Peter Parker

Ahn:

Today is April 26, 9:40 in the morning. We are at Wright Lab. Which was formerly the...

Parker:

Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory. The new professor that came in and took over, Karsten, decided that this needed to be much more generally open than just the Nuclear Structure Laboratory, so that’s what he could do. Karsten has been a wonderful person here. He has made this into a new laboratory, as it were, a whole brand-new laboratory with so many more people doing so many different things. And it’s a very exciting place to be.

Ahn:

Let’s start from the beginning, maybe before you were born. If it’s okay with you, could you tell me something about your parents, like, what their names were?

Parker:

Okay, my father’s name was Allan Parker. My mother’s name was Alice, and her middle name was Heywood, and she then went with Parker. Alice Heywood Parker, she was.

Ahn:

And when they were born?

Parker:

Yes, my father was born February 12 of 1909, and my mother was born in Westford, Massachusetts, it was about two years thereafter. I would have to even look up some of that stuff. But she was born about November, let’s say, 7th of 1911.

Ahn:

Okay.

Ahn:

Did they grow up in New England?

Parker:

Okay, my father probably grew up in New York City, and my mother grew up in a small town outside of Boston. My mother grew up and was adopted by her grandmother. My mother’s father was a sailor, and soon after she had a sister–there were two sisters– the father basically deserted them. And so, the grandmother and grandfather then adopted these two children, and they then were the ones who brought them up. They were the mothers and fathers, if you want, of these two daughters. My mother was apparently very bright. I know she was very bright. She went to high school, she graduated at the top of her class as far as I remember. She went to Middlebury College, which is a good school up in Vermont, and she basically got her way paid through there, and she did very well there.

Ahn:

So she won scholarships.

Parker:

She won scholarships of such. I don’t remember the details of that. That was before my time. But she was born into that, and she did very well with that.

Ahn:

And you wrote that she earned her bachelor of science.

Parker:

Yes.

Ahn:

Do you know what field of science?

Parker:

I don’t know what field it was. I don’t know the details of that, frankly. I do know that for a while after that in 1931 she was basically working as part of… Franklin Roosevelt, who was then the president of the United States, he had a program which was to find work because this was the middle of the Depression. It was a very bad time in this country. And she was knitting and sewing, and she would spend all day sitting there, knitting, making gloves, and making hats, and scarves, and sweaters, and all these sorts of things.

Soon after that, she somehow then got into a position as somebody in charge of– making use of her science background, basically, working in a hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts, which wasn’t very far from there. She was in charge of the diets for those people. That was where her expertise was really in. But after she worked in there, she was married to my father and raised the children, and that was her job, to raise the children. There were three young boys, my brother and myself (twins), and then a second boy, who was about two years younger. And she was the one who was in charge of teaching them what to learn, what to do. We lived a bit in the country, and she taught us to grow up, as it were. That was her job.

Then, there were a couple of things that I think I remembered mentioned in there. We lived in New York City at one point, and my mother took us up onto the roof of the apartment building that we lived in, probably in Manhattan, I would guess, although I don’t know for a fact that it was Manhattan, and let us watch a Zeppelin balloon coming over from Germany. This was now in 1937, let’s say. It came across New York City heading for a mooring place in New Jersey, where it was going to land.

The famous one that you may remember—well, you wouldn’t remember, of course—was one, not the one we saw, but one called the Hindenburg. When that flew over, as it was landing, it caught fire and burned. And there was a big tragedy. This was towards the end of the period– this was a way of flying across the Atlantic in a balloon, which is sort of hard to imagine these days, but that was the way it was done. And that basically disappeared at that point. And at that point, of course, then, the Second World War started, so that was a time when basically the zeppelins, and the balloons, and all that sort of stuff got crossed out. There are movies you can see with zeppelins in them, but they’re just movies.

Ahn:

You were born in…

Parker:

1936.

Ahn:

You were small babies.

Parker:

I remember going up on the roof, and I remember seeing this thing going over. Basically, I remember it. I don’t know that I really remember it. I’ve been told that I remember it. Who knows? But at most, I was probably this tall. And everything I talk about, my twin brother is always there. The two of us are there together, always the two of us together.

Ahn:

Did you two ever talk about the zeppelin memory?

Parker:

No, not really. It’s one of these things, I’m not sure he remembers that. I do remember it, but memory at that age is very fragmented. I remember this, and I remember this over here, but there’s a lot of stuff in between that I don’t remember. Another thing that I do remember is sitting in a house that we had built or bought when the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. It was the beginning of getting the Americans involved in the Second World War. There was this fleet of aircraft carriers that had come over with Japanese airplanes, and they had bombed Pearl Harbor. Completely surprised, completely unannounced. All of a sudden, there it was. They sank battleships. They made one hell of a mess of the place. And this was in December 1941.

At that point, I was just about to turn 5 years old. Roosevelt, the next day, declared war. Up to that point, we were a neutral country. But right after Pearl Harbor, he declared war on Germany, and Japan, and Italy. And we had basically no army, no navy. We were basically nothing. And for the next—’42, ’43, ’44, ’45—the next four years, we became an industrial powerhouse. We no longer produced cars. All the companies that produced Buicks, and Oldsmobiles, and Fords, and things like that, gone. They were producing tanks, and aircraft, and ships, and things for the War. This became very much a war economy at that point for four years, and it was something which I… at this point, now, I’m now 5 years old, 6 years old, 7 years old. I’m getting to the point where I do remember these things. I remember toys that I had were all airplanes.

They were fighter airplanes. They were this, they were that. Yeah. Very clear what they were. That was what I did. At that point, my father was working at a company in New York City, and he took the train in from where we lived sort of upstate in New York, just a little bit. Took the train in every day and went to work there. And somebody said, “Would you like to work in Massachusetts?” Now, Worcester was a much friendlier place because this was not a port city like Tokyo would be, or New York City, or Philadelphia, some place like that. This was an isolated place in the middle of Massachusetts. Here’s Massachusetts sitting here, here’s Worcester, Massachusetts sitting in the middle of that state, and here was a college, and they were looking for somebody to teach a physics course. Was he interested in doing it? And he said yes. And so, that summer, we moved to Massachusetts.

Ahn:

Could you tell a bit about your father?

Parker:

He was probably born in New York.

Ahn:

And he grew up in New England?

Parker:

No, I think he grew up in New York. His father was a librarian, but who retired in the late 1930s. My father had gone off to school in the late 1920s in Amherst, which is in Massachusetts. He’d gone off to school in Massachusetts and gotten his degree, and at that point, had come down here, and he was a graduate student at Yale, surprisingly enough. Got his job out of Yale working for an organization which Roosevelt was creating to employ all these engineers who were basically out of work now because their jobs were gone.

Initially he was in charge of looking at light fixtures for the lights going into the tunnels, going under the bridges, going into New York City. That was his first job. Just like my mother was sitting there knitting sweaters, and scarves, and things like that. Then, he moved through two or three sets of different jobs. Eventually, he was working as an engineer in New York City. But this is now over the space of four or five years. He was working as an electrical engineer, as a physicist, on light and things of that sort, which is what his PhD had been in. Worcester Polytechnic Institute were happy to have him come and work in Worcester, and he went up and worked in Worcester for the rest of his life. He was there for the rest of his life, yeah.

Ahn:

And that’s where you grew up?

Parker:

That’s where I grew up. When we moved up there, I was 5 years old at that point. And we moved up in the summer of 1942, and started 1st grade.

Ahn:

How was the elementary school? How was your schooling?

Parker:

Ordinary. [Laugh] I don’t know how to say it any better than that. We went to the school, there were two, three classrooms in the school for first grade, and then two or three for second grade, and then two or three for third grade, and that sort of thing.

Ahn:

It was a substantially large school.

Parker:

It was a substantially large school, yes, right. Shrewsbury at that point was a town of probably 10,000 people. It was a small town, but not a tiny town, in a farming community. When I grew up, there were people down the street who were raising cows and selling milk. There were people down the street raising tomatoes and other sorts of things. It was also a vegetable area in that sense.

Ahn:

So you didn’t live in Worcester, you lived in Shrewsbury?

Parker:

Yeah, well, here’s Worcester, and here’s Shrewsbury sitting right outside here, yeah. And we had the good fortune of the fact that my father had a car at that point, the same car that he owned for 10, 15 years. They weren’t building cars, really. But he was a professor, and that gave him an “A”. Gasoline was all rationed. Everything was rationed. You had a little sticker on your car that said you were A, B, C, D, E, F, whatever. And I’ve forgotten what his sticker was, but he had a sticker like that. And when he went to get gas, he could get so much gas per week, I guess, or something like that. This was war. This wasn’t Germany, it wasn’t Poland, it wasn’t Japan or Italy. But it was war.

Ahn:

Growing up, did you or your siblings have any fear that the US might get attacked?

Parker:

No I don’t remember any fear of that, frankly. I don’t remember ever being afraid of that. I do remember that we had something called air-raid drills and things of this sort, where a siren would go off, and everybody would duck under desks and things like that in school, but nobody was ever afraid that airplanes were going to come over and drop bombs on us. Here’s Europe over here, here’s Japan over there, and here we are, sitting somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I don’t think there was ever any fear of that. There may have been some worry about that, but it was mostly just a, “Be ready,” sort of thing.

Ahn:

Did you and your twin brother and younger brother get to run around?

Parker:

Oh, yes. This was much as it is here now, where the kids are running around in the streets, and they’re playing games, and they’re playing tag, and they’re playing baseball, and they’re playing football, and they’re doing all the sorts of things that kids do now. That was all part of that game. We also used to play “war”, and we all had “guns”. Guns in the sense of pieces of wood with a barrel on the end of it that we could go around, and shoot at each other, and things like that.

Ahn:

Were you given a lot of freedom?

Parker:

A lot of freedom. Very much freedom. Nobody was really afraid of anything happening to us.

Ahn:

You mentioned that your school was very ordinary. Were there some interesting subjects to you? Or was everything very ordinary?

Parker:

Well, you learned to read, you learned to do pluses, and minuses, and divisions, and things of this sort. The first school that I was in, I did six grades there, and then I went to high school and went through seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade, 10th grade, 11th grade, 12th grade. And I simply did all those things and got those courses. And then, where do I go from there? At this point, of course, the War is long since over. Everybody’s home from the War. I can remember, as a little kid, going out in the playground and playing hunts, and robbers, and games of this sort of thing, and tag, that sort of stuff. But by the time I got to 12th grade, we were already in the Korean War. That had come along in there.

Ahn:

As you grew older, did your family or your parents talk about the current affairs?

Parker:

Oh, we talked about that, and we were well aware of it. By this point, I was in the third grade, fourth grade, and so I was certainly well aware of what was going on in the War. I was aware of the atomic bomb. But it was a scary time, in some sense. But it was not scary in the sense that I was afraid that I was about to be blasted by an atomic bomb or something like that. It was different from that. The United States was sitting over here, and Europe’s over there, and Asia’s over here, and we’re kind of independent of the battle that’s going on in these two places.

Ahn:

Did you also talk about schoolwork?

Parker:

Oh, yeah, sure.

Ahn:

Were your parents encouraging you and your siblings to work?

Parker:

Oh, very much so. They were people who had grown up in a system which was– they had both gone to college, they had done all the sort of things that you would expect in the 1920s and into the very beginning of the 1930s. They had done all the sort of things that you would have expected people in those ages to be doing.

Ahn:

Did they have high expectations for you and your siblings?

Parker:

That’s always a hard question. It’s a hard question to answer. I think as we began to get further and further along, and especially my twin brother and I were doing very well, the expectation was really sort of there that we had a bright future ahead of us. Where, doing what, didn’t have any idea at all. But we had a bright future ahead of us there.

Ahn:

Did they have expectations for you that you needed to do a certain thing?

Parker:

Not really, I don’t think. It’s hard for me to say what their expectations would have been, it would be hard for me to know what they thought we would end up doing. We could’ve become engineers. My youngest brother became a computer scientist. This was something which, when he went to school, didn’t even exist. But at that time he was getting out of school, he got drafted into the Army, and he went and worked at the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and basically absorbed lots of stuff from the computers there.

And by the time he got out of the Army after two or three years, he went to work for a company in Minnesota, where he still lives, and he was somebody who was involved with building and installing computers. So, they expected that. I was somebody who was teaching fairly early on. In fact, I began working at Yale in 1966, and that had to have been a very bright moment for my father. And my brother, at that point, had become an astronaut and was working that way. That had to be a very bright moment. You look at where these people are going, they’re clearly not falling down. These are people who are growing better and better and going into bigger and better things.

Ahn:

When did you start getting interested in science?

Parker:

Oh, I suspect that was when I was 5 years old or something like that, yes. My father was a scientist, right? And he taught physics. And my mother was a scientist in a secondary sort of was, but was still in some sense a scientist. I think at that point we could easily see ourselves– I had a little chemistry set and things of this sort. I was going up the ladder, as it were.

Ahn:

You said you had a chemistry set. Did you do things by yourself, or with your brother, or both? Do you remember the sort of things you did?

Parker:

Not particularly. I’m talking about something when I was fourth grade or fifth grade. I don’t remember the details of that.

Ahn:

By the time you were finished in high school, it was clear you wanted to do science?

Parker:

I wanted to do science, yes. What in particular in science, I don’t think I knew. When I got to Amherst, which is there– and that’s an interesting episode. My grandfather went to Amherst, class of 1893. That’s my grandfather. My father went to Amherst in the class of 1929. And then, here I am in Amherst in the class of 1958, and I’m doing physics. And I got to Amherst, and I was going to be a chemist. And the chemistry professor I had the first year I took chemistry there was godawful. He was terrible. And the physics professor (Arnold Arons) was– my God, he was great. Within the first week of classes, I had become a physicist. And I remained a physicist for the rest of my life, as it were.

Ahn:

Your first-year professors had a profound influence on what you did afterwards.

Parker:

Absolutely, yes. The professor I had my first year at Amherst was the one who basically turned me into what you see today.

Ahn:

How did you decide to go to Amherst?

Parker:

Good question. Amherst is a very good school. It probably ranks number-one in the country, and it was number-one then. The question was, were we good enough to get into Amherst? When we were in high school, we went up and visited the place, talked to people there, and they were very enthusiastic about it. And basically, the word we got back from Amherst was, “Don’t bother to apply to a lot of places. Come here.”

Ahn:

To both of you?

Parker:

To both of us, yeah. We were twins. We were very much together.

Ahn:

Were you identical twins?

Parker:

Yes, we’re identical twins.

Ahn:

Were you together a lot?

Parker:

We were together. Growing up, we shared a room. In college, we shared a room. At the beginning of around that point in college, we began to split up a bit, but it was just a bit. And we went to graduate school at the same place at Caltech. You couldn’t go to a better place than Caltech. You were sort of told that. So, we both went to Caltech. And at that point, we were married, we were getting kids and everything else.

Ahn:

Were you two taking the same courses?

Parker:

What else do physicists take but the same courses, right? We didn’t take the same courses; he majored in Astronomy. We took very similar courses, yes.

Ahn:

So you thought you might like chemistry, but you decided on physics.

Parker:

Oh, the chemistry professor was terrible, yes.

Ahn:

And your brother?

Parker:

I don’t remember now what he was taking at the time. We weren’t taking exactly the same courses, but we were taking very closely the same courses.

Ahn:

Was Amherst coeducational at that time?

Parker:

It was all male. I came to Caltech, it was all male. I got my degree from Caltech, and came to Yale, and it was all male at that point. I had been here maybe three or four years when Yale began to take women. And it was a wonderful thing that happened. That was a very big plus, yes.

Ahn:

At Amherst, I’m guessing that the majority of the students were white.

Parker:

I can remember one or two who were not, but that’s about it. We deliberately had Jewish students, and even that was a mark of some distinction. We had some Black students, but that was a mark of distinction. We belonged to a fraternity, which is a house group which has sophomores, juniors, and seniors in it, but they were all white. We decided we were going to take a Black student. Well, all hell broke loose. I was, at that point, president of the fraternity, so we went to St. Louis to meet with the board who ran the fraternity, and they were basically, “What? You want to do what? You want your sister to marry one of them?”

It was almost as if they were oriental. [Laugh] I say that with my tongue in cheek here. “Well, that’s just not going to happen. We have a national convention coming up every two, three, four years. We will see what the fraternity decides about that.” And they said, “Will you be there?” I said, “Yes, I will be.” So I went to this thing, and they promised me they would give me a chance to say my piece, and I said my piece, and there were people in the back of the room applauding, there were people in the front of the room booing. There were people unhappy with the fact that we were going to be doing this. The fraternity threw us out.

We became a local fraternity at that point. At one point, at Amherst, there had been, say, a dozen fraternities, living groups. And in 1950, let’s say, I’ve forgotten the dates exactly, one of those groups began to take Jewish students. “This is terrible. The next thing you know, they’ll be taking Black students.” Then, there was one of them that took a Black student. This was socially not a good thing. It was very white, very standardized. And by the time I got there, it was simply assumed that all the people who were in your fraternity were going to be white or at least Jewish, and that was it.

Ahn:

What was the name of your fraternity?

Parker:

It was called Theta Xi, two Greek letters. And we, at that point, got thrown out of the fraternity, and we decided to call ourselves Alpha Theta Xi. Why not? And instead of being at the bottom of the list, we were now at the top of the list. There was a bunch of name changing, and name calling, and things of that sort going on.

Ahn:

Were there any Asian or Asian American students at Amherst?

Parker:

There were, but there was one, two, three maybe, four. But numbers like that, not many. Some of them became very notorious, very well-known and very well-liked, but not large numbers, no. Now, it has become much more of a university college. In fact, most of the students from Amherst these days are from foreign countries, I suspect. I don’t even know what the statistics are.

Ahn:

While I was going through your papers, I came across two papers with your affiliation at Amherst.

Parker:

Yes.

Ahn:

Were you able to do research as an undergraduate?

Parker:

Amherst is an undergraduate college. So, there are basically no graduate students at Amherst. It’s all undergraduates. And there are two papers in there, I think, maybe three, which I would have done with a guy who was a professor at Amherst.

Ahn:

Yeah, so, the one I found was with Bruce Benson.

Parker:

Bruce Benson, he was my undergraduate advisor. And I think I did two papers with him.

Ahn:

Deep Sea Research journal, “Nitrogen/argon and nitrogen isotope ratios in aerobic sea water.”

Parker:

Yes, right.

Ahn:

And then, the other one’s in physical chemistry.

Parker:

Yes, yes. Well, physical chemistry and chemistry are not so different.

Ahn:

Journal of Physical Chemistry, “Relations among the solubilities of nitrogen, argon and oxygen in distilled water and sea water.”

Parker:

Yes, right. These are people who were going out in oceangoing boats, and they were dropping devices down into the water, deep into the water, to several thousand feet probably, then opening them and capturing an amount of water, sealing it up, bringing it up to the top of the water, and taking it, and it went to a laboratory on…

Ahn:

Woods Hole?

Parker:

Woods Hole, yes. And that was then shipped to me, among other places, and I would then take that out, and I would then study to find how much of which gases were dissolved in the water. That was the job which I had as an undergraduate. That was my research project as an undergraduate.

Ahn:

How did you get involved?

Parker:

You went to look– there were maybe a dozen physics majors at Amherst in my class, and one of the faculty members there got one of you to work with them. Some of them worked on this, some of them worked on lots of other different things, and I just happened to be picked by somebody who was looking for somebody to do this kind of work. So, there I was, doing this kind of work.

Ahn:

Did you get to go out to Woods Hole?

Parker:

No, I never did go to Woods Hole. I had a classmate who went there, who in fact got his PhD from MIT, I think it was, and then went to Woods Hole and worked his career at Woods Hole as Dr. Bruce Warren, and he went on ships like this, and brought back samples, and did studies, and so on.

Ahn:

How did you feel about your first research project?

Parker:

Oh, I was fascinated by it. All the research that I ever did, I think I found fascinating.

Ahn:

And what kind of analysis techniques or experimental techniques did you use?

Parker:

Oh, they went from something which was basically pencils on paper and things of this sort to stuff which grew through– in five generations, this stuff has grown into something which is now something that’s all being done in computers. And you’re taking the data off of the sheets of paper and feeding it into equations, and you’re writing out what those equations are telling you about the solution of oxygen, and nitrogen, and argon, and things like that in water. And somebody was using that as a way to try to understand how the waters travel from the South Pole up through the waters and eventually along the Gulf Stream up into the north part of the Atlantic Ocean.

And you were trying to understand– there was no science involved in this, this was simply trying to understand how the water moved from one part of the ocean to another part of the ocean. You think back as to when you began to learn about the waters in the ocean, for example, and one thought when I was very young was “The water sits in the ocean, period.” Okay, now, what’s the next thing you want to learn? Well, the amazing thing is that this water moves in the oceans, that there are these mountain ranges in the middle of the ocean. You know all about these things, of course. And you have ridges of mountains that run right through the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, that run through the Pacific Ocean. The deep spots of the trenches– there are trenches in parts of the Pacific Ocean which are 35,000 feet deep. Enormous trenches underwater. And they were there. And how did the water ever get there? And what was it doing when it was there? So, there was just lots of questions being asked about the water that was in the oceans, how it moved from place to place.

Ahn:

Did you consider going into oceanography?

Parker:

Probably. That would be one of the things that I was interested in. Somewhere along the way, I worked with Willie Fowler, and he was looking at the way elements are formed in stars, and that’s absolutely fascinating. And so, when I was a first-year graduate student, I took a course from him, and I learned all about that. I learned about supernova explosions, where stars burn up their fuel and then explode. And one learned about what sort of reactions must be taking place inside that star when all those things happen. And that became very, very interesting. One of my fellow classmates at Amherst went and spent his summers and his years working at Woods Hole, going out on boats and collecting water samples, and then learning about how water got places from other places. Yeah.

