [laugh].

Zierler:

Did you specifically want to get off the West Coast?

Wieman:

[laugh] Like I say, I’m just blank on all this. —Obviously just wasn’t a terribly important thing in my life that I remember so little about it.

Zierler:

But obviously you recognized that MIT would be an excellent place to pursue a physics degree?

Wieman:

That’s right, yes, —and math and science in general, I was interested in that.

Zierler:

And did you declare the major in physics right away, or you sort of took a more general approach at first?

Wieman:

So, for me, it was really all about getting involved in research. I started out at MIT, and I was actually pretty poorly prepared compared to most students there. Ironic because, my parents [laugh] moved to Corvallis so that I could have a good school, but I look back on it, and I took these AP courses, and the teachers didn’t know anything. And they just sort of turned us loose, and said, “Try to learn the stuff” I— —I didn’t do well on the AP exams. When I started out at MIT, I remember, in my first year—, it was pass/fail. But my advisor quite concerned about how I [laugh] did in both math but especially in physics class, as I was, doing quite badly. But I had a seminar, where we sat around talking about physics, these sort of freshman seminar type things, with this kindly, gruff old physics professor, Al Hill. He would just come in and bring us topics in real physics—not, stuff in the mechanics books that were like [laugh], inclined planes and things [laugh]. So I was much more interested in that real physics, and I remember thinking gee, these students aren’t thinking very much [laugh], not as much as I could. Anyway, he sort of noted me as unusual and arranged for me to get involved in doing undergraduate research. This was very early in the days of encouraging undergraduate research. At MIT, they now make this big deal about their undergraduate research program, and how they were leaders in the world in setting this up. I didn’t know it at the time but I was about the first [laugh] person or maybe the second student in it. Anyway, so I got working in a physics lab and, talking with the graduate students and postdocs there. That’s where I got the idea, “oh, you could start building things”. And you were trying to figure out how things work. It just was much more rewarding to me than anything else I was doing in school. And so I just kept doing it,[laugh] basically without ever making a particular decision about a major. It was just, “oh, this research work is fun”. I don’t remember thinking ever I was particularly good at it, but thinking that if I worked hard at it, which I did, that I could be successful. And so, I just was kind of sucked into that, and spent the rest of my undergraduate career really focused on the research lab, and trying to do as few courses and as little classwork as possible.

Zierler:

And so you sort of naturally gravitated towards the world of experimentation early on?

Wieman:

That’s right, yeah.

Zierler:

How were you with theory? Did you feel like you had any particular talent in the theoretical realm?

Wieman:

I don’t think it’s fair to talk about talent so much. It was not as—just not as interesting to me. But it was also, as a beginning student, you can do experiments [laugh]. You can’t really do theory. You can’t really be playing with things that nobody knows how to do or things nobody understands. Whereas I— —I could even at this very early stage do real physics things. When I was working in that atomic physics lab, I could be looking at stuff that, well, nobody had looked at that thing before,. And I’d be trying to figure out. That was just very different from course work. There were theoretical aspects and theoretical questions and problems in physics that I remember being very interested in. How electrons radiate. I remember trying really hard to understand that. Looking back on it, there’s a thing—bunch of things that the textbooks actually have wrong, that I, as a second- or third-year student, was worrying about. [laugh] And, not at the time but only sort of later decided, hey, they aren’t really right in what they say [laugh] here, and the way they described it. So, I was clearly interested in some of these questions about how atoms behaved, but, not to the point of going off and doing extensive calculations like a theorist, more interested in underlying theoretical ideas. The calculation stuff I always saw as too much just practice exercises. —and I always felt that way about doing homework problems. Those were just boring because, you weren’t trying to figure anything out. You were trying to produce a product that the instructor wanted to see, [laugh]. And that just wasn’t very interesting compared to going off in the lab and, shining lasers on atoms, and seeing how they behave in a way nobody else had looked at before.

Zierler:

Right, right. Carl, what professors at MIT did you become close with, or who did you think of as a mentor at MIT?

Wieman:

There were two very clearly in that category. First was Dan Kleppner, whose research lab I started working in from the beginning and spent really the whole time at MIT there. And there was Dave Pritchard. When I started, Dave Pritchard was a postdoc in Dan Kleppner’s research group, then became a professor [laugh] at MIT.

Zierler:

Now, was Dave still at Harvard at that point, or he had already moved over to MIT?

Wieman:

He was a postdoc. So he had graduated from Harvard, and was an official MIT postdoc, I believe. But, in any case, he was there, part of the research group, his office was there, and so on. Those were the two that I worked very closely with, and was very involved with. —I had a lot of educational privileges [laugh]. I did interact a lot, much more than other students, with faculty. And faculty member was Rai Weiss. Al Hill, the first one who got me into research, ran something they called the physics family. And basically —it was an evening discussion group. They and then there was another young woman faculty member, Scotty Macvicar, who started he undergraduate research program. Anyway, it was 10 or 12 of us, undergraduates of various ages, plus a few graduate students and a few faculty. And we’d get together, and we’d talk about some physics topic that they’d bring in.

Zierler:

And what was Kleppner working on at that point? Was he still doing masers when you got involved in the lab?

Wieman:

Yeah. he was still doing masers. I was really the first person that got him into lasers—

Zierler:

Oh, wow.

Wieman:

—I had this very charmed [laugh] education, if you like. They were still doing masers, and Pritchard was doing colliding beams, and I—started, helping on a little project. But then tunable dye lasers were just invented, and so they were just kind of wanting to get one into the lab, and it was actually necessary to build it. You couldn’t buy them at that point [laugh], but they wanted to put one together and see what you could do with it. They had some senior who was supposed to be starting on this, who turned out to be completely irresponsible. So there was Carl basically as a second-year undergraduate suddenly having his own lab, and putting together a new tunable laser. I would shine it on sodium atoms and study them.. That was Kleppner and Pritchard’s moving into using tunable lasers in atomic physics research.

Zierler:

Carl, I wonder even as an undergraduate what you might’ve appreciated in lasers as being sort of the wave of the future beyond masers?

Wieman:

So it’s funny but whereas I can’t remember anything about selecting a college to go to, I can remember very clearly about choosing a field of research. [laugh] I was just learning about these tunable lasers and I was also there in a research environment. I can remember as a junior—very explicitly looking at what these lasers could do, and actually looking at the power per bandwidth, compared to light from spectral lamps, and seeing how much power you could have in the natural linewidth in atomic transition. I remember deciding this had tremendous, capabilities compared to the tools people had in atomic physics before then. And so I decided this was going to be a great technology that was going to revolutionize atomic physics. Now I look back and think, geez, as a junior in college, [laugh] I was doing that. [laugh] But, I think it was I was just fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, surrounded by the right people. But, yeah, that was a very conscious decision I made then that, OK, I was— —this was going to be a great technology that’s going to let you do really different, interesting physics. So I caught that wave, and rode it for the next 30 years quite successfully.

Zierler:

[laugh] I wonder what might’ve been convincing to Kleppner when you indicated that lasers were pretty promising technology?

Wieman:

I think he was thinking the same things, but I do remember quite independently exploring the capabilities. Thinking about it, probably somewhat before most of the people in the research group really, because I was building and using it [laugh].

Zierler:

Now, of course, you knew Rai Weiss long before he was fully embraced in terms of his vision for what would ultimately become LIGO probably at a time when there were a lot of people who were doubting what he was doing.

Wieman:

So that’s an interesting thing, because I actually remember quite a bit better than Rai does the early history of that. It’s probably because, for me, it was [laugh] a completely new thing. When I first got to know Rai, he was doing these balloon experiments, looking at r the— —the cosmic three-degree black-body radiation. I actually spent a summer helping on one of those experiments, broadening my [laugh] experimental, opportunities. But as part of this physics family, one of the things that Rai was very interested and brought in for us to talk about was Joe Weber’s first claimed announcement of seeing gravitational waves. And so we spent a bunch of time in that thinking about— and talking about it. I went off and, explored it on my own, reading the papers, I went to some seminars. So I can remember very clearly during that period Rai started thinking about how to use interferometers to do that. He would come in weekly and [laugh] talk about his latest ideas on that. That was v exactly during the time he was developing these ideas.

Zierler:

At what point, Carl, did you know that you wanted to pursue graduate studies, particularly because, for the kinds of things you were doing, there were certainly industrial applications that you might’ve pursued?

Wieman:

There weren’t that many at that time. I really never thought about it. In a practical sense, by my sophomore year, I was doing what a physics graduate student would be doing. And so it was just, “OK, I’m just going to keep doing this”, there was never any question. The big question in my mind was do I stay at MIT where I think I could finish in a year or two, or do I go up to someplace new and take— —take a few years longer? I remembered just saying, OK, I want to just get away from MIT and the East Coast, and go back to the West. [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh] Carl, what was your senior thesis on?

Wieman:

My senior thesis was on blasting sodium atoms with lasers. And actually, I [laugh] discovered a phenomenon which I didn’t have the theoretical capability to actually explain. And I blame Kleppner a little bit for not paying enough attention, because, it turns out that a couple years after I graduated, then other people came along, and other people saw this effect that I had and worked out the theory, and, it was a modestly significant, discovery. The basic experimental observations were [laugh] essentially.in my undergraduate thesis, but never published.

Zierler:

When you were thinking about graduate school, were there particular professors that you wanted to work with in terms of where you applied?

Wieman:

[laugh] So I applied to a number of places. I can remember applying to Berkeley and Stanford, and those were really my main, places I was considering. I remember University of Maryland as kind of a backup [laugh] option. Probably I applied to some other places, but I don’t remember. But, for me, going to Stanford with Hänsch as the main draw, because I had been working on tunable lasers. He did a tremendous amount to advance the narrow-band tunable laser technology,. I had all his papers [laugh], worn out from rereading on my desk., I’d been reading and following all his work for a long time. So, he was a clear attraction, knowing he was clearly the star in that field—

Zierler:

Carl, before we leave MI…

Wieman:

—the star—

Zierler:

Please, please.

Wieman:

—the star in a technology [laugh] that I’d seen was going to be the wave of the future.

Zierler:

Yeah. I wanted to ask before we leave MIT altogether, you graduated, right at the tail end of the Vietnam era and all of the protest movements. Was that a part of your reality at all when you were an undergraduate there, or did you mostly try to stay away from all of that?

Wieman:

It [laugh] depends on what you mean by [laugh] stay away. It was very much a reality. I used it to—I mean, I wasn’t as cynical as this is going to sound. [laugh] I used it to my great advantage,. I told you that in my first semester, I did really poorly, particularly on final exams. To me, it was an enormous relief that, because of the Vietnam protests, the exams were canceled at the [laugh] end of the first year. [laugh] And partly because of that, of the protests at just the time, was there was a tremendously more flexibility in [laugh] what one could do academically, and I took great advantage of that. So, I wasn’t out protesting in the streets particularly. I— —I was concerned about things. I was paying attention to it. But I didn’t see any particular things that I could do. [laugh]—I it was kind of a pragmatic decision, OK, I can go out in the street and make noise, but what’s that going to accomplish [laugh], ? Whereas I can go ahead here in the physics lab, and it seems like that’s a more productive way for me to spend [laugh] my time, on an education. So, but, I was well aware of and concerned with the political situation, and I frankly took a lot of advantage of the flexibility and educational opportunities [laugh] that that allowed. if you look at my transcript, it has very few courses in it, MIT still doesn’t know I didn’t satisfy all the requirements [laugh] I never would’ve gotten away with that, frankly, if it had not been for the disruptions caused by the protests. [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh] Now, your perspective as an undergraduate would’ve been limited in this regard. But, of course, I know at MIT, this was an issue. Because of the Vietnam War, science funding, federal funding, Pentagon funding for basic science became pretty strictly limited to military applications. And I wonder if you had any experience in dealing with that transition at all.

