Warren W. Buck

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ORAL HISTORIES

Credit: The College of William and Mary

Interviewed by

David Zierler

Interview date

March 2, 2021

Location

Video conference

See catalog record for this interview.

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Interview of Warren W. Buck by David Zierler on March 2, 2021,
Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,
College Park, MD USA,
www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/47040

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Abstract

Interview with Warren W. Buck, Chancellor Emeritus, Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Washington at Bothell, and Adjunct Professor of Physics and Special Advisor to the President for Equity in the 21st Century at William and Mary. Buck recounts his upbringing in segregated Washington DC, his early interests in science, and the opportunities that led to his admission to Lincoln University for his undergraduate degree before transferring to Morgan State. He discusses the racial strife and the civil rights movements of the late 1960s, his interest in physics as an undergraduate, and his decision to pursue a graduate degree at William and Mary. He explains his decision to leave after getting a master’s degree to teach at Bowie State and to be more involved in Black student organizing, and he describes his thesis research on deuteron theory under the direction of Franz Gross. Buck describes sailing in the Bahamas after graduate school and his appointments at Stony Brook and Los Alamos, and he explains his interests in nucleon-nucleon interactions. He describes a formative research year in Paris and his subsequent faculty position at Hampton University, his collaboration with Jefferson Lab, and his work introducing theoretical mesonic form factors. Buck discusses meeting Lillian McDermott and his recruitment to help build a new UW satellite campus at Bothell as chancellor. He surveys his accomplishments in that role and explains his decision to retire, and at the end of the interview, Buck discusses his interest in Buddhism and how Buddhist philosophy can be understood in the context of nuclear theory.

I think it was partially responsible, David. I think that we are faced with not only STEM, but a cultural transition. Hopefully we’re transitioning to a place where more of us can feel more welcomed. It also was a downturn in money and availability of things to purchase, people to hire. Yeah. So, it was a big effect, and I think this president here at William and Mary, Katherine Rowe saw an opportunity that- I’ve been pretty fortunate in many respects that pretty much everywhere I go I make some positive change, so she’s hoping I can do that here at William and Mary once again.

One of the first things I got to do was to chair a working group on naming and renaming at William and Mary. You know, William and Mary is an old place and a lot of the nation’s founding fathers are alumni. I guess they were alumni as they’re not living anymore. It was also not very far away from the home of- the beginning of the English version of the African slave trade in the United States. It started twenty miles away- actually twenty plus, in Hampton and then also in Jamestown, which Hampton is about twenty-eight miles and Jamestown is about ten. At the same time, David, in 1619, the representative government, the colonials created a representative government at Jamestown within about a week of the first African slaves arriving, and so the whole business of the United States was built on that representative government (now Congress, Executive branch and the Judicial branch) and the trade of making as much money off people as possible without regard to others welfare, mainly black folk suffered horribly. Yorktown is thirteen miles away from Williamsburg. So, this has been interwoven throughout the centuries, 401 plus years, something like that, although and William and Mary is at the nexus of that, so it’s really right in ground zero.

Zierler:

Warren, a question in the moment, one that we’re all dealing with, but specifically for you, for all of your responsibilities and all of the geographic diversity in terms of your affiliations and responsibilities. What has been challenging for these past eleven months of social isolation and remote work, and in what ways has video conferencing sort of allowed you to do more and establish more connections than you otherwise might have been able to?

Buck:

Yeah. You know, thank goodness for Zoom. Zoom came in just at the right time.

Zierler:

(Laughter) That’s right.

Buck:

It’s not the same as being in a room with friends and colleagues, but it’s as good as we can get under the pandemic. I think at first it was kind of getting adjusted to how do we communicate, you know? What’s the way we collaborate? I think eventually we discovered that Zoom was a good thing to do, and so we’ve had a lot of collaboration meetings. I meet even sometimes with family (laughter). We have family reunions over Zoom, and actually a reunion from Hampton University. I was there, and the group that I actually created had a reunion and so we had this Zoom meeting. It was great to see people I hadn’t seen for years and hear what they’re doing. So, I think this platform of Zoom, also, the clarity, the resolution on Zoom is much better than other forms that we used to have, and it doesn’t crash as often as Skype or something like that. So, it’s really been a boon. I’m liking it more, and even though my second shot is coming up for the vaccine, I’ll probably still wear a mask and still do a lot of Zooming.

It was segregated. There are some interesting stories I can tell you, David, that woke me up from- when I mentioned I didn’t feel it, it was when I was four years old, five years old. My mother was a daycare instructor and a director, so she directed a daycare center and was one of the first Head Start teachers in the country. So, I grew up in that environment, and then in 1954 when the courts ordered D.C. public schools to be desegregated, I moved from an all- I lived in an all-black community and moved from an all-black elementary school to a new school which was mixed, but by the time I got there, all the white folks had taken off. I mean, they weren’t staying around at all. White flight. I remember I learned how to multiply on a slide rule because my dad taught me. He taught me how to use a slide rule, and my fourth-grade teacher told me that I couldn’t use a slide rule, that I should learn to remember the numbers, which I can probably see some of that reasoning. It was actually a black teacher, so I didn’t feel any discrimination there.

But then in the sixth grade, I was on the hall patrol and I had- my job was to help usher students across the street after school. There was this white cop on that beat, and he called me all sorts of names, the first time I had heard these names like that. I went home and I told my parents what had happened, and actually, probably the second and third day I wasn’t sure how to tell them this because I was so upset.

So, do you know my mother- my dad worked and my mother took me down to the fourteenth Precinct in Washington, D.C.- I still remember the number of that precinct, and got in to see the captain, the all-white police force. Got in to see the captain! She said to me, “Honey, tell this man what happened,” so I did and the next day that cop was gone off that beat. It was amazing. It was nineteen- what was that? 1956, 1957, something like that.

So, I started getting those experiences about that point. That’s when I started getting the experience of this racism. I would hear my father talk about it a little bit, but we were pretty closed on that. I was raised in some ways, I wouldn’t say isolation, but we had lots of good friends, but they were all black. We had no white friends at all that I remember.

Zierler:

It sounds like the example that you learned from your parents was as long as you were respectful and careful, you could stand up for yourself, and this wasn’t anything that you had to accept.

Buck:

Yep! Yeah, that’s right. When my mother took me to that precinct and that guy was gone the next day, it taught me that if I could speak up, I could solve some of those problems. And that’s stuck with me to this day.

Zierler:

Warren, when did you start to get interested in science? Was it early on?