Ahn:

In college, were you supported by scholarship or fellowship?

Parker:

Yes. Most people were, in one way or another. I think at Amherst, while I was there, probably 30% or 40% of the students who were there had some kind of fellowship money from either where one of their parents worked, typically the father, but it needn’t be the father, or they would get money from foundations, from the National Science Foundation, for example, or the US Atomic Energy Commission, or places like this, which had money, which wanted to find things out and wanted to hire students to study these sort of things. So, yeah, there was money to be had. I spent one year working on this, one summer, working on the design for an income shaft that was part of a rocket, and the shape of this rocket was such that the air went into it, and as it was in it, it was exploding in certain ways, and they were learning things from this. So, there were simply engineering problems that you were working on.

Ahn:

Was the decision to continue to graduate school natural, expected?

Parker:

It was natural enough, anyway. Many people did it. Many people went to banking school, went to business school, went to medical school, went to all these different places. But one of the places that they went was to graduate school. And that could be graduate school in economics, it could be graduate school in this place, or in that place, a whole bunch of different things you could be doing. And physics happens to be one of those areas.

Ahn:

When did you start seriously forming plans or ideas of going to graduate school?

Parker:

Probably when I was in the middle of my college years. Probably somewhere in there. At the end, I think, I was, “Well, what do I do now? Well, I could go to graduate school.” And in some sense, I had a father who’d gone from Amherst to graduate school, got his PhD working for a professor down here in the Physics Department at Yale and spent his life doing that. And I could do the same thing. So, I think that was simply one of the things that people could do.

Ahn:

Did you also talk with your brother about what to do afterwards?

Parker:

We lived in the same room for all four years. We were talking about things, and in the end, as I say, we both ended up coming to Caltech. Couldn’t have come to a better place. It was notorious as hell. But when I moved into Caltech, it was a little place about this big. It was about one block wide, from California [Blvd] not even to Del Mar [Blvd], and was about two or three blocks this way. That was all that Caltech was. And while I was there, it became longer, it became wider, it became bigger, and it became a very big place. There are people now who think that its lost what it used to have, and that may be. I haven’t spent much time back at Caltech recently.

Ahn:

What made you choose Caltech when you were applying?

Parker:

It had a reputation that was number-one. That’s what made me choose Caltech. It was a place to apply to. Other places that I applied to were Berkeley, that was an obvious place to apply to, Princeton, obvious place to apply to. I got into basically all of those places. In the end, I ended up going to Caltech.

Ahn:

Were your parents happy that both siblings got into the most difficult graduate school to get in?

Parker:

Yes, I think they were happy. Yeah. If we had both ended up at Berkeley, or if we had both ended up at Princeton, there were lots of places we might’ve both ended up that they would have been very happy with, too, I think.

Ahn:

And did you two want to be in the same graduate school?

Parker:

No, I don’t think so. It ended up that way.

Ahn:

That’s independent of you being twins then.

Parker:

I think so. At that point, I think it was. Being both at Amherst was not really sort of independent of being twins, but both going to do graduate school at Caltech, I think, became– we were in different departments, and it was different then.

Ahn:

Were you thinking of some subfields in physics you wanted to do at that point?

Parker:

No, I don’t think so. I think when I got here to Caltech, there were a whole bunch of different things that I could’ve gotten into. There were people doing interesting stuff in astrophysics, there were people doing interesting stuff in high-energy physics, there were people doing interesting things in a whole bunch of different things that I could’ve gotten into. One of the first courses– in fact, it probably was the first course that I took at Caltech, and that’s just because the way the schedule was, 8 o’clock on Monday morning, there was a class that I was taking, had signed up for, which Willie Fowler was teaching. He is just a very unusual person. I can remember he came from Ohio State as an undergraduate, I think it was Ohio State, and this was now in 1933, let’s say, somewhere in that period. And he came home one day and told his family, “They’ve offered me to come to a place called California Institute of Technology.” And his father said, “Will they pay you?” And Willie said, “Yes.” And he said, “Take it.” [Laugh] That was it. There wasn’t really much if, ands, or buts about it. This was a time when the country was not in very good shape. This was during the Depression and all.

Ahn:

How did you travel from Massachusetts to California?

Parker:

Good question. How did I get here? I don’t remember now. It was either by train or by plane, one or the other. And I don’t remember which way it was.

Ahn:

Did you and your family travel…

Parker:

At that point, my family was me. When I got out of college, I was single.

Ahn:

Sorry, I meant your parents. When you were growing up, did you live mostly in New England, or did you travel to other places?

Parker:

No, mostly in New England, I would think.

Ahn:

So, it was your first time encountering a different place.

Parker:

Well, somewhere along the way, I had gone to Colorado for a conference when I was in college, and another time, I had gone some other place while I was in college to a conference. So, I had been to other places, but they were just a spot here and a spot there. It was not large amounts of traveling around. This was just I happened to go there, and I happened to go here, and that was about it.

Ahn:

Were your parents okay to see you and your brother going to the other side of the continent?

Parker:

Oh, yeah, they could care less. Yes, they were very happy.

Ahn:

At Caltech, you said the first class you took was Willie Fowler’s. Would it be nuclear astrophysics?

Parker:

It was basically nuclear physics. I’ve forgotten what the title of it was, but something like that, yeah. But that’s just because the second class that I took would have been quantum mechanics or something like that, and that just happened to be the way the schedule was conditioned. Yeah.

Ahn:

Can you recall some of the courseworks you did at Caltech?

Parker:

There was just so much of it. There were so many different things that you– it’s like everything else, you learn everything in high school, and you think you’ve learned the world in high school. And all of a sudden, you get to college, and you discover that there’s all sorts of stuff you never even heard of when you were in high school. And then, you get out of college and go to grad school and discover that there’s even more things you never even heard of. You simply go on picking all these things up and learning things about different kinds of quantum mechanics and different kinds of this and that.

Ahn:

Was it like a world came into being?

Parker:

Yeah. I think that’s probably a fair way to describe it, yeah. That was the nice thing about science was that the world you were discovering was something which was here, and then as you went to college, it got a little bit wider, then as you went to graduate school, it got a little bit wider, and as you went other places, it just got bigger and bigger. And when I graduated from college, probably some things that you would find strange– what was the farthest one could go or think about going in the universe? And consider that to what it might’ve been 100 years earlier, and it was a universe about this big. And then, as you got to go to graduate school and discover that there’s all this other universe out there which we didn’t even know about before, and there were all the areas of the world. How old was the universe?

We had no idea at all when I graduated from college how old the universe was at that point. This was one of the amazing things about going to graduate school was that as you went further and further, there were simply more and more new things to learn. Which was the same thing about whether you were looking at water falling off the cliffs in Antarctica, and going down into the deep water, and then traveling along the streams, and the trenches, and things like that. Things you’d never even thought of being were there. All this was there to be learned. Could one use it for some advantage to some of the things that you might like to do? And you just kept looking and trying.

Ahn:

Caltech in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s, there were many famous people there.

Parker:

Oh, yes, very many famous people. Yes. People like Feynman, and Gell-Mann, and Willie Fowler. There were Nobel Prizes and all sorts of things. Yes.

Ahn:

Did you have any encounters with Fritz Zwicky?

Parker:

Yes, I never took a course from Fritz Zwicky, but I certainly sat in seminars in the astronomy department where I was learning about some of the things that he was doing, yes. So, I certainly was aware of Fritz Zwicky, yes. He was somebody who was well-known and appreciated.

Ahn:

What about Gell-Mann or Feynman? Did you take classes from them?

Parker:

I actually took a class from Feynman. I remember taking a class from Feynman, and he had agreed to teach the third semester of some course that we were taking as long as, on the Friday of that course, he could talk about anything that he wanted to. And so, he walked into class one Friday morning and said, “Most amazing thing happened to me today. I drove into the parking lot out here, and there was the car,” and he read off the license plate on the car. And he said, “What was the chance that I would see that license plate?” And what he could do once he’d seen it, of course– and then, the question was, what were the chances that he would have seen that license plate? And it was 1 in 100 billion or something like that, just amazing things like that. And then, he got down to the end, and he said, “But there it was.” And of course, the reason it was there was because he had already seen it, you see. Anyway, you’ve heard the story probably from other people maybe.

Ahn:

No, I didn’t but I could imagine.

Parker:

But that was him. Yeah. He was an amazing person. And a tragic person, like some of these people, very tragic people.

Ahn:

And astronomically, Caltech, Mount Wilson, Palomar, were making so many discoveries.

Parker:

Of course. They were the center of the universe, in some sense. Yes, I think that’s right.

Ahn:

Were there interactions between physics and astro?

Parker:

Oh, absolutely. Yes. In fact, somebody like Willie Fowler probably had an appointment in the astronomy department as well as in the physics department and things of that sort. Sure. Caltech was a very wide-open place. You weren’t just over here, and you didn’t talk to the people over here, then there was another group that didn’t talk to you. This was something which was just all very happily together, yeah.

Ahn:

And were you more so aware of other departments? Aeronautics/aerospace was big at Caltech as well as geophysics.

Parker:

Certainly, geophysics was recognized as being a big part of Caltech. But they were still not the biggest part. And of course, I’m looking at it from my perspective, and from my perspective, the biggest part was physics, and maybe mathematics. Chemistry was a big piece of Caltech at that point, too. People like Linus Pauling and people like that.

Ahn:

I forgot to confirm, when did you start at Caltech?

Parker:

I graduated from Amherst and went to Caltech in ‘58.

Ahn:

So, you started in the fall of 1958?

Parker:

In the fall of ‘58, yes.

Ahn:

Did you feel a lot of Millikan’s presence at that time?

Parker:

Not really. He was dead and gone at that point. And I don’t think I felt any of his presence at all. Yeah.

Ahn:

Willie Fowler made a big impression on you.

Parker:

Yes, he did. He was somebody who made a big impression.

Ahn:

What about other faculties or postdocs?

Parker:

Well, there’s a whole bunch of people like that. I can remember teaching a class with Kip Thorne in it, and he was a student taking the class. This was when he was very young. [Laugh] And I was the instructor of the class, and he was taking the class. I obviously remember lots of other people in the then different departments.

Ahn:

How did you get into your research project?

Parker:

Oh. That was very funny. In one of my first summers there, and this is now the summer of ‘58 or ‘59– every place has seminars all the time. And that’s one of the nice things about Caltech. And the discussion that was going on here was by a guy whose name was George Griffith, and he had come down from the University of British Columbia, and he had made some measurements of a reaction. And there was some discussion about what the value for the size of this reaction should be and so forth. And I was sitting a row back or so, and sitting over there was Willie Fowler.

And Willie Fowler turned around and looked at me and said, “Peter, that sounds like it’d be a good thesis problem for you to look at.” And I said, “Yes, I would think so.” What am I going to say? Of course, “Yes, I think so.” So, the next morning, I started work on this project, and that was my thesis. [Laugh] And it was just one of these little things out of the world. Willie had looked at it and said, “That would be a good thing for you to look at.” And I said, “Yeah, okay. I’ll see what I can do.” And so, I did. And it was something which moved very nicely onto an experiment that I was doing that summer already, which was looking for lithium-4, which turned out to not be stable, but one of my early papers was the fact that lithium-4 was not stable. And here was this thing.

And so, I was working with Kavanagh and a summer visitor there on a project which was to see if we could find lithium-4. Somebody had reported seeing lithium-4, so we looked at it, and in the end, I finished–you’ve probably even got the paper, haven’t you? Yes, indeed, this is it. And so, here the thing was. Here was this thing, and here was when the lithium-4 would be formed, and then it would decay. And so, it was all there, and Willie looked at it and said, “Oh. That’d be something trivial to sit down and look at.” And I said, “Yeah, no reason why we couldn’t do that.” Well, it took me four more years to work on that experiment, and to get it refined, and to do it at very different energies, and to measure the yields of this and that. But in the end, that ended up being my thesis was looking at the production of beryllium-7 in the sun.

Ahn:

You having started working on lithium-4 would have probably helped Willie turn to you rather than some other student?

Parker:

Could be because, in fact, he was well aware that this was the experiment being done down here, and he was well aware that there was the detector for– all this is Kavanagh’s stuff. He was well aware of this thing, and there was the detector for it. He then looked at me, and I was sitting in the audience. This was something that was clearly related to the sort of work that I was doing. And he turned to me and said, “This would be a good thing for you to work on.” I said, “Yeah, it would. Sounds good.” Of course, it could’ve turned over, and the answer could’ve been, “No, what he’s done is good. It’s fine. Forget about it.” It turned out to not be that case at all, so I then kept on working on it.

Ahn:

How did you get involved in the lithium-4 research?

Parker:

Oh. [Laugh] I don’t know how. This was now the summer of my first year there, after I had been there one year and had taken Willie’s course. I remember going up to Willie after class one day and saying, “Any chance that I could come over and work in your lab this summer?” The lab being the whole of Kellogg Lab, which included maybe a dozen different faculty members and all. And he said, “Yeah, sure. We have a seminar da-da-da-da.” So, I started coming to seminars and listening to the sort of things that they were doing. But this was the sort of thing which was all very open and was just simply a chance encounter, that people were quite willing to have people come along. “You’ve got an idea? Yeah, come on over and try this out.” And that was the way it went.

Ahn:

By the time you started research, did the Burbidges, Hoyle, and Fowler have their…

Parker:

B2FH. I remember coming over here to work that summer. This was now the summer of ‘59. And I can remember coming over here to work that summer, and probably was one of the secretaries downstairs said, “Oh, good, I have a job for you today.” And here was a pile out by the front door of Burbidge-Burbidge-Fowler-Hoyle. The reprints of the article that had come out. And they needed to bring them up and put them in a room somewhere, so that was my first job. [Laugh] To collect all these volumes of Burbidge-Burbidge-Fowler-Hoyle and put them up in a pile in the room. And I probably got a copy of it out of the process. But that was the very beginning of a lot of things, of course.

Ahn:

Did you and the others study that paper?

Parker:

Oh, sure. I had probably already read the paper. It had come out a year before. But here were all the reprints, and they were a pile, whatever. And they wanted them put into a room upstairs where somebody could now mail them out. That’s how you distributed reprints was you mailed them, which is sort of hard to think about now. But you would actually take and mail reprints out. Unbelievable. Can you imagine having to mail your reprints out? [Laugh] Well, maybe you did, I don’t know.

Ahn:

Well, didn’t mail my reprints out, but I’ve seen them. Just going back a little, about how many grad students were there when you were there?

Parker:

Probably a dozen. Maybe 15, 18, somewhere in that range. Somewhere in that kind of ballpark.

Ahn:

A year?

Parker:

A year, yes.

Ahn:

Amongst the grad students, about how many were interested in your field, nuclear astrophysics, nuclear physics?

Parker:

Oh, two or three. I wouldn’t even want to guess at this point. I know one guy that I was very close to went into high-energy physics. He lived in another apartment just sort of across the street from where I lived. So, it was just who needed a student, who had money to pay for a student. Some of it was simply the question of who had the money.

Ahn:

And you just mentioned having money for support. How were you supported in graduate school?

Parker:

Oh, that’s a very good question. One of the ways you can get money would be to get money from Caltech. If I applied there and put down somewhere that I needed money to support me to do that, then they would find a way to support me. And part of that money for support would probably come from teaching classes, so that would be something that I would expect to do.

Ahn:

Would that be a teaching assistant or an instructor?

Parker:

A teaching assistant, right.

Ahn:

And you also listed you had grants from the Atomic Energy Commission.

Parker:

Yes, right. That’s the AEC. Sure.

Ahn:

And Office of Naval Research.

Parker:

Naval Office of Research. That was one of the people that supported the Kellogg Lab, for example.

Ahn:

And you also mentioned the NSF, the Danforth Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

Parker:

Yep. These are all people with money, and they’re looking for people to get letters of recommendation from people here saying, for example, “Here’s a good student doing good work. He needs support for one more year. Can you give him a hand this year?” And so, there was simply money around to be had. Now, that was quite different than if I had in a department such as, shall I say, electrical engineering. Electrical engineering may not be a good one, but there could be other departments where you would say, “Well, come, but we don’t have a way to support you. But if you can find a way to be supported, we would be happy to have you come.”

Ahn:

Like department of history? [Laugh]

Parker:

Like the department of history, right.

Ahn:

Did you have to write the applications yourself? Or did your advisor or a person who supported you write the applications to these foundations?

Parker:

Good question. And I don’t remember now. Because at that point, I had money from– when I was at Amherst, there were people coming around looking to give you money or almost give you money. Yeah. And so, that was Danforth Foundation, National Science Foundation was prepared to give you money, and you could apply to these different things. And some of them would say, “Yes, but I see you’ve got money for next year, so come back again next year, and we’ll see what we can do to help you out,” or whatever. There was money around for things like this. I can remember when my second year here, I had not done something.

And I’ve forgotten if I’ve got the sequence of years right. But I remember going in to see Willie Fowler one morning saying, “I’ve got a problem here, Willie. I need to get a teaching fellowship for next year.” “No problem, we’ll get you one.” So, he would find me a teaching fellowship, and that was how the money was– there was a class to be taught, and they needed people to do these things. And he would see to it that I got one of these positions. And that was just simply something that was done. And there were positions– this was a small place, remember, in those days. This is not something as big as MIT, or Berkeley, or something like that. This is actually a pretty small place, and they needed somebody to do– “Yeah, okay, we’ll get you a job.”

And so, I had a job one year there, anyway, teaching a section of physics 2 or whatever it was called in those days. And I got a check every month. Or it was deposited in my checking account every month. There it was. Meanwhile, I had to grade papers that came in, and I had to send out comments to this student and that student, “This wasn’t well, and this was the problem,” all the usual sort of stuff. And of course, this is simply one school, and it’s a little school.

Ahn:

It seems like the fact that it was a little school was something very special to Caltech. It’s like a big family rather than a huge institution.

Parker:

That’s the impression it gave me. There’s only a few hundred students here. That’s the total number of students at Caltech, a few hundred. It’s not like the University of Chicago, which must be a few thousand. I don’t know what Chicago’s enrollment is.

Ahn:

I don’t know. I’m not sure what it was like in the 50s and 60s.

Parker:

And I don’t either.

Ahn:

And were you still rooming with your brother? Or were you separate at that time?

Parker:

No, at that point, my brother had gotten married. I had not. Was renting the adjoining unit to his. When I got married 6 months later, my wife and I lived there together. These were little bungalows but there were places around there where students got a bed and a breakfast or something and lived there. I had an address that was Del Mar. The bungalows on a corner between Del Mar and Wilson [Ave]. And I lived basically on that corner. The bungalows are considered part of Pasadena history, and when Caltech wanted to develop, they were moved. There’s a whole new big building that was built in its place. And it’s been moved around the corner somewhere. As I say, for one thing, Caltech didn’t come much– if this is California, and you go up a block, and there’s another street there, that, I think, was about as far as Caltech went. One block. It was, like, one block from here to there, and there were buildings here and all sorts of things. And somewhere in there, I suspect that they might’ve expected that the graduate students would have found somebody who would be willing to make a room for you. Because I can remember looking for a room when first arrived here and going out to somebody, and they said, “Well, here’s a list of the places that have given some indication of having rooms available.” But this was just scattered rooms here and there. And I don’t even remember where all those rooms were at some point.

Ahn:

You were doing the lithium-4 as your first– was this your first research project as a graduate student?

Parker:

Probably. Yes.

Ahn:

What did you work on?

Parker:

Oh, well, the guy who had built the apparatus here– this was actually my thesis advisor in the end who was Ralph Kavanagh. And he had built that as a part of his experiment to try to study– and I’ve forgotten what his thesis was, but it was to try to study the actual decays of what was happening in the target that was located down there. He was looking there at those decays. But he had that, and somebody said, “Well, you could do this. And you could put the material in here on that particular sample. The beam comes through here. Here’s the beam coming down, it goes into here and gets detected right there, and then makes some kind of a decay, which then breaks out. This was a scintillator here, and it went into this scintillator.” It seemed a logical thing for his particular set of apparatus that that was a way that the experiment could be done.

Ahn:

Did you have to modify any parts of the apparatus?

Parker:

Well, probably. This was the gas target chamber was this white space here. In front of that was a beam came down here, and then there was a thin foil which then held the gas in this region. A very thin foil there. The beam went through that thin foil into this area, and the energy was chosen such that you were then detecting something on that particular surface back there. And as you hit that, you made then some scintillation particles. And my job was basically to analyze those particles and get cross sections for what this could be. These were the cross sections. These are microbarns down in here, so it’s very, very low. And what we were able to say is that across this particular range, there was no evidence for any particles in here.

Anyway, what he was suggesting that– well, in fact, whatever Kavanagh’s idea was, this was now saying that you could do the same thing looking for lithium-4 made on that target at the back of the chamber. And you were looking to see, was lithium-4 made here and then decayed by spitting out protons or alpha particles in various directions around here. And we didn’t see any sign of that within a range that we thought would be reasonable. But that required chopping the beam in such a way that you were looking for it beam-on-target here, and then scalars account for the decay particles in here, and there was no sign of any decay particles in there. And so, our conclusion was that although we didn’t rule out the fact that there couldn’t be a particle of stable lithium-4 in there, we didn’t see any evidence for it.

Ahn:

You had this in your first year, and then Willie Fowler suggested…

Parker:

Yeah, this, we were doing that summer. And Willie Fowler basically said, “Look, you’ve got a thesis apparatus up there now which is already closely designed to be detecting this sort of thing.” Yeah. It had to be adjusted, the time pulses and so forth had to be adjusted to be the right time and things like that. But we were capable of doing that.

Ahn:

How did you proceed after you got your thesis topic given to you?