Wieman:

, I didn’t—I was completely separated from all of those funding issues and questions. That was something I had no awareness of really as an undergraduate. I just thought people got money to do science. [laugh]

Zierler:

What were your impressions when you got to Palo Alto? What were your impressions both of the physics department and just sort of the campus overall, coming from that MIT perspective?

Wieman:

So I remember I wanted to go to Stanford and away from MIT. And, in fact, I chose Stanford over Berkeley, in part because I thought, gee, it’s so laid-back, and people aren’t hyper-competitive, and so on, which seemed to me like MIT was. And, it was a gorgeous campus. I can remember feeling a relief in the contrast of having a much less competitive culture of the students. But I can also remember after about a year of that, thinking gee, these people really aren’t that dedicated. It’d be nice if they [laugh] were, a little more intense about their studies. [laugh], I think both those reactions were not entirely realistic, but that was [laugh] my emotional reaction to being at Stanford.

Zierler:

Now, was your game plan rather similar to MIT where you tried to spend as much time in the labs and as little in the course—in the classroom?

Wieman:

Pretty much, yeah, although I took courses more seriously, and spent quite a bit more time on them in graduate school, in part because they were better. But also they were a lot closer to actually doing physics, I can remember causing some annoyance in my classmates, complaining that the problem sets were too easy, and specifically not—, They took a lot of time, but they were mostly just kind of following steps of how you did this long, complicated Jackson problem. ,. You didn’t have to do any real thinking about it though,. It was just, oh, yeah, I got to just follow the steps to solve this messy transformation. So I was complaining to the teacher that he ought to have things that were more real physics ideas in them, and a little more challenging. And I remember that as not being a universally shared sentiment among my classmates though. [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh] Carl, of course, there’s tremendous technological growth that’s happening in real time, even from your transition from undergraduate to graduate school. And I wonder if those advances sort of affected the kinds of experiments that were most compelling to you as a graduate student.

Wieman:

you have to appreciate that both my background and experiences starting as a graduate were much closer to that of an advanced [laugh] graduate student. And so I was attracted to the idea of trying to use these new technical capabilities of lasers to tackle fundamental physics questions, and probing new things. And at that time, it was, better tests of QED in atomic systems, hydrogen specifically. And that’s what Hänsch was working on. But I was also thinking about, OK, what else could this technology do ? Not what it’s already doing, but rather what else could we do? Where could we go beyond where the technology is now and what it is doing?, That was a big part of my undergraduate research, my graduate research, [laugh] my postdoc work, and beyond. Much of my career was always kind of, OK, how can we push this technology beyond where it is now to do interesting things with it? So I have an awful lot of technology development in the research I’ve done. In fact, the Bose-Einstein condensation was kind of the final outgrowth of that, and people don’t notice all the technology that went before it that made it possible.

Zierler:

Did about Ted’s work before you got to Stanford, or you only really got to learn that when you got on campus?

Wieman:

Oh, no, I knew about his work. Like I said, I’d been building and using narrow-band tunable dye lasers completely based on his work and his ideas. So, I had never met him but, yeah, I was very familiar with his papers and his work.

Zierler:

And what was—even as an undergraduate—what was compelling to you about what he was doing?

Wieman:

What was compelling was that I saw the technology capabilities, and he was advancing that technology. It wasn’t any great new physics ideas. It was an exciting technology that he was the leader in driving forward.

Zierler:

Was his style as an advisor that as you were developing your dissertation topic, it would be relevant to his research? In other words, would he be giving you a problem from his research, or no?

Wieman:

, when I got to Stanford, Ted was extremely shy and did not function like a typical advisor. He was working on a research project, and I’d came in and start working on it, and then I went off to do my own related project. He’d come by, and I’d talk to him about the work, but it would be rather seldom. I now understand better how an advisor might work with students. Fortunately, I didn’t really need that much [laugh] advising, but it was a somewhat unusual relationship.

Zierler:

But, of course, this is something that you couldn’t have known until you got to know him on a one-to-one basis?

Wieman:

Yes. .

Zierler:

Now, how interested were you in pursuing research in atomic spectroscopy as a first-year graduate student?

Wieman:

, I went in as a first-year graduate student thinking, OK, I’m going to try and have an open mind. I’m going to look at research in various other areas. I remember looking at some of the elementary particle physics things, and talking to some of the faculty, and deciding the ones I talked to were real jerks [laugh]. And so, more than anything, that drove me out of elementary particle physics, because a couple of professors [laugh] that I had talked to were so, unpleasant and dismissive [laugh] in talking to a graduate student. I also looked around at other areas, but because Stanford’s was a very small department, there just weren’t very many good people in other areas. I looked a lot at what Bill Fairbank was doing, and realized there were some really questionable things about his [laugh] research. And I’ll go on record on that, OK. [laugh] And the way he treated students was pretty outrageous. So that dropped him out as a possible advisor. There wasn’t much going on in condensed matter experiments at Stanford. I spent a summer doing an internship working on a research project at IBM. It was on magnetic bubbles, so it was kind of applied. It was pretty interesting, but it wasn’t something I wanted to pursue. I explored all these things, and came back to, Nothing’s coming close to the opportunities and interesting things to do in atomic spectroscopy. So after a year of considering other things, then I dove back into doing laser spectroscopy with Hansch.

Zierler:

It is interesting in terms of your work style that you were at once open-ended in terms of the kinds of dissertation topics you would pursue but, at the same time, you say you weren’t terribly in need of much advising from a graduate director.

Wieman:

[laugh] It might’ve been useful! [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh]

Wieman:

I don’t know. I never had that opportunity. [laugh] So let’s just say…

Zierler:

I’m curious, Carl, was—what was happening in theory? I mean, so many exciting things were happening in the world of theory. What might’ve been relevant or compelling to you as you were thinking about, your own identity as a physicist, and the kind of research that you would want to pursue, not only for graduate work but, in terms of a calling card that would go on to make your career?

Wieman:

, I don’t recall ever very seriously considering theory, and I think it was just because, I like building things, and I—at that point—I recognized, OK, I’m reasonably good at this. And so, by the time I got to graduate school, I may have briefly considered theory, but I was always pretty sure that I was going to be an experimental physicist, just because I could see that fit with my personality [laugh] and experience.

Zierler:

And so how did you go about developing your dissertation topic?

Wieman:

I t was really continuing Ted’s work. He spent really his whole career [laugh] doing spectroscopy of hydrogen. And so [laugh] —my dissertation was on one of the steps advancing that. it was a natural thing—just what the lab was working on. I had essentially taken over the research group at that point, and was continuing the work. I don’t remember ever sitting down and having a discussion that this was going to be the research topic I’m going to go do, and I need to try and figure out how to make the lasers that are going to be capable of doing it. It just happened as a natural continuation of what I started working on in the group.

Zierler:

And was your funding through Ted, or you had your own sources of funding as you developed these experiments?

Wieman:

Well, [laugh] that’s another [laugh] somewhat touchy subject. I had a Hertz Fellowship, so I had my own funding through that to cover my salary. But for the equipment and things, it was always a struggle to get money, and a lot of things I had to build rather than buy, because it didn’t seem possible to get money for them. I look back at this now, and I blame Art Schawlow. He had this big, NSF grant. He used this to have two full-time technicians that basically just did errands mostly for him, which is a whole [laugh] lot of money,. Occasionally if we graduate students pleaded and begged and wheedled, they might build something for us [laugh], but mostly, it was always really hard to get them to do anything and it was also really hard to get money to buy stuff for the research And I look back at it now, and I think, that was outrageous [laugh],. Anyway, there was this NSF grant that we did buy things with, but it was always hard to. Looking back now, there were a lot of things that [laugh] should’ve been a lot easier for me to get [laugh].

Zierler:

Carl, who else was on your committee?

Wieman:

Oh, it would’ve been Ted, and Art Schawlow, and I don’t remember who else, to be honest. I got to know Sandy Fetter He was a condensed matter theorist who taught a couple courses I took and liked. So I got to know him fairly well. But I can’t remember if he was on my committee.

Zierler:

I want to ask sort of a broad question. I know that graduate students are hyper-focused. But to the extent that you were thinking broadly, what were some of the major research questions in the field at the time, and how did you see your dissertation and your own abilities and research interests as being responsive to those broader questions beyond the specifics of your dissertation?

Wieman:

So when I started my dissertation, it was really driven by the question: Is there some fundamental physics that I can do? What are reasonably interesting, fundamental questions in physics we can do with laser spectroscopy? And that came down to, testing QED better in a little different way. QED hadn’t been tested as well then as now, but it was still not expected [laugh] to make any major breakthroughs. But at least, it was something different and somewhat new. By the time I finished my thesis, that was when the Standard Model had come into existence. And in particular, the Bouchiats had pointed out that it would be manifested in parity violation in atoms. And so that’s when I realized, Oh, here’s a much more important fundamental physics question to be probed by atomic physics. So by the latter stages of finishing up my thesis, I was really looking to that field as a more meaningful fundamental physics question to be pursued. Now, I remember that, at the same time, I gave quite a lot of thought into going into laser fusion. That was because, whatever year that was, early or late ’70s, there had been these claims—which have now turned out to be basically wrong, [laugh] claims of the potential capabilities of laser fusion as a better energy source. That seemed like a potentially really important thing to pursue. Since lasers were kind of my thing, I spent a fair amount of time learning about that laser fusion and thinking seriously about switching into that field. But after looking at it enough, I decided it was probably pretty questionable and so to not do it. That was the right decision, because over the [laugh] next several years after that, it became more and more clear that it was just not going to happen. But I just mention that because that was a pretty serious consideration going into my choices, between that versus going into atomic parity violation as a way to try and test the Standard Model in a novel way.

Zierler:

After you defended, Carl, what opportunities were available to you? What did you want to do next? What postdocs seemed most attractive to you at the time?

Wieman:

So this is where I made some very bad decisions, and [laugh] not having a more involved advisor [laugh] really—

Zierler:

[laugh]

Wieman:

—hurt me. [laugh] I’m always very careful now to have a very extensive—

Zierler:

[laugh]

Wieman:

—discussion with my students [laugh] about what the opportunities are and the reasons for different choices after they get their PhDs [laugh].

Zierler:

They are beneficiaries to your experience?