Buck:

It was early on, you know. My brother and I would always look at the stars, as most kids would do, and wonder why they twinkle. They had glowed and what was the deal on that? I think that was my first- and also, my dad was kind of a physicist. He was an engineer type, so we got chemistry sets, got a little chemistry set when I was a kid and I could play with some chemicals. I was a good math person and so was he. He was Phi Beta Kappa at Lincoln. I did math really well. I love math, but I hadn’t taken physics. So I was about, I don’t know, seven years old when I started to really try to understand what was going on in the heavens and the question that was a- to my brother and I, you know, what shape is the universe? Everything has a shape that we see pretty much many of the shapes are complex yet geometry, geometry helps to guide the shapes, you know, and so what was the shape of the universe? Of course, that question is still unanswered, but it was something that provoked thinking, contemplation, and wondering. You know, what is that all about? So that was a lot. It got me moving.

I have to admit this because a lot of people know it. Some people know it, but some others don’t, that when I first went to college, I went to Lincoln University in Missouri. I was a jock. I ran track in high school, and I got this partial scholarship to go to Lincoln University. I thought, “I’ll go there and see Dr. Talbot!” because he was still around then. But when I got out there, he had just left. Unknowing to us, he had left. I stayed there for a couple of years and didn’t really find it very challenging. Also, I took physics there and I didn’t do well in physics at all. It was really bad (laughter). I got two D’s in two semesters.

Zierler:

Zierler:

Warren, was Sylvania more like basic science or applied science?

Buck:

It was more- it had both. It had both. Mostly it was applied. They wanted to use my mathematical skills and my physics interest. When I told them I couldn’t do it, that I was going to go to graduate school, they said, “Well, how long is that going to take?” I said, “Two years,” and do you know- (That was to get a master’s degree.) Do you know in two years they called me back and asked me to come back to them? Very interesting life there. I didn’t go. I stayed for a PhD because then I realized that’s what I really wanted was more. I wanted more physics. Give me more! More, more, more! So that’s when I went to William and Mary.

Zierler:

Warren, what kind of advice did you get when you were thinking about programs to apply to, what would be right for you?

Buck:

Well, I asked Bob Dixon. I said, “Where should I go?” and I also asked Dr. Talbot, “Where should I go?” They suggested some places. They even suggested Howard University and I got denied at Howard; they didn’t let me in. Long stories about Howard. I got two other denials from Howard. I never applied again. They just didn’t know what they were doing. Anyway, that didn’t end up well.

I went to William and Mary and they said, “You should go there because it’s small.” At the time there was a proton cyclotron there, a 600-MeV proton synchrotron, and that was owned by NASA but managed by William and Mary. I thought it would be a great way to be in a small environment with not a big university and have people from all over the world coming to work on this machine. So that was the thing that got me.

Before I went to William and Mary, Dixon said, “You should go and spend the summer working,” and so he managed to get me into Johns Hopkins for summer work in the mechanical engineering department there summer of ’68. It was fun. I was playing with internal waves with Prof. Phillips’ group, learning how to- I was tweaking knobs. I had never had, except for freshman physics, never really “tweaked knobs” in a lab. I was mostly a mathematician type, theoretical. And I could tweak knobs. They gave me my own oscilloscope and said, “This is your oscilloscope for the summer. Learn how to use it.” It was really quite great. Every morning around ten we’d have coffee. All the senior people would show up and so would the grad students. There were a couple of students, but mostly a couple of postdocs. I think I was the youngest in the group. They had coffee and we’d bring in toys and take them apart and see how they worked. First, we talked about how they would work and then we’d open them up to see if our guesses were right, and so it was kind of nice to do that.

There was this one guy who- everybody was first name, and there was one guy who they always referred to as Professor Bell. So, one day I said to a postdoc who I was working under, “Why is he called Professor Bell?” He said, “Oh, he doesn’t have a PhD.” Then I waited and he said, “Oh, and he was the guy who invented the Bell lung.” So here I was having coffee with the guy who invented the iron lung, and he was just the nicest person. It drew me more into this whole thing of doing science and doing physics. Not only was the work that we did very interesting, but the people that began to show up were very interesting, too. So, I felt like I was rubbing shoulders with some great, great folks and that propelled me.

So, when I got to William and Mary, I picked up plasma physics and built an experiment in plasma physics, but as one might say, the chutzpah was acting up. So, I had this professor, Prof. Fred Crownfield, who was very good. He was one of the people who worked on the early radar devices. So, I gave a talk. I was working on this waveguide experiment. I built a waveguide and it was very fun. I went to the grocery store and bought stuff that I couldn’t get in the catalogs, and I tried to blow glass myself; that failed. I had to go get parts, so I would go get parts and I loved that. I went around getting parts and putting it together. I had to actually put a vacuum gauge feedthrough to the waveguide. The waveguide was a glass tube so we could see the colors, right, and see what kind of chemicals were there, what kind of wavelengths were there from the scope. The toroid magnet trapped to gas fluctuations. My father was the first to teach me how to solder. But now I had to learn how to solder a copper vacuum feedthrough to a brass end plate because I put this brass plate on the end of the cylinder so that you could have an anode and a cathode. So, I had to place a little wire loop in the center which was the source of the juice and then the endplates. So, you get this oscillation.

I went through so many different copper feedthroughs because- and we had a lot of them. They were surplus. I would take the copper, put it on the brass. I actually drilled a hole in the brass, countersunk it myself. I actually made a tool for the lathe myself. You know, I was doing that, learning how to do that the first two years I was there. Then I’d take this copper bell, kind of a bell shape, that went on the plate which was also countersunk, and then I would take solder and put a torch on it, right? Of course, the heat difference- I mean, the brass plate was absorbing all the heat and the copper was heating up too much and so I’d blow up the copper. It would just sort of boom! right in front of my face and I’d go, “Whoa!” I did this repeatedly (laughter). I don’t know how many times it took me, maybe six, seven times or something like that. Then I realized, “Oh my god, this is brass! Brass.” So, I would put the solder on the brass, let it sit on the side, put solder around on the copper, let it sit on the side, go get some coffee, come back, and then just heat up the solder. Perfect. Anyway.

So, I gave my first talk in physics on this experiment without a dry run. It was my first physics talk, period. I had never talked in front of anybody about physics, especially people at the University. My advisor kept interrupting me every five minutes, it seemed. He said, “But you forgot. You forgot this part of it.” I don’t know how many times that was, three, maybe four times. It was in a half-hour of time. I closed my book. I had my notebook, you know? That’s all I had because I didn’t know how to present any other way because I had no experience and he never taught me.