Parker:

Oh, I then had to basically… the beam is coming in here, and chopping on this thing, and going away. I had to now find a way of measuring how many counts are coming when the beam is not on the target but is in this region between the targets. And so, that was basically the job. That’s what the thesis was about was, in fact, to then find a way where you can get the beam off– it’s gone onto the target, it’s done whatever it wants to do, and now it’s off to the side, not doing anything as far as the experiment’s concerned. And are you getting any counts at this point? And if they’re getting counts on this point, this must be because while the beam was on the target, it was, in fact, generating lithium-4.

Ahn:

Who did you work with?

Parker:

Oh, I worked with Kavanagh and Bashkin. Bashkin was a summer visitor who came here and spent the summer here, and then went on to Australia, I think, for a period of time. And Kavanagh was a faculty member here. And he and I worked together with the data to try and analyze this and get all this to mean something.

Ahn:

And afterwards, you also worked with Thomas Tombrello?

Parker:

Yes, right. He’s a guy who was basically my age, and he was working originally at– I don’t know where he was originally.

Ahn:

He was at Rice.

Parker:

Oh, at Rice, okay. Then, he was at Rice getting his PhD there, and then he came as a postdoc to work at Caltech as a postdoc here. But he was a postdoc. I was a graduate student, and he was a postdoc.

Ahn:

I was very impressed that you got a series of papers out in such a short time.

Parker:

We worked very hard. [Laugh] We worked very hard. Tom Tombrello was here as a postdoc, and this was what his job was.

Ahn:

So, you had, at this point, the scattering of helium-3 paper out, submitted in December ‘62. And it came out in May ‘63. And then, May 8, you submitted two papers, one with Tombrello and the other with Kavanagh.

Parker:

Oh, yes, okay. Yes.

Ahn:

Did you use computers to do your calculations?

Parker:

Computers? What are computers? [Laugh] We certainly had computers doing these calculations, yes.

Ahn:

Machine computers or human computers? [Laugh]

Parker:

[Laugh] Good question. And I would have to guess that in this particular case, it had to be– that’s a good question, and I don’t know the answer to that one.

Ahn:

In your earlier paper, the first paper with Tombrello, you do mention that you used a Burroughs 220 computer. Was that a machine?

Parker:

That’s a machine, yes. That’s something made by Burroughs. Burroughs would have been the company that made the machine, yes. Yes, exactly. So, that’s the one that would have calculated this smooth curve that went through there.

Ahn:

How did you use that computer?

Parker:

You probably had a console like this, and you could put the data tape over here, and you put the thing through there, and you plugged the thing in and punched the button, and the lights would flash on and off. And you would, in the end, get a curve which, when you plotted it as a function of the beam energy, did something like this. So, that’s what the curve would come out as.

Ahn:

Did you have to learn how to use the computer as part of your research?

Parker:

Good question. I suspect that there was a person, probably Barbara Zimmerman, the woman, and I’m sure she’s dead and buried at this point, who was, in fact, responsible for making this curve.

Ahn:

Yeah, you mentioned her in one of your papers.

Parker:

Here’s Barbara Zimmerman, okay. “Our special thanks for helping programming the subroutines for the Coulumb and bound-state functions. So, she was doing that, which then got us the smooth curves which you see in these plots here. Yes. But she would have been the technician who, in fact, made the smooth curves. Yes. But that’s no different than, say, somebody who was making the apparatus that moved the beam back and forth. That’s a technician who, in fact, is doing this sort of behavior. Yes.

Ahn:

You would consider Barbara Zimmerman as…

Parker:

As a collaborator, really. Yeah. In some sense, it would be perfectly reasonable to consider her as one of the collaborators on this apparatus, yes.

Ahn:

It’s past noon, so maybe we can stop here.

Parker:

Okay.

[End of Recording]

[Begin Recording]

Ahn:

Today is Friday, May 3.

Parker:

3rd, yes.

Ahn:

We are continuing interviewing Peter Parker at Wright Lab.

Parker:

Correct.

Ahn:

Picking up from last time, we’re finishing your graduate education. I wanted to ask about your thesis work, what you felt about nuclear astrophysics at that time.

Parker:

Well, see, the thing at Caltech with people like Willie Fowler, and Kavanagh, and people like that, these are people who worked so closely together that one day, they’re talking about nuclear physics, another day, they’re talking about nuclear astrophysics, and the two things are just wound together like that.

Ahn:

Does it make sense to distinguish nuclear physics with nuclear astrophysics back then?

Parker:

Not really. It was very much the same thing.

Ahn:

It would be more like talking something that’s happening in the lab accelerator versus what would be happening in the sun or stellar nucleus?

Parker:

Yes, right. Or in a black hole or whatever it was that you might want to worry about.

Ahn:

Did you have black holes? [Laugh] Was the term in use back then?

Parker:

Oh, yes, I think by then, the term was in use.

Ahn:

And as a grad student, you just absorbed what was going on.

Parker:

Oh, yes. You talked to this person about that, and this person about this, and these things all sort of meshed together. It was all one problem. And so, when you think about distinguishing between nuclear physics and nuclear astrophysics, they’re all the same thing, as far as we were concerned. Sometimes one emphasizes one part more than other parts, but other times, it goes the other way around.

Ahn:

Were there any scientific hierarchies, or working with professors, postdocs, people older or younger than you?

Parker:

At that time, when I started working with him, Willie Fowler was probably in his late 40s. And here I was in my middle 20s. And so, it wasn’t so strange to think of the two of us working together. And as I say, there was a seminar where the speaker was talking about making beryllium-7 in a star, and this was a nuclear physics seminar, but it was also a nuclear astrophysics seminar. And it was then that Willie sort of turned to me and said, “Peter, that would be a good thing for a thesis problem.” And I said, “Yeah, good. Okay. I’ll do it.” Things were that simple as to what was what and what you could say was something or the other. And there were nuclear physics problems involved with making the beryllium-7 in the star, there was nuclear astrophysics involved with making beryllium-7 in the star. And they were just all part of the same problem.

Ahn:

That led to your thesis.

Parker:

That led to the thesis, yes. And of course, the thesis starts with that question. And of course, then, the thesis– well, you’ve seen the paper that was written on the thesis. The thing expands out, and here is this thing as a function of bombarding energy. Here is this thing where the cross-section is rising like this, and it’s simply taking off. There’s a lot of nuclear physics involved in that, but there’s also a lot of nuclear astrophysics involved in that. And so, the two things are really the same problem. Yeah. We did experiments where we were looking at the scattering of helium-3 and helium-4 on one another as a function of energy. We looked at that as a function of energy. And that was a nuclear physics problem, but on the other hand, it was also a nuclear astrophysics problem.

Ahn:

Was that a completely new contribution to nuclear physics?

Parker:

In some sense, it was. This person I talk about in there, Tom Tombrello, he’s now passed, but he was a person who had worked on his thesis at Rice University and had done his PhD thesis on nuclear physics of helium-3 and helium-4 and how one could understand this from a nuclear physics point of view. And so, he had this model, where you had the two nuclei coming together and fusing that way. And that, in some sense, was a nuclear physics problem. But then, he comes to Caltech and, of course, it becomes quite clear that this is a nuclear astrophysics problem. They’re both the same problem.

Ahn:

He’s around your age.

Parker:

He’s the same age I am. Within a few months of my age, yeah.

Ahn:

He got his PhD, and he’s, like, a postdoc?

Parker:

And then, he came to Caltech as– and I’m not sure whether he was a postdoc, or an assistant professor, or what his rank was. Nobody worried about those sort of things.

Ahn:

Oh, okay. He’s just a colleague to you?

Parker:

He’s a colleague, yes. He came, and he worked, and he and I did experiments together. I was working with him, and he was working with me, and it was one of these kind of relationships. He then came to Yale. He was at Caltech for about a year and a half or two years maybe, and then he came to Yale. And one of the reasons that I considered coming to Yale was the fact that he was now here. Well, by the time I got to Brookhaven, he had gone back to Caltech. And so, it was one of these things where we were working together, and then we were apart, and then we were working together. We worked together, really, from then on for years, and years, and years, we worked together. Yeah. Tom Tombrello was a very bright guy.

Ahn:

You got along well with Tombrello, Kavanagh, Willie Fowler, and John Bahcall.

Parker:

Yes. We were, in some sense, a group, as it were. I don’t know that if one ever officially called it a group, but I suppose in some sense, it was a group.

Ahn:

Wow. That must’ve been wonderful, really bright people.

Parker:

Absolutely. There was this office down the hall, that was Willie’s office, and he would have meetings in there with Feynman and with people from the astronomy department, and they would talk about all these sort of things. And then, we might get involved with some of the discussions as well. Things just gradually evolved out of that. Yeah.

Ahn:

You published a few papers, like your thesis project. Was that the usual practice at that time?

Parker:

I think so. I think so, yes. I don’t remember now what all the titles on them were, but my chief paper would have been one which was basically just the experiment, what experiments I had done to measure helium-3 alpha gamma beryllium-7. And so, I did that, and somewhere along in there, this was something that was done as a colleague with Tom Tombrello, with Ralph Kavanagh, and sometimes with Willie Fowler. It was various people doing things together.

Ahn:

And I found it fascinating that your first paper was published in Phys Rev Letters, then you have a series of Phys Rev papers, and then in ApJ.

Parker:

In ApJ, yes. It seemed appropriate. I submitted it to ApJ, and ApJ published it. And I don’t remember whether Willie was part of one of those or whatever.

Ahn:

Your ApJ paper’s with John Bahcall and Willie Fowler.

Parker:

And with John Bahcall, right. The whole thing was a group of people doing things together in various different ways, yes.

Ahn:

So, you would have different expertise or knowledge?

Parker:

We each, I suppose, one could say had different expertise on these problems. I don’t know.

Ahn:

And did you consider yourself an experimentalist?

Parker:

Yes, I considered myself an experimentalist, yes. Absolutely.

Ahn:

How did you see yourself differing from a theorist?

Parker:

A theorist would probably not have put the experiment together and would not have made the measurements that the experimentalist made. But the experimentalist would not have come up with some of the ideas which a Tom Tombrello came up with or a Willie Fowler came up with. These were people who were more theoretically involved. But they were both. Fowler and Tom Tombrello were people who were both. They were better physicists than I ever was, yes. And where John Bahcall had done his stuff, he probably was considered a theoretical physicist. And when he came to Caltech, he was probably behaving like a theoretical physicist. And I’m not sure, he may have been a coauthor on some of the papers as an experimentalist, but he was more somebody who had ideas that somebody should pursue. And those became experiments. And he wasn’t involved with doing the experiments as much as he was involved with coming up with things which would have made useful things to do, whereas somebody like Tombrello, or Kavanagh, or Willie Fowler would have been people who were taking ideas and making those into experiments. They were doing both aspects of it.

Ahn:

You, too, then. You make things, but you also have to know a lot of theory to interpret…

Parker:

Now, you come up to the things where you’ve got people with a lot of theory, and people with a lot of experiment, and people with both. And I was somebody who was somewhere in the middle and had a bit of both.

Ahn:

Did you feel that was something special to Caltech?

Parker:

I think it was. Caltech, at that point, was a very unusual place. Probably still is. But it was a very unusual place in that sense. There are people there who are doing experiments and doing the theory both.

Ahn:

Even though you considered yourself an experimentalist, you’re pretty much familiar and comfortable with all aspects, like, from experimental aspects to theory interpretation?

Parker:

Well, I think it’s a question of how much of you is experiment and how much of you is theory. And I would have been more on the experimental side, whereas there are some people like John Bahcall who are more on the theoretical side. And so, they’re quite different people, and one person knows how to put an experiment together and make measurements, and one person knows how to put theoretical ideas and make theoretical predictions. Yes. And they talk to each other, and they interact together, yes.

Ahn:

And how would you view your scientific impact of your thesis project to the field?

Parker:

I think by the time it was done, that somebody had suggested that this would be a good thing to measure, I think it had a big impact on the field. Yes. And in terms of what was the thing which had the largest impact that came out of my thesis, it was probably not so much the thesis itself, but probably was the fact that there was somebody who had a friend who was a chemist who could make a beryllium-7 target. Somebody had to come and make a beryllium-7 target for me. That wasn’t me. I didn’t know the chemistry involved with making a beryllium-7 target, but Ray Davis did. And Ray Davis was in a whole different department.

At Brookhaven, here’s the physics department, here’s the chemistry department. He was over there. But we were working on the same problem. He, then, comes up with knowing the chemistry involved in making a beryllium-7 target, which I could then put in my– there’s a whole paper in there on the beryllium-7 target P-gamma. I was the one who then put the experiment together and measured the protons come in, hit the beryllium-7 target, makes boron-8, and then that’s got about a one-second half-life.

And then, this makes the boron-8 on this target, and this thing chops over, gets in front of a detector, and looks for the alpha particles coming out, which are the decay of the boron-8, which decayed that way, that was the way it preferred to decay, and then came back and measure the cross-section. And I measured it at half a dozen different energies and looked at it as a function of the beam energy. And probably, that was the most significant experiment that was done. As far as I’m concerned, that probably was the most significant experiment I did. Probably. I don’t know.

Ahn:

The nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics community were very interested in what your group was doing?

Parker:

Yes. Yes, I would say that was true. And once I had done that, there were people in those two groups who then looked at it and said, “Oh my God, this is amazing. Yes. Good work.” So, there have since been people in Seattle who have repeated the experiment and people in other places who have repeated the experiment and get numbers that are the same or the same within the error bars as the experiment that I did. But doing my experiment was probably the most significant thing.

Ahn:

How big was the nuclear physics community at that time? Would you know everybody at least by name?

Parker:

Oh, yeah, I think so. Yes. Now, not necessarily all of them very well by name. There would be people in Europe, people in Germany, or people in other countries who were doing related experiments, and I knew them as people, but I didn’t really know them well. But they were people who now saw the advantages of what I was doing, and they began to basically copy what I was doing and do it better. They began to do experiments with lower backgrounds, with things which were different. And therefore, although mine had led the way at one point in my paper, these are people who now followed this up and did it better, and better.

Ahn:

But your work was the breakthrough.

Parker:

My paper was probably the breakthrough, yes. Probably.

Ahn:

Your thesis project led to you considering what you would do after?

Parker:

Well, you’ve seen the list of papers. There’s 100-some-odd papers in there, and some of these things are heavy ions on heavy ions, and you look to see what comes out when you do that. There are all sorts of experiments that you put together, which are related to the boron-8 experiment, but now off in a whole different direction.

Ahn:

When did you start considering what you would do after you get your PhD?

Parker:

Oh, life just wandered on. And that sounds dumb, but it’s like Winnie the Pooh. You know Winnie the Pooh?

Ahn:

A little.

Parker:

A little, okay. It’s like a Winnie the Pooh experiment where something tries this, and then, “Let me try that over there. Let me try this, and let me try that,” and I see what comes out of that.

Ahn:

But you were very clear that you wanted to stay in nuclear physics.

Parker:

Oh, I was very clear that I wanted to stay in nuclear physics, yes.

Ahn:

When you were considering your next job, was staying at Caltech an option? Or did you want to go somewhere else?

Parker:

At one point, there was consideration about that. There was, in fact, consideration in the 80s, let’s say, I don’t remember exactly when, when somebody was considering making me an offer to come to Caltech. And I thought, “That would be fun. That would be good. I would enjoy that.” But on the other hand, I was doing all sorts of stuff here at that point, and I was more inclined to say, “But I can stay here and do more things here than I could be than if I went to Caltech at this point.

Ahn:

What did you want to do? You were writing your thesis. This must be late ‘62 or early 1963.

Parker:

Yes.

Ahn:

You were about to graduate in a few months’ time.

Parker:

Yes.

Ahn:

When did you start thinking of what…

Parker:

Well, I began to wonder what I would do. And what I was thinking about was looking at light nuclei. What were the energy levels in light nuclei? If I’m looking at something like helium-4, for example, what were the energy levels in helium-4 that I could be looking for? There’s a paper in there on the energy levels.

Ahn:

Yeah, this is ‘65.

Parker:

‘65, okay. So, there were things like that that were of interest. But it wasn’t just that. It was coming here, and then I could be looking at things in fluorine-16, which is a very unstable nucleus, but I could look at that. And there were other nuclei that I could be studying. There was the whole periodic table of things that I could be studying. Of which a very few at the very beginning are the light nuclei. But that’s just a few at the very beginning. But then, there’s the whole spectrum of nuclei out there. Proton-rich, neutron-rich. It depends on what you can get out of the ion source down here that you can accelerate and have interact with a target, and then look at the results that come out of that. And you look to see what those results are. What do they tell you about the way in which– this entire universe is made in this way, right?

Ahn:

After you got your experiment to work for your thesis project, it seems like the whole world was open to you to examine.

Parker:

The whole world was open, yes. And there were different things that I could think about doing.

Ahn:

How did you find your next position? What considerations went in?

Parker:

I was at Brookhaven, and at that point, I was collaborating with people at Yale on experiments, and at Bell Labs, and at Brookhaven, and was looking at things that I might do. But all along, I had had, deep inside me, a sense that I wanted to teach physics. And so, I wanted to go somewhere where I could teach physics. And a very logical place just across the water was Yale. And so, I said, “I should come here for six months as an assistant professor and become part of their experimental group.” And that’s where I started to work.

By the time I’d been here for six months working on that, I was having such a good time doing it, and I was, at that point, doing experiments here, whereas over at Brookhaven, there was a project that I was working on, which was moving forward nicely, which was building new accelerators, and it would be work making experiments. And in the end, I decided I would have much more teaching involved here than I would have at Brookhaven. At Brookhaven, I would have been doing experiments with other people, and that’s perfectly fine, there are good people doing things like that. Here, I would be doing experiments with people, but I would also be teaching classes like freshman physics, and sophomore physics, and things of this sort.

And so, I decided this was where I wanted to be, so I went to the department chair here and said, “I would like to make this a permanent job.” I remember going over to Sloan Lab, and sitting down with the chairman, and saying, “I would like to make this a regular full-time job.” And he said, “Okay. Good.” And that was it. There was no search, no nothing. It was just, “I would like to do this,” and he said, “Good. You’ve got it.”

Ahn:

So, you move from Brookhaven to Wright Lab as an assistant professor. You said it was six months?

Parker:

I came here in January, and by June, I had to either pack everything up and go back to Brookhaven, or I had to make the move.

Ahn:

Was it like a visiting professor for six months?

Parker:

It would have been like a visiting professorship of some sort, yes.

Ahn:

So, not even a tenure track.

Parker:

I don’t know whether it was considered tenure track or not.

Ahn:

You also must’ve been very good for them to want you here.

Parker:

No, of course. I must’ve been good at doing what I was doing. And at that point, I was already the associate director of this lab, so I had come over here, and now I had bumped up a step.

Ahn:

Within six months, you became associate director of Wright Nuclear Structure Lab. And you wanted to stay.

Parker:

I wanted to stay here. I wanted to become a full-time– now, this was not tenure track, but this was something which could easily become tenure track. And at that point, they were still looking for faculty members.

Ahn:

Oh, so the department was still expanding?

Parker:

The department was expanding, and if I were to come here and say that I wanted to do this and wanted to become a faculty member here, they could say, “In five years, we could see you as a full professor,” or whatever the timescale was, I don’t remember now.

Ahn:

Going back a bit from Caltech to Brookhaven, you were at a university, and you moved to a national lab. When you were looking for that position, did you differentiate between going to a university department or a national lab?

Parker:

Not really. I knew the two were very different, but the university had the advantage of doing teaching, and so if I saw a difference between the two positions, it was one where there was experiments, and there was one where there was teaching and experiments.

Ahn:

You graduated from Caltech in spring 1963.

Parker:

1963, yes.

Ahn:

You started at Brookhaven– I think it was September.

Parker:

From ‘63 until– well, because I immediately moved from one to the other, it was like just going down the street and opening this door instead of that door sort of thing. Yeah.

Ahn:

And you mentioned Bell Labs.

Parker:

At that point, Bell Labs was more of an independent institution. Nowadays, they have since become very fragmented, and there’s now a Bell Labs here and a Bell Labs there. There’s half a dozen different places where Bell Labs is located. At this point, when I was making the first decision about the thing, Bell Labs was a place where you could come and do all sorts of things. But none of them really had as much opening as, say, the people from Bell Labs who were actually working at Brookhaven. And so, being in a position where I could be at Brookhaven and having the salary paid by Bell Labs was something that was very attractive.

Ahn:

Oh, so Bell Labs paid your salary?

Parker:

No, Bell Labs never did. I think if I had wanted them to, I think that at that particular time, I could’ve gone down, sat in front of somebody’s office, and said, “I would like to do the following.” And I’ll bet you that within a day or two, somebody would have said, “How would you like to come here and work?” And I would have said, “Great.” But I never really felt that way. This was more of a place to come and do experiments. It wasn’t a place to come and teach, for example.

Ahn:

At Brookhaven, what kind of scientific or technical support did you get?

Parker:

Oh, just an enormous amount of stuff. It’s like Oak Ridge or Los Alamos. It’s a place where you’ve got huge scientific staff and technical staffs. And if you want something built, I may not be able to do it, but So-And-So over in building 37, they know how to do this, and they can build this thing for you.

Ahn:

At Brookhaven, were there off-limits areas? Did you need security clearance?

Parker:

There could have been. I would say I never encountered any off-limit areas. But that’s because there were places that I simply didn’t go to. So, there would have been places like that. And I’m not even sure whether Brookhaven had these places, but certainly there would have been places at Oak Ridge, or at Los Alamos, or places like that where unless you had an X across here on your badge, “No. Can’t come here.” Because I had not been cleared. Nobody had gone through and checked my background yet.