Wieman:

Yeah. [laugh] At that point, I was [laugh], I didn’t look at it that way, but I recognize now, I was a superstar student coming out of a superstar lab. I didn’t go out looking for postdocs. I had people coming to me from groups around the world saying, “Hey, you want to come work with us?” I was looking particularly at places working on atomic parity violation because I thought that was an interesting area. I remember the three that I seriously considered. One of them was the Bouchiat group in Paris where I actually did apply for some fellowship there and got it. That was a young, stupid mistake. [laugh] But I had a girlfriend, and there were complications over that, and then complications over going to Paris, and I ended up backing out of it, making them very unhappy. It was the right decision but not handled well by me. I mean, I should have never gotten [laugh] into it in the first place. I mean, it was one of these things you jump into, and then you start learning [laugh] what’s really involved, going out to work in lab that doesn’t speak English [laugh]—

Zierler:

[laugh]

Wieman:

—and things. Anyway that was an unfortunate thing, and I also considered joining Norval Fortson who was somebody working with atomic parity violation with lasers. But I ended up going to Michigan. It was a big mistake but at the time it seemed like an interesting, more novel experiment to work on. In retrospect, basically, they [laugh] told me a lot of stuff about the progress of the experiment which just wasn’t true. In part, because they didn’t know any better. But it just wasn’t a feasible experiment at all because, [laugh] the numbers like beam intensity and signal-to-noise ratio and so on were just not good enough. They were giving me numbers that, after I took the job and started working there, I discovered, they were off by four orders of magnitude. That and [laugh] a bunch of other things showed that it was—like I say—it was really a big mistake. It would’ve been enormously helpful to have an advisor who would’ve said, “, these people are talking good but they don’t really have much of a track record, and you ought to be awfully careful about [laugh], taking this job.” I didn’t have that advice, so I made a mistake.

Zierler:

How long did you stay at Michigan?

Wieman:

A long time. [laugh] It was painful. Except for the benefit of meeting my wife, which I think is a very important one [laugh]—she’s been very important to my success. But, yeah, there were a lot of bad things about it. I went there as a glorified postdoc. I was a research scientist. That was one of the attractions, because I had somewhat higher status than a postdoc. Do you know the person Bill Williams?

Zierler:

No.

Wieman:

OK. He was atomic physicist there I went to work for. He was doing a parity violation experiment, and he had all these things supposedly worked out on it. But basically after a few months, I realized they didn’t really understand their experiment. Then I spent two years working very hard trying to fix it and make it work. [laugh] But the more I thought about it and analyzed the whole field, I came to the conclusion that there was actually a very different way, a much better way to pursue this subject using fancy laser technology. At that point, I had been appointed an assistant professor. After a couple of years of postdoc, they appointed me as assistant professor. But I wanted to go off and do this completely different experiment. I knew Bill Williams had a number of flaws. One was his temper. Second, was his ego. He thought he was much better [laugh] than he was, and I’d just spent two years with him going around giving talks on an experiment that I was making work. I had been two years getting it up to almost the capability that he claimed it had before I [laugh] arrived at the lab. So I wanted to be independent of him. I remember going to the department Chair, and saying, “Look, I’m going to send in an NSF proposal to do this work I want to do. I don’t want Williams on it. I don’t want him involved in it. But he’s going to go ballistic once he finds out about this. He is going to be very upset. I want to know how to handle this.” The department chair said, “Oh, yeah, I’ll take care of it. It’ll be fine. Go ahead.” And everything was exactly like I predicted, except the department chair totally screwed it up. [laugh] Williams was a very powerful figure in the department, and so I had all kinds of trouble being dumped on me. He was trying to get me fired all the time, and I couldn’t get lab space, couldn’t get office space.... I look back and think, it was pretty outrageous that, I had to have my students working in my office, setting up apparatus, because the department wouldn’t give me any space. Meanwhile there were graduate students that had big, open, empty spaces given to them. [laugh] Whereas I as an assistant professor, I couldn’t get space to do my experiment or anything. The air conditioning in my lab would never work, and the department never fixed it. There was just a whole series of things. [laugh] I discovered there was a three-year review that I didn’t even know had happened, but it was within one vote of firing me, and no one event told me there was a review. The only way I found out about this was that, in one of the temporary offices I was using because I couldn’t [laugh] get a regular office, the old desk had all these old papers in it, [laugh] and I started reading them. It was from somebody had been on the chairman’s advisory committee, and it had all this information on how they reviewed me, had a long discussion on whether they should fire me or not, without me ever even knowing about this, or having an opportunity to say anything. With this fellow, Williams, accusing me of all kinds of bad stuff. So, anyway, yeah, Michigan was not a pleasant [laugh] time. But [laugh], then it was kind of weird because in spite of all this, I made a lot of progress on the new parity violation experiment I had started. I was able to get results—atomic spectroscopy results, that made it clear that this experiment was going somewhere. That basically allowed me then to get a job at University of Colorado. Then Michigan decided, “Oh, gee, if other people will hire him, maybe he’s not so bad after all.” They actually wanted to consider me for tenure, and, said, “Well, if you can wait three months before deciding on Colorado, we can quite possibly give you tenure.” [laugh] I said “Don’t even bother [laugh]. I’m not going to stay here with you, even if you offered me tenured compared to the non-tenured position I am getting at Colorado.”

Zierler:

Carl, in what ways—even though you’re professionally in many ways, sort of treading water or perhaps even worse—in what ways did your research agenda sort of continue?

Wieman:

So my research agenda went along fine, because I was building up these experiments, figuring out how to do the atomic parity violation experiment. I had my wife, and we were working together on that. I had a couple of other good students. We had made a lot of progress towards working out the detailed design, setting that experiment up, and getting it working. People [laugh] notice my Bose condensation stuff, but from my perspective, the parity violation experiment was actually a much harder experiment. And in many ways I advanced the field much more to do it. So it had made a lot of progress. Relatively quickly after I got to Colorado, then we started actually getting results out on parity violations, publishing, and quickly leapfrogged over the rest of the people working in the field [of atomic parity violation measurement].

Zierler:

What was your next move after Michigan? What did you want to do next?

Wieman:

[laugh] You got to remember that the last couple of years I was at Michigan, my main goal was getting was get out of there [laugh] to a place where I don’t have to put up with all this.” [laugh]…

Zierler:

But, Carl, theoretically, I mean, with different personnel, Michigan could’ve worked out beautifully for you.

Wieman:

Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely, right. So, yeah, it was all about the people. [laugh] When I went there, or when I took the assistant professor position, it was with the agreement they were going to hire another laser person there, because they had been doing this old-fashioned atomic physics. [laugh] I said, “OK, I need somebody else doing some modern stuff.” And they said they would hire another assistant professor doing laser atomic physics research. And then they backed out on—that was of course just part of everything else [laugh] that they backed out on that I was promised. So I was just trying to get out of there. Now, Boulder—CU Boulder, and JILA in particular, was just a wonderful—for me—a wonderful opportunity because it was filled with people doing lasers. They were at the forefront of laser-based atomic physics and pushing the technology. It fit very well into of my professional aspirations, plus my wife and I thought it was a wonderful place to move to and to live. She’s also in laser atomic physics, and so there was a dual career issue, and that’s always tricky. But Boulder had an exceptionally large number of opportunities in that area. So it checked off a lot of boxes.

Zierler:

And your appointment, was it a joint appointment with JILA and with CU Boulder?

Wieman:

So the way JILA works is JILA is an institute in CU Boulder. In fact, literally right in the middle of campus. The JILA building is attached to the physics building. And so the JILA faculty, half of them are actually federal employees, and half are University of Colorado employees. So I was a regular physics professor in the physics department, but then I had my labs and offices in JILA.

Zierler:

I wonder if the JILA environment provided you with instrumentation and just general laboratory opportunities that were unsurpassed; that even a place like Michigan couldn’t compete?

Wieman:

Oh, yes, it was clearly way, way beyond Michigan. You’re completely right. I mean, it was a wonderful place to go in that regard, probably the best place in the world.

Zierler:

And in terms of collaboration, right, I mean, there’s so many unbelievable people at JILA. What opportunities did you see in terms of collaboration with, some of the really exciting things that were going on at the time?

Wieman:

Well, I mean, one of the obvious ones was with Jan Hall, who was a pioneer in developing laser technology, and so I knew about that. I certainly interacted with him and interacted with a couple of the other younger people who were hired about the same time I was, particularly Dana Anderson. But then I also ended up interacting with—collaborating a reasonable amount with, Alan Gallagher who was an atomic collisions person but who also worked with lasers and atomic collisions. He really had a lot of insights and was just better at thinking about these things than [laugh] me or anybody else I knew. The precursor of Bose condensation was understanding the collision processes at very low temperatures, and Alan was tremendously valuable in that.

Zierler:

In what ways did you see opportunity to increase the questions you were asking, to do new kinds of experiments, just simply as a virtue of being in a new place with this amazing instrumentation?

Wieman:

I didn’t think about that at all. [laugh] I had this parity violation experiment, and it was asking an important question. And so I was just very focused on that for many years actually from the relatively early days at Michigan, probably 1980, up until 1996 or so, I think. That’s [laugh] a very long time to continually be advancing that experiment to measure better. With QED, it was you’re always checking the next decimal point, but you really know what it’s supposed to be. [laugh] And with a lot of the other sort of fundamental atomic physics experiments, you’re proving that zero is really zero, and it always turns out to still be zero. With the atomic parity violation measurement, we didn’t know what the numbers were. They could’ve been anything. And depending on what they were, it [laugh] told you new stuff. [laugh] I would argue it was probably the only area in atomic physics that was at that level. So there were just many, many years I was very focused on that. Getting into the cold atom business and the work we did there was really just a spinoff of that. It was a spinoff of doing a lot of work developing new lasers that we needed for that parity violation experiment. We were looking for easier [laugh] fun things to do, playing with them. It was nothing like fundamental new questions based on [laugh] the environment. [laugh] Although, Jan Hall was working on some laser cooled atom stuff and there were discussions about that. And people down the road at the NIST labs with Dave Wineland were working on laser cooling stuff. So when I was looking around for somewhere fun to play [laugh], it looked to me like they had a good sandbox. [laugh] I wanted to jump in there too. [laugh] But I’m afraid it’s not nearly as inspiring as [laugh] the idea of pursuing great fundamental questions of physics.

Zierler:

Carl, in terms of teaching responsibilities and just administrative general responsibilities, how much time were you spending in the department of physics itself?

Wieman:

At Colorado?

Zierler:

Yeah.

Wieman:

So that was a downside of Colorado. I think I had a major influence on the department, for the better, that was good, so that’s not such a downside [laugh],. But from a completely personal, selfish point of view, what I found was there really weren’t very many people in JILA who were professors in the physics department, like me. Although JILA was by [laugh] a large amount—the most prominent research institution at the whole university, there were very few faculty from it that were actually in the physics department. I was soon one of the most prominent faculty members then in the physics department. So that came with quite a lot of responsibility. Representing JILA’s interest, balancing the demands between the two so making sure that physics and JILA were aligned nicely, and played well together, and graduate students could move seamlessly between them, and making sure that I did a good job of fulfilling my teaching requirements so that other physics faculty wouldn’t get jealous. I could see that happen in chemistry. They had lots of friction between the chemistry department and JILA, which has a bunch of physical chemists in it as well as physicists. I saw it as my job to make sure it didn’t happen in the physics department. But that meant paying a lot of attention and working on it a lot. When I say I think I did good, I mean if you look at the rankings of the physics department, and the hiring and so on, it went way up [laugh] in the 10 years I was paying quite a lot of attention to this. And physics department and JILA got along well together. But, yeah, that was kind of part of the job as I saw it and it took a fair amount of my time.

Zierler:

Carl, how many graduate students did you take when you first got to JILA? Did you have a full laboratory right from the beginning?

Wieman:

Well, when I moved from Michigan, I moved with one postdoc and two graduate students. And then I rather quickly added a couple more from Colorado. So, yeah, it was—there was really no [laugh] interruption at all, particularly because I brought two senior graduate students and a postdoc. So we were up and running very quickly, I integrated in more students from Colorado pretty quickly.