So, I closed the book, walked over to him, and there were professors in the room and some students in the room, some graduate students. I gave him the book and said, “Here. You know more than I do. You give the talk,” and I walked out. My friend’s students said, “Warren you’re done, they’re never going to give you a degree here. You’re done. That was a big professor you just embarrassed in front of everybody.” I said, “Well, then I don’t belong here. I want to learn myself. I want to make my own mistakes. I don’t want to get interrupted in front of-” Anyway, it was a feeling that I had.

It was directly connected. I was actually taking his equation that he had gotten from the Bethe-Salpeter equation. I took it and actually I did some non-relativistic reductions to show that you can get the Dirac equation from it. You can get the Schrödinger equation from it to all orders of V/c …Pauli equation…and I showed that. I then took it and solved the deuteron problem, so I, as an example, did the deuteron as well as just derive spin orbit terms for regular hydrogen-like atoms.

Zierler:

Warren, I wonder if you could explain a little what the deuteron problem was at the time.

Buck:

So yeah, at the time, Hans Bethe had- and I met Hans Bethe a couple of different times along the way (laughter). Hans Bethe had a student named Reid, and Reid collected a bunch of the data. The data was showing- and this was the phase shift, so this was the nucleon-nucleon scattering issue where there are basically different levels of wavelengths involved in the scattering process. Those were phase shifts, how they shift from one phase to another, one state to another state, one wavelength to another wavelength trying to fit- the deuteron data only fit with what’s called a hard core, so they had this- from zero, if you have a configuration space graph, then there would be a straight line on the x axis. It would be r, you know, interaction radius up to about half a fermi and then there will be a non-zero wave function. People would say, “Oh, that’s the wave function!” I mean, the deuteron has only one bound state. It’s not an excited state, so it’s always in a ground state and so people said, “Well, it has to be a ground state. If it has some zeros in the wave function, then it can’t be a ground state. It has to be something else and it’s not going to be a deuteron.”

So, at that time, there was this hard core approach that was dominant, and it was getting the right binding energy, quadrupole moment, and getting all the right things there, the mass, the long-term, long-range things. But it couldn’t get the short-term things, and that would affect the phase shifts. Then Reid did a phase shift fit, so he basically fit the phase shifts with a whole bunch of Yukawa potentials, and I don’t remember how many. It was like just a bunch of Yukawa potentials …each Yukawa had two parameters, a “mass” and a coupling. So, however, many Yukawa potentials one had, you multiply two and that is your parameter space and then he fit the available data (empirically obtained data) employing the Schrodinger equation - non-relativistic physics. It became very multi-user; everybody was using that at the time, but there was still a question of what is the hard core? What is the real physics? And just around that time quarks were starting to show up in nuclear physics, and what is that?

So, Franz had this idea that it’s relativity and people were doing, all these fits were doing nonrelativistic physics. So, Bethe created this totally double off-shell scattering equation which was totally relativistic, covariant and all. But nobody had used it or solved it, so Franz said, “I want to use a modified version of this with one nucleon on shell and the other off,” because Franz was at Cornell with Bethe for a while, so they had overlap. Actually, Franz was at Princeton first. He went to Princeton for his PhD; then he went to Cornell. I think Bethe was behind hiring him. I’m not sure of that. I’m not sure if he was a Postdoc or a junior faculty member.

But at any rate, the idea was now to solve for the wave function, so it goes all the way to zero. So, I did the calculation and showed that there was this- if we have an axis like this, a two-dimensional coordinate system, amplitude and then distance, Reid’s wave function came out like this and then went up like that and came out, and mine came from zero, went down below zero and then up and out, and people went bananas. They said, “That can’t be because it’s a ground state. That’s an excited state wave function. You’re using the wrong formula,” and we had a hard time publishing because of that, which was- but anyway, it stuck.

It turns out that not only are there a couple of channels for L = 0 and L = 2, orbital angular momentum 0 and 2. Usually the deuteron was represented by the S and D states (L = 0,2) at 0 and 2 and that’s why you had a quadrupole moment because of L = 2. We found that the deuteron had L = 0, 1, and 2 channels and so it was coupled not only between 0 and 2, but coupled between 0, 1, and 2, so instead of two wave functions, you get four! (laughter) Anyway, that’s what we did and so that’s what got me rolling in the theory world.

Zierler:

Warren, I’ll test your memory. Who was on your thesis committee?

Buck:

Let’s see. That’s a good one. Carl Carlson was on, and we had Charles Perdrisat was on there, a Frenchman. Oh, and I had a guy! I had this guy, I guess I can tell you this. This is pretty public knowledge, but anyway, a guy named Ed Remler. He has now passed. He was a decent physicist at William and Mary. He was on my committee, and I think he’d been on for a year or so. I was going to give my final oral defense on these new ideas on a Monday, and on Friday, he came up to me (the Friday before that Monday). He said, “Warren, your work is all wrong. I want nothing to do with it. Goodbye.” Ugh. I mean, that was a major blow. That was a major blow, so I went to Franz and I said, “Franz, what do we do?” I just had the minimum number of people, and with him off I was not able to defend. Franz said, “You should ask Hans von Baeyer.” So, I went to Hans to ask, and Hans said, “Warren, I would have been on your committee from the beginning. Why are you asking me now? It’s only a weekend to go before your oral. Why are you asking me now?” I said, “Hans, I need you. I need you.” He reluctantly said, “Okay. Okay.”

Okay (laughter). So, I wanted to go on to keep working in physics. I just was- I like working with covariant stuff. It was just really quite kind of magical to me to be able to manipulate these symbols and physics came out, you know? (laughter) Really quite nice. Just incredible. I extended my time because I had applied for jobs or postdocs but didn’t get anything, and so I extended my time for, I forgot, a couple of months. Franz paid me for a couple more months and so something would show up.

In the meantime, though, I took off and went to the Bahamas, so I had this- I had learned how to sail when I was in D.C. in 1970. I bought a little boat, a little fifteen-foot Albacore day-sailer and learned to sail on the Potomac River, so I was a sailor. This was now six, seven years later and I’m still sailing, right? So, a friend, a physicist, Chris Fronsdal, invited me to go on his boat. He sails all the time. In fact, he’s trying to get me to go to the South Pacific with him this spring. Anyway, he’s a big sailor, and so I flew down to Nassau to meet him. My friend who operated the computer at William and Mary, you know, those were the days when there was just one computer on the whole campus! and it took up the basement of the Math building.