Ahn:

Scientifically, you said going to Brookhaven was just going next door from the Caltech experiments.

Parker:

It really was, yes.

Ahn:

Did you get to work more with Ray Davis?

Parker:

Yes. I certainly worked very much with Ray Davis. He was a prince of a guy. He was a very unusual person. Yes.

Ahn:

Did you get to know him better when you were at Brookhaven?

Parker:

Probably when I was at Brookhaven. I was certainly aware of him when I was at Caltech, but when I got to Brookhaven, he was the one who made my beryllium-7 targets. He gave them to me, and I then analyzed them, looked at what was there, looked at the intensity that was there, and looked at it as a function of time. I got to know him very well. He’s passed, of course, at this point because he was older than I was.

Ahn:

You have a recollection of them, “In memory of John Bahcall and Ray Davis.”

Parker:

Yes. They’re both passed at this point. In fact, they died within a year of each other, as I recall. And at that point, I was one of the people who, when they were organizing this conference, which was at CERN…

Ahn:

Yeah, 2006.

Parker:

…and they had asked me, since I knew both of them, would I give a memorial talk for the two of them. And I said of course I would. But then, I had to, of course, write to the various people, and begin to get pictures, and things of that sort.

Ahn:

Do you recall how you got to know Ray Davis and how you interacted with him while you were at Brookhaven?

Parker:

Well, I was at Brookhaven. I got to know him because he was working on the beryllium-7 B-gamma experiment. And he was doing non-secret things at this point, studying this reaction, for example. He was talking about that. He was quite prepared to sit down and talk to me about that. And then, as I say, he built the target for me and I ran the experiment.

Ahn:

Was the solar neutrino an issue at that time?

Parker:

The whole issue of were there neutrinos coming out of the sun, that was a key experiment. There were people like John Bahcall, who were quite clear about it that there had to be neutrinos coming out of the sun. Could they be detected? That was the real question, could they be detected. How could they be detected? And so, he was one of the people who was concerned with speculating, and it really was speculation, as to how one might try to detect these neutrinos. And he did that, and he did it in collaboration. He, in fact, worked very closely with Ray Davis. Ray Davis and he were the closest of friends.

Ahn:

John Bahcall and Ray Davis. When did you start getting interested in solar neutrinos?

Parker:

That’s really an open question. Again, you’re at a place like Caltech, and this is now in, let’s say, 1961 or ‘62, and somebody is talking about this and could one detect these. Well, no, because the neutrinos would go right through you, and you would never detect them. Then, somebody says, “Well, no, but maybe you”– and this was where now somebody like John Bahcall comes into the problem. “No, no, we could put something up, and the neutrino would interact with the chlorine atoms in this detector.” And we would see them interact, and there would be one of these things every week or something. And you– “Okay, now, bury it in a mine where nobody knows what you’re doing with it out there.” This is now in South Dakota. And that’s a mile under the ground. Consider that. The mine already existed that way in South Dakota. It was an old mine. People were digging down that deep to get the gold out of the depths of the Earth at that point. And if we could now put all of this down there and then look to see the neutrinos come through down to that point, we could then say, “Yeah, neutrinos did that.” There were neutrinos coming out of the sun. How many neutrinos were coming out? Now, you get a theorist like John Bahcall involved, who says, “Okay, I think da-da-da-da-da,” and there are now decks of these things coming out, and he then speculates about this. And that’s the theorist side of John Bahcall.

Ahn:

You were involved with the solar neutrino project early on?

Parker:

Early on, yes. But I wasn’t the one who was doing all the initial calculations, no. But somebody like John Bahcall was, and Ray Davis. Ray Davis got the Nobel Prize for predicting that. John Bahcall didn’t. He should have, but he didn’t. In the end, Art McDonald, a Canadian, came from Canada, got his PhD at Caltech, same lab that I worked in. Anyway, he did the experiment that detected these things. If I had my life to live over again, one of the things that I remember sitting here almost in this room maybe, and I might’ve looked at it then, “I should give Art McDonald a call and say, ‘Could you use another warm body up there?’” And he would have said yes, and I would have packed up. Of course, I had a family and a whole bunch of other things to worry about. [Laugh] But I would have packed up, and moved to Canada, and done experiments with him.

Ahn:

But then, you wouldn’t have done so much in your career of physics.

Parker:

Well, no, that’s right. There were paths that branched out, and instead of going this way, I’d have gone that way. Exactly, yes.

Ahn:

Yeah. But it seemed like your training and where you were made you really uniquely placed so you could do a whole spectrum of nuclear astrophysics.

Parker:

There was a whole spectrum of things like that that I could have done.

Ahn:

And you did. I don’t think there are many people who did both heavy-ion nuclear structure experiments and solar neutrinos.

Parker:

Maybe that’s true. I think I would see that as being a narrower group than that, but that may be truer than I think it is sometimes.

Ahn:

Before we move to Yale, when you went to Brookhaven, did you have an idea of what you wanted to do? And did you get to do all that work while you were there?

Parker:

Oh, you have all these ideas, and you get to do this many of them.

Ahn:

And you got to do those at Brookhaven.

Parker:

Yes. That was a place where I was going to choose between two, or three, or four places, and I chose to go to Brookhaven. If I’d chosen to go someplace else, who knows what I might’ve done or not done? I don’t know.

Ahn:

Just for the record, what were the other places you were considering?

Parker:

Considering that, one place was Princeton. Princeton had a small cyclotron, and I could’ve gone there and done work. I could’ve come to Yale and done work at the cyclotron here. Or maybe a different place like Rutgers University, which had a small tandem at that point or was in the process of getting one. There were places that one could have felt around and looked for. But somehow, I had narrowed it down. At some point, you take half a dozen places, and you narrow them down to two or three, and you end up going to one of them.

Ahn:

You came to a choice between Princeton, Oak Ridge, and Brookhaven.

Parker:

I think I went and visited each of these places. Or maybe I won’t say I visited each of these places, but that I talked to people that I knew at these places about the sort of things that I might be doing in those places, and in the end, I decided that Brookhaven had the biggest range of things that I wanted to do. But that was a very narrow span of places that I might have gone to.

Ahn:

Did you go to many conferences while you were at Brookhaven?

Parker:

I went to some. I didn’t go to as many as I probably should have. But I did go to some. Yes, of course. You had to, that was where you met people, and you learned about the sort of things, the experiments that they were doing.

Ahn:

What conferences would you consider?

Parker:

Typically, when I was young, I would go to conferences by the APS, American Physical Society. Then, I would later find that all of that stuff was stuff that I should be getting out of the journals, and now I would start going to international conferences, conferences in Canada, or in Copenhagen, or in places like that. And I never did as much of that as I should have. I should have done more of that. Some individuals spend their lives going from conference to conference, giving talks, listening to other people’s talks, and doing all this. And to me, there’s a limit to how much of that you can do and do it usefully, frankly.

Ahn:

How did you know what was going on in your field?

Parker:

You read about it in the journals. You came across them there.

Ahn:

Were there some things that going to a conference was crucial to know what was going on or the latest developments?

Parker:

That’s hard to say. One could say in hindsight that there are things that were going on in these conferences that, if you’d been there to hear them, it might’ve made a difference in terms of what you were doing. On the other hand, there are probably things that were being talked about there that, one or two conferences later, people would not have been as excited about.

Ahn:

Wow, so things are changing.

Parker:

Things are changing, and things are changing faster and faster. I think this is true.

Ahn:

Did people also visit Brookhaven specifically to know what was happening scientifically?

Parker:

Probably not nearly as much because you can see it in the pictures. If there’s something important going on at the 60-inch cyclotron or whatever, I can look at the pictures. I can read about it. So, I think that seeing those things was no longer as important as it used to be. I think back to 1895 when people were doing stuff on X-rays. Being able to go to the lab and see what Röntgen was doing with his X-rays and what he was finding out, boy, was that important. Nowadays, not so important at all anymore.

Ahn:

Now, we’ll go back to your Brookhaven to Yale move. When did you move, and why Yale? How did that happen?

Parker:

Well, I came to Yale because it was just across the water. I came here in January of 1966, and this was an easy transition. I just had to drive around Long Island Sound, and here I was.

Ahn:

Yeah, but there are other institutions. If you draw a circle from Brookhaven, there are other places you could have gone to. Why did you choose New Haven?

Parker:

Partly because I knew some of the people here. I knew Allan Bromley, I know Al Howard, who was here and has since died. But some of the people that I knew were here. And it was close enough to Brookhaven that I could imagine now getting in my car some morning at 6 o’clock in the morning and driving to Brookhaven. It was physically that close, and I could now drive around to Brookhaven. I could spend the day at Brookhaven, talking about experiments that were being done there and how they were doing their experiments, and then at 5:30, 6 o’clock, get in my car, chew on a sandwich, drive back around, and be here to teach a class on Friday morning or whatever. It was not that I couldn’t have done the same thing from Princeton or from some other places, but this was a place that was very close and very convenient.

Ahn:

Cars were common back then? [Laugh] Commuting by car was pretty established?

Parker:

Everything was by car, yes. Although, there were people who would fly– there’s the airport out here on Long Island Sound, New Haven Airport, and there’s an airport in Brookhaven, which is very close to the Lab. And there are people who would fly back and forth, back and forth. And people who had grants, who had enough money who were willing to pay for that kind of transportation could, in fact, do that. They wouldn’t do it every week, but they would do it frequently enough that you’d think that they’d be a little bit out of their mind, but okay.

Ahn:

Moving to Yale, you felt you could keep your Brookhaven connection.

Parker:

I could keep my Brookhaven contacts pretty strong.

Ahn:

And were there other non-scientific factors that played a role?

Parker:

No, not really.

Ahn:

Your father graduated from Yale physics.

Parker:

That had nothing to do with it, no. He graduated from Yale. That was 1933. That was 30, 40 years earlier. No, that had nothing to do with it at all.

Ahn:

Did you visit New Haven or Yale when you were small or after?

Parker:

No, not really.

Ahn:

And you said you knew Allan Bromley?

Parker:

I knew Allan Bromley, partly because when I was at Brookhaven, one of the things that he would do for keeping his physics alive was, say, going to Chalk River, but that’s a bit of a hike. But he would also drive around here and spend a week here in the summer doing an experiment. In that sense, I was well aware of him, and I was well aware of Al Howard and other people like that.

Ahn:

So, it’s being in a national lab that took users that also gave you extensive connections.

Parker:

It had lots of visitors coming in and out from nearby universities, yes.

Ahn:

When you came to Yale in January ‘66, what was this place like?

Parker:

You wouldn’t recognize it from what you see here now. You wouldn’t recognize it. This lab was just being built at that point. When I came and moved in, I had an office down at the end of the hall there somewhere. I was particularly keen about that because it had an office, and it had a connection to an accelerator that was going to be just like the accelerator that we were in the process of building over at Brookhaven. This was called MP. That was the initials for it here, the MP accelerator. This one was just getting going at that point. The first beam came out of it 1966 in March.

Ahn:

At Wright Lab or at Brookhaven?

Parker:

Sorry, at Yale. The first beam came out of the accelerator at Brookhaven in 1968 maybe. So, in some sense, what I was learning here had direct connections to what I was going to learn when the new accelerator came on board at Brookhaven in a couple years. And so, in some sense, I was beginning to learn about what the new accelerator would be.

Ahn:

I see. Just as the Caltech to Brookhaven transition, you said you were opening a door and going to the next place, scientifically, it was also like that.

Parker:

It’s very much the same sort of thing, yes. And in fact, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for me to have done this, and then two years later, have simply gotten in my car, and driven back here, and become full-time at Brookhaven. We’d be sitting here in an office at Brookhaven. Literally, it would have been that easy. Yeah.

Ahn:

Did the outside of the Wright Nuclear Structure Lab look like today? I think you would describe it as a pyramid.

Parker:

It’s a pyramid. It looked much like– well, nowadays, it’s beginning to look less and less like it used to. But it is such that in 1966 when I came here, it looked very much the way it looked three or four years ago. Not so different from this. Yeah.

Ahn:

Were you struck by how it looked?

Parker:

No.

Ahn:

It was what a nuclear lab should be?

Parker:

It was what a nuclear structure lab should look like, yes. Right.

Ahn:

It’s well-shielded…

Parker:

Then, it had no windows at all. There were no seminar rooms with offices and windows on it, no windows like on some of the offices out here, no windows here, of course. But there were no windows at all. The person who built the lab originally, I’m told, I wasn’t here at the time, was an architect who wanted to build it completely underground. It would be an underground laboratory. And that was partly shielding. When Yale saw that, they said, “No, we are about to put $2 million, $6 million,” whatever it was, something like that, “into this new building. We want something that we can see.” And so, he said, “All right.” And so, he built the lab, and he basically took the lab and built it like this. You can’t see it. [Laugh] But at least you could see it, sort of. That’s a bit of a story.

Ahn:

What was your office in Brookhaven like? Did it have windows?

Parker:

Oh, yes. Of course. At that point, most places had windows of some sort. Yes, indeed.

Ahn:

How was it coming to a lab where…

Parker:

Without windows?

Ahn:

Yeah.

Parker:

It was always sort of strange. If you wanted to see what the weather was like, you had to walk out of my office, down the stairs, out to the front doors downstairs, and open the door, and look and see what the weather was like. That’s what you had to do to see. Because you couldn’t see it from the inside out. That is strange. But you get used to that. I’ve been here for 30 years, and I got used to that.

Ahn:

For the first six months, you didn’t teach at that point, you just worked?

Parker:

I’m trying to think whether I was teaching. I might have been teaching a section at that point. And I frankly don’t remember. But I might well have been teaching a section in a freshman class or a sophomore class, something like that. And I might’ve been meeting with these students once or twice a week, and going over problem sets, and things of this sort. But it was nothing major. Came September of that year–so I’d been there now six months, and I’d made the commitment that I was going to stay here–then, I actually had a class that I was the main teacher in. It was a freshman class, but I was the main teacher in that class.

Ahn:

And did you have teaching assistants in that class?

Parker:

I probably had some teaching assistants, yes.

Ahn:

When you made a commitment to stay, do you remember what your official title was?

Parker:

Probably was assistant professor.

Ahn:

Assistant professor in the physics department.

Parker:

In the physics department, yes.

Ahn:

At Wright Nuclear Structure Lab, you were the associate director?

Parker:

Probably at that point, I was the associate director or was about to be the associate director, yeah.

Ahn:

What were your official duties as an associate director and also as an assistant professor?

Parker:

I would say that my main responsibilities– by that point, I was probably to the point where I was worried about the overall budget of the Laboratory or very close to that. Maybe it was another year before I was really worried about that. But very close to being worried about that. And that was getting to be my responsibility. And if there were new professors coming on board, or if we were hiring somebody new, I would have been one doing some of the interviewing of the new people coming on board, and were they people that we wanted on board. And that’s a bit of memory, but yeah. If it wasn’t the first year, it was certainly true the second year.

Ahn:

How was your research like at Wright Lab? I was wondering whether, as an assistant professor, you had complete freedom or you had some duties to do.

Parker:

Basically had complete freedom to do what I wanted to do. Professor Bromley basically– if I wanted to be doing something, I didn’t have to go and ask him if I could do that. If somebody asked me the question, I would explain to them what I was trying to do, and they would nod wisely and say, “Good. Do a good job at it.” It basically came down to that, yeah.

Ahn:

And where did you get funding to do your work?

Parker:

That was all from the Atomic Energy Commission. At least I think, at that point, it was the Atomic Energy Commission, the AEC.

Ahn:

And later, you got it from the DOE?

Parker:

The Atomic Energy Commission was renamed as the Department of Energy.

Ahn:

The DOE.

Parker:

Yeah, the DOE and various places. Yeah.

Ahn:

So, you got your grants from the AEC and then the DOE.

Parker:

Yes, but remember one agency simply morphed to being called the new name. And there could be somebody involved in there that I’m forgetting to mention, but yes, that basically is the way it evolved through various cycles of things.

Ahn:

And jumping to teaching, what courses did you teach?

Parker:

By the time I was done, that’s freshman 1, or freshman 14, or something like that. This was the first course I probably had– okay, there we go. That’s the first course I was teaching.

Ahn:

Physics 14.

Parker:

14, that was the number of the course. Who knows what that number meant? But that was the number that somebody had assigned to it. And ‘66 to ‘67, that’s a one-year course. So, this is one year of physics that I’m teaching here. By the time I’m now into the 70s and the 80s, I probably have taught most every undergraduate course of physics at Yale once, or twice, or three times, whatever.

Ahn:

Across the spectrum, including solid-state, optics, E&M, everything?

Parker:

Almost everything. Almost everything, yes. But these are all the undergraduate courses.

Ahn:

Which can be more difficult to teach.

Parker:

Sometimes they can be. And this is freshman physics. This is Halliday and Resnick or whatever the title of the book is there. You know Halliday and Resnick. And I taught that for two or three years. But by then, I’d moved on to other ones. I’ve taught courses in physics of waves, I’ve taught courses in E&M, taught courses in all sorts of different classes. The department chair did the assignments of that, and usually the department chair would ask me, “Well, would you be willing to teach this class next year?” And I would usually say, “Yeah, sure.” I had, after all, listened to all these classes in my years at Amherst, and graduate school, and all these sort of things. I had learned all these things. And so, it was a question of digging up– I had files of books and things like that. And files like this that have been thrown away. [Laugh]

Ahn:

Please don’t throw away any more. [Laugh]

Parker:

No, I won’t throw away any more.

Ahn:

September of ‘66 would be roughly three years since you got your PhD.

Parker:

Yes, that’s correct.

Ahn:

The courses you took are still somewhat relatively fresh in your mind?

Parker:

Yes, that’s correct.

Ahn:

Ann pointed this out, that you wrote your address, 207 Nuclear Structure Lab, so it’s not even Wright Nuclear Structure Lab.

Parker:

And it may not have even been called Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory at that point.

Ahn:

Yeah, it was just NSL. And you wrote Mayan Temple, at far end of parking lot.

Parker:

Yes, that’s correct. I was standing in a lecture hall over there in Sloan, and I’m in front of this lecture hall with 100 people in there, and I said, “This is where you can find me if you’re looking for me and I’m not around, this building. Most likely, this is where I’ll be.” And by then, this was a permanent residence for me at that point and was for the next 50 years.

Ahn:

Another thing that was very interesting here was– this is the organization of the course. “As far as the conduct of the course is concerned, let me say from the outset that I shall assume that you gentlemen are enrolled in this course as students.”

Parker:

Gentlemen, always men. At this point, these were all males. And about 1969 or ‘70, they began to admit women, and probably into a class like this for freshman, probably the first women didn’t really show up until ‘73 or ‘74 or something. It took a while of women, and they started off in English of all places or history of all places. Can you imagine? [Laugh] Anyway, in fact, then, it was gentlemen. At that point, it was gentlemen.

Ahn:

I also found it funny that you say, “You gentlemen are enrolled in this course as students, and consequently, I do not intend to spend a lot of time on the spoon-feeding process. Let’s face it, you are big boys now.”

Parker:

Big boys now. But you were boys now. [Laugh] Yes, indeed.

Ahn:

I wanted to ask about mostly gender, but also maybe race and class. Because the admittance of women as undergrads is always a big thing. But women were enrolled in the professional schools and graduate schools before.

Parker:

Oh, in other schools in the University, that’s correct, yes. But not as undergraduates. Yeah.

Ahn:

Before ‘69 or ‘70, were there women graduate students in physics or the Nuclear Structure Lab?

Parker:

Oh, one here, one there sort of thing. They were the odd balls. They were different. [Laugh] They were like you. They had long hair. Did you know that? They had long hair. [Laugh]

Ahn:

What about race?

Parker:

There were people of different races around, but only a few.

Ahn:

They were really the minority.

Parker:

They were definitely the minority, yes. They would have been people who are Asian or people who were maybe an occasional Black student or something like that. But they were few and far between.

Ahn:

And this would be graduate students or undergraduates?

Parker:

The ones I’m talking about here are undergraduates.

Ahn:

I meant the occasional Asian or Black students. Would they have been undergraduates or graduates? Or it’s hard to recall?

Parker:

It’s hard to recall. There were not many. Not many.

Ahn:

And it’s also interesting that you recall that it’s not immediately after they let women into undergraduate that they started populating the physics department.

Parker:

Women didn’t suddenly appear, “Now, there’s a dozen women in this class.” No, there’s one. And I can remember the first one to appear in a class of mine. I don’t even remember who she was, but I do remember that there was a woman student who was taking this class. “Oh, okay. So, what? That’s fine. You’re okay.” But there’s a class of 30, 40 students, and there’s one woman. That’s the way it was. I don’t know what the statistics are at the moment, but I would say that when I retired, which was a dozen years ago now, the women made up about one-half of the graduating students. At the moment, I would say that about one-half of the graduating students are women. Pretty impressive.

Ahn:

Yeah, big change. But it took time to change.

Parker:

Oh, it took time. That’s the space of 20, 30 years that it took that much have changed to take place. And it takes professors who are teaching these classes to the undergraduates to be open, and welcoming, and coming in, and so forth. And I remember particularly one student who showed up the last year that I was here, and she had this name, and she said, “When I was walking down the street as a freshman, my mother looked over there and said, ‘Professor Parker, he’s still here.’” [Laugh] She didn’t quite say it in those words, but basically those words. Because I had taught her as an undergraduate. And now, one of her daughters was coming to Yale as an undergraduate and going to be a physics major. And that happens. And I’ve taught now several undergraduates who have had students before me and things like that. Yeah.

Ahn:

How did you get to interact with the undergraduate students? Were you affiliated with a college?