Zierler:

And what kinds of research questions were your graduate students asking? I mean, how was—how were their interests relating—related to what you were doing in the laboratory?

Wieman:

When I was working on the parity violation, it was very much, OK, these students come into work on [laugh] this experiment. But then we started branching out to exploring new technologies. And so there were a number of things where people were doing relatively small projects, playing with this laser, and trying to control it in new ways, and understanding the noise in the laser scattering off atoms, and things like that that were sort of all small pieces of this broader research agenda. And then once we started thinking, we’ve got these new diode lasers that are really cheap ways to do things that were costing $100,000 with dye lasers. I started looking for easy, fun things to do with them, and the students were working on that too. How can we use this technology to do interesting, worthwhile things? Maybe laser cooling and studying cold atoms? It was kind of nice because we had the technology to do this so much cheaper than what people had had before. People don’t realize the scientific benefit [laugh] to just doing something cheaper. [laugh]. I’ve always been an expert at finding cheap ways to do things. An awful lot of our early laser cooling and trapping work was all driven by the idea, hey we can just go and try this without needing to have to get a $200,000 grant to buy a bunch of fancy equipment. We just needed to have a few hundred dollars and a machine shop, and so we could do a lot of different things. That also meant that those students and postdocs then had a lot more flexibility in the kind of things they could be thinking about doing. They were never grand, big questions, but were interesting little questions, and they did not cost much money. That makes it a fine thing to do and makes a great [laugh] PhD thesis too.

Zierler:

How did the lab develop over the course of your tenure at JILA?

Wieman:

Define “develop”. [laugh]

Zierler:

I mean, did you—did it get bigger, for example, not just in terms of the people but in terms of the instruments?

Wieman:

The experiments got somewhat more complicated. But the parity violation experiments started out as one of the most complicated atomic [laugh] physics experiments ever done. We had that experiment as a central thing, and it always had a couple of graduate students and a postdoc working on it. Then we started doing a few things with laser cooling and related small-scale experiments, and then I got a postdoc on that, and then doing more and more things on the laser cooling. So that probably doubled the group, and then ultimately almost tripled it in size. I never wanted a giant lab. It grew to maybe two and a half times bigger, moving slowly from parity violation with a little laser cooling to a large laser cooling and trapping program, as big as the parity violation, and then in addition a smaller third effort exploring wild new ideas with [laugh] laser cooling or laser technology stuff. So that was the evolution. Maybe I should be embarrassed, but these new areas of research in the group was not driven by big questions. These were driven by technology, and what useful, interesting things you could do with technology, but we were learning a lot of new physics. There was the parity violation stuff, and that did produce quite a lot of important things. The discovery of an anapole moment is still alone 25 years later. Nobody else had been able to duplicate it, just because it’s so darn [laugh]. I mean people its one thing if people are trying to repeat an experiment, and can’t duplicate it. In this case though, it’s different in that nobody’s been able to develop an experiment as good as ours to hope to see it, [laugh] which is kind of amazing after 25 years. This is a novel phenomenon from parity violating nuclear forces, but it is still largely unknown just because [laugh] it’s waiting for other people to have the capability to look at it. I’m sort of proud of that. That was an important accomplishment, and it meant that we were, literally orders of magnitude beyond where [laugh] these established competing groups had been able to get to.

Zierler:

And I wonder if you could explain the science in terms of using cesium. In other words, are you looking to demonstrate parity violation, and cesium is just a good element to get there?

Wieman:

Yes that was part of my basic analysis of atomic parity violation back at Michigan. Sor of stepping back from what everybody had been thinking about. Stepping back and saying, what is it you’re really trying to accomplish, and really what are the barriers [laugh] to getting there, and what are the best way around those barriers? I would say my main physics talent or skill, if you like, is being able to do that and finding better ways to do the experiments. I have only done it twice. One was the parity violation, and the other was the Bose-Einstein condensation. To Bose condensation, in many ways it was rather like the parity violation. There was a goal that I didn’t think of, but I could appreciate [laugh] the wisdom of people [laugh] who identified it as a really worthwhile goal. And then I was able to think “OK, how could you do this experimentally?” And then stepping back and realizing, “oh, they’re not really worrying about the right problem or the right experimental issue to focus on.” With the parity violation, those issues were: first you had to have an atom where you had a signal relative to the possible systematic errors that was as big as you could get. Second, you had to have an atom where you really could understand the atomic structure, and so people could calculate that. I looked at cesium and said, “ OK, it’s an alkali atom. It’s not just any old atom, its an alkali atom, which makes it easier to calculate its structure. But it’s also an alkali atom that it’s really easy to measure a whole bunch of stuff about it, and because it’s part of the atomic clock, people had measured a whole bunch of stuff about it. So that just meant from the atomic structure point of view, it was just a much better candidate that met these other criteria of big signal to systematic errors ratio. So that was the choice but it was not an accident. [laugh] It was a very deliberate.

Zierler:

Carl, in terms of writing papers, and presenting at conferences, what were the most important things that you wanted to convey to the broader physics community about what you had accomplished?

Wieman:

With regard to the parity violation?

Zierler:

Yeah.

Wieman:

It was that we really could set constraints on the Standard Model. We could set constraints on, if there were additional Z bosons, what their masses could be, and so on. And we could do this in a way that was competitive, in some ways and along some dimensions, superior to what people were doing with multimillion-dollar [laugh] high energy experiments. So that was really the points to convey. The whole field had somewhat of a checkered history in that there were a lot of early experiments that were wrong. So, first, I had to convey [laugh] that, our experiment was better. [laugh] That it had a whole bunch more check and stuff on it to identify and remove systematic errors. And then I needed to show that you could interpret the results in terms of important fundamental physics.

Zierler:

When did you first start to work with Eric Cornell?

Wieman:

1990, he was brought in as a postdoc to work the Bose condensation.

Zierler:

So that was the plan from the beginning, to work on Bose condensation with him?

Wieman:

Yeah, what happened was my group had started playing with these cheap diode lasers, showing we could cool atoms down, we could trap them, and actually do better in some regards than what any other people were doing with much more expensive lasers. I didn’t invent this. I just saw it was an easy thing to play with. What I did then appreciate was that we had atoms in a new regime of lower temperatures where we could probe how they were behaving, in collision processes, for instance. So then we spent a number of years studying—and this is where Alan Gallagher helped—studying these processes. It was kind of a funny time because, [laugh] I had gotten famous, in atomic physics circles anyway, with the atomic parity violation results. They impressed people. Then I was off doing and presenting work on ultra-low temperature collisions, but that just seemed really boring to people. [laugh] And I can remember, going to these meetings in 1989 or so and being ignored. Not at the very beginning—but fairly early on, I realized, these things are really important if you want to get Bose condensation. But that was ahead of where everybody else was thinking. So, I went from talking about parity violation work and having everybody pay attention, to giving talks and having nobody paying attention and [laugh] nobody showing up. And I kept saying, “Wait, but this is interesting. You should pay attention.”[laugh] So, anyway, it was kind of a funny deal. But we had made enough progress in know how to do BEC then. We didn’t know we could get Bose condensation, but it started looking like there was an approach to get close. Again, this was sort of stepping back and thinking, here’s this completely alternative experimental route to pursue. Eric was interested in doing a postdoc on that, and so he came in to spearhead that effort.

Zierler:

Carl, I’m curious, in terms of an intellectual transition, what might’ve been some of the questions to serve as a bridge between parity violation and Bose condensation? How might that have been sort of a natural progression for what you had been doing previously?

Wieman:

None whatsoever.

Zierler:

None at all?

Wieman:

It was purely—it was the technology. It was all about the technology. Like I keep telling you [laugh], I followed the technology. [laugh] It’s worked pretty well. [laugh] But that was very much the case here, yeah.

Zierler:

Now, of course, the problem had been around for decades, so it would be great to hear you talk about—what were some advances in the technology that allowed for what would become this tremendous breakthrough?

Wieman:

I see it as very similar to what guided the atomic parity violation. It was my coming in, looking at a problem that other people had identified and they’d been working on, and being able to step back and say, “OK, how could you approach this experimentally? What would the technology allow you do? What approaches would it allow that haven’t been pursued that might be better? And what were the main barriers to progress?” With Bose condensation, the thing that struck me was, people like Kleppner and Greytak and other groups had been working very hard on this for many years. I knew about their work quite well. But they’d been working with hydrogen because you need a product of coldness and denseness and they were thinking, let’s take the best reasonable refrigerators and figure out how we could get things denser. Hydrogen was the lightest atom so would condense at the highest temperature. I came in from outside the field, knowing that I had this laser technology that [laugh] was not just cheap, but also was getting things down very cold. A microkelvin was not a big deal for us, which was way below the temperatures these people could think about. And I thought, oh, their problems have all been with the density. [laugh] That cold stuff they are making really wants to turn into an ice cube when it gets cold. And the denser it is, the more readily it turns into ice cubes. So I thought, you really want to think about keeping the density really, really low, which means you got to go to a really, really low temperature, but we’ve got technologies now that let you go to low temperatures. [laugh] That is what I would was the key insight that, in retrospect, is obvious, but [laugh] a lot of good ideas are.

Zierler:

Carl, I’m curious if the realization of what you were onto was early on or it took some time to understand that?

Wieman:

You mean the realization of the experimental technique to do it, or that it would be an interesting thing to pursue?

Zierler:

I mean, essentially, that it would succeed.

Wieman:

Oh, OK, so we never knew if it would succeed. [laugh]. And the reason was, there were all these ultracold collision phenomena that I said we’d been plugging away at studying. So I came into this knowing a lot more about those cold collisions than anybody else—I mean, my group did. By the time Eric joined, we had the idea that it was at least potentially feasible. But there were some processes, the three-body recombination. If you don’t know what that is, it’s just a nasty collision [laugh] process that kills off the atoms when they would condense. And nobody could calculate what that rate was within three orders of magnitude [laugh], probably not within four. And so we went into this saying, “OK, we want to have [laugh] a range of different atoms we could use to sort of throw the dice more times to try and get a low three body rate.” But we always recognized that this rate was a giant uncertainty. We might make Bose condensates, but they could’ve disappeared so quickly, they’d never be interesting. And until we made it we were never be able to know if that would happen or not. I remember actually giving a series of lectures on this at Harvard in what must’ve been 1990. Telling people that we’re just going to make the BEC and if it goes away, we’ll just make it lower density. [laugh] So we should be able to see it at some level, but it might be only two atoms, in a half a centimeter. [laugh] So yeah, I believed from very early on that, in principle, we could make it. But whether it would be ever anything other than just a cute demonstration, and not really of any further interest, that [laugh] had to wait until we’d made it. [laugh] Then when we did, the fact it was still there after a tenth of a second was a big deal. That meant this three-body recombination coefficient is at the lower end rather than the upper end of the range where it could be[laugh].

Zierler:

Carl, I know you worked with your wife on a very close basis for many years. Was she involved in Bose condensate at all?

Wieman:

No, we didn’t actually work together for that many years. We worked on the parity violation, and she worked on that up until essentially the first observations. And then she went off to first go work with Dave Wineland, and then lead her own group at NIST, getting much more into applied things. Still laser stuff but we were not directly collaborating. She had moved out of the group, and went on to do her own things way before we got into the laser cooling business.

Zierler:

I’m curious just for a point of sanity if you had a no-physics talk rule at the house?

Wieman:

Quite the opposite.