Zierler:

Right.

Buck:

I had a big computer job, you know, with FORTRAN. It was a big computer job which took up a lot of time during the week. So, Franz organized a time where I could work on the weekends and I had the machine to myself for two weekends in a row, so I could finish computing all my results. My BIG job was a whopping 450k (laughter). The fellow who ran the machine became a friend of mine, so he and I went to the Bahamas.

We stayed for a couple of weeks and I came back and there was a telegram for me. yep, telegram. It was classic. I don’t have it now. I wish I was more organized and could keep stuff like that, but I- if it’s here, I don’t know where it is, but anyway. It said, “We have a job for you. Can you come as soon as possible?” It was from Gerry Brown at Stony Brook. I had applied to them a few months earlier and they said, “No job. There’s nothing available.” So, the fellow who was there, I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember, was hired into a an Assistant Prof position at Michigan State. He got a job at Michigan State, so there was a job open for me at Stony Brook and so I went to Stony Brook that summer. Came back from the Bahamas, got my PhD, and went to Stony Brook.

When I was in my, I think it was 1974, ’72 maybe, ’72, ’73, Hans Bethe came to William and Mary to give a talk, and I had the good fortune of having dinner with him and about six other people over at the department chair’s house. This was my first Nobel Laureate that I had ever met, and I was sitting next to his wife (laughter). He was on the other side of the table. I wanted so badly to go to the other side of the table. She was talking about their travels and all that, and I just wasn’t that interested. A nice lady, but it just wasn’t-

So, after dinner, I went over to him and said, “I’m working on something. I’m working on some things with weak interactions,” and I didn’t quite know exactly what I was doing at that time. I was explaining to him what I was doing, and he said, “We should-” You know, in his German accent [imitating the accent], “We should meet tomorrow.” He had an office at William and Mary, so I went there and asked Franz to join me because I was scared to death. I have a nervous reaction. My body just- I get nervous in front of people. I had my notes on computer printout. I just found some old- this old printout (laughter). I’m leaving. William and Mary wants to keep my papers, so I’m giving them a bunch of stuff. So, I had a computer paper that had notes on it. I don’t remember how many pages it was, but it was a number of pages, maybe six or seven of those pages, maybe more. I don’t know.

In Bethe’s office, there were two big blackboards, so I was writing. I filled them both and I was explaining as I was going. He sat back in his chair and was very quiet and I just kept going. I got to my conclusion and I said, “And here’s what I have,” and it was a decay. I had some decay that I had calculated which was clearly- it was exponential. It had a nice little shape to it, and it was based on an idea that I had that there was some unknown particle that was causing the neutron to decay. It was an interaction. It was not something so much internal, but there was an external force that had to hit the neutron that we didn’t know what it was. Maybe it’s dark matter now. I don’t know what it is, but anyway, it hits the neutron and decays.

So, he sits back. He leans back in his chair and he says, “Ah!” And he goes back to the second line and he says, “You made an error in the sign there,” and I went, “Oh, shit.” That threw everything off, right? So instead of decay, I had growth, I walked out with my head down, like okay, I’ll never do physics. Franz said, “No problem.” Franz was very quiet. He didn’t say a thing. He was really great. He didn’t say a thing, but I felt stronger with him in the room, you know. And I met Bethe again at Stony Brook because he came to- we had a big celebration for a birthday of his and he remembered that! (laughter)

But anyway, I ended up at Stony Brook and that’s where I did more sailing in Long Island Sound and through New England on my boats. I had a couple of boats there, one was a trimaran. And I actually learned to watercolor paint from Nándor Balász, who was Einstein’s assistant at Princeton and was also Schrödinger’s assistant when Schrödinger was in Ireland. Nándor would go in. He was Hungarian. I went to his office to talk about stuff and he taught me to watercolor paint. This is kind of broader than what your question was, but I had a lot of experiences at Stony Brook which were really good. Met Max Dresden, Frank Yang and Murry Gell-Mann there too.

Zierler:

What about Los Alamos? How did you get involved with research at Los Alamos?

Buck:

Well, when I was at Stony Brook. So, one of the places I had applied just before [getting] my PhD was Los Alamos, and I met Dick Silbar, who is now well retired and, sadly, his wife, Maggie, just recently passed last year. They had become good friends of mine. He was at Stony Brook visiting one year and we talked about my- you know, I was kind of lukewarm about Los Alamos because there was no water and I liked water to sail in. He said, “Why don’t you come out to Los Alamos? We’ll make a deal. You come out one month of the year anytime you want, and we can work together,” so I said, “Okay.” So, we had that deal. I went for three years. I was at Stony Brook for three years.

Zierler:

What were some of the broader research interests that you had during your postdoc years? In what ways were they connected with your graduate research and in what ways did they represent new avenues of inquiry for you?

Buck:

Well, it was on nucleon-nucleon interaction, so Andy Jackson was there, who was editor of Physics Letters at that time. Stony Brook had a nucleon-nucleon potential which was semi-relativistic, but at the time I arrived, Gerry wanted me to work on nucleon-antinucleon interactions, NN-bar stuff. So actually, Iosif Shapiro at Lebedev Institute in Moscow generated something called G-parity transformations, and so it was easy for meson theory to convert this so you can change the nucleon to an antinucleon pretty easily. I was calculating these states using the then Stony Brook Potential and the tensor force now was not repulsive, but it was generally attractive and so there’s just a ton of states in there. So, I worked with Jean-Marc Richard and Carl Dover. Dover has also passed. He was one of my good buddies. Jean-Marc is still living and it’s always good to see him. We still see each other now and then. So, that was a place where I started doing some different things.

I also started working on isobars because isobars were something Gerry liked to do, and he had a problem that looked like it was a double isobar exchange and so I was calculating that in collaboration with Werner Fabian, another post doc. In and of itself, it gave a nice result; it matched the data pretty much, but if you put it in with all the other exchanges, it washes it out, so it wasn’t a real contribution. So, I was doing those kinds of things.

Zierler:

Warren, how did the opportunity to do research in Paris come along for you?

Buck:

So that came along, David, at Stony Brook. Gerry and I were beginning to move in different directions. He was having a lot of- some would say a mental breakdown. He was kind of erratic and it was not pretty and so the group was kind of in disarray. Actually, I helped interpret for Gerry Brown, so when people said, “What did he mean?” then I was the one who would talk about, “Oh, I think he means this. This is what he means.” Gerry would give me, “Yeah, that’s right, Warren.” Then he would say something and then people would say, “What did he say?” and I would say, “Okay, I think he’s saying…” So, I was a translator, really.