Parker:

Yes, I’m a fellow at Pierson College, which is probably the furthest college from here. It’s down right at the far end of the campus. It’s named after somebody Pierson. And I think each faculty member, as they want to or not, gets to be elected as a member of this college. It’s a pro forma sort of thing that you get to be a member of the college, and that was fine. I was happy to be that. It was a way of getting to have lunch with– you get a free meal each week or something like that, and you get to have a chance to meet with these students.

Ahn:

Did that help you get to know the undergrads or recruit them?

Parker:

I think so. I never really found that my faculty-student relationships were anything that was particularly close. I would have thought that there’s me, and there’s the students. And there was one woman who was a student of mine who played the harp. And one of the things she did during an exam break, she gave a harp concert one night. And I went down and sat and listened to it, behaved the way I should, and so forth. I said, “This is pretty amazing.” And then, she said, “Oh, I’ve done this for years. This is a way, I find, of breaking my concentration on just doing physics. I also play the harp.” And she was playing harp. And it’s funny because she was, shall I say, a rather petite young woman, but she was playing the harp. These people are as different as night and day in what they can do and so forth. She was interesting, and I have no idea where she went to or whatever became of her. But people graduate from here, and where they go at that point, no idea at all. No idea at all.

Ahn:

This is a very broad question spanning over the decades you were here. How do you see the demographics and the ambiance of the students changing over the years?

Parker:

Oh, it’s hard for me to know. It’s 12 years since I was here before. When I retired, it was, I think, 2012 or something like that. And that must be, in terms of even just the languages that they communicate with, in terms of how they use the keyboards and things, completely different than when I first arrived here. When I first came here, there was no email, if you can imagine. There was just no email. Things have changed a lot.

Ahn:

Did what you teach change?

Parker:

In some respects, especially in freshman physics, no, that hasn’t changed. F = ma is still true. V= IR or whatever, all these sort of things are there now still. Things like black holes, things of that sort, that’s changed a lot. Black holes didn’t even exist when I first came here in 1966, or if it did, it was just something that was sort of way up in the sky somewhere that you can talk about, but what the hell do you care? Yeah.

Ahn:

In this 1966 notebook, you say you’re going to assume the students are gentlemen, and you don’t need to spoon-feed them information. They should be responsible to some extent. There’s an expectation of what students should behave like and should be like.

Parker:

Oh, well, for one thing, one of the things that I quickly learned, of course, was that the students now knew calculus. When I arrived at Amherst as a freshman undergraduate, I had never heard the word calculus, or how it was used, or integrals, or things of that sort. I didn’t know those words. And one of the things that I learned as a freshman was what is integral calculus, what are all of these things, and I had to learn that. Nowadays, it’s something they learn in high school. There were things like that, which are just wide open at this point. There are things like black holes, and it goes on and on, things like that, which 35, 45 years ago, people would have looked at you, and rolled their eyes, and said, “Yeah, sure. And the world is still round, right?” And that would have been it. Nobody knew that there were other planets in the sky. They knew that there were Pluto, and Uranus, and Neptune, but those were the nine planets in the sky, period. That was it. Nowadays, the universe and our solar system, the world is full of planets. And we have things like Io with volcanoes on its surface and things of this sort. You wouldn’t have even thought of that when I was an undergraduate at Amherst, for example. Wouldn’t even have thought about something like that.

Ahn:

The moon landing happened when you were here, when you were teaching. Did that create excitement in the physics department?

Parker:

Certainly. It happened in the summer, when there weren’t so many students here. And of course, the buildup to getting the moon landing and so forth, that was something that took a long time. And Apollo 1, and the explosion, and things of that sort had happened. This was, what, Apollo 11, I guess, when they first landed on the moon. That wasn’t a surprise, but it was something that happened. Any more than, say, the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb might’ve been something, going back to 1945, which was when I was in grammar school, that would have been, “Oh my God. Oh my God.” But on the other hand, it was, “Okay, now what?” That would have been the sort of attitude that one might’ve taken as far as that was concerned. There were so many things like that that you were prepared to think that science was going to solve that problem next. “What’s the next problem that science is going to solve?” And that would still be there, yeah. Just like now, when we find out what is dark matter. Do we even know what dark matter is? No, we don’t. You must have long discussions about that at the supper table every night. “What is dark matter?” And when I was your age, and when I was a freshman in college, one would have shaken your head. “We don’t know. We don’t need to talk about that. We don’t know what dark matter is. What is dark matter?”

[End of Recording]

[Begin Recording]

Ahn:

Today is May 8, 2024. We’re back at Wright Lab, and this is the third session with Peter Parker. Today, I want to continue asking about your work at Yale. We can start with research.

Parker:

Okay, that’s fine.

Ahn:

It spans, like, 50-plus years.

Parker:

50-plus years. Yes, it was just amazing. I started at the very beginning with the accelerator, which was just coming online, right down to the very end, when the accelerator got turned off. And so, there was roughly 50 years in there that that covered.

Ahn:

Your time here started with the start of the first …

Parker:

The first tandem accelerator here. Yeah.

Ahn:

Oh, boy. We can’t go into every single detail, because it would take, like, years. Since this is for the record, could you sort of give an overview of how you got into the research topics you did here? What work did you do, what resources you used at Wright Nuclear Structure Lab?

Parker:

I would like to simply say I wandered around. I did this, and then I did that over there, and then maybe this. And so, I don’t think that there was a real key to what I did. If there was something that was an interesting question, I might spend some time doing some research on it. But then, on the other hand, it might well be something which was not– well, but then, there might be something over here that was an interesting topic, and I would do some research on that. So, it wasn’t that I focused here, and then got done with that, and then focused on part B, and then got done with that. I kind of wandered around.

Ahn:

Did you carry over the work on helium and beryllium at Brookhaven to here?

Parker:

Yes, I did some of that stuff here, and I actually did some more of that. I spent summers or time over there doing experiments involving that at Brookhaven as well. Yeah. And that just depended on where could you get beam time. You looked to get some beam time, and there’s some time here that you can use, so, “Okay, we’ll try doing that here.” And then, “Okay, now, I can’t get beam time, but I can do something over there,” and so, I would go over there and do some experiments.

Ahn:

I see. Even when you came over to Nuclear Structure Lab, you still went back and forth between Brookhaven?

Parker:

I still went back and forth. I was, in fact, going over– basically, one day a week, I would drive over in the morning, do some work over there, then drive back and do work here later.

Ahn:

How long did you do that for?

Parker:

Oh, for several years. I even went down to Rutgers and did some experiments at Rutgers during that time because they had a tandem accelerator that I could use. And part of that was in collaboration with some of the people from Bell Labs, who, as far as closeness is concerned, are closer to Rutgers than they are to Brookhaven or Yale. And I would come down and do some experiments with them at Rutgers.

Ahn:

Did Brookhaven, Rutgers, and Wright Lab all have tandem accelerators?

Parker:

Yes, they did.

Ahn:

How did they differ?

Parker:

They were different in sizes. The one at Yale was the biggest of the accelerators. The one in Brookhaven was a somewhat smaller size, but basically the same thing. And the one at Rutgers was, again, somewhat smaller. But it was a question of where could you get beam time. You had to write down the experiment you wanted to do, why you wanted to do it, and submit it to them, and then they would have a meeting of a committee, which would look at it and say, “Okay, this looks like we should find some time here. Let’s see, we’ll do that in May. We’ll give them a week of time to do this experiment.” And then, later on, I might get some time at a different accelerator. And I can remember one time, running an experiment here, getting in my car and driving to Rutgers, and spent the day building an experiment over there. We had trouble with the accelerator, so that morning, after having worked all night on it and not gotten anywhere, really, got back in my car and drove back to Yale to teach a class. It was a lot of traveling around. Yeah. And none of these places are really all that far apart, they’re two or three hours apart, driving-wise.

Ahn:

Yeah, so not so close either.

Parker:

No, not so close either, no.

Ahn:

Did they have different energies?

Parker:

They had different energies. Depending on the accelerator you were at, you could get different kinds of beams, and you had perhaps different target chambers that you could use at different places. Yeah.

Ahn:

That really sounds fascinating.

Parker:

That’s right, it was fascinating because there were things that you could do one place that you couldn’t do at another. And you could do that experiment there, then you could come back and do this experiment over there. It was fascinating. Tiring, sometimes. You can imagine, yes. It’s like an astronomer almost, although an astronomer gets to go to sleep at night. Or during the day. [Laugh]

Ahn:

Or they reduce the data during the day. [Laugh]

Parker:

Well, yeah, there’s that, too, of course. But you have the trouble of finding time when you can get time on telescopes, which I didn’t have to worry about.

Ahn:

But you have to apply for beam time.

Parker:

I have to apply for a beam. And sometimes I get beam, and sometimes somebody else– there’s only one beam at a time in any one of these places. And so, somebody else might have that beam for the next three or four days, so you’re busy analyzing your data from the week before, or teaching, or doing a lab, or something like that. Yeah.

Ahn:

Can you recall any differences in the way you did your experiment or the support you got between Brookhaven, which is a national lab, and Wright Lab, which is a university?

Parker:

Not really, I don’t think. Brookhaven, for example, is a very open place. Have you been to Brookhaven at all?

Ahn:

Actually, no, I haven’t.

Parker:

Okay, well, sometime you should get to go over there. You would find things that look very much similar to the experiments downstairs. So, yeah, they were very open, and they were happy to have you bring things over to do experiments, to use the apparatus at Brookhaven to do an experiment that maybe they wouldn’t have the beam energy that you wanted to do it here, but maybe they would have slightly higher beam energies or whatever over there that they could use.

Ahn:

In terms of your coworkers, colleagues, technicians, or administrative support…

Parker:

They were people who might have gotten their degree at Caltech, for example, and were now working at Brookhaven. And I was going over to Brookhaven to do an experiment with them. There were examples like that. Or they were people at Bell Labs who were doing experiments that they could do either at Brookhaven or at Rutgers, for example.

Ahn:

And how many people typically did you work with?

Parker:

Oh, three, four, five people. Yeah. These are not huge experiments, these are small numbers of people.

Ahn:

These three, four, five, they’re all scientists?

Parker:

Yes. And then, there were technicians, of course, as well at all of these places who are responsible for getting the equipment working.

Ahn:

Did you have undergraduate or graduate students working with you?

Parker:

I had, typically, graduate students. Typically, graduate students were working with me. Or postdocs, for that matter. Or junior faculty members at places, like at Rutgers, for example, who might be working on an experiment with me.

Ahn:

When you went to Brookhaven or Rutgers, did you bring your students with you?

Parker:

Yep, some of the times, I would bring them. Some of the times, I would simply go alone and work with people who were already at Brookhaven. And I would find a place to stay for two or three days over there. And I was doing experiments during the day, then sleeping and so forth at night sort of thing.

Ahn:

Can you recall some of the more important work or some of the work you liked in particular?

Parker:

No, not really. It was all much the same sort of thing. Yeah. I can’t think of anything in particular that I did that was– one thing I think I mentioned the other day I thought that was probably one of the more interesting things I did was, this was a very convoluted experiment. Ray Davis, who was a chemist, and older and dead, had some collaborators that he was working with at Oak Ridge, and they made him a sample of lithium-7 and so forth, shipped him up to him at Brookhaven, he did some chemistry on it and out of that extracted beryllium-7, which is a decay product that comes from the lithium-7, and he made a target. And he was two buildings down. He handed me the target and said, “Okay, see what you can find in this.” And I then did experiments with that target and published a paper in it, with thanks to him and so forth, and the people from Oak Ridge who had made the target.

Ahn:

Yeah, you have some papers with beryllium-7 targets here. It also helped to know the right people.

Parker:

Oh. [Laugh] Whether you’re an astronomer, or whether you’re a physicist, or a chemist, knowing the right people is always number one in the things that you want to worry about. Like, knowing Ray Davis, knowing John Bahcall, who I collaborated with, who was more of a theorist, knowing these people, even just those three or four people– here’s a group of people who come up with an experiment that they want done, and each of them is doing particular parts of it. I was doing the part that measured the cross-section, somebody else was making the target, it was all collaborations. Lots of collaborations with people from very different backgrounds.

Ahn:

Can you recall how you worked with the Bell Labs people?

Parker:

Oh, the Bell Labs is a huge organization. It’s the size of a national laboratory, in some sense, when I was collaborating with it. But I was working with three or four people in the lab. But there were people in all sorts of different buildings doing things that I was completely unrelated to. And the same thing at Brookhaven, it’s got a huge number of– it’s got 2,000 or 3,000 people working in a place like Brookhaven, and I was working in a collaboration with two or three of those people. It was always relatively small groups of people that I was working with, but the labs themselves are huge establishments.

Ahn:

Did your collaborators at Bell Labs have different expertise or access to different instruments?

Parker:

Yeah, their expertise was maybe in the development of particular physical apparatus that they were building that had particular detector capabilities. So, I would be using what they were developing to do things that they didn’t care about, which were of value to me. Small detectors, sensitive detectors that I could use that they had developed that I could then put in a target chamber and use to do experiments with. A lot of physics is– not so much when you go back 100 years, but a lot of it when I was starting out was collaborations. And so, you were using something that they were developing, and you were then studying it.

For example, when Röntgen was discovering X-rays and things of this sort, he studied this particular phenomenon, and he discovered that it had strange properties to it. And he, in fact, then discovered X-rays and radioactivity. But it was collaborations between what he was doing and what somebody else had been studying to discover what were– people had discovered what electrons were at that point. This was in 1890 or something, they had discovered electrons. In a vacuum tube, they were impinging on a spot over here. And then, out of it were coming these things you discovered. Somehow, they were getting through the air, over other things that were light up due to the interaction with these things that he then– no idea what they were.

He called them X-rays just because they were unknown. X was unknown. But that’s where the name came from. That was what he discovered. But he was trying to study their properties, and lo and behold, out of this came this whole new world of X-rays. And then, from that came nuclear physics. It’s a lot of things that you look at coming from here goes over to there and does something different, and you then spend some time studying that. It’s just new things that you’re discovering, things that nobody had ever seen before and you now see for the first time and begin to develop. Yeah.

Ahn:

Did you feel similar with your work with light and heavy nuclei?

Parker:

Oh, I think so. I think you discover things in dealing with light nuclei or heavy nuclei. You discover things which you weren’t necessarily looking for before. One of the things you always hope to find are new things. Yeah.

Ahn:

How do you think your work impacted the field?

Parker:

Well, for example, things like the beryllium-7 P-gamma, that was something which– beryllium-7 has a relatively short half-life. What I discovered by then measuring that process, what happens when an energetic proton hits a beryllium-7 nucleus, and out of that comes boron-8, which then decays, and something else goes on. These are some of the things which I then studied, how that decays and what goes on.

Ahn:

And you used them also to learn more about what’s going on in the sun and the stars.

Parker:

In some sense, you could say I was looking inside the sun. I wasn’t really looking inside the sun, but I was learning about what was going inside the sun that was making the things, that was making, for example, neutrinos that were coming out that nobody knew about before. Yeah, nobody knew about those before.

Ahn:

Yeah, I like that expression that you’re looking into the sun. It reminds me of the Mount Wilson Observatory.

Parker:

Yes, of course. Yes.

Ahn:

Because they were observing the sun, but they also had a laboratory. And they were just looking at elements to compare it with what was happening in the sun.

Parker:

That’s right. Helium was discovered in a star. It was something that you didn’t discover– nobody discovered it here on Earth, they were looking at doing experiments on it with astrophysical events, and they discovered there were some lines in there. They were saying this was helium. The Greek name helium is for the sun. They’ve discovered a new element. That was that whole process. And out of that came helium, and neon, and a whole series of– if you look at a chart of the nuclei, there’s a whole series of elements that are all related to the magic number nuclei, which are helium, and neon, and so forth.

Ahn:

You worked a lot in solar neutrinos. Was there a connection with your nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics work when you were working on solar neutrino flux?

Parker:

Yes, I think that was one of the things which, when Willie Fowler had suggested that I look at how you make beryllium-7 in a star, one of the reasons he was getting that was, well, if you make this in a star, what are the other things that must be coming out of the star? And coming out of the star then were things like neutrinos, and gamma rays, and behaviors like that that then were important to be included as part of a star. So, that’s one of these things that you learn, but that I think originally, people had not thought of them that way.

Ahn:

Your expertise in calculating light nuclei–well, light is a relative term–or cross-sections, how did they help in your work on solar neutrinos?

Parker:

Well, it was important because these light nuclei were things that were happening inside the star. When hydrogen came together inside a star, among the things that it made were beryllium-7, for example, or beryllium-6. And how these things decay and what they did are things that are then useful for you to see or useful for astronomers to look at, which then are things astronomers can do experiments. There are now neutrino astronomers. There are astronomers who spend their time looking at or trying to detect neutrinos coming out of stars, coming out of supernovas, for example. One tries to see these. But I was never in the business of trying to detect neutrinos. That’s a once– I won’t say once in a lifetime, but it’s the sort of thing where you have people like Ray Davis, who detects neutrinos with detectors which are as big as this building, in some sense. People do things like that, and then they detect these neutrinos, and they detect their energies and how many are coming out of a star.

Ahn:

What was your contribution to the solar neutrino flux issue?

Parker:

My contribution was discovering another way that neutrinos could be made in the sun. And they therefore had an energy which I could predict, that this was the energy that they would have. Now, were they low-energy neutrinos? Were they 13 MeV, were they 18 MeV coming out of the sun? Because depending on the energy of the neutrinos, they would interact in different ways with the elements that are inside the sun.

Ahn:

Was this the neutrinos coming from beryllium-7?

Parker:

Yes, among other things, they were beryllium-7 neutrinos, they were boron-8 neutrinos. If I made boron-8 in the sun, it would decay by emitting an 18 MeV neutrino. That’s important because it has very different interactions than does a 5 MeV neutrino, than does a 400 keV neutrino. How these things interact is important.

Ahn:

And over the years, our understanding of neutrinos changed.

Parker:

Oh, well, to begin with, nobody even knew that they were there. When I got into the game–I didn’t discover them–there were people who were discovering neutrinos. They were saying, “Well, gee, if this goes on inside the sun, maybe there are neutrinos coming out.” And that’s where Ray Davis got involved with it, trying to make detectors which would detect neutrinos coming out of a reactor. There were reactors around at that point, and he could then put detectors up, which then saw the neutrino coming out of the reactor.

Ahn:

How did neutrino oscillation, which was originally a theory…

Parker:

Well, to begin with, there was a neutrino, period. That was it. And then, some people did experiments over here, and they discovered that there were different kinds of neutrinos, that there were muon neutrinos, and there were electron neutrinos. And then, later on, people discovered that there were tau neutrinos, and these were things that people didn’t have a clue that they should be there, what their properties should be, how their properties would be different. And that’s the sort of thing which people doing experiments here discover this, and they say, “My God, this is not what a neutrino is supposed to do. This is a whole new world.” This becomes particle physics.

Ahn:

You have a paper on new solar neutrino flux calculations, an implication regarding neutrino oscillations. How did neutrino oscillation affect your understanding…

Parker:

Oh, well, it meant that they would interact in different ways, that you would get different chemistry happening if a muon neutrino interacted with a detector. There would be a different thing than if an electron neutrino interacted.

Ahn:

Did you have to go back and reexamine your other experiments?

Parker:

You had to rethink what you had seen before, yes. It was an additional parameter that you had to begin to include in that. The muon neutrinos have different energies and interact in different ways, I guess is the simplest way to say it. Most of what we’d see and study… well, I shouldn’t say that. If I were studying in here, they would all be electron neutrinos. The muon neutrinos now are much more energetic. They’re more energetic particles.

Ahn:

Were you surprised when people found out or came to an understanding that neutrinos have mass?

Parker:

I think people originally thought they probably did not have any mass because they have very little mass, say, compared to an electron or something like that, a much, much smaller amount of mass than that. In fact, when people did experiments and discovered that they had– well, it’s a very small amount of mass, but the fact that they had some mass made a difference in the way they behaved. And that was not something that was known. It wasn’t known until some people did some experiments and discovered, “Oh, okay, they must have some mass.” How much mass is it? Well, there’s a limit on the mass, and I don’t even know what the limit on that mass is now. But there’s a limit on how small the mass of an electron neutrino is. But it’s very small, say, compared to the energy that an electron has.

Ahn:

What other experiments or work did you carry out?

Parker:

Oh, well, some of these things had to do with how do you make certain radioactivities in stars, like sodium-22, which is a nucleus with a very finite lifetime. And yet, you see, coming out of stars, gamma rays and things like that, which come from the nuclear decay of sodium-22. It’s important to know how much of that you can make, and how you make it, what energies you need to make it, what was the energy in the star that must’ve produced it?

Ahn:

To get to that, you were in the accelerator, and you would be looking into the cross-sections?

Parker:

That’s right. what I was involved with is a very narrow piece of this set of reactions, and one of those pieces is, then, how do you make aluminum-26. We’d look out in the sky, and you can detect the presence of aluminum-26. Normal aluminum is aluminum-27. All the aluminum we have around here is aluminum-27. But there’s a certain amount of aluminum-26, and how do you make it? There are people who have made maps– there’s a German who had made a map of, if you were to have a telescope which was set so that it detected aluminum-26 only, because it has a particular gamma ray that comes out, and you would then plot pictures of the sky in aluminum-26, it would be a very different-looking sky than if you were looking at a normal aluminum-27. That’s an interesting thing, how much you’ve got there. What sort of conditions must have existed to make that aluminum-26?

Ahn:

A lot of your papers right after you moved to Wright Lab were on lighter nuclei. And later, towards late 70s and 80s, I noticed the elements were getting heavier.

Parker:

Yes, of course. Because accelerators can now produce beams of heavier and heavier nuclei, yes.

Ahn:

What you were looking at also was sort of hand-in-hand with how accelerator physics developed?