Zierler:

Oh, really? [laugh]

Wieman:

I don’t think I could possibly…I mean, I think I’m too focused to survive with a—

Zierler:

[laugh]

Wieman:

—spouse who wasn’t happy to talk about physics, and be tolerant of the demands of my [laugh] focus.

Zierler:

And in terms of your partnership with Eric, as a matter of collaboration, what—how were you sort of mutually beneficial in terms of your styles and your creativity? What did you bring to the table, and what did he bring to the table?

Wieman:

I’ll first talk about this in general because I’ve just been reading Bill Bryson’s book on the body and all these medical researchers, and being reminded how few collaborations there are that last for any length of time, particularly when you start getting a lot of attention like [laugh] Nobel Prizes and stuff. I think I can, we can, point with some pride to the length and success of our collaboration. I think the first thing we bring to the table is both of us actually being very sensitive to what we need to have an effective collaboration, how you always have to have some compromises. [laugh]Because credit isn’t a conserved quantity but it’s semi-conserved. [laugh]

Zierler:

Right. [laugh]

Wieman:

It has constraints [laugh] and so you have to be willing to share and make sure both people are happy and successful. And I think we’ve been extraordinarily successful at doing that compared to anybody else. But in terms of what specific things each one brings to this, I brought great technical skill with experimental things. Eric has a great quote about me, that when I walk in the room, the experimental apparatus all sort of sit up at attention. Whereas he brings, a stronger, well, much stronger theoretical perspective and things like figuring out the detailed conditions for making runaway evaporative cooling work for Bose condensation, and calculating other things. So, [laugh] I’m sort of really good with the experiment. He’s really good with the more basic thinking about it. And this gets back to your question about when did we know we had something important here? When Eric first came on, I was really focused just on, people have been working hard to make Bose condensation, and we need to demonstrate this. Whereas, Eric brought in a lot of the ideas that I think really were important about what to do with it when we had made it. I ended up a lot more excited by it, from him talking about and calculating what you could do once you made a Bose condensate, some of the interesting properties and things you could look at, and why it would be unique and different, and modeling that. So that was a big part that he brought to it. Although, it’s not like he’s clueless about the experimental equipment. [laugh] He brings a lot of skills there too.

Zierler:

And were you aware at all of what Wolfgang Ketterle was doing at this time?

Wieman:

It depends on what you mean by “at this time”. I was pretty aware because I knew that group, in 1990 I had this extended visit at Harvard, talking about our BEC work and I talked to the MIT folks then, visited their labs, and they were at my talk, and at that time, they weren’t thinking about this at all. And then as we made a lot more progress over a couple of years, then they jumped into it. People talk about this big competition, and there certainly was at the end. But I—personally, I always kind of thought it was like I was running a marathon, and they were running the last five miles, [laugh]. So it wasn’t exactly the same race. [laugh] But yeah, so we were pretty aware of the different things other people were doing in trying to get BEC.

Zierler:

But you weren’t specifically collaborating or sharing ideas?

Wieman:

No, [laugh] Eric and I had a lot of discussion about this. There was one point Wolfgang was presenting things about this strange loss process he was struggling with. We knew what that loss process [laugh] was from our experiment, and it was different from what he thought. We talked about, do we tell him [laugh] ? We talked about it for a while and decided yes, we’ll go ahead. So Eric told him, but other than that wasn’t a collaboration.

Zierler:

And, Carl, that’s such a—it’s such a great metaphor to think about, how you’re running a marathon. And it begs the question, is the realization that you produce the— —this Bose condensate—is that a sudden realization, or is this something that gets confirmed and reconfirmed over a period of time? I mean, how dramatic is that moment, so to speak?

Wieman:

Yeah, so with Bose condensation, it was completely different from any other experiment I’ve done. All the other ones, you start seeing some hint of a signal, and you tweak it and test it and poke it, and it gets a little better, and you get more and more convinced it’s right, over time. With BEC, it was completely different, in part because the three-body coefficient was cooperative [laugh], and we were fortunate to have chosen the right atom that had particularly nice properties. When it first showed up, it was just spectacularly clear. I told you I was giving these talks at Harvard in 1990 and I made these sketches of what it would look like in kind of the ideal case. And, boy, that’s just what the first pictures looked like [laugh],. In fact, Eric and I were quite nervous at first because it was just too good to be true. And in physics, [laugh] almost always when things are too good to be true, they aren’t true. [laugh] And so we were trying to think of all the tests we could do to check this. To make sure it’s really right. Actually the most comforting aspect that we [laugh] both had was, have you looked at the BEC images much?

Zierler:

Yeah, sure.

Wieman:

OK, there was this broad in the background, and then there’s this narrow peak in the middle. The narrow peak is actually an ellipse, and it’s because the trap-confining potential is elliptical, OK. It turns out that was something we just had never thought about, and so we were briefly surprised that it wasn’t round, it was an ellipse. And then we thought, oh, yeah, that’s what the uncertainty principle says, it is the shape of the wave function. [laugh] We could calculate what that ellipticity ratio should using very simple quantum mechanics, and that it worked out to what we saw was actually very comforting, because it was unlike the other stuff we’d calculated ahead of time [laugh]. When you see just what you predicted, you think, “OK, there’s a confirmation bias. You’ll see what you were looking for.” But that ellipticity, we weren’t looking for it. So, there were a lot of tests we did, but that was [laugh] one thing that helped us be a lot more comfortable with this being so clear, but also was actually correct.

Zierler:

Yeah, and, it’s—

Wieman:

I have to just stress how strange [laugh] that is in my [laugh] physics experience to have something show up so beautifully right away. Of course that did follow five years of development and figuring out better ways to do things.

Zierler:

Yeah, and I wonder—I mean, so the recognition from the Nobel Committee, in some ways, it’s sort of—it’s a distraction because there’s so much noise around all of this attention. So I wonder if I could just focus your attention on just the science itself, right. How do —long before all of the recognition and the excitement—how do yourself just how significant this is, and, more broadly, how does this really advance physics, this discovery?

Wieman:

I think part of my success is that I have [laugh] in some sense a much more realistic but more mundane perspective about what good science is. There’s a few things in science, very few in physics, where you can look at it and say, oh, this really impacted people’s lives. But the vast majority of what makes something good science is a bunch of other people thought it was good science. [laugh] It’s not that different to what makes good singing, right. [laugh] It’s other people thinking it’s good singing. I tell all my students this. [laugh] A big part of doing good science is explaining it so other people think it’s interesting [laugh] and worthwhile, and they want to do it. [laugh] So, what first convinced me BEC was important was that a whole lot of other people, lots of important people in the field got excited about it, wanted to start working in it, and so on. That’s what [laugh] convinced me it was going to be seen as good science. Now, I have to say that much earlier—and this was back in the days when Eric first got me thinking about what you could do with this condensate, we were thinking about, gee, this is a really unique quantum system. Way, way before we got BEC, we were thinking about the fact you could control the interactions in it, and that that would be really where all the excitement was. Thinking about all the interesting physics to do in this fundamental quantum system you could see, and control interactions in and manipulate. That was why I thought this was going to be really good science, but I had other things that I’d done that nobody paid much attention too, even though I thought they were really [laugh] important. So, like I say, I’m realistic enough to know that there’s certain things that I can think are interesting, but the rest of the world won’t, and it’s only once you see the rest of the world respond is it clear it is going to be a notable research accomplishment.

Zierler:

And on that note about the way that the broader scientific community was responding, when did the Nobel buzz really start to become noticeable for you? In other words, in theory—

Wieman:

[laugh] About three weeks.

Zierler:

—in the world of theory, these things can take decades, and it can be kind of excruciating to wait.

Wieman:

Yeah, but again, in the same way this was so unusual to actually see it to spectacularly clearly early on, it was also very quickly recognized this was going to be a big deal. So, I interrupted you, but I would say not entirely joking that the Nobel Prize buzz started within a few weeks—

Zierler:

[laugh]

Wieman:

—[laugh] .

Zierler:

Any special insight on why 2001? Why not ’96 or 2004? Any idea on the timing?

Wieman:

One can speculate on all kinds of things. But you when you look, you see there were several [laugh] prizes that people wanted to get in first [laugh]. Like the one for laser cooling and trapping. That would’ve been kind of a downer to give it for Bose condensation first, and then sort of give this afterthought to laser cooling. So 2001 made [laugh] a more natural progression. So there was that. The condensed matter people were also really anxious, again, to have the helium-3 [laugh] prize first. So there are a few things like that that one can speculate about. I have it on a little better authority that 2001 was the 100th anniversary, and so it had a lot of special stuff. You can believe they really didn’t want the prizes to be controversial in that year [laugh] That’s the one reason that I’m moderately confident had something to do with it. But the other’s are just the same kind of speculation everybody has.

Zierler:

What was the day like for you, Carl, when you got the call from Stockholm?

Wieman:

So I didn’t actually get any call from Stockholm [laugh] because they didn’t have my phone number. I got a call from my brother. There was enough buzz around. My brother got up at 4 a.m. and checked [laugh] the internet for the announcement and then called me up. Then I had to help the public relations department at the University of Colorado because I had a class that I taught that morning. It was a big introductory physics for non-science majors, and they wanted me to have a press conference, and cancel class. I had to explain to them, “No, [laugh] I should teach my class, and then have the press conference.” There was a certain amount of [laugh] haggling back and forth over that. But other than that, I can’t remember too many details. When you have a press conference, people ask you various questions, take lots of photos. I have to admit I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about those things. [laugh] I’ve moved on to other interesting stuff. I don’t know if you know, I just won a great, big award in education. [laugh]

Zierler:

Yes, yes.

Wieman:

[laugh] That’s 10 times the money than the Nobel Prize [laugh] I was spending a bunch of time on science education research back in the pre-Nobel days, and nowadays, I’m focused on that.

Zierler:

Carl, it sounds like you did a pretty good job even from the beginning of not allowing all of the recognition and hoopla to sort of cloud your research agenda.

Wieman:

Yes. [laugh] I remember somebody telling quoting Hans Bethe about the Nobel disease. That people get the prize and then they think they can only work on grand things after that. I’ve never had that problem [laugh] at all. I’m still quite happy to work on little problems that seem kind of interesting, and might be useful for people.

Zierler:

I wonder, to circle back to our discussion about the Vietnam War at MIT where you were largely aloof from the political issues, many Nobel laureates have happily sort of accepted the mantel of getting involved in all kinds of political issues that really have nothing to do for the—with the work for which they were recognized. And I wonder if sort of that trajectory from your time as an undergraduate in terms of staying away from the political stuff held true for you post-2001?

Wieman:

No, I think you have to go farther than just political stuff. Let’s just say broader involvement in things outside of physics research. I have been very involved in education things but [laugh] that’s nothing to do with Nobel stuff. I make very conscious decisions on what I get involved in, and what I don’t, and what I will sign and approve, and what I will not. My rule is that if it’s something where, not the Nobel Prize but my background provides me with some particular insight or wisdom [laugh] on the subject, then I get involved. But if it’s something where your reasonably educated person on the street is just as qualified as I am put forth an opinion, then I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to speak out on it.

Zierler:

But I guess if I could refine the question, I was asking more about using the platform of the Nobel recognition to involve yourself in things for which you’re not an expert, which is different from your interest in educational interests, which sort of comes naturally in the trajectory in the things that you’ve wanted to do.