The Paris group had also a nucleon-nucleon interaction called the Paris potential of which Jean-Marc was the spokesperson. It was a meson exchange potential, and it was also non-relativistic mostly. It was very popular. It had replaced the Reid potential in popularity, you know, old Reid from Bethe. So, I met Jean-Marc who was at Paris. His PhD was at University of Paris. So, when Gerry and I kind of went different ways and Dick Silbar- Silbar has helped me a lot. They helped me through that. They helped me understand that he was not as level as he had been, so that helped me understand him, helped Gerry a little bit more about that. One time, Gerry said- I stayed at Los Alamos a little longer than he wanted me to, and when I got back to Stony Brook, he said, “Okay, Warren. You have your physics; I have mine,” and he walked away. That was pretty much the last time I talked to him. Oh, that’s not true because I actually stayed at his house some years later. We made up and it was a whole big wonderful thing.

But Jean-Marc was at Paris, so at my wedding to Linda Horn, Jean-Marc brought his PhD advisor, Robert Vinh Mau, who has now passed, but brought Vinh Mau to the wedding reception and at that event he said, “Why don’t you come to Paris?” I had an offer to go to Mainz, Gutenberg University, and I had an offer to go to the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and some other place. Then Paris came up, so I said, “I’ll take Paris” (laughter). So that’s how I got to Paris.

It wasn’t really a postdoc. It was a staff position at Orsay, and I stayed there one year. It would have been a permanent job, actually. I stayed there one year working on weak interactions with K. Kang of Brown University and with Fronsdal on DeSitter Space calculations before I quit and went sailing. It was interesting because the nucleon-antinucleon interaction was starting to be pretty big and so I got there because of that. I took my- my mother and brother Lawrence came to visit. Neither had ever been to Europe, so I had her hosted in my house, my flat in Paris. My brother went to the Netherlands and my mother came down with me to CERN. I was giving a talk at CERN and it happened that the machine was down and- oh, I can’t think of the fellow’s name who was in charge of experiments there. It was Kurt Killian, anyway, he said to me, “Let’s take a tour!” My mother was there and my mother had never been inside the workings of an accelerator before, few have of course (laughter).

So, we took this tour and we landed at one of the experimental stations and there were like three to four people working on their equipment there. My mother, who was very upbeat, you know, she would engage anyone and was very straightforward. She said- she’d see a governor and she’d go to the governor and say, “Hi, I’m Warren’s mother. Let’s talk about food and life” (laughter). I mean, she was really very, very much a free soul. So, she saw these people working and she said, “What are you doing?” and one experimentalist said, “We are trying to prove your son’s theory.” I had no idea who they were at the time, and I thought, “Oh my god! I’m at CERN and they’re trying to prove my theory! Boom! That’s nice.” It was really nice.

So anyway, there were a lot of things that happened in Paris. I traveled all around Europe giving talks and it was a good time, but I realized that it was going to be a long time before anyone could discover any metastable states in nucleon-antinucleon interactions. So, I decided I would take five months off. I asked Vin Mau if I could take five months off on leave without pay and he said, “Yeah, sure.”

So, Linda and I returned to the States and sailed to the Bahamas from Martha’s Vineyard. We ran out of money just at the right time and were going to come back to Paris and decided to stay. Ron and Jean Chapman encouraged us. Ended up staying for three years on the boat in the Bahamas and went back and forth between Annapolis and deep in the Bahamas. So, I quit my job in Paris and there I was. We sold our artwork to mostly pay for the trip. We were on a sailboat without auxiliary power.

Zierler:

Warren, as I’m sure you know, there’s a rich tradition of African Americans going to France, and Paris in particular, and really having an eye-opening experience in terms of racial politics. I wonder what your experiences were and how that might have broadened your horizons.

Buck:

I had great experiences in Paris. I went to some of the cafés that some of the very famous musicians had been. I found the French people- some people think that French people are kind of, you know, not very friendly, but I found them extremely friendly. I tried to speak the language and I speak a little French; I learned it there. But I found it very friendly. I could go anywhere. I didn’t feel any discrimination. It was really interesting. I could certainly feel I was a foreigner at times but didn’t feel like there was any discrimination. It was really quite the place. I had working and resident papers. In fact, all through Europe at that time I felt really good even going to Germany, which is a whole other story there. I wanted to go to Germany to see what kind of people the Nazis came from. The racism in the States comes a close second. But Paris was really good. I still go back to see friends. I go back there and visit. It’s a nice place to hang out.

Zierler:

Warren, of course you can’t know in real time; there’s no grand plan for the future, but when you got on the boat and you were focusing on watercolors, did you accept the possibility that you were removing yourself from the science to such a degree that it might be hard, if not impossible, to get back in even when you wanted to?

Buck:

Yeah, I think so. I think it was- I had that feeling. But I was so happy with the boat and learning how to move this boat, this other piece of equipment through oceans and all kinds of waters deep and shallow etc. I was just intrigued by all that, and Franz thought I was throwing my life away. A lot of people thought I was throwing my life away. They would say, “Warren, you’re just throwing it away.”

So, I did finally come back after three years, and actually, Franz wrote me a letter, general delivery in the Bahamas, that essentially stated, “Come back, because we’re going to build a lab in Virginia.” Franz was always honest with me. I believed him, so I came back to William & Mary and then I stayed in the area. I got off the boat, had a young daughter. Linda and I and a young daughter, Liandren (who now has a son, Jayden, and a daughter, Aliana). That’s when I- and I did that because I really wanted to find a way to get more African Americans involved in first-rate science, first-rate physics. I was really motivated at that point to see if I could make a difference, and so I just “knocked” on Hampton University’s door - talked with Demetrius Veneble who was physics chair at that time. I just went over there and said, “There’s a USDOE electron accelerator machine coming to Hampton Roads. I know something about it. Please hire me” (laughter). And they did! They said, “Okay. We’ll give you a shot.” So, I stayed at Hampton fifteen years and we played a major role in building The Jefferson Lab.

At first, I had to bring attention to Hampton - unknown in the nuclear high energy physics world, so I created the Hampton University Graduate Studies program (HUGS), which was an international summer school. I got my friends in. I got Silbar in, Gerry Brown, Dresden, Frank Close, Carl Carlson, Franz, Dirk Walecka and a host of other very distinguished physicists. I got my friends from Paris and Germany to come fly over to give lectures and whatnot. Even Feynman had agreed to come and then he was sick that year and he didn’t make it. So, he didn’t get there, but I had Jerry Friedman there and it was a good number. Jim Gates was there, so we had lots of great people coming and giving talks, Bev and Fred Hartline and I became good friends there, Bev was our champion for HUGS with the lab…she supported us strongly.