Parker:

Absolutely. One of the advantages– originally, accelerators produced protons, period. That was it. And you could have protons bombarding all sorts of stable nuclei, but they were always right around mass one, two, things of that sort. And I can remember doing experiments where we would actually have beams of protons interacting and making tritons, which is hydrogen-3, they would interact with the hydrogen-3, and would make different sort of things come out of that. And some of that might’ve been helium-4, for example. But then, as you had more energetic beams, you began to see heavier and heavier nuclei, and you could have protons, or alpha particles, or carbon-12, or neon, or whatever it was interacting with the other elements that are in the star as well, and they would make things that you could then think about setting up telescopes to look at.

There’s the Harvard Observatory, which makes plates of star spectra that they look at, they look at the gamma rays being emitted by these stars, and by measuring the energy of the gamma ray, then they associate this with a particular isotope of that star. How did that star make that? They have to then begin to think about processes in which things like that were made. The S process, the R process, there are things like this. This is now where Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler, and Hoyle came up with their famous paper. And they tried to figure out where were all these things being made, how were they being made, what were the conditions in the stars where these things were being made.

And if you look at the abundance of certain isotopes of iron, let’s say, or something like that, you would find a certain spectrum where different isotopes would have different amounts coming in stars. But in a different star, that instead of being this way, might’ve been this way over here somewhere, just different masses coming out of the star. And that had to do with the temperatures that existed in the stars at that point. And this was sort of where Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler, and Hoyle came along and really sort of opened the whole world up.

Ahn:

Our understanding of stars also changed a lot since you started in grad school and after.

Parker:

Oh, changed enormously. We had no idea what was going on in stars. Well, you go far enough back, we have no idea what was going on in stars. Yeah. When people like at Chicago, for example, opened up a whole world of stars that nobody had an idea existed before.

Ahn:

Were you in contact with people in the Chicago area?

Parker:

Not particularly, although, of course, I was because people like Willie Fowler and Kavanagh, they were in contact with the people in Chicago. One of the reasons that I got involved with beryllium-7 was, through contacts that came down the chain, there were people there interested in doing things like that. There were people in Vancouver who were interested in the problem, and they could do experiments which would then discover how beryllium-7 in stars got made and how it decayed.

Ahn:

Do you recall any names from Chicago?

Parker:

Oh, it’s the guy named Eugene Parker, who unfortunately is no relation to me at all. But it’s somebody whose name I know. Parker’s a relatively common name, so I do know of people like that. He’s probably the most famous person I know with my name. But he’s no relationship to me at all.

Ahn:

Were you in touch with Jim Truran?

Parker:

I knew Jim, yes, and I was at conferences and talked to him at conferences and experiments that he was involved with understanding. I remember being at a conference in Copenhagen, I think, somewhere, and meeting with him there, for example.

Ahn:

How do you look back to how nuclear physics changed, nuclear astrophysics changed since you started getting into this field?

Parker:

Oh, it’s changed enormously. If you think of turning points, B2FH is something which stands there as a pedestal for something that came along. Here we are going, all of a sudden, “This thing is there,” and all of a sudden, there’s so much more that we can begin to understand. That’s an example of that. The sort of people who did the systematics, which astronomers did in the decades before Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler, and Hoyle, that sort of thing, that’s something that was being done at Harvard and at Chicago. People had plates, literally glass plates with the spectra in them, and here were the lines due to each of the elements and so forth. People who were understanding how the spectra of stars changed.

If you had a star which was an RR Lyrae star, if you looked at the way that the spectrum coming out of that star changed as a function of where it was in its cycle, it went through a cycle, and then it changed. And it went through the cycle again and changed. There are so many things like that that people began to understand that there were variable stars and how important were variable stars. Originally, stars were stars. And yet, if you began to look at them, and you began to look at red giants and blue giants, and the different spectra coming out of these stars, you began to discover that there were so many things going on in stars that originally, you had not a clue about. But now, we’re talking about hundreds of years ago.

Ahn:

For your experiments, you have a target, you have a beam. How did you collect your results?

Parker:

Well, as the beam strikes the target, out come other things, like gamma rays, for example. And those gamma rays tell you about the nuclei that were made in the target when the proton, for example, struck a target. And obviously, it made atoms of different isotopes, of copper, or nickel, or hydrogen. And you began to see which of those isotopes were important and began to understand what was the carbon-nitrogen cycle. How did you get protons and the carbon-12 nucleus to make nitrogen-13? Well, that’s just radioactive and decays to carbon-13, but now the carbon-13 is something which interacts with protons and makes nitrogen-14, and there’s a whole series of these things. And in the end, one has taken four protons together inside the carbon-nitrogen cycle, and you’re back to carbon-12 again, and you’ve made a helium nucleus in the process, and you’ve made a lot of energy in the process. Not the sun in particular, maybe a little bit of the sun’s energy is produced that way, but most of the sun’s energy is produced by hydrogen fusing to form helium. But there are other ways that one can have reactions going on.

Ahn:

You had a paper on the CNO cycle.

Parker:

Yes, right. Yeah.

Ahn:

The data you got from accelerators, would it have been on tape? Or what did you use?

Parker:

Oh, well, to start with, [Laugh] it was probably dots and dashes on paper tape, really. And one could then read that into a spectrum, and one got a spectrum of the number of gamma rays of this energy and the number of gamma rays of that energy. Eventually, one got onto magnetic tape, but that’s just changing the science. The techniques of it are basically the same sort of thing, it’s just a different way of storing the data. And then, one stored into other different forms, and that becomes really more of a technical problem, I guess, as much as anything else.

Ahn:

Did you have people helping you out to deal with the magnetic tape?

Parker:

Oh, of course, yes. We had people who did nothing but worry about how you could take– we had disks of magnetic tape this big around with hundreds of inches of stuff in there, and we had rooms full of these things. And these are all full of the gamma rays coming out of particular reactions. And there are people who discovered ways to get the density of information out of these tapes higher and higher so that you can get more and more information stored on the tape, and then onto disks, which is a more efficient way to handle it.

Ahn:

Did you prefer the magnetic tapes over paper tapes?

Parker:

Oh, magnetic tapes, you can store 1,000 times what you can store on paper tapes.

Ahn:

So it’s just storage space. Like, one tape equals to, I don’t know, like, a room full of paper tapes.

Parker:

Right.

Ahn:

Did you also use computers to analyze?

Parker:

Well, this is a whole series of lines. To begin with, probably what you were doing was using– I guess in terms, it would be like computers, where you would be putting information into these devices, and then eventually, these devices became the computers where you stored the information in the computer itself. But that’s a technical question. How you store and what the density of materials stored in a device like a computer is, is something which– it’s a whole different world.

Ahn:

How did you deal with those? You had a coworker?

Parker:

For every physicist, or astronomer, or whatever around here, there is a crew of people who are technicians who do nothing but worry about how you handle the stuff which is stored on the magnetic tapes. How do you read it? For example, you’ve got a piece of magnetic tape, and there’s all this information stored on it. Somehow, you have to now read that and put it into a format which you can now plot one of these pictures that I give you here occasionally with peaks and stuff. And that’s what this person now does. And what it does is, it then takes a spectrum, which is all this stuff stored in it and now sorts it into a way which is just a whole different way to look at it. It’s almost unbelievable the compacting. It really is a question of compacting, how you store all this information into this very, very dense medium that you have.

Ahn:

So, paper tapes became magnetic tapes that became those floppy disks or other things?

Parker:

Yes.

Ahn:

And you also did experiments other places, like Brookhaven, Rutgers, and you mentioned previously you also went to Vancouver and Seattle. The data that you collected from the experiments, were they handled the same way?

Parker:

That’s right, yes. How you get the stuff onto the tapes, and then somebody has to read the tapes, and when you’re reading those tapes, there are standard ways to do it. And there are people whose livelihood depends on knowing how to read those tapes. And they’re just as key to the experiment as the person who is doing the experiment to, in fact, measure the data to begin with. It’s a whole nest of collaborations, really.

Parker:

All these things have to do with the nuclear physics which is behind the experiment. And that’s why even if you go back to Röntgen and discover the X-rays, this is somebody who discovers something happening that nobody had expected. What were these things that were getting out of a spot of the back end of the cathode ray tube that were flying through space and coming up and making this spot on material glow in the dark? Something had to be getting here. And you could put something in between, and you could discover– well, you look at the picture of his wife’s hand with the ring on it, and the ring makes a difference compared to the rest of the hand. You saw the picture? You see her bones. My God, what is going on here?

And all of a sudden, you’ve discovered something that you can use, whether it’s some of those pictures of people who had had an accident and fired a shotgun shell that went into their hand, and their hand is full of little black dots because particles came out of the shotgun shell and went into the hand, and some of them stopped there. And now, you can go through, and you can understand, “Well, that’s a particle. I can reach in, and actually grab it, and pull it out.” These are all something which happened, and these are all particles that are embedded in his hand. And this doctor can now look at this and go in– this is somebody looking at what the X-ray would tell him is in his hand. And this one is here, so here’s the bones in the hand.

Maybe it’s not obvious, it’s obvious now, but in here, there’s little bits and pieces of the exploding particle, which went into his hand and stopped. And now, in order to make this hand whole again and useful again, I can actually go in and now pick all of these out. That’s what people who study X-rays do. Here’s, again, the hand, an earlier version of that, and there’s her wedding ring sitting on the hand, what a wedding ring would look like in an X-ray. His wedding ring– well, he may not have had it on this particular hand. But anyway, that was there. Eventually, you see so many of these things that you move on to something different.

Ahn:

Did you have to eventually learn computer software to write your papers?

Parker:

This tells you about my age. When I started doing this, I wrote programs where I would have a statement, which said, “Take the piece of information from cell”– there were 5,000 cells altogether in my original computer. “Take the information in cell 455 and put it in this register. Divide it by two, put it back into cell 427.” That was literally how, when I first started doing computers, I programmed it. I had to say, “From here to there, put it down here.” And eventually, I got it to the point where I then had a spectrum. But it was really done one particle at a time, which is very crude. Very crude. And then, eventually got to the point where I could have a do loop. Originally, I was doing it sort of bit by bit. Then, I began to use Fortran. And wow, what a saving that was. [Laugh] Because then, I could have something that did this for 500 times. It would do that, then it would move onto something else.

But yeah, eventually, you learn that, and eventually, you learn that, and that’s something the computer does for you automatically. And how good you are doing that depends on how fast your computer will do that for you. Originally, if you’re doing this sort of one step at a time– I can remember sitting at a computer when I was a graduate student, and I could punch this, and I could see bits moving around and things happening like this. And then, eventually, I got to the point where I could now do this, and I would see it doing all these things very fast. And eventually, I got to the point where you simply put it in and walked away, and the computer just did it all automatically.

Ahn:

This is towards the end, before you retired. You still did a lot of experiments. How did you feel with the way you gathered data and analyzed?

Parker:

I got to the point when I retired– I was 80 years old basically when that happened. Compare that to your age, I’m twice your age, okay? When I was getting to that age, if I wanted something done, I would let a student know that I wanted something done, and I would then walk away, and the student would get it done. And the student would do all of that hand work that was involved with that. But I got to the point where these students were showing up as first-year students, and they already knew more about the computers, and the hardware, and things of that sort which were going on than I knew after 50 years.

Ahn:

Then, it becomes, like, a division of labor.

Parker:

That’s right.

Ahn:

Because you know the physics and how to analyze the data.

Parker:

That’s right. And they know far more than I know about getting it to the stage that I wanted to look at it for.

Ahn:

You continued to work on heavier nuclei, nuclear structures, and nuclear astrophysics. And then, you also got involved with the dark matter search. How did that happen?

Parker:

If you had mentioned to me when I was your age, “You’ve got to go look for dark matter,” I’d say, “You’re out of your bloody mind. Why should I look for dark matter? I can’t even see all the light matter there is.” This was stuff which was simply beyond me at that point. And then, eventually, I began to see some of the experiments that people were doing, seeing evidence for dark matter. And I have to say, my reaction has to be, “Oh my God. This is real. There’s really something out there.” And I don’t know how long it takes me to kind of realize that, but at some point, I realize that there’s something there which I don’t understand and which I need to know do experiments to try to understand. And that becomes dark matter, dark energy, things of this sort. And the answer is, as far as that’s concerned, I still don’t know. I don’t know the answer to it. I don’t know what dark matter is.

Ahn:

Yeah, no one knows.

Parker:

Of course not, no. But that’s what science is all about, it’s discovering things you don’t understand and trying to figure out what is there. When Röntgen discovered these X-rays 120 years ago or whatever it was, he had not a clue as to what the hell they were. They were simply something that he didn’t know, and he saw them interacting with the magnesium for some reason. Didn’t know why or what was going on, but he discovered that. So, he spent a month. When you consider it, a whole month he spent just studying things before he began to publish it and let people know what he was seeing. Well, there it was. He won the Nobel Prize for it, discovering something new and startling. And then, you get people like Rutherford, and Madam Curie, and all these sort of people who now discover what’s going on here.

Ahn:

I see your first paper on dark matter with LUX published in 2011.

Parker:

And what’s the size of the list of people in the author list? Hundreds.

Ahn:

Well, it’s less than 100.

Parker:

Less than 100? Okay.

Ahn:

It’s 66.

Parker:

Oh, I never bothered to count them. Okay.

Ahn:

I think the LUX collaboration continued to grow.

Parker:

The LUX collaboration, I think, has got thousands on it now or something like that.

Ahn:

Yeah, so by, like, the time with the 2014 Phys Rev Letters, it’s 100 or more, so it grew.

Parker:

I was this tiny, little piece of the dark matter search at that point. I was contributing because I was part of a group– there was a group here that I was– here I am, 80 years old, and I get myself to be part of a group so I can kind of keep track of what’s going on, but I’m just a tiny, little piece of a group. Most of the people who are on there are doing things that I don’t really understand. And that’s when I look at it and say, “It’s time I exited the group and let people who know better what they’re doing run the show at this point.” So, that’s why I’m here, not doing it anymore.

Ahn:

Well, you did so much. [Laugh]

Parker:

Well, I did getting up to that point. But at this point now, I’m getting to the point where I am now not contributing. I go to the weekly meetings and try to keep track of what’s going on in the field, but that’s really a question of just simply keeping track of what’s going on in the field.

Ahn:

And what work led you to get involved with the dark matter group here?

Parker:

I thought it was a fascinating thing and something that would be interesting to learn that I didn’t understand yet and something that made sense for me to try to understand at this point. But it’s like the question, what led Röntgen to see this spot on the wall somewhere, look at it, and say– well, he had two things he could’ve done with it. He could’ve said, “Well, I’ll stick it in a drawer, and then it won’t bother me anymore.” And that might’ve been the logical thing, which a lot of people would have done. Literally, that’s what they would have done. “I’ll hide this away so it won’t disturb what I’m trying to study here.”

But he didn’t. He was curious enough to look at it and say, “Damn. I wonder what’s causing that. Why is that thing glowing like that?” And so, he then went and began to do experiments. He began to hold things up to it or try to absorb whatever it was, the X-rays that he eventually called them. This is all within the first month. You can imagine. Hold up his hand, or his wife’s hand, in this particular case, in front of the beam of this thing. And he holds it there, and he looks at it, and there’s the picture of her hand, the bones in her hand. Nobody had ever done that before. Nobody had a clue as to what the hell that was all about. What was this thing that was going through her hand and leaving the traces of the bone behind?

That’s where science moves forward. And hopefully, now, that’s where dark matter will lead, somebody will look at it and say, “Ah, I know what that is.” We don’t know yet what the answer is, but somebody one of these days will do an experiment, way down in the tunnel somewhere, and discover, “Oh, that’s what it’s all about. This is what’s doing this thing.” We don’t know. But somebody’s going to figure it out. Maybe it’s you, I don’t know. But it’s somebody who’s going to figure it out.

Ahn:

It’s also interesting how the dark matter experiments are getting bigger and bigger, similar to the neutrino experiments.

Parker:

Yes. You had neutrino experiments with one person involved. One person. Now, they’re much, much, much bigger.

Ahn:

But not everybody in your position would have joined a new experiment.

Parker:

No, and I suppose in one case, it was a question of it being a way to drop into something that was already going on. I looked at it, and I knew I wasn’t going to solve the problem.

Ahn:

But it’s a team effort.

Parker:

It’s a huge team effort.

Ahn:

And they wouldn’t accept you if you didn’t bring something.

Parker:

Well, of course, and I brought in something, which was an ability to look at detectors and use detectors to detect things that might be important for this.

Ahn:

Were you involved in the detector design?

Parker:

At one point, I was using gamma-ray detectors. This is now back when I was a first-year graduate student, I was using gamma-ray detectors, and I was using those to detect the gamma rays coming from a reaction. Now, I’m using, in a very different way, gamma-ray detectors to look at what happens to particles that have something to do with dark matter. But it’s a huge jump, yeah.

Ahn:

You started out with just a few people.

Parker:

With basically two people, yeah.

Ahn:

And then, your last many papers are, like, a huge collaboration.

Parker:

A huge collaboration. That’s simply because the experiment has become something which is much, much bigger.

Ahn:

I wanted to ask about the accelerators here. Were you involved in the accelerator physics?

Parker:

I was probably as much as anybody here, although the people who built the accelerator are the people from what’s called High Voltage Engineering Corporation, HVEC. You’ll see those initials around. They’re the ones who actually had a– I don’t think the plant even exists anymore, but they had a plant up in Massachusetts, where they built small accelerators and then gradually got to bigger, and bigger, and bigger accelerators. And somewhere along the line, and I don’t know who or how because it was really before my time, somebody said, “You know, we could do this.” And they said, “No, no, no, we’re doing very well doing this.” “Well, okay, we could try to do this and see what happens.”

And they began to build tandem accelerators, where you had the high-voltage material at the center of the machine, and you accelerated particles into it, and these were negative particles. Then, at the center of the machine, you had a very thin foil, particle went through the thin foil, and stripped off the electrons, and went out as a simple particle. “We could sell this.” That’s basically what it came down to. “We could sell this. Somebody might be interested in spending some money to buy one of these things. And the Department of Energy might be interested in buying one of these things.”

Basically, the Department of Energy, or the NSF, or something else in astronomy, having money there to buy a clever device is something you could talk about and get somebody interested in buying one. A million dollars, five-million dollars. You end up spending millions of dollars to buy one of these big accelerators downstairs. And so, yeah, somebody gets an idea and, “We can make this thing bigger.” Instead of something this big, it’s now this big. The accelerator that was in this building beforehand was, in fact, 100 feet long from one end to the other end, just of the accelerator, where you had the ion source, and you injected a beam into it of negative ions. It had to be negative ions.

You injected those in as negative ions, they got to the center, they then went through a stripper foil that stripped off the electrons, and now this thing becomes a positive ion, but now it’s a positive ion in a region of high potential, so it gets accelerated out. So, it gets accelerated in, strips off the electron, gets accelerated as a positive particle out, and that’s the so-called tandem accelerator. That’s where the name comes from, of course. And this was something that they could design and sell. And they, in fact, made– well, I think they’re out of business at this point because there are bigger and better ways to do things nowadays. But for a while, they dominated the field. It was like the first people who made cyclotrons.

The first cyclotrons were little things about this size with particles which went around in circles in a magnetic field. As they went around in circles, they picked up more energy, more energy, more energy, and they were then ejected out because the energy was too large, so they could no longer be held by the magnetic field. They would get ejected out, and then they could do experiments with them. This was how one discovered cyclotrons. That’s the way science moves forward. Somebody tries something different. “Hm. That’s clever. Okay. Build it bigger.” And so, the cyclotron I worked with at Brookhaven, the one I mentioned, it had a base in it that was about this big.

Ahn:

I think it was 60?

Parker:

60 inches, so it was something that was about this size. And when you fired it up, it made enough radiation that you didn’t want to be in there when the thing was running. It was all sealed up, and so forth. Nowadays, those things end up being hundreds of feet in diameter. These are much, much bigger, the devices.

Ahn:

While you were at Wright Lab, how much did you have to know about the accelerator to…

Parker:

This was probably partly also my training as a graduate student at Caltech. There, I had to know how that accelerator worked. And to begin with, it was a single-stage accelerator. Well, it’s like these little things at the entryway if you come in the front door of the Laboratory. They’re about this tall. And the particles get accelerated from an ion source here and down. And I had to know that. I had to know the vacuum that we needed. As a graduate student, you do some pretty damn crazy things. Maybe graduate students are smarter than that these days, but I can remember I was the youngest graduate student on a team of three or four maybe working on an accelerator, and we were having trouble with it. As we gave it more and more energy, it was simply not performing the way it should. So, we then guessed that one of the ways we could do this would be to put somebody inside the accelerator. And that would have been me. And so, I was– “Yeah, I could do that.” Then, we’d fill it back with air.

Ahn:

You actually went into the accelerator?

Parker:

Went into the accelerator to discover what was going on, what was wrong with the accelerator at that point. And I’ve forgotten what the answer was now. But I was quite prepared to go into it.

Ahn:

But you did go in, and you observed and solved the problem?

Parker:

Partly that. That’s really too simple-minded. But we did find a way to figure out– and I’ve forgotten how we figured it out. But we did figure out how to go in there and do something which, in fact, solved the problem. And I don’t remember whether there was a crack in a piece of glass or what the problem was at this point.

Ahn:

The point is, it’s not that you go into the accelerator, you were going to go in when they were having beam.