Wieman:

Yeah. I have very consciously and intentionally used the Nobel platform to advance the education agenda, recognizing that I have been studying this for 30 years and so have real expertise in it, unrelated to Nobel prize. I was talking to you about my research group doing [laugh] parity violation and laser cooling. I didn’t tell you that a little after expanding the group to doing laser cooling, I added a physics education research group [laugh] which lived off in a completely different building, was smaller, but coexisted and was something I worked in. I had been doing that work and was very interested in it and always feeling guilty at splitting my time, not spending enough in either [laugh] area. I knew that there were a lot of stuff we knew about education. “We” being the physics education research community, we knew about better ways to teach, and better ways to have people learn. I realized that the Nobel Prize gave me a platform to talk about this. It did not mean that I know more about it after the prize, but it meant [laugh] that people listened to me [laugh] more. And so I used that platform. [laugh] I felt justified in some sense to use that platform to push for changes in college teaching that I was convinced were right. I don’t use that platform for politics because I don’t see that I can make such an impact there, and I don’t feel as if I’m nearly as expert on many political issues. But in education I am, and it does give me a platform to have an influence that I couldn’t have if I didn’t have the prize.

Zierler:

Now, Carl, what’s new is the platform, but what’s not is your interests. So let’s talk about the origins of your interests in being an educationist, where this comes from for you.

Wieman:

[laugh] I’m thinking about your question about how did the laser cooling BEC come out of parity violation, and my saying it didn’t really have very much connection. In contrast, my education interests came very clearly out of my physics research. [laugh] And it came because I got more and more intrigued by the fact that I’d have these graduate students, and they’d done so well in all these physics classes, and then I’d get them in my research lab, and they were clueless [laugh] about how to do physics research. [laugh] So I got really interested in this idea of how do people develop into thinking like physicists? And what’s not happening in the people’s physics courses to make this happen? It was very much as a scientific question to me. It wasn’t deciding I need to save the world by making children smarter. I always thought I was a professor and teacher, and so I had a responsibility to try and teach well. But that wasn’t the same thing as spending a lot of time on learning about how people learn, learning what the research was on teaching and learning physics. But once I got into it deeply, I thought it was a very interesting subject. And it made me realize, there were an awful lot of unrealized opportunities to make a big change and make big improvements on how we faculty taught. So that got me more and more interested in doing the research, and trying things, and doing experiments in teaching.

Zierler:

Carl—

Wieman:

But [laugh] almost all my subsequent research and work in this area can be traced back to, how do scientists think in productive, useful ways? And how do we help students learn to think that way, and benefit from that way of thinking. So it all goes back to my physics graduate students.

Zierler:

Carl, do you think the Nobel Prize had an impact on how much longer you would stay at Colorado and JILA?

Wieman:

Yes, absolutely, because, what happened was my [laugh] feeling of this responsibility that came with the Nobel Prize. Thinking, “ OK, I’ve gotten all this attention. I can get attention to improving education in a way that nobody else can. Are there important things I should be doing?” And basically, that took me through the process of thinking about, we’ve got this basic research and lots of experiments showing how to do better teaching. How do you scale that up? How do you turn this into something that is done on a widespread basis across the universities? Again, it was just me thinking about what’s the right experiment to do? And realizing that there were a bunch of things that were needed that no one had tried, and somebody needed to do an experiment to see how to scale this up. OK. So not just what you could do in one class. But was there a way to transform entire departments in how they teach to adopt these better methods? I had this model, a science education improvement model, that was just like models I had in designing any of my other experiments [laugh]. Thinking hard about how it’s got to have these various components in it, and some of those were a bunch of money and administrative support. That was my hypothesis and [laugh] it’s pretty clearly been borne out. I also thought there’s nobody who could get the resources together, other than me. And I could do that because there were universities who were awfully eager to get a Nobel Prize [laugh] winner and that thought education was sort of important. But your random physics or education professor was never going to be able to pull this off. I got to that realization of thinking this was a really important step [laugh] for advancing education. It would’ve been nice to do it Colorado, but when I looked at the money that was needed, and I looked at the resources at the university, the fact the state was continually cutting its budget, and the fact that the administration was always distracted dealing with the football program, and I decided “it’s just not practical to do it here.” I was not eager to leave. I did have a meeting with the university President and told her I really wanted to do this experiment in large scale improvement in teaching science, but it seemed like it would have to have some substantial private donations to support it. I told her I would wait for a year, but if there was no progress on raising that money, I would start looking for other schools where it could be one. After a year, nothing had happened, and so I started quietly reaching out to other places, ending up at UBC. I don’t know if she didn’t believe me, or just quickly forgot the conversation, likely just forgot.

Zierler:

So, Carl, just to understand when you were thinking about new opportunities, education issues were really front and center about the best place for you to go next?

Wieman:

Yep, because I brought to this a unique expertise and experience, I knew there was a great untapped opportunity. It was kind of like when we had these $100 diode lasers that could suddenly do what had required a quarter-million-dollar [laugh] laser system to do before, and it means there’s all these nice cookie jars opened up. Then it was the same in education. I could see we had the research to make a big impact if we could put those ideas in place widely.

Zierler:

I wonder, Carl, at what point you might’ve gotten involved in, like the AAPT, for example? Did you institutionally become more engaged with this community of scholars who had been, dealing with these issues for quite a long time?

Wieman:

Yeah, so it had not been going on for that long actually [laugh] when I first started in it. But, when I actively started to pursue this, I had this fundamental question about why our students do well in physics courses, and not do physics in the research lab. I looked for what research was out there. I went and found out about it, and heard talks, and so on. It was established but still relatively new for doing rigorous research studies and so on.

Zierler:

Did your interest in terms of education, how rooted were they within physics education specifically versus science education generally?

Wieman:

So that has grown. The interests initially were very much rooted in physics. Then I had people coming to me wanting to do some physical chemistry stuff, and that was almost the same, and so I was doing a little in that. And then I had somebody show up saying “Gee, I’d really love to do a postdoc in this education research, working in the physics-y side of chemistry.” When I went off to UBC to start that program, I felt it had to be in multiple departments, and so then I was involved in a bunch of fields beyond physics. But as I learned more about these other disciplines, and teaching in them, and [laugh] what expertise was in them [laugh], I recognized how much of this teaching stuff transferred over.

Zierler:

Now, when you went to the University of British Columbia, did you retain any affiliation with Colorado?

Wieman:

Yeah, I set up the Science Education Initiative program so that it was a joint program across the two places because, like I said, Colorado just didn’t have the resources. I knew that taking any central university money, given the painful budget situation, was not a way to convince people to [laugh] endorse a new program on teaching and buy into it. But I was able to put in a bunch of money personally to support this. What I had accumulated through an endowed chair that I hadn’t spent, something like a half-million dollars, and what they would save on my salary, and so on. So I was able, without really taking much of the central university money which I know wasn’t there, anyway, to put together something there that was sort of a half-size program there. So, It was collaborative with the University of British Columbia, and I’d shared appointments between the two until I went off to work at the Whitehouse, and then I had to officially give up those appointments.

Zierler:

And how much was physics research and experimentation itself part of your work at UBC?

Wieman:

Zero, yeah.

Zierler:

It was zero?

Wieman:

Yeah. That was part of the decision that I had to make is to launch that program at the scale that was required. It just made no sense to continue trying to maintain a physics research program. And, it was also true that, I don’t know whether to say this, but the atomic physics research just wasn’t that much fun anymore, for a couple of reasons. One is, for me, the technology and the instruments and the equipment and tinkering with that was always the fun part. That’s one of the things that happens as you get more successful. You have to do more things, you just can’t do much of that tinkering anymore. You go through these phases, from where you immediately know which knobs to turn in the lab, to where you got to be more and more careful, to where the students start putting up barriers when you’re walking in, so you won’t touch anything and mess it up.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Wieman:

There’s that part of it, but more and more was the opportunities issue. The work I’d been doing up through getting Bose condensation, and the first years after that was all about finding new ideas and completely new and different things to look at that opened up new areas. But then it got to the point where I thought, OK, now there’s a whole bunch of bright, young, hardworking kids in this field. Anything I do, it’s going to be more a question of can I do it three months before somebody else, not [laugh] is this going to open up some new field nobody thought of? It was inconceivable to me that I was going to do anything in physics that was that was as significant in some sense as what I had done. Whereas in education, I could see opportunities to make really significant impacts beyond what others were likely to do. And so that was part of what made that decision to stop doing atomic physics.

Zierler:

Now, as exciting as this was to you, was there a part of you—was it difficult to sort of walk away from the laboratory?

Wieman:

Not really. [laugh] The difficult part had already been done. That was when I couldn’t go in and turn knobs. [laugh]

Zierler:

And maybe the Nobel Prize—I mean—you hit the pinnacle, right? That must’ve been a part of it as well?

Wieman:

No, really, the prizes just aren’t much of what matters. They’re kind of nice but, two days later [laugh], I over that and it’s kind of a pain to deal with the details, and I’m onto doing other things. For me, it’s always the process that’s interesting and rewarding. That’s the one thing I can say for sure, thinking of the prize as reaching the pinnacle didn’t [laugh] matter on this.

Zierler:

And, Carl, what were the main objectives when you got to UBC with the joint appointment at Colorado? Exactly what were you looking to accomplish? What was there that you saw where this new endeavor could really change the game in terms of science education?

Wieman:

So it was an experiment, just like [laugh] all my other—

Zierler:

[laugh]

Wieman:

—other things I do.

Zierler:

[laugh] A very different kind of experiment though.

Wieman:

Well, —

Zierler:

Or is that not true? Did you take sort of a scientific approach to it?

Wieman:

This was somewhat different, but I look at my education experiments and my laser physics experiments, in very similar ways actually. [laugh] Let me get back to UBC in a minute. Remind me if I get off track. I wrote an article, I’m not sure I would have but the associate director in the NSF really wanted me to write it, and when the associate director of the NSF wants you to [laugh] do stuff, you do it. [laugh] Anyway, the article was comparing research in the physical sciences with research in social/education research. I talked about how I thought they were in many regards much the same in terms of thinking about how to design and analyze experiments, and the importance of [laugh] checking and overcoming your biases, and thinking about what the confounding variables are, and so on. This got a lot of pushback, probably more so than any other article I’d written. What was really funny about the responses was that almost all the criticism from the physical scientists was that I didn’t understand social science research. [laugh] And all the criticism from the social science researchers was that I didn’t understand physics, physical sciences research. [laugh] Anyway, I see them as very much the same. So at UBC though, it was an experiment in institutional change, and that’s really a bigger, messier thing, the goal was to see if you could bring about large-scale change in teaching. And so you had to measure what methods people were using in teaching in [laugh] the beginning, and how much they changed, and what factors impacted that change. It was looking at what works in different departments, and how departments are different in terms of what works and what doesn’t work, and where you run into barriers and problems and incentives. It was very frustrating for a long time as progress was slow—not so different from a physics experiment where everything just doesn’t seem to work the way [laugh] you thought it would and wanted it to, and you got to keep rebuilding it and making changes. So a lot like my physics research.

Zierler:

I wonder on the flipside of that, as a scientist, what feedback mechanisms were you looking for to know that this experiment was on to something, that it was achieving results?