So instead of fighting to get in, you’re in. You’re in. So, we got Keith, and then of course he did a little test run on his wire chamber, a little one, and it was better than spec. People said, “Oh, it’s a toy. It can’t work, a real one. We need somebody who is experienced at pulling wires.” So, I said, “Give him a chance. Give him a chance.” So anyway, he built it and it also did better than spec and had, I think, the third… The second or third experiment of Jefferson Lab’s history was done by an HBCU, and it was the first time an HBCU had had. At that time, when I left, we had something like, oh, I can’t remember, David, but I want to say seven major experiments in the queue, and by all measure it was successful. It was a very successful operation.

She was just the strongest person, but she was so- we fell in love. She, her husband, and I. Anyway, there’s another story. Mark and I met first, actually, second. I met Lillian on this committee and then Mark and I were asked to go to Louisiana by the board of regents to evaluate some physics departments in Louisiana. So, it was he, me and David Campbell who was at Boston College, who I think got the job at Los Alamos that I had applied for back when I was a student (laughter). We just had a blast going through Louisiana, just a blast.

So, I got this offer. I got an invite from Roxanne Springer, she was Feynman’s last student, who was also someone I was trying to recruit to Hampton to hire. She went to Duke instead, but she said, “Why don’t you come out to Washington? I’m hosting a conference and you could fit in really well,” so I flew out. The first person I saw when I got in the physics building was Mark McDermott, and he said- he didn’t even say, “Hi, Warren.” He said, “Does Lillian know that you’re here?” and I said, “No, I haven’t reached out.” He said, “You’ve got to talk to Lillian. You’ve got to see Lillian.”

So, I got on the elevator, went up to Lillian’s office, knocked on her door. She was there. “Warren! You’re here! Why are you here?” you know, in Lillian’s way of talking. I said, “Well, I’m giving a talk on physics calculations I’ve been doing,” and she said, “You’ve got to talk before my Physics Education Group.” I said, “Lillian, I don’t want to do any of that because I’ve been absorbed in doing a bunch of stuff at Hampton as well as my research, but I just don’t feel like I want to talk about anything other than my research. I don’t want to.” “Warren, you have to give a talk.” “Okay.” You know Lillian, you just agree. You say, “Okay.” Jim Stith knows what I mean.

So, I went to give a talk to the group and what I was talking about was the Hampton. I call it the Hampton experiment, so how we did it, how we got started, and actually, what got started- I went over to my friends at William and Mary and I said, Rolf Winter, who was the chair who kept my fellowship while I was in D.C., said- I said, “Rolf, how do I create a PhD program?” He said, “A lot of money.” So, I went out and got a lot of money! (laughter)

So anyway, I was talking about that to Lillian’s Group and then there was one administrator in the room to whom I was introduced by Lillian. He said, “Have you been to the campus before?” and I said, “No, this is my first visit to the Washington campus.” I had actually been to PNNL some years ago, Pacific Northwest Labs, because they wanted to make a matter-antimatter propulsion system and I told them that they couldn’t do it. They brought me out there to explain why they couldn’t do it, so I explained why not now. So, this wasn’t my first visit to Washington.

So, my second visit was to the UW physics department and so this administrator said, “Let’s take you around the campus and show you around the campus.” I said, “Okay, fine.” So [I was] walking around and ran into Lois Price Spratlen, a black woman who was the first female ombudsman for any U.S. university. She coined the term ombuds because she was a woman. She didn’t want ombudsman. And she was from Hampton University! She graduated in nursing from Hampton University.

I would have run. I mean I was like fed up with administration, you know, but I like building stuff. I like building things. I like building things for people, building things for myself. I’ve always liked that and not just widgets, but programs. I like building organizations, you know. So, Lillian and Mark took me out to dinner, and I complained that they were railroading me, you know, and they said, “Yeah, we are, but it’s okay. You should come out anyway.”

I ended up getting the job and I had to go back to my group and explain what was going on here, that there was a chance of a lifetime for me to build a campus from the ground up. I hadn’t ever done that. Few have. It’s a rare thing for anyone to do that, and I felt that I’ve done as best I can here in Hampton. The group was not happy to see me leave because I was running administrative interference for people so they could do their work, you know. I really believed that I didn’t want them burdened down with administration because then they can’t do the physics.

Zierler:

Warren, last question on the collaboration with Jefferson Lab. Given the path-breaking nature of this partnership between a Historically Black College and a national lab, was your sense that this partnership resonated more broadly? Were other national labs aware of what you were doing? Were other HBCUs aware of what you were doing, and would you see other partnerships arise as a result of what you had built at Hampton?

Buck:

Yeah. So, people were definitely aware of it, but it was so difficult to replicate because it was so unique with unique circumstances.

Zierler:

Yeah. Yeah.

Buck:

We even had- there was a group, the NSF Research Center of Excellence that I had, there were, I think, eight others at the time with different HBCUs around the country. Only Hampton had this strong connection to a national lab and a prominent NSF STC. We went to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to see Ernie Moniz. I knew Ernie; I’d met Ernie back in the Stony Brook days.

You mean as chancellor?

Zierler:

Yeah.

Buck:

Oh, I harbored those feelings, but then I realized I had to wait, and at that time there was no physics at Bothell. There were two chemists who didn’t have a lab. Actually, that’s not true. One had part of a lab. But it- the campus was all humanities and so they thought I was going to come and build an accelerator. You know, it’s a beautiful place out there. I mean, it’s really- there’s a natural wetlands there and they thought I was going to build the accelerator under the wetlands. I said, “That’s an idea. That’s a good idea” (laughter). But we didn’t. We didn’t do it. But the wetlands had to be restored as part of the construction agreement with the state and the city of Bothell- the largest restoration of a fresh water wetlands in the NW, it is now a beautiful addition to the Bothell campus for many reasons.

I arrived there in 1999, and I stayed as chancellor for six years, left, went over to Seattle to teach physics for two years…struggled through creating class web pages…, came back to Bothell to help start the new science and technology program the new chancellor and vice chancellor for academic affairs, Susan Jeffords, asked me to do that. There was no science and technology there, so they both asked, “Can you do this?” I said, “Sure,” so we made it happen. We started hiring. We started writing proposals for courses and that course and this curriculum and that curriculum. I’m making it sound a little simpler than it is, but we started hiring.