Parker:

Well, it wasn’t really having beam because, in fact, the accelerator was filled with air, whereas normally, it would be filled with dry nitrogen. So, I wasn’t in any danger. But I can remember when we were in a room that was about the size of this room, and we had another one about the size of this room over there with another accelerator, and a student went into that one. And that one, thank God– mine had a hole about this big on the side that you could crawl into to get into the accelerator. The other one had a hole in the bottom which was about this big. And he went up into it, and I’ve forgotten the whole story, but basically, he stood up into it without really being smart enough to recognize that it still had dry nitrogen in it, and he collapse and fell out. And he came to. “Oh, I shouldn’t have done that, should I?” And so, they then filled it with air, and he went into it and found the problem. But graduate students do some crazy bloody things. He went on to become a nuclear physicist, and last I knew, he was working at a lab somewhere in Virginia. But if I had done that and stuck my head into the tank this way, I would have collapsed into it, and I probably would have died.

Ahn:

Yeah, because there’s nowhere to fall out.

Parker:

There’s no way to fall out, that’s right. But I didn’t. I was just stupid, or lucky, or whatever.

Ahn:

I guess you can say that’s dumb with hindsight, but I do concur, that’s a very possible thing to do.

Parker:

I think that’s right, yes. It is a possible thing to do. Yeah. But it is sort of dumb, and if I had thought about the what-ifs, “Well, that’s not a very good idea.” Anyway, yeah.

Ahn:

Because of how you were trained and how you did experiments, you had to be familiar with the hardware of the accelerator.

Parker:

I think that’s right, and I think that was partly because I had been trained at a place that built accelerators, and therefore, I knew how an accelerator worked.

Ahn:

And while you were working at Wright Lab, or Brookhaven, or other places, did having a knowledge of the hardware or the accelerator…

Parker:

That made a big difference. That was certainly very important. I knew about the way the ion source worked. The ion source is up here on the top of the machine aiming its beam down, and I knew how that worked, and I knew about magnets, and coils, and things like that, and vacuum systems. This whole thing is in a vacuum column, so I knew all of those sort of things. And that’s how I would have learned to design what an accelerator should look like. But I would learn that because there was somebody who had come before me, who had come before him or her, although usually him, [Laugh] and I would have learned all of that from their experience.

Ahn:

And were you involved in the design or upgrading of the accelerator here?

Parker:

Not really. This one was something which was some who was at High Voltage Engineering Corporation, HVEC. That’s a big company. That’s lots of money. Somebody there who is an electrical engineer, has a PhD in electrical engineering, that’s something that that person got a PhD learning how to build these sort of things.

Ahn:

And how was it changing or upgrading the accelerator, the MP tandem to the ESTU? How did you call it?

Parker:

Yeah, ESTU. That was Extended Stretched Tandem whatever, I don’t know what all the letters stood for at that point. But that was something which basically just grew bigger and better. It went from being something that was 80 feet long to 100 feet long, the tubes went from four tubes of this big to 10 tubes of this big sort of thing. And you were just making something bigger and better.

Ahn:

Did your interaction with the technicians or the operators change with the machine?

Parker:

No, I don’t think so. I think that was partly probably also due to the fact that I had learned, as a graduate student, how an accelerator worked and things like that. If I had not learned all that to begin with, I probably would have had to rely more on the techs to do the work. There are people who are better doing that and people who are worse. Allan Bromley, for all that one says about him, was somebody who was very good at talking about designing an accelerator. But in terms of just hands and waving hands, this and that. Whereas there are people who now worry about the actual bits and pieces that come together and make it actually happen. And that’s what the technicians do.

Ahn:

How would you see yourself in Wright Lab in terms of your– you had an almost unique skillset.

Parker:

I do. I think that’s probably a fair enough statement. And I like to think that it was a useful enough set of tools that made me– I think it was such that I probably helped Allan Bromley have a better accelerator than he would have had if he had tried to build it just himself. I came along at the right time for Allan Bromley, as it were. I like to think of it that way. He might not think of it that way, but I like to think of it that way.

Ahn:

If I read the papers on the accelerator, would I be able to sort of tease out …

Parker:

Probably, you would, but some of that would be reading between the lines. You read between the lines a lot.

Ahn:

Yeah, one has to.

Parker:

Exactly.

Ahn:

So, you are somebody who knew accelerators who also had the physics vision and knowledge.

Parker:

Yes, I think that’s right. And I think that was a big advantage that I had.

Ahn:

When I read about or talk with people in particle physics, they talk about this division, accelerator builder, experiment physicist, theorist. And I don’t know if it was true or if it’s how they saw themselves later, that they put some divide between the accelerator physicists and the experimental particle physicists.

Parker:

I think as the collaboration– if you go from being a three-person or five-person collaboration, you get to something which is bigger, which is now the sort of thing that you have at CERN, it means that you have hundreds of people who are responsible just for the magnetic system, and you have hundreds of people who are responsible just for the magnets, for all the different pieces. But now, you need to have somebody who integrates this piece with that piece, to make sure they come together to here, but now they’ve got to interact with this piece and this piece. It becomes a much bigger, more collaborative affair.

Ahn:

Your case, if I tried to make an analogy, you knew the accelerator, you knew the physics, and you could relate to the theory as well.

Parker:

Yeah, but my strength was probably in the first pieces. Yeah. There were people I worked with who were much better theorists than I was, so I was not competing with them, in some sense.

Ahn:

But they’ll be saying that the people they’re working with are much better experimentalists to know what’s going on.

Parker:

Well, of course, and one has this mixture all the time. Yeah.

Ahn:

So, it’s really fair to say that you knew the accelerator, and you knew what kind of experiments would be good, and how to improve the accelerator.

Parker:

Yes, I think that’s fair enough to say, yeah.

Ahn:

Any more? I think you’re being too modest.

Parker:

No, I’m not being modest. I managed to fill an important part of the equation, yeah. But I was part of the equation.

Ahn:

Maybe next time, we can talk about teaching. And I would love to hear more about your course. And can we also talk about your service work to the University and labs?

Parker:

Okay, and I did an enormous amount of service stuff for the University. That was one of my key things, yes. Okay. I’m going to go, and I’ll see you soon.

[End of Recording]

[Begin Recording]

Ahn:

Today is May 13, Monday, 9:20 in the morning. We are back at Wright Lab, and this is the fourth interview session with Peter Parker. Today, I’m going to ask Peter about your course, radiation and the universe. Could you tell me how you came to think of this course and how you put it together?

Parker:

I was already 75 years old when I put all this together. It’s not something that I thought of for decades and decades, no. This is something that I thought, “There’s a lot of interesting stuff in here to read about and to write down about.” And so, these are the notes of a class that I taught for a decade, and I did it several times, but for a decade, and they start with, basically, the discovery of X-rays. When you start in here, in 1895. And so, this is 120 years ago, almost exactly, when Röntgen was doing an experiment in his lab. And his lab was basically in the cellar of his house in Germany. It was a time when leading science was being done in places like Germany and other small countries as well.

And so, he was doing these experiments, and lo and behold, he found this spot on the wall which was glowing, and if he put something in between it, he could see grids, and he could eventually see the hand of his wife with the wedding ring on it, and things of this sort. And how was that getting there? How is the energy getting there? That’s what was going on. And during the next several days, he was going from one experiment to another for the property of these strange rays. What were they? They didn’t know what they were, but they were coming, by tracing patterns and things like that, from the spot on a cathode ray tube, which is a physical tube about this size. Electrons are coming on, and they’re impinging on the glass, and this is in a vacuum, and these things are coming out.

And they’re traveling across the room, over there. How are they getting there? And what are the things that interfere with them? X-rays meant unknown rays. X just meant unknown. And these things were getting all the way to these plates. And as I said the other day, one of the things which he very easily could have done, had he been you or me, would have been to say, “Okay, I’m going to put this in a drawer and get it out of the way. It’s interfering with what I’m trying to study here.” But he didn’t. He went to look to see what are the properties of these rays. And that’s where X-rays begin. And he did all of this in the space of about one month’s time. It’s amazing.

Ahn:

How did you choose the topics you put in here?

Parker:

Oh, just sort of out of the air. But historically, they are topics that are chosen because I found them interesting. The fact that he could, in fact, discover X-rays in this very simple-minded way was a fascinating idea, that he could do that. And so, that’s what made me then begin to study this thing. And over the course of one month’s time, working in his cellar with a lock on the door, so nobody was going to get down and interfere and find his secret, he could in fact say, “Here are these things that I’ve found. And here’s a picture of what this hand looks like when you expose it to these rays.” And everybody said, “Oh my God. What is this?” And then, the doctors saw it and said, “Oh my God, what is this?” And everything basically blossomed from there. That’s where particles came from. Light from the sun came and did this sort of thing. And so, I just found that fascinating, that you could go from just this simple spot on the wall, as it were, to the world that we live in today.

Ahn:

You didn’t have to teach this course, but you wanted to.

Parker:

I wanted to. Yes, I said, “This would be a fun course to teach.” These were freshman, so these are people who came to Yale and didn’t know anything about these things before. At least, a lot of them didn’t know much of this history before. And I’m a historian. If I had to do a lot of things the same, one of the things I would become was a historian. But anyway, I said, “This is something which would be fascinating for these people, men and women, to basically discover that this was how science really began, X-rays, where they came from and how everything else then flowed from them.” And what flowed from them came out to be, well, the whole world that we see around us.

So I found that fascinating, and I thought it was fun to teach. And this was Madam Curie’s thesis and what she had found. This was, then, in 1926 or so, which is now 30 years later. That’s younger than you are. And there were people who were then using paintbrushes to paint numbers onto dials, and then these dials– because at that point, airplanes had come along in that process. They were something which were brand new in 1900. And yet, if you were up in the airplane in the dark, you wanted to see where you were, you had a dial, you had a needle which was glowing in the dark, and that needle moved depending on whether you had 5 amps, or 33 amps, or milliamps, or whatever it was, that moved and told you where you were, and what you were going on, and whether you should shoot down the airplane or not.

All of these things came to life, I guess, in some respects, because the there was a war, the First World War. Then, there was the Second World War. And in this process, there were now whole engineering marvels, which then took these new devices and could then use them to fight the war. And these are the women, this is the book, The Radium Girls. And their job was to take and paint these lines with a very fine paintbrush, paint the thin lines. Like, the twos and the threes, and make these things. And then, they glowed in the dark. And that’s, in some sense, a miracle. Here’s something that glows in the dark.

Well, it is a miracle, in some sense. And a lot of these people died. They died because they got poisoning from the radioactive material that they were painting with. And when they wet the end of the brush on their tongue, it got into their teeth, and some of them actually used it then to decorate their teeth and things like that. Well, this is radioactive material. You’re getting it into your system, and that’s not good. And it took people a while to kind of recognize that, but that’s why the skeleton is here, it’s because these are people who were doing dangerous things with this new material.

Ahn:

This course combined physics– well, you were telling the history of radiation in some way, but it was also scientifically rigorous.

Parker:

Yes, absolutely. Everything that was in there was stuff which was based on science, based on physics, for that matter.

Ahn:

Do you recall what assignments you gave to students and their reactions?

Parker:

This was, in some sense, a summary course. It was an introductory course. It basically didn’t assume a lot on their part. But one of the first assignments that I gave them, and I had to find things for them to do, was to then go out, and get yourself a– how do these rays behave? If you go around a corner, what happens? Do these rays go around a corner? And one group of students, two or three students, probably, and there were probably 30 students in the course altogether, actually went down to the railroad station, took a train to New York City, got themselves in a cab, and then had the cab drive them around the corner. And how these rays then behaved as the car went around the corner and the fact that the rays coming out bent as they went around the corner. And they had to learn all that. Those are the kind of properties that Röntgen would have found when he did this in 1897 or something like that.

Ahn:

And one of the things I found surprising and appreciated a lot is, in high school and in undergrad, there’s a very standard way of learning until we get to today’s picture of the nuclear atom.

Parker:

That’s right.

Ahn:

And here, I found it really interesting that you start with the X-rays, and then you talk of things I only got to know much later. Like the radium girls, I got to know much later. That was really fascinating because the radium girls, it really ties science, physics with what’s happening around us in society, and also the medical application. I got to learn later how Ernest Lawrence was really pushing for this, also partially due to getting funding as well as trying to see if this can help humanity.

Parker:

Well, that’s right, yes.

Ahn:

It really merges physics into what’s happening around us. So, I really appreciated it a lot, and I found it very interesting you included these chapters.

Parker:

Okay. And in some sense, the organization of this was simply– it’s a history book.

Ahn:

Yeah, but you chose these topics. You could’ve chosen not to include the radium girls or the nuclear medical applications.

Parker:

Oh, yeah, but I found that fascinating, though. I found the radium girls to be a fascinating topic. You’ve got people doing this thing, and they’re dying. Why are they dying? And you then discover that, in fact, it’s something that’s getting into their blood, it’s getting into their hearts and doing things to them which is killing them. Anything like that becomes fascinating to me.

Ahn:

I read about Madam Curie dying from the exposure to radioactive materials. And that’s about it. That’s the example my teachers and the textbooks I read used, Madam Curie. Not the radium girls. Because they were not scientists, they were just working-class people. I was interested that you included them.

Parker:

I guess I found the radium girls as being a fascinating image of people dying from having too much of this. There were doctors in the teens, 1907 or 1910, something like that, who were using radiation as a way to try to understand what was going on inside the bones in your hand. And people were dying because they were getting too much radiation. It was getting into their bloodstreams. They were getting radioactivity in their bloodstreams, and it was killing them. And then, these were deadly rays. I don’t know how many movies have been written about the deadly rays of radioactivity.

Ahn:

And what about the nuclear medical application?

Parker:

I would bring over this woman from the medical school because she was a friend of mine and tell her that I was teaching this class, and I would be interested, if she was willing, to come and talk to the class for an hour and a half once or twice in the early weeks of the class about the dangers of radiation. And she was very happy to do that.

Ahn:

Did you have some principle in what topics you would decide to put in?

Parker:

Me, I guess. And I mean that literally. I could decide that I wanted to talk about something like this, and so I would go and read a book about it. And that’s why after each one of these chapters, there are references. And so, you’d go, and you’d read about this in the books, and these would talk to you. And some of these are old books, some of these are brand-new books. And you simply go and read that, and you find enough to make an interesting seminar. I’m going to sit there and talk for an hour and a half or two hours, and I could then just talk what I wanted to and ask questions, get them to read something, get them to write papers about things of that sort. How do you bury radioactive waste? That’s a very key issue. How do you bury it? Somewhere in here, there’s a whole chapter, or two maybe.

Ahn:

Not everybody, not all physicists would be interested in that question. They might pursue other questions. But you were clearly interested, in this case, in how do you take care of the radioactive waste.

Parker:

Right. I guess I thought that was an interesting– oh, here, that’s what’s left of Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped. Simply just flat. There was one building left standing here, but basically, they killed 100,000 people, of that order. And I found that fascinating. Some of them just died horribly. But boy, it ended the War. And I found that fascinating enough that I felt that it was worthwhile making this into a weapon. There were people, physicists, my colleagues 10 years younger than I was, not much younger, who would come down, go to a place, and say, “Suppose we put all this together into a bomb. What would it do?” And lo and behold, there’s Hiroshima. 100,000 people just decimated. You’ve got to look at that and just shake your head and say, “My God.”

And it’s only been used twice, and once was at Nagasaki, and three, four days later, whatever, once was at Hiroshima. And some people now say, that having been done, “No more. We will not ever do this again to the human race.” On the other hand, we have thousands of these weapons alive at the moment, ready to be bombed, dropped on cities, and results like this happen. And everybody is basically afraid of getting into the business of, “Suppose I dropped a bomb tomorrow on the city of Moscow,” or wherever. But then, lo and behold, three bombs come over, and they land on cities in the United States. And lo and behold, then, 20 bombs come out of here and land in cities in China. The whole world dissolves, as it were, just disappears. The world becomes very different.

And at some point, one interesting topic, which I never got into, but would be interesting to do, is, what’s the next generation of dominant animals on this planet. They were dinosaurs to begin with 100 million years ago. They were dinosaurs, they were T-rexes. Who would ever imagine having something like the three-horned animal out in front of the Peabody Museum? That’s an animal that evolved, that developed, and fought in these things. And at some point, along came something that wiped them out, and it turned out to be probably an asteroid that came in and struck the Earth in the neighborhood of Central America. Basically, wiped out all of these animals. Birds are an example of something that did survive that, but it’s related to dinosaurs. They’re dinosaurs, in some sense.

What’s the next animal? There are interesting science-fiction stories that talk about what happens when an interplanetary vessel is touring the universe, trying to save civilizations and comes to the Earth because it has a warning that its central star is about to become a nova exploding that will wipe out– there’s a planet there that’s got civilized people on it and will wipe them out. What happens to those people? And they then go off in search of these people, and lo and behold, they discover them. And they have built a fleet of ships, have recognized this ahead of time, left the area of the solar system, and are now going off to another place to live. It’s pure imagination, but that’s the sort of thing that people talk about.

Ahn:

For the nuclear energy, you also talk about the environmental aspect. Is that something you were interested in?

Parker:

It’s one of these things, which is, as soon as you have nuclear weapons, you’ve got the residuals of nuclear weapons. When the weapon explodes, it then contaminates. Here’s Hiroshima, it’s all wiped out. And that’s one single simple weapon. Suppose you threw down 100 of these things. What does the Earth look like at that point? Good question. Its not a very pretty picture. What comes along next? What’s the next generation of species? Not all the animals died, even when the asteroid struck in Central America. Not all the species died. 90% of animals got wiped out, but there were another 5, 10, or 20% that still survived.

And the same thing would happen after we have a nuclear war. There were be some that survive. These were things which were buried under the ground and protected from the radiation or things that were down deep in the ocean and protected from radiation. They’ll survive, and they will eventually develop into the next human beings. Well, they won’t be human beings anymore, but they’ll be the next objects that now rule the universe. Rule the Earth, anyway. What will they look like? You have people who write science-fiction stories about these things.

Ahn:

You could have looked at other parts surrounding nuclear energy or nuclear physics. But yeah, I was impressed by how much of the environmental impact you put into the textbook. I loved it.

Parker:

Well, it’s whatever fascinated me. Nobody gave me a list of things I had to include. But that’s fascinating. There was this giant radio telescope in Puerto Rico. It now had an earthquake, and it’s been broken and no longer works. But here was something which made some startling discoveries. Well, okay, now that one’s gone, but we’ll make a bigger one, a better one next time. Well, we’ll see what we learn from that. Yeah. No, the world is a living place. There’s a book somewhere. This one there. It’s in two different languages.

Ahn:

French and English.

Parker:

There is an English version, and there’s a French version, I guess. And somewhere in there, they were discovering that samples which were coming to a place that was discovering uranium, looking for sources of uranium in this book.

Ahn:

I’m trying to find it. Here. You also included that.

Parker:

Okay, right. The Natural Reactor. This is Oklo.

Ahn:

This one, the natural reactor, I didn’t know at all.

Parker:

Neither did I.

Ahn:

But you came to know this because you’re a nuclear physicist.

Parker:

I came to know this because somewhere along the line, somebody told me that this is fascinating. And I said, “Never heard of it.” And so, I dug up the book, and put the book out there, and read about it, and said, “My God, here we go.” Somewhere in here was the– when they were studying sources of uranium for use in weapons, for example, mainly, I suppose, but I guess for any sort of thing, they were then getting samples from various places, and one place they were looking for it was in Africa. And when they look at the stuff coming from Africa, somebody has to sit there, and analyze it, and discover how much of uranium-235 is in here, how much of uranium-238 is in here, how much of this, and how much of that.

And some of these samples were coming back, and they were not quite right. and did that mean that somebody was going through and taking pieces of it out to be used in dangerous ways that we didn’t know about. Somebody was at this mining site and then had found ways to in fact then sort out the more dangerous– because not all uranium is dangerous. Some of it is more so than others. And they could find and take it out, and they would then basically be enriching the uranium into another form. And so, there was a person in France doing this, and they were getting samples from this place, and when they studied the samples, they discovered that, “Samples from this place had these particular properties, but then a sample from the river gorge next to it had a different set of properties.”

What was going on? Then, somebody has to decide, is somebody taking the bad stuff out, or the good stuff out, whichever way you want to look at it, and then using it, keeping it for weapons? Is somebody now taking out the bad stuff and using it in a separate way? And when they did this, they discovered that, in fact, it was the fact that nature, in that time period, was in fact doing a separation process, was in fact getting rid of some of this and keeping some of the other stuff of it.

Ahn:

When did you come to know of Oklo?

Parker:

Oh, in the course of studying for this course. Somebody said, “Well, look this up,” so I went and got the book out of the library and began to read about it. And I thought, “Oh my God. Oh my God, really?”

Ahn:

So, you didn’t attend the 1975 meeting.

Parker:

No. Not a clue. And yet, I could have known that. But the fact is, the world is full of so much information, that you just can’t get at it all. It wasn’t that somebody said, “Here, take this book and read it. This is important.” Nobody did that, but somebody might’ve done that.

Ahn:

It’s also admirable that you could have just included things you were expert at, but you included new things that fascinated you.

Parker:

Well, yeah. Partly because I found that once I learned about them, I became an expert in them, in a small way.

Ahn:

Do you recall some of your students’ reactions to your lectures?

Parker:

Oh, some of them were bored as hell. [Laugh]

Ahn:

Really?

Parker:

Others, however, went on to become nuclear physicists. There’s a book, which you might have come across, which is Paddle to the Sea. It’s a story of a person living in Canada along the border with Lake Superior somewhere, and it’s winter, and he’s got nothing better to do, so he’s twiddling. One year, he decides to make himself a canoe. And so, he makes himself a canoe, say, some size like this, and puts a person in it, does all that work to it. And in the end, come springtime, he’s living up in these mountains. He puts it up there in the mountains on a bunch of rocks like this. And then, he goes up and looks to see what happens to it. And one day, in fact, the canoe tips forward and runs downhill.