Wieman:

Yeah, I spent a lot of time actually thinking about that, and how to get feedback. And we collected all kinds of different data. It wasn’t as nice, clean numbers that you’d like. And one of my frustrations was I couldn’t get departments to collect [laugh] the detailed quantitative numbers I liked. I don’t want to get too deep into this, but we had all these teams of people working in departments that sort of half-reported to me, and I could weekly get reports from them on which faculty were doing different things, and which faculty weren’t. And so I fairly quickly knew more about the teaching that was going on in these departments than anybody had ever known before or since actually. I mean, that just a statement about [laugh] how little universities actually monitor what kind of teaching methods are being used in their courses. But because we had these people [laugh] and were getting these detailed reports, that’s what I could get. These reports had of a lot information on why faculty would object to certain things, refuse to do certain things, or were eager to do certain things, and what worked and didn’t work. It was great working with a whole bunch of departments, because people within the departments that we worked with figured out different good ways to do things that I could then run and transfer [laugh] to other departments.

Zierler:

When you moved to Stanford, how much of this project did you take with you, and how much of it stayed behind?

Wieman:

I didn’t take any of it. This project was to be an experiment. It was from the very beginning intended to be an intervention with a limited term and with limited resources, and see what the long term outcome would be.

Zierler:

It was designed to be more—bigger than you?

Wieman:

It was [laugh] always designed to be bigger than me, but it was also not designed to be an ongoing thing. It was to answer the questions, “Could you put this in place? Could you make this change in teaching?” And then part of the experiment was to see what will be maintained after you’re no longer having a special program. Can you flip the state of the system, and then have it stay [laugh] changed? That was always the intention, and so it was on a very strict timeline from the beginning actually. Now, as it turns out, there are a bunch of things from the program that UBC has adopted, and they have changed some budgets and so on to maintain a bunch of things. But I look at that as, “OK, that wasn’t me doing it. That was their [laugh] institutional decision.” That’s a kind of data that goes into measures of success.

Zierler:

What were the cir…?

Wieman:

My wife and I discuss this a lot, and she keeps reminding me without being entirely successful that, “You didn’t go to Stanford to transform their teaching,. [laugh] You left that behind. Now you’re just going to putter around doing your own little experiments.” [laugh]

Zierler:

What were the circumstances of the move to Stanford? Were you looking for a new opportunity? Did they sort of reach out, out of the blue?

Wieman:

[laugh] So I went off to work at the Whitehouse. I’d like to think I did some good there. But, personally, it was a pretty ghastly experience.

Zierler:

And what year was this?

Wieman:

I was there from 2010 to 2012. Let’s see, the re-election would’ve been in ’12?

Zierler:

It would’ve been 2009. Oh, no, no, the re-election, yeah, was 2012.

Wieman:

2012, yeah, OK, because one of the things that—not the main thing—but one of the things that was discouraging to me there was when they were sort of shutting down doing anything [laugh] until the election was over, so for [laugh] five months or something. I didn’t go there to sit around and not doing anything for months. My wife was left to run things at UBC and so we were separated, flying back and forth, and I was living in a crummy apartment in Washington, D.C.. Just personally there were a lot of miserable things, and it was a very frustrating job. So I was getting very frustrated and unhappy about that, but, like I said, I think I did some reasonable good. And if the darn James Webb telescope ever goes up and works, I’ll take a significant credit for it, because, boy, was it a mess when I got there! [laugh] It’s been disappointing that it slowed down again after I left, but hopefully it will go up soon. [laugh] Anyway, I was already unhappy but then I got this disease. Do you know what multiple myeloma is?

Zierler:

Yeah.

Wieman:

OK, so after I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. I wasn’t about to hang around in Washington [laugh] any longer than I had to. I got treatment, and it’s under control, but it’s not curable. So—anyway—so at the end of that time, I decided, OK, I’d done my public service and more. Now, [laugh] I’m going to pick the nicest place to live

Zierler:

[laugh]

Wieman:

—that I can find, and not feel guilty about it. [laugh] So Sarah and I looked carefully at different places to live, and good universities in a nice place to live and that could pay a salary that would make me very comfortable. [laugh] And we selected Stanford, which also had Dan Schwartz, a cognitive psychologist in education that I liked a lot and hoped to collaborate with. I sort of called them up, and told them, “OK, [laugh] you should hire me.” [laugh] And it more or less, happened that way. But Stanford has been very good to me, and I’d like to think I have done quite a lot for them. I have done a lot of good research and done quite a bit to help improve their teaching.

Zierler:

But it was clear that just like with UBC that you would be coming primarily to continue the work in the educational realm?

Wieman:

Yes, but I was not going there to lead a big program like at UBC. I was going to Stanford as a faculty member to putter around and do my little education research projects. I wasn’t going to deal with bigger institutional issues. Now, that hasn’t stayed that way so well [laugh], but anyway that was the plan.

Zierler:

Carl, I’m curious if you saw any opportunity during your time in Washington on the political stage to advance your interests in science education?

Wieman:

Well, that was a big part of why I was brought in. Obama had a big interest in science education. And so I was officially the associate director for science at OSTP, but from the beginning, it was always understood that a substantial part of that agenda was on the education side. I spent plenty of time looking at budgets and problems with big projects like telescopes and NASA and other things. And I spent time on keeping the science research side of things going, but roughly 50% of my time was on working on science education issues.

Zierler:

Beyond learning all of the bureaucracy and lingo of Washington, D.C., once you started to get comfortable there, in what ways were you able to sort of move the dial on the issues that were most important to you?

Wieman:

So, first, I don’t think I ever really got comfortable there.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Wieman:

By the time I left, I at least had a better appreciation of what I didn’t know. I went there knowing I was naïve politically. With time I got a better understanding of how, if I was going to be successful [laugh], more successful, what I should’ve been doing. [laugh] But that was about all the progress I made. But in terms of the areas where I made a difference, [laugh] sadly, my biggest contribution, I always felt, are the stupid things that I kept from happening [laugh]. Whether it was decisions about education stuff or science research, or science funding, people would have some idea, and they would want to go do something, but they just didn’t know very much about it, but I did. [laugh] I would come into a meeting, and listen to them, and say, “Well, have you thought about when you do that, what’s going to happen with this other thing?” And they would say, “Oh, no, we didn’t know about that. I guess we shouldn’t do this idea.” [laugh] That’s not the kind of thing that you can be most proud of, but it probably [laugh] helped make quite a bit of difference at some level. [laugh] When I think back to some of the things they were proposing, they were not that they were evil people, I just brought a level of knowledge and [laugh] experience in certain areas that most of the people in Washington don’t have.

Zierler:

And in terms of the education of Dr. Wieman goes to Washington, who were—what agencies did you understand were the real players in these issues? I mean, you have OMB. You have the Department of Education. You have the National Science Foundation. Who for you were the real—the most important players in ensuring that the things that you wanted to accomplish actually could get accomplished?

Wieman:

So you’ve just put your finger on all the important ones, really. The ones I interacted with a lot were NSF and OMB (Office of management and budget that oversees how all the federal money is spent.). A lot of what I did was try to keep the politicians out of the way of the agencies, particularly in the areas science, but also somewhat in science education. One of the things I learned is that agencies are generally pretty darn good [laugh] and they know a lot better about what they’re trying to do and what they should be doing than the political folks. But the political folks don’t know how little [laugh] they know, and so they meddle an awful lot. Especially with the NSF, I spent an awful lot of time just trying to get people to stop trying to push them around and make them do stuff, and just leave them to [laugh] do their jobs. The Department of Education, I came to realize it’s a weird institution, in that it’s not really about education at all. It’s about giving out money for special programs set by congress. I came in with the perspective of, “Oh, a lot is known about how to improve education. It’d be good to have these education folks get it put into practice.” But they didn’t have anybody who was connected with that research or that way of thinking at all. They just had these great, big programs of passing out money. To give you some scale of how long it takes to get things done in DC, one of the things that I accomplished is an OMB federal directive thing that just came out a few months ago. It is about laying out the stages and types of education research supported by the federal government for going from basic research to large scale implementation. It makes it clear which parts belong in the NSF and which in Ed, and how the different type of research should build on each other, leading up to these massive kinds of programs that the Department of Education gives out money to the states for. This shows how the government funding should be set up to move ideas in education through a development pipeline. There was really no [laugh] understanding of how to make that happen before this, and no kind of agreement across these agencies. I worked on that a bunch, and then I left. Now after several more years of it kind of percolating, it finally emerged successfully, pretty much what I laid out [laugh]. And there were a couple of other things like that. I also worked a lot with OMB trying to get changes in the unreimbursed mandates associated with federal research. This is something that’s been a frustration of mine in that I’ve never been able to make progress on this. What this is about is that if you’re at some university, and you get money from the federal government to do research, it actually costs you money. And if it’s money from the NIH, it costs you a lot of money, in that they don’t even come close to covering what the actual costs for the research are. It’s worse for them, because the NSF also has within its mandate the preparation of the workforce, so that means that the NSF kind of has a responsibility for making universities function well [laugh] in educating students. NIH doesn’t have that, and so they give their program directors much more freedom. There’s this big negotiation between federal government and universities for what the overhead rate can be, and it’s legally capped at a certain level. But then Congress, or the head of NIH, or the NIH in responding to Congress, they just routinely add stuff in that costs money without paying for it. For example, NIH says, “We now want universities to collect conflict of interest info on all your faculty with grants, ( long, detailed forms) and make sure to check that that they’ve all done this.” So who pays for this? Well, the federal overhead’s capped, so it always stays the same. So the federal government can keep adding these things to what universities have to do to get federal money, it without it ever making a difference to them. So how do universities pay for doing all this extra stuff? Well, they pay for it out of tuition. But since every university administrator worth their salt has for years and years been insisting, “Oh, we don’t use tuition to pay for research,” they can’t come out now and admit, “Yeah, 30% of all the tuition dollars is going to subsidizing NIH research.” So you’ve got this system that’s built up where federal research funding is actually driving up tuition. It’s really hard to get these numbers because they’re [laugh] intentionally all obscured, but I managed to do it. For the year I left OSTP, my estimate was the amount of unreimbursed research costs that universities were having to take out of tuition was roughly equal to the total student debt, about $5,000 per student. And that’s not every science student; that’s the fine arts students and all the others as well. It is this horrible secret [laugh] that’s really messing up the accessibility to education by increasing the cost. I pushed very hard to try and get that changed, but there are enormous political [laugh] barriers to changing it. The universities don’t want to admit what they’re doing, and the agencies don’t want to say “We can’t fund as much research now, because we’ve got to pay the real cost for it.” OMB figures, “Well, the federal government’s getting a great deal by [laugh] not paying for this.” This is a long story filled with political twists and turns. If I’d been more politically skilled, I could’ve done a better job. But, a year or so ago there was finally some change in this, and some reduction in the unreimbursed costs; not nearly as much as I wanted it, but they reduced some of the stupid requirements, and covering more overhead. Anyway, that’s too much on this subject, but that’s—

Zierler:

No, it’s great, it’s great.

Wieman:

one of the things that I worked on there a lot.

Zierler:

In what ways did your experience in Washington help you reformulate a new project at Stanford? In other words, it’s an ongoing interest, but it’s a new opportunity to really build something from the ground up. So I’m curious with now sort of an insider’s perspective on how things happen in Washington, how might that have been useful to you as you were developing this program?

Wieman:

I don’t think it was at all. I mean, I went to Stanford to try and go back to basic studies for teaching and learning, and so it really has nothing to do with it. Where it could’ve helped me is knowing how to get money in Washington for research [laugh] that I wanted to do. But the reality is Stanford gave me such a generous startup deal and I’ve had a few foundations grant things more or less fall into my lap, so I haven’t needed to get money. I had to do a little work for those foundation grants, but [laugh] nothing like doing research proposals for atomic physics. And so I have had plenty of money. I haven’t needed [laugh] that skill, but it’s there, I guess. [laugh]

Zierler:

And to come back to really, right from the beginning of our conversation, how have you navigated the joint appointment that you have at Stanford?