We already had a little computer science going there when I arrived, so we made that more robust. We got a different slant on that. We built a new biology research lab. The engineering-we put engineering in place. Electrical engineering was the first one to come, and I did that on purpose because what does electrical engineering need? They need physics! So, you get the electrical engineering in. You get the mechanical engineering in. What do they need? They need physics! And you get biology. Sometimes they need physics; sometimes they don’t. But you get biology in and all this, and then finally you have to put in a proposal to make a physics major (laughter).

It flew through because the chancellor said, “We can pay for that.” UWB was still growing in enrollment rapidly and STEM had become the largest school because the students will pay for it thru tuition and state dollars as the students were growing, numbers of students, so you had a growing budget coming. Physics is an expensive program anywhere, and at Bothell we now have a physics program. I think it’s two years in a row we’ve had outstanding SPS chapters. That’s the best you can do in SPS! This also meant we were reaching more students.

Zierler:

Yeah! (laughter)

Buck:

I mean, what a wonderful thing! And then just before I retired, we hired Joey Key, who is a long-term LIGO collaborator, and we hired her before they were awarded the prizes!

Zierler:

Oh, wow!

Buck:

Okay? So, then you say, “Oh, Bothell has a prize winner!” UWB had two mathematicians win a prize the year earlier. That brings in the students and it brings in more money. Then we have Rachel Scherr, who is a Fellow of APS with physics education. She was a post-doc with Lillian McDermott. It took a long time, David, to get there, but we got there. You know, we got there.

During the early years when I was at Bothell as chancellor, we have this multi-campus university in Washington, and nobody was really understanding it. So, I created a little- well, it was not a seminar, but a working session. I had three people come and talk, a panel, who had experience with multiple campus universities, and one of them was Johnny Toll. I met him at Stony Brook. He was the president of Stony Brook and he was one of Wigner’s students. John and I got along real well. He ended up at Maryland and he was chancellor there and president there, so I had Johnny there. So, he came in- he was not the first president of Stony Brook, but he was I think the second. But he started bringing in the physicists, right? The way he said he started building physics in particular, he said “I just called Frank Yang up and said, ‘You’ve got to come over here. Leave Princeton,’” and there were a whole bunch of people leaving Princeton at that time and he was grabbing them up.

So, the Bothell and Seattle people were hearing this, these techniques of how you build things. How do you make things happen? I was using all these techniques, all the techniques I could muster. So now it’s very respected. We, UWB, were number one in the country for being the most affordable education of the public, at least for publics at Bothell. It was a situation that was similar to Jefferson Lab where people thought it couldn’t happen, you know. It’s not going to happen. So, I figured if we lose, it would be expected, you know. No big deal. But if we win…

Zierler:

Big deal. Warren, an overall strategy question. As you’re thinking about taking on the chancellorship, obviously there’s a mandate for growth right from the beginning. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about when it was most efficacious for you to live in the shadow of Seattle and when it was efficacious to branch out and really demonstrate that Bothell could be its own Center of Excellence.

Buck:

Yeah. When I first arrived, the Bothell campus had been created, so it was ten years old at that time. They had been living in a business park in one and a half buildings, and there was a lot of feeling that it was not going to survive. I would call Seattle the Montlake branch. The Seattle folks did not like that, they did not want to share the stage but it’s the Montlake branch. They really want to be the big Husky. They don’t want any competition. I was at a meeting once that the chief financial officer, in a cabinet meeting, I was sitting there, said, “A dollar for Bothell and Tacoma (University of Washington, Tacoma). A dollar for Bothell and Tacoma is a dollar Seattle does not get.”

Also, at Bothell we had to co-locate with a community college. I wanted to find out why we had to, so I went to the legislature and asked questions of different legislators, and finally I got led to a senator, Bauer, I believe. I went into his office one day and said, “I was told that you know why UW Bothell and Cascadia Community College have to…” Cascadia had no students yet. It was a name only with a very dominating and fearful president; it had no campus, it had a president and a Board but no students. He was so excited. I think it was Senator Bauer, that was his name. He was so excited! He went to his bookshelf and pulled off a piece of- he was looking for a book of legislation, pulled off a book of legislation, opened up the book to the right page, and he said, “Here. Look right there. In the sentence,” he said, “I changed one word from the University Washington can co-locate with the community college. I changed it to the University of Washington must co-locate with the community college,” right? I found out how that worked, and so then I realized, he was a UW Seattle graduate, alumnus.

I started making alliances. The UW president at the time, Dick McCormick, who later went to Rutgers. I think he’s at Rutgers now, but I think he’s a historian as a professor, but I don’t know. Anyway, he didn’t quite know how this three-campus thing was going to work, but I kept him abreast of what I was trying to do. I realized that he (mostly the people around him) didn’t want us to grow. You know, they wanted to be University of Washington without any other qualifiers. Even today they hardly ever say, “UW Seattle.” It’s almost always UW, right? This is part of the culture.

There were times when I had to just decide I was going to build up my local representatives, so I worked the local ones to a point when luck happened where one of them became chair of the Committee on Education for the State Senate (laughter). Rosemary McCauliff had legislators calling me from the floor saying, “How should I vote?” and that didn’t go over well with Seattle at all. They didn’t like that one bit. They said, “Are you doing this?” and I said, “I’m building up support for UW Bothell. You hired me to bring in and build this place. I’m trying to build it.” I didn’t say that I was undercutting them, and I wasn’t. I wasn’t. I was never in any- when the door closed, I tempered my speech so that I just called Seattle the Mount Lake Branch of the UW. I always just said how good we are, you know? We can offer something that the state doesn’t have. One of the state legislators, Al Obrien was/is one of my best friends. I happened to be in his office when I received news my mother died. He let me stay, alone, in his legislative office to help me process my sadness. I even opened the door to leave so he could see others on his calendar. He saw me and basically ordered me back in saying, “you have not been in long enough.!” So those were some of the stresses and joys I had.

Zierler:

What were some of the biggest challenges that you didn’t see coming until you dealt with them in real time?

Buck:

Oh, one of them was there was a period of time where with UWB we had an upper division only at the time I arrived, so it was only juniors and seniors, and the whole idea about the community college was to provide the lower levels of education and the students would transfer over, and they needed a new community college in the area. We shared the same campus. Even though we created co-location agreements, the transfer of students was just not working, so folks in that community college were not coming over in droves as expected. So we did some needs assessments in the area and really found out that people would come to the UWB campus if we had lower division and upper division and had lower division in addition to the community college instead of trying to run the community college out of town, which the community college felt we would do. You know, we could coexist, which we still coexist today, by the way. who would have thunk it?