And this story is a story of somebody– it runs downhill, runs into Lake Superior, and over the course of 5, 6, 10 years, it wanders through various parts of– the Great Lakes are absolutely amazing things. And it wanders and gets picked up here and gets picked up there. And eventually, some of the people who pick it up look at it and say, “Oh, this is pretty interesting.” And they begin to write messages on the bottom of it. And this person that I had in class had said something about this in class one day. She said, “Yeah, he’s [the author Holling] my third cousin’s uncle,” or something. It’s a remote person. Nobody that she knew, but somebody she knew of, anyway.

And the thing goes down through the Great Lakes and comes out, and in the last chapter of the book, the guy is down there– this is now the kid who was the little Indian. He was 6 years old or something when he made the canoe to begin with. Maybe not even 6. But he’s now 15 or 20 years old, and he’s picking stuff up at a dock, and somebody says, “Oh, did you see this?” And somebody hands off to somebody else this thing, and here’s a picture of his canoe. And it had gone across, down the canal, through the Great Lakes, and the author of the book is Holling C. Holling. But it’s a yarn. And this thing had gone through the sea, and the guy with the canoe looked at it, and the guy who was sitting on the canoe says, “Oh, who was that guy you were talking to?”

And he said, “Oh, he was an Indian.” And out in the lake is this guy paddling across the lake, and it, of course, is the image that was in the canoe that went down the hillside. It’s something like about this big, goes down the hill and off into the woods. And yeah, the world goes around. Fascinating story. Fascinating story. And I can remember getting that, and I must’ve read the book three, four, five, six, 10 times at various times. But you find things like that, and then they fascinate you, and then you get interested in beginning to write more about them or dig more out about them.

Ahn:

Thank you for telling more about the course. I think the materials in there are very special, how a physicist crafted this.

Parker:

They tried to be, let’s put it that way. They tried to be. All of them are real. But then, they tried to be– you could write a whole book about nothing but the period of 133 to 134 million years ago. This was what happened. And it would be a very complicated description of what happened in that million years, or 250,000 years, or something, the things that happened. And for a historian, it would be fascinating.

Ahn:

Moving on to your service work. You have to really guide me because I don’t know what you did.

Parker:

I don’t know how I got started in it. Probably fairly early on when I was here, somebody asked if I would serve. Faculty, especially junior faculty, and when I was here, I was 30 years old. Can you imagine being 30 years old? That’s just incredibly young. And would I serve on the committee? “I suppose, yes.” And so, there were times when I would say yes, I would serve on that committee, or I would do this, or do that. And somewhere along the line, and I’m not sure what all that history was, I began to do not one or two committees, but now maybe three committees, or some more extended committees that I began to work on. And then, of course, as you get older, you get asked to do more committees. And pretty soon, you’re doing six or seven committees. Now, I’m exaggerating a bit, but I’m doing more committees. And as you get older, you begin to chair committees. You begin to become the chair of committees of things. And I won’t even try to guess what different committees that I was on.

Ahn:

But can you name a few? I’m in the dark of what kind of committees existed. [Laugh]

Parker:

They could be almost anything, in the end. I remember being on a committee which was to pick a new dean of something or other. And I don’t even remember what it was a dean of. But I was chair of a committee that wanted to worry about that. And I couldn’t even begin to sit down and paw through the number of committees that I had been on. More than useful. More than useful. I was simply on a lot of committees. The Sexual Harassment Grievance Board is clearly something which I became a member– I was here 50 years. That’s a long time.

When I first got put on it, I was probably– here’s the committee, and here’s the older people, and here’s me down here. And the next year, and the next year, and eventually, I get so that I’m a bigger, more important part of that committee, and eventually maybe a chair of that committee. And some of those were things like Sexual Harassment Grievance Board, or there was some other committee that I can remember going to a going-away party for somebody, and I don’t even remember who it was and where she was going at this point. But she was leaving, and I said, “You don’t remember me, but”– “Oh, Peter Parker, of course I remember you. How could I have ever survived doing that committee work without you?”

And I thought, “Oh, wow, okay. So, I did do some good.” And I don’t remember what the committee was at this point. But this was somebody who had been dean, and I remember going to somebody else who was leaving, and I remember saying to him, “How did things go? You did this and that.” And he said to me, “The one decision that I made that I wish I could unmake was the decision that you came and argued with me about.” And I’ve even forgotten what the decision was about at this point. But it was something that he was there, and he was going to let this person get away with what they had done. He was going to let it pass by because it was going to be too much of a headache. And he said, “I should have made the other decision.”

Ahn:

What you were pushing for?

Parker:

He should have done what I wanted him to do. But it had passed by at that point. But these were university-wide committees, they were committees to the Yale College, they were things of this sort. And I can remember being on them. Well, I can remember being on them, and I can remember spending sometimes what was far more time on them than I really wanted to spend on them. But it was useful. It was important time.

Ahn:

Were you representing the Wright Lab or the physics department? Or were you there just as a college faculty?

Parker:

As all of these sort of things. At one point, I was director of this Lab. But then, at other times, I was director of some other group within the Lab. I can remember talking to somebody, and I don’t even remember what the issue was now, but a faculty member, something had happened, and he had made a threat to the student. And we had talked to the student, and was the student prepared to basically go to court, as it were, to try to settle that issue. I’m sure it was a young woman. The woman said no, this just wasn’t worth her time, that she understood that the faculty had looked at it and supported what she had done. But she wasn’t going to take the time and go to court to hear it out. And that’s something which does happen. Because there is a difference. There’s a faculty member who’s doing something, and there’s a student down here who’s doing something that’s either opposing what a male student or female student wants to do, but does this person have more clout than this person does? And the answer is, this one does. It isn’t like you’re taking two people like this and comparing them.

Ahn:

Yeah, there’s a big power imbalance.

Parker:

Exactly. And so, there were certainly times like that where my power balance was not the dominant power balance.

Ahn:

What do you do in a committee? Why is a committee formed, for what things?

Parker:

A committee is formed because something has been going on that you don’t like, that somebody has complained about a faculty member who has misbehaved to a student, has rubbed a student’s back or has done something which you look at and say, “Shouldn’t ever have done that.” But now, what do you do with it? I can remember going to one professor actually in this lab who was teaching a course and had said something, and a student had come in with a complaint, the faculty member had done X, Y, Z. And I said, “Okay, thank you,” to the student. I said, “I will now go, and I will talk to the faculty member about this.” And I talked to him, and he was a senior faculty member, and I said, “Da-da-da-da.”

And he said, “Oh, no, I would never have done that.” “I have somebody who’s come in here and sworn to me that this is what happened.” “No, no, no, no, no.” I’m sure that he did, but I said, “What I’m going to do is to take this student out of your course so you’re not going to be the one assigning the grade to this particular student. Somebody else will now read this student’s paper.” I think it was a woman, but that wasn’t the important aspect of it. “But somebody else will read this paper and assign the grade for this course.” That’s the way it was.

Ahn:

You, as a committee member, get to decide.

Parker:

This, again, is something where, as a committee member, you get to make a decision. When you make that decision, does somebody higher up the plane say, “No, no, no, that’s not right. It should be done that way”? If it goes that way, that’s not a happy situation, and I’m less likely to do something like that again. But anyway, I went back, and I remember the case, I said, “There’s a student in this department who could read your paper and give you a fair evaluation of the work being done in the paper. And I will simply take the paper, and give it to this person, and ask them to grade it as if they were the professor doing it.” And I told the dean or whoever it was that was what I was going to do, and they looked at me and said, “Yes.” But that’s something which, as you work from down here to up here on this scale, you don’t have it down here somewhere. But as you get farther and farther up the scale, somebody looks at you and says, “Yes, what you’re saying is the right thing to do.”

Ahn:

So, this happened when you were a chair of the committee?

Parker:

I was probably the chair of the committee, yeah.

Ahn:

How many people are typically in a committee?

Parker:

Five or six. Relatively small number. Yeah. And I don’t even remember whether this was something which simply went to the whole committee, or whether it was something which somebody came to me and said, “Here’s the problem. See what you can do with it.” So, I read the paper and read what the complaint was, and I came back, and I asked the student about the story, then I went and talked to the faculty member and got his baloney. I’m being critical here. [Laugh] And I said, “Okay, I’ll find somebody else to grade your paper.” And the student said, “Thank you.” And the professor grumbled, was unhappy, but what could he do. Was he going to take it to the dean, or to the provost, or to somebody higher up than that? And I think the answer was no, he was not.

Ahn:

Where would the student make the initial complaint or raise the issue?

Parker:

Probably would have made the complaint to some dean or somebody. There are committees. If a university or college has one thing, it has committees. It has committees, which are in charge of committees, which has committees which are in charge– just more, and more, and more committees. And so, if you’ve got a complaint, you go and talk to somebody a nudge up.

Ahn:

Oh, I see. So, there was already a committee, and you were the chair, and the student came to complain.

Parker:

I was the chair of the committee, yes.

Ahn:

I see. So, it’s not a case where committees are formed case by case, there’s already a committee in place.

Parker:

There’s already a committee in place, yes. Yes. And that could be a committee like the committee you’re talking about. Or something else like that, yes.

Ahn:

So you sat on those committees for the college?

Parker:

Yes.

Ahn:

And you said there were a lot of committees. Did you also sit on some committees that were only for the physics department or only for Wright Lab?

Parker:

Oh, yes, yes. That would be true, yeah. I was director of the Lab for a while, so I was basically the head of all of this sort of stuff down here.

Ahn:

What other service work did you do?

Parker:

Well, the committees go around, and they’re making hiring decisions. You’re now up for promotion, so you’re going up one more step in the ladder. And we have an opening. We then put out a notice that goes into a journal of physics or something like that, and people write in and apply for the job, and there may be five, six, eight, 10 people who apply. It depends on the job, of course. And then, your job is now to find the best one. And one of the things you’ll do is say, “Okay, come and give us a seminar. Come and talk to us about the physics, for example.” This would be somebody working in this lab. “Talk to us about the physics that you’re doing.” So, you do that. But that’s sort of the way it is. And then, the committee will sit around and have a discussion about, “We’ve heard three or four people, and of these, these two seem to stand out most. And we think that this is the one that we would make the offer to,” so you end up making an offer to that person. And if you’re lucky, that person says yes. If you’re not lucky, that person says, “No, I’ve got a better offer over there,” so he goes there, and you make your offer to the second person. And maybe some years, you don’t get anybody.

Ahn:

So there are hiring committees.

Parker:

Yes, hiring committees is a big deal. Yes.

Ahn:

So, you served in those?

Parker:

Yes. Everybody sooner or later serves on hiring committees, yes.

Ahn:

Were there also committees to do with accelerator usage or research?

Parker:

Oh, there would be certainly technical committees, which might be, “What’s the next step we should make in upgrading the performance of the accelerator? Should we be putting in X, Y, Z? Or should we be doing the following?” And there, the technician who’s in charge of the accelerator would be one of the key people on that committee. And you, as a faculty member, would be a key person on that committee, too.

Ahn:

For Wright Lab, would only Wright Lab people be involved?

Parker:

Not necessarily. And I think that would depend on what the decision was. It might be that there’s a committee in the department that says, “We need a person to take position X over here,” and you might say, “Okay, we have a guy who will do it for us.” And somebody else would come along and say, “No, we have a position. We want to take the position and do person Y instead.” And so, we then have to listen to somebody come along and tell us what were the advantages of what X would do versus what Y would do. In fact, there can certainly be competitions between certain people, yeah.

Ahn:

I see. Was there some friction between what Wright Lab wanted versus what the physics department or the larger college wanted?

Parker:

Absolutely. We are one of four or five different groups in the department. And so, one of those decisions has to be, “Where does a new hire come from? How many new hires does Yale College have in physics? Can it be this person or not?” Each position costs money.

Ahn:

Was there friction regarding funding from the department, or the college, or the University?

Parker:

It’s all the same thing, I think. I’m not sure I would say that’s something which– that’s between the chair of the department, typically, let’s say, and maybe the dean of that particular piece of the college.

Ahn:

And I heard that you gave the beam time allocation.

Parker:

I frequently was the person. And I think that’s a question of seniority. When I first came onboard, I handed in my request for beam time along with everybody else, and somebody else said, “Okay, you get this much time.” I can remember at Caltech as a graduate student saying, “Okay, well, I want two days there, then I’d like another day over here.” By the time it was all done, you kind of saw how the beam time was being fragmented around. Here, it’s probably bigger pieces of time being talked about. But somewhere along the line, somebody has to say, “I need a week to do this,” and somebody’s going to say, “But if you get a week to do this, what am I supposed to be doing during that time?”

And so, then, somebody else gets some time out of that week or maybe from a different week, and you may be taking up five or six weeks at once. And you may be deciding, “Okay, we’ll have a week where this person does this, and another week where this– well, that’s three days does something, and there’s two days on the end, which we’ll give to so-and-so.” There gets to be somebody who has to be “wise” enough to keep everybody happy. And that’s not always an easy thing to do. I think that when I started off, I was simply one of several people looking for beam time. Later on, I was the person making the decisions about that beam time.

Ahn:

Did you do that in a committee? Or is that a one-person job?

Parker:

I think to begin with, it was probably a committee. I don’t remember whether that was a committee in the end. Certainly, in the end, it was not a committee, it was me. But you’re not doing this as one person or as one group, somebody making the decisions. You’ve got to have, “Well, okay, over the next five weeks, we’ve got to have the following.” And list things. And next week, “Okay, we’ll do three weeks of the following.” Time just gets divided, and you try to divide it smoothly enough so that everybody stays happy with it.

Ahn:

Did you feel comfortable assigning beam time by yourself in the end?

Parker:

Of course.

Ahn:

Is it because you knew this lab…

Parker:

It’s because either I was the chair, or I was one down from the chair. And if I said, “Okay, we’ve got the following beam time allocations,” the chair would say, “Fine.” And then, I would say, “Okay, good.” And so, the next time around, I would then be the one who said, “This is the following beam time assignments,” and he would say, “Fine.”

Ahn:

What’s the running principle or priorities in assigning beam time?

Parker:

Trouble is, there are so many different priorities. It’s not like a big accelerator experiment. These are experiments where we’re talking about three or four days, or at most, a week, something of that sort. It’s a relatively small amount of beam time. And if somebody gets an extra day this week because of the experiments that he or she is doing, that’s the way it goes. And somebody else gets an alignment of beam relative to that.

Ahn:

I was going to ask about users versus Wright Lab people requesting beam time. Where you assigning beam times from roughly what time period?

Parker:

We would be assigning beam time– outside users are certainly one of the people that get considered for it, and if somebody else on the outside wants beam time, that’s one of the ones they have to submit, and they get considered in the same way that people on the inside get considered for beam time.

Ahn:

Did you get many outsiders?

Parker:

Not so many. Most of the people who were using beam time here were people who were in house.

Ahn:

So, that was true for both accelerators, the first one, the MP, and then the ESTU?

Parker:

These are all really the same accelerator, they’re just different generations of them.

Ahn:

What other service work did you do?

Parker:

I think those pretty much cover all of them. There are several different kinds of service work that you do, which cover all the way from Sexual Harassment Grievance Board discussions, to times which have to do with beam fairness and things of that sort, to hiring and firing decisions. These are all things which different committees get a whack at. And different people get different weights of input into these things.

Ahn:

What are some of the difficulties you face in being in committees or doing service work?

Parker:

Time. Literally, time. Do you have enough time to do this? “Okay, we’re going to meet next week at this same time, and we want to spend two hours talking about this conflict, which exists in here.” It’s basically just time. I remember one group that I was chair of a committee for had to do with hiring. And I’ve forgotten what it was now, it was a hiring problem. And I can remember getting up at the faculty committee. These all eventually go back to the faculty. And I remember getting up and saying some discussion, which had to do with whether somebody from the outside or in the department had some prerogative to get more time in this slot.

And I remember having this discussion, and the faculty voted in favor of what I had said. And one of the people on the committee, or maybe she wasn’t even on the committee, but somebody not on the committee came out to me afterwards and said, “I have a friend at,” say, Princeton, I don’t know where, “who will be very happy to hear that decision.” And I’ve forgotten what the decision was or what it was about. But those are the sort of things which do affect people coming. Well, if people want to come, here are the rules of the university that you’re applying to come to.

Ahn:

Did the topics you looked over in your committees change over the decades?

Parker:

Oh, sure, they do, yeah.

Ahn:

So it’s reflecting what’s happening.

Parker:

What’s happening in the world. We went through an issue, Yale, at one point, had a very active Air Force recruitment group on campus. And I don’t even remember when it was, but the faculty had a vote, and people put up their hands and voted yes, or no, or whatever. And I don’t remember what the issue was, but in the end, the issue was, were we going to keep that group on campus or not, and the answer was, we were not going to keep the group on campus. And the vote was such-and-such to such-and-such. Now, 20 years later, the issue had come up again, and the question was, would we keep such a group on campus, and the answer was yes, more people voted in favor of keeping that group on campus. And I don’t even know at the moment, but I’m going to think that there is a group on campus, which involves Navy or Air Force junior officers on campus. And I don’t even know which way that decision has gone at this point.

Ahn:

Was it part of your duty to meet with students or the person raising the issue or bringing up an issue as part of your committee work?

Parker:

One of the things that I had to do involved talking to students who were, say, bringing a complaint against a faculty member, for example. And it was one of these things you had to be very careful with. I would meet with this person. But a good question, and you had to be able to do it fairly enough so that you were respecting the faculty member’s prerogative to make a decision and the student’s prerogative to raise the question about the decision. And I can remember there being such issues coming up, but I don’t remember particular ones at this point.

Ahn:

Independent of somebody or a group bringing up an issue to the committee, would there be regular meetings with student bodies?

Parker:

Probably not. Although, that doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be. But the answer is probably not because there are just too damned many committees.

Ahn:

Was being in all these committees affecting your work?

Parker:

Oh, yeah, they take time.

Ahn:

So, you were sacrificing your research and teaching.

Parker:

I was sacrificing research or whatever it was that I was supposedly doing here.

Ahn:

I’m getting the impression that many people appreciated your work very much.

Parker:

I think that they did. I like to think that they did. That’s one of the things I hope they appreciated, the service that I was providing for that, yes.

Ahn:

As part of your service duties, you’re also director of undergraduate studies for the physics department.

Parker:

For the physics department, yes. That’s right.

Ahn:

What do you do in that position?

Parker:

That’s somebody who basically shares decisions about who teaches what courses, although again, that’s something which you– I’d have discussions with you or with different people, “What would you teach about thinking this course next year?” And if somebody’s happy to do that, “Good. Why don’t you go ahead and do that?” sort of thing. There’s a lot of collaboration that goes along in making a good department work. You keep enough people in the department happy with what they’re doing, and then they tend to do a good job at it.

And so, if it’s a question of, “Do I want somebody teaching wave mechanics who doesn’t want to teach wave mechanics? Then, probably, I should find some other job for that person to do and somebody else to teach wave mechanics.” And the other thing that you’re doing, you’re making sure that there’s a way of dividing the responsibility for a particular set of students among the various faculty members that are present. And that’s an important thing so that you’re making sure that some undergraduate has somebody to work with and look after the experiment they’re doing.

Ahn:

So, you’re looking after the teaching on their research.

Parker:

You’re looking after responsibilities. Yes, right. We had one year two students died in the department. There was a young woman who died, she was overworking on a lathe by herself at night. Long hair, got that caught in the lathe, and she strangled. Saddest damn thing in the world. And she was a bright, good student. And then, we had a student who I think committed suicide, and I don’t remember his death particularly. But this young woman who died, it was pretty gross. This was while I was director of undergraduate studies. What do you say? You say, “Oh my God.” Now, that’s not that people haven’t died doing experiments before. Of course they have. But it’s never a happy thing, especially with somebody young, and bright, and exciting, and moving on.

Ahn:

Did you see changes in courses or things you had to worry about or take care of over the years?

Parker:

Yes, there are courses now– I don’t know that we teach a course in wave mechanics the way we used to. I don’t know that we do. I remember one year when I was here early on, I taught, for a year or two, a course in wave mechanics. Which was a fun course, the math was fun, and it’s an exciting course to teach. But there were other courses to be taught as well. What can you say? Sometimes comes up a hassle about how much quantum mechanics do you teach. Should you be teaching three semesters of quantum mechanics or just two? And there are things like this that get taught. There are a couple of ways that quantum mechanics can be taught, the question is, who does that better? Is it a theorist who does it better or an experimentalist who does it better? Some combination of those two things. And so, the director of undergraduate studies is somebody who looks after all of these pieces.

Ahn:

And Yale admitted women in undergraduate studies in ‘69.

Parker:

I think that’s right. I don’t remember now.

Ahn:

And you said it took a few years for them to appear.

Parker:

It took a few years. It wasn’t all of a sudden that there was a long line waiting to get in to take physics. I think there were probably three, four, five years, and finally, we had a woman who came who wanted to major in physics. But it was two, three, or four years before that happened. Nowadays, I don’t know what the statistics are at the moment, but I think that there are as many women as there are men majoring in physics.

Ahn:

Did the change in demographics, like race and gender, in the physics undergraduate makeup affect duties of the undergraduate studies director?

Parker:

I don’t think so. Not that I was aware of, anyway.

Ahn:

Do you know the rough number of years you were the director of undergraduate studies?

Parker:

I would have to go back and see. It’s probably 15 or 20, but I don’t know. It’s certainly several years, yes. And I enjoyed it. Working with young, vibrant students, male or female, was something which I enjoyed doing. Again, it was one of these things that I was happy to do. It meant that, in some sense, I was an advisor to these students. And that is an important feature. I would say that one of my responsibilities as being the undergraduate director was being the advisor to the students who were majoring, where they might be going next, for example.

Ahn:

Thank you.

[End]