Wieman:

It hasn’t been too much trouble. I mean, if I was an assistant professor, it would be a giant headache, but nobody is carefully evaluating my research projects, or teaching productivity and accomplishments each year, and deciding to chastise or reward me. They say, “Yeah, you’re doing fine. [laugh] Here’s the average raise,” [laugh] and that’s about it. Different parts of my life and activities are much more focused in either the physics department or the School of education. I get the students from School of Education, and so I’m working with the requirements for degrees and so on there, and not very involved in graduate students in physics. At the same time, I’m very involved in the physics side of the introductory teaching, and how it’s done, and what the problems are, and how to improve it. Whereas I’m not really involved in the teaching side of the School of Education at all. They both schedule their faculty meetings at the same time, so I have the excuse I can always skip faculty meetings, because [laugh] they all figure I’ve got to be in the other one. [laugh]

Zierler:

You’re at the other one, right, that’s great.

Wieman:

Yeah. [laugh]

Zierler:

[laugh] Carl, what have been some of your most significant accomplishments in this realm since you’ve been at Stanford? Obviously nothing is going to be as easy as saying, “Well, I got another Nobel Prize.” It’s not— —it’s going to be more difficult than that. But to get back to this question of feedback mechanisms for success, right, in this past six, seven years, right, what have been some of the items that have given you optimism that you remain on the right track, and that this really is the best application of your skills?

Wieman:

OK, so that’s actually pretty easy to answer because it’s work that’s happened over the last couple of years. Its depended on the fact that I have a team now of people with expertise, PhD level and above expertise, across a bunch of different fields, in both science and engineering, and one from medicine. What we’ve done is that we’ve been able to identify that across the fields of science and engineering, we can categorize the problem-solving process in a way that’s never been done before. And what we see is that—and this is going to be probably too technical, so interrupt me and ask me to explain better [laugh]. But what we’ve seen is that across all these different fields, by looking at how these people solve real authentic problems in their research or in engineering in their designs for companies, we see that this involves 29 decisions, the same 29 decisions across all these different fields. And how they make these decisions requires the specialized knowledge in the subject. For example, you’ve got a project, and one of the first decisions is what information do you need or are you going to need to answer this question, or you need to make a good design, or to make a medical diagnosis? So same decision in all three cases, but to know the information you need [laugh], you’d have to know a lot about the subject. So, we’ve been identifying this specific sets of decisions made in solving problems, and we find out they’re the same across all these different fields. But, even more important than that, in any given field, the experts are all making the same decisions. And then they have a particular structure of knowledge that they call on to make those decisions. So why is this wonderful and important? Well, what’s really important is that what expertise is all about is being able to solve problems, but up to now, the way we teach problem-solving is just telling people to go up and try and solve all these problems. And if you [laugh] can do them, good. If you can’t, go try to solve these new ones and get better. What this new work allows us to do is now identify these very specific pieces that go into problem-solving. And so we can both measure if somebody’s good or not at these different pieces. If you’re a student going into mechanical engineering, I can give you an assessment that we have developed that will identify, “Oh, you’re good at these specific decisions, but you’re weak in this area and this area. That’s where you need to concentrate on learning more, practicing more.” So we can measure this problem-solving expertise. But then also it tells you how to teach it much better because, obviously, if you want people to learn to make certain decisions better, the best way is to have them practice making those decisions, and then getting feedback on what they’re doing right, what they’re doing wrong, and how to do it better. And nobody’s had this capability, and nobody’s even realized it would be possible to break the expert science problem-solving process down into a set of decisions in this way. It is a big step forward for measuring and teaching expertise. Now, having said that, what I really mean is that I think this is a major accomplishment. I’m having a terrible time publishing any of this stuff. [laugh]

Zierler:

Where are you trying to publish?

Wieman:

We started with the highest end, Science and Nature, and then we moved down through PNAS and below without success. Because it’s relevant to all of science engineering, we [laugh] want a journal that people from across different fields will look at. But, when we have assessments based on this, where we’re trying to publish those in the more discipline-specific education journals. But this work is just so different from what anybody’s thought about in this area before that most of the time we can’t even get it reviewed. The editors look at this and usually they say both of these things. “Nobody would ever be interested in this, and without bothering to look at your data, you can’t possibly be right.” [laugh] They don’t put in the “without bothering to look at your data” part,[laugh] but they’re certain that it can’t be true that experts have a consistent process like this. They are sure that they are all independent and different in the way they think. The fact is, it was surprising to us [laugh] that the process was consistent, particularly across disciplines. Within a discipline wasn’t too surprising to me, though, because the physics education research suggested that. But across disciplines was a complete surprise. But like I say, we can’t even get people to listen [laugh] to how we discovered this. I keep trying to comfort my group by telling them that, except for the Bose-Einstein condensation paper, my papers that have been the easiest to get published, I always thought were the least important. And the most important papers [laugh], those were really hard to get published. [laugh]

Zierler:

Well, Carl, now that we’re sort of right up to the present day, I want to ask for the last part of our interview, I want to ask first a broadly retrospective question that sort of brings it all together for you, and then one that’s sort of forward-looking. So, to state the obvious, your—the evolution of your interest in education are unique compared to all of the other physicists in both theory and experimentation who never, think much about education, or don’t think about it nearly in the sustained and deep way that you have, right?

Wieman:

Yeah.

Zierler:

So what is it sort of maybe about your intellectual inclinations or even about the science that you’ve done that naturally lends itself to pursuing what is essentially a major change in your career? What do you think explains that broadly?

Wieman:

I mean, to some extent, I’m just such a hardcore experimentalist [laugh], I always sort of believe in, no matter what you’re doing, look at data, and then see if you can extract principles from that data that you can apply. I’ve been such a firm believer in that from [laugh] at least the beginning of my undergraduate [laugh] days. I think that I sort of carried over that approach to everything I do in a way that most faculty don’t seem to. They say, yeah, that’s true in physics, but anything else, like education, they just think of that in a completely different way. Whereas for me, even well before I learned about all that physics education research, even in my very first days of teaching, I remember thinking, “What data can I get from other faculty or from my own classes to say what is effective or not?” And, “What can I find out, because obviously I can’t believe anything [laugh] if I don’t have data?” So I think being driven by that is a big part of it. And that was helped when I got seriously interested in wondering how come my graduate students are the way they are. It was a good time to starting thinking about this. There was enough physics education research that I could really look at this [laugh] and see, yes, this isn’t just random little things. There’s some good, solid research on this, and also it is not just physics education research. There’s also the whole field of cognitive psychology and the learning sciences, which from the beginning I always looked at, because they looked at expertise in different ways. Again, it was an optimum time when I became interested in it. There was enough known to get involved, but not so much that it didn’t see lots of opportunities where I could do important things in it. So that was just good timing.

Zierler:

And, Carl, for my last question, looking to the future, obviously your passions and your efforts are really directed in this area now. So, looking ahead, what’s left for you to accomplish personally in this field, and where do you want to see your efforts go even beyond your active contributions to education in science?

Wieman:

[laugh] Now I sort of get Pollyannaish.

Zierler:

[laugh]

Wieman:

I think fundamentally the future of the world depends on science education.

Zierler:

Yeah, now more than ever.

Wieman:

Yeah, we’re faced with these enormous societal questions that are fundamentally technical. If society is going to make good decisions and follow through on them, they have to be scientifically literate.

Zierler:

There’s the political dimension and the uphill battle therein as well.

Wieman:

Yeah, but I would say if you had all these people well-educated in how science works, and the process of science, as opposed to science is memorizing all this stuff some authority says is right, you wouldn’t have any of the politics we have now [laugh]. So fundamentally, it all ties back to, or it could all be solved by, good education. So I see science education as being enormously important for the future of humanity. And from the research on learning, and how to teach better, I see how we can do vastly better. It’s not like curing cancer where we don’t really know what to do. In science education we do know what to do. [laugh] We just have to implement it. I look at it as kind of like medicine was in the early or mid-1800s where you had practitioners who declared themselves doctors without knowing anything, and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. And then you had research coming along saying, “Oh, no, there’s infections from these little bugs, and if doctors wash your hands patients will get a lot better,” and then having to get that into standard practice. If I’m going to accomplish something, it’s going to move the dial [laugh] in some meaningful way towards putting into practice teaching methods that we know work better than what people have thought, [laugh] what people have thought for the last thousand years. I also see it has to start at the university or college level because, that’s not where most of the education’s happening, but that’s where the education of the future science teachers [laugh] is happening. And it’s also easier to change things there. So my goal is just to keep chipping away at what I can to getting this widespread adoption at universities of more effective science teaching that will then carry forward across the education spectrum.

Zierler:

Well, Carl, I mean, if you’re concerned about Polly…being sounding Pollyannish, I’ll happily join you in that because it’s—it really is impossible to overstate just how important it is that science education is the bedrock of our future because it’s going to be pretty bleak without that. There’s no doubt about it.

Wieman:

Yeah. Yeah, so we’re in agreement there. And the Nobel Prize, in some sense, it just adds to the responsibility I have to work on that, because people—right or wrong—people, particularly science [laugh] faculty, listen to me in a way they won’t listen to other education people, even when they know just as much [laugh].

Zierler:

Well, Carl, on that note, if you continue to succeed, it’s obvious that we’re all going to succeed as a result, so I want to wish you a lot of luck in your ongoing endeavors. And thank you for spending this time with me. It’s been incredibly special to be able to learn all of your insights over the course of your career, and I’m honored to have spent this time with you, so thank you so much.

Wieman:

I’ll just finish with a last point. As I was growing up [laugh] in my academic career, I was seeing all these old scientists, continuing to do the same things they were doing, and getting older and older, and more and more out of touch. [laugh] I’ve always felt, I don’t want to be like that. But now I feel, —and hopefully I’m not just deluding myself in my senility—but that I moved into a completely new area, and I’m kind of leading in this area—

Zierler:

[laugh]

Wieman:

[laugh] rather than just kind of getting older and less timely. What I’m doing, it’s a lot more fun, I think.

Zierler:

That’s great. That’s great.

Wieman:

OK.

Zierler:

All right, Carl, thank you so much. [End of recording]

See added Wieman note below:

There is one aspect that was the fundamental guiding principle for all my experimental physics work. It was so basic and pervasive that I never thought to mention it during the interview. For much of my career, I was pursuing experiments that were at the “cutting edge”, in that they required new techniques and technology that went beyond what anyone had done before. To a large extent, the same could be said about most physics experiments, but mine tended to be at the far end of the different and challenging spectrum. What I forgot to mention that my fundamental guiding principle was to always look for the “quick and dirty” approach to building the apparatus. Though not literally quick nor dirty, this meant building things as quickly as possible, ideally just barely good enough, but to also make them relatively cheap and easy to modify. Duct tape and glue was a frequent construction material. My assumption was that I was not smart enough to figure out how to do things right the first time, there were just too many unknowns and I was too impatient to worry about all the details, and so the best way to make progress was to try lots of things rapidly to learn from my mistakes. Or in other words, I always assumed I could do better by trying things and figuring out how to improve many times, than I could do by just trying to get things perfect from the beginning. So all of my experiments went through many iterations.