So, I was talking to legislators, and one day in the Christmas holiday, I think it was just after Christmas, I got a call at home from a state senator who was head of the House Budget Committee, Representative Helen Sommers. She said, “Warren, do you want a four-year university?” I said, “Yeah! You bet,” and she said, “I want to have a legislative discussion about that this upcoming session.” I said, “Okay, good. Have you talked to the UW president and the president at Cascadia?” “Yes, I talked to them already. You’re the last one to talk to.” I said, “Okay. I think, let’s have it.”

Well, that discussion turned out to be- she dropped the bill that said, “We are going to abolish UW Bothell, abolish Cascadia Community College, create a new university called Cascadia University with a whole new board, and that would be the present board of Cascadia Community College.” Oh, man! So, I thought, “I didn’t bargain for that!” That’s a big price to pay.

I managed to get the UW president on board, so he and I drove down to Olympia and testified, and I brought alumni with me and students, you know, had a bunch of people testifying and then also people in the gallery who would raise their hand when I’d say, “How many of you are students?” Anyway, they would do that. It shocked me. You know, it shocked me that that kind of thing could happen. We could lose the whole place, you know. It was the University of Washington brand that was bringing people in, and so if we got rid of the University of Washington brand, will we have the same kind of students? What’s going to happen to that?

Anyway, Helen Sommers asked questions and it was really pointed, like, “What will you do if you have a new board?” It was really tough. We responded and I got the president to say, “We want UW to stay. We want…” I got the big Husky to come and talk about it. The legislation process continued, and that bill died.

A new bill came up and it said, “We’ll make UW Bothell four-year” (laughter). And then a whole bunch of other community colleges also wanted to be four-year because they wanted to be upside down in their curriculum, so I said, “Okay. Whatever is needed to get us four-year.” So, we got four-year, and I think that was the biggest challenge in my time there. We got it. We’re growing like gangbusters now. It’s very strong and so is Cascadia College. We’ve got great faculty. We’re hiring good people. Many students are first-generation students, you know, and they never had a chance before.

Going to Seattle was a big, in some ways it’s a huge school. The introductory physics courses are not quite as big as Illinois, I think, but you get 300 students in one room and there are like multiple sections of them, you know. When I was teaching those courses, it’s impossible for me to remember everybody’s name, so you don’t get the kind of one-on-one treatment that we could give you at Bothell. So, we had nearly one-on-one. The first year I offered physics, I had- I think it was five students. I had five students (laughter). Because I was former chancellor and at that time chancellor emeritus, they said, “Okay, you can pretty much do that. You can do what you want,” basically. If it were another professor facing that kind of enrollment, the class would not be offered. The first quarter there were five, and then the third quarter there were only three left (laughter). People said, “See? It’s not going to work here. It’s not going to work,” and I said, “Well, give me some time. This is just the first year.” Second year, I think I had twelve and finally got up to- when I left, we were having several sections of- we had two or three sections of one hundred plus students in our intro physics courses alone.

I think one thing is to encourage growth, encourage, allow people to experiment and also help us learn, help more people learn that one failure is not the end of the world, or ten failures is not the end of the world. So, you just keep going and doing the kinds of things that you like to do, even when people say, “You can’t do that.” You know, “Warren, you can’t.” I’ve heard that so many times, you know. It’s kind of a joke at this point. But it seems no one tells me that anymore and some things I can’t do or don’t want to do. I don’t know if I can’t, but I just don’t have any energy to do it, so I don’t do it. But I just need room to play, you know, to just play, but instructions may be needed on the toys that you have to play with. Get some instruction there - create instruction here and so forth.

Also, another thing too, David, I think is to loosen up our expectations and to also reduce the number of assumptions we make about what can or cannot be. We get into a place many times where we feel because of history that you can’t make this change. This is something we have to live with forever. Then somebody comes along and says, “No, you don’t have to do that forever. We can change this and this and this,” and look what happens. It broadens up our world.

I also think about this in terms of reference frames, you know, basis vectors. When you fill the space and can’t fill any more space, but you have more to fill, you have more to use, you don’t throw that stuff away; you just make another basis vector. You know, you create another coordinate system and things will work there that wouldn’t work in the other one. And if you can transform between the spaces, all the better.

So, I think basically it’s just to give folks room to breathe, room to know that they can make a mistake and realize that it really wasn’t a mistake; it is just all leading toward success (laughter). And that you take another path if the one you are on severely limits your movements and intellectual growth. There’s another path, and there are many, many paths. There’s an infinite number of paths. You can’t explore all of those infinite numbers of paths, of course, but you pick what you like to do and go after it and find people who can help support you.

Zierler:

Warren, my last question, going forward. It might be an obvious one, but it might also be a difficult one. What’s next for you?

Buck:

Well, I don’t know, really. I enjoy working with the process of dismantling racism with President Katherine Rowe at William & Mary but I do say that I’m still sailing. Cate and I bought another boat last year on my mother’s birthday. We have four grandkids that live out in the Seattle area, so we have a house near Seattle and a house in Williamsburg. We’re going to continue to go back and forth as much as we can. More sailing, but also, we picked up Buddhist studies. I think I’m a Buddhist at this point, and I think learning about meditation, one of the interesting things about meditation and with a scientist is that there were times when I thought, “That’s woo-woo. It has no real meaning. You know, you can’t see anything going on. You can’t build a widget out of it.” But I’m finding that there are meditative practices that resemble physics, that there are actually some clear states of mind that you can actually achieve and can reach repeatedly. They’ve given me a great deal of peace when I get into these states.

So, I’ve been studying that for itself, but also, I can’t help but make similes to physics. There are big things like emptiness. Buddhists talk about emptiness and it means really no self or no ego. Physicists have the biggest egos in the world, generally speaking. Nobody compares. It’s really “I am the best. I… I’m the only one that could do this. I was the first one who did this,” you know. It’s really- it’s almost out of control for physics, but that’s the way the beast is, right?

But living without that is an interesting question of how do we- we identify ourselves with things we’ve done. We identify ourselves with our names and our hairline, the kind of clothes we wear that we think is us. We identify those things as us, sort of like you take a glass of water. You say, “This is a glass of water.” Then you drink it and where is the water now? So, do you say, “That’s me?” It’s in me (laughter). That’s me.

Thank you, David. Thank you so much.