Russell Alan Hulse

[PART 1]

DeVorkin:

This is an oral history interview with Dr. Russell Alan Hulse, with his wife, or partner.

Kuhlman:

Wife, yeah.

DeVorkin:

Wife. Good. [Laughs] Okay, because I know that was a question when you were interviewed by Marcia [Bartusiak] back in 1998. Jeanne Kuhlman, and then Kristen Frederick-Frost from [National Museum of] American History, and Roger Sherman from National Museum of American History. And I’m David DeVorkin, emeritus from the National Air and Space Museum.

Hulse:

Let me just ask you a question. You said Marcia Bartusiak talked to us?

DeVorkin:

That’s right.

Hulse:

That name rings a bell. I think I remember that.

DeVorkin:

Yeah. She wrote Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony. She interviewed you in 1998 and has a nice solid section in her book on your work with [Joseph] Joe Taylor.

Hulse:

Right.

DeVorkin:

Oh, I just stuck it over here. Just a second. Here it is. Is that [familiar]?

Kuhlman:

No, that’s not familiar to me. At least, I don’t remember the front of it.

Hulse:

I don’t remember that cover.

DeVorkin:

This is a paperback version. [Laughs]

Kuhlman:

Ah, okay.

Hulse:

Yeah. What I’m thinking is, there was a book, Was Einstein Right?

DeVorkin:

Oh, yeah.

Hulse:

And that was not by Marcia.

DeVorkin:

Let’s move in here. My understanding is this will be a two-hour session, and we will have two more of them in the next few days. And this session will be to fill in information on your early life. Marcia asked you interesting questions, important questions, about that, but I have quite a few more. Then we want to move into the pulsar work and your training, of course, and also again fill in things. Happy to say that Marcia’s interview will be at the American Institute of Physics and available online just like this one will be eventually, so that will help get it all out. [In] this session, we will fill in some questions about your early life, your family, training, your pulsar work, and then we’ll move on to your postgraduate years and your switch to plasma physics. The next session, the beginning will be plasma physics, and then we will get into your outreach work.

At the end of the second session, we’ll move into the outreach work that you’ve done, find out more about what stimulated you, and then the third session will continue that.

Hulse:

Can I just add one thing when we’re doing in terms of a general overall context? I don’t know whether you know I have Parkinson’s Disease now. At the moment, I think I’m pretty fairly still. I don’t know if [I am from] your perception, but at times, it’s nothing I can control.

DeVorkin:

Understood.

Hulse:

There may be moments where I’ll start moving around.

DeVorkin:

Yeah.

Hulse:

And I’m sorry, I can’t do anything about that.

DeVorkin:

One of my closest colleagues experienced it and was that way in his life, and I’m very familiar with it.

Hulse:

Okay.

DeVorkin:

Absolutely, we fully understand. Well, let’s start with your full name: Russell Alan Hulse. And to appreciate that, let’s start with the full names of your mother and your father. Give us their brief life profiles, just so that we can appreciate your heritage. Family background, levels of education of your mother and father, and possibly other people in the family who are significant to you.

Hulse:

So, shall I start?

DeVorkin:

Oh, of course.

Hulse:

Let’s see. My mother was Betty Joan Wedemeyer — was her maiden name. And my father’s name is Alan Earle Hulse. The “Earle” — actually, there’s sort of a debate in her family as to whether there was an “E” after the “Earl” in the middle name.

Kuhlman:

“Earle.”

DeVorkin:

Where were they born and raised? Give me a little bit of the background of the Hulse family.

Hulse:

I had a sister, too. Elizabeth Allyn Hulse.

DeVorkin:

Are you the oldest?

Hulse:

I’m the oldest. Yeah.

DeVorkin:

So [what are] the birthdates of your mother, father, you, your sister, and where you were born, and where your father and mother came from, a little bit of the family origins.

Hulse:

The family origin, if we go from what we’ve learned from genealogy, it turns out there was a fellow who wrote a genealogy of the Wedemeyers, I think it was.

Kuhlman:

Right. Yeah.

Hulse:

And then other information that we looked up just recently, I think it was a genetic [test] what was it, 23 and Me or something?

Kuhlman:

Yeah, 23 and Me.

Hulse:

So, I’m not sure. There are parts of this family tree I’m certain of. Other parts, I’m pretty sure that’s right. [Laughs] At least, that’s what I remember being told, but I have no way of knowing.

DeVorkin:

Well, where were your father and mother born?

Kuhlman:

In the Bronx?

Hulse:

In the U.S., and I think they were both born in New York City, and it may be in fact both born in the Bronx. No, hang on. It could be that they were born in Manhattan and moved to the Bronx or something.

Kuhlman:

New York City.

Hulse:

It’s fairly New York City. We’re very much of a New York City base.

DeVorkin:

How would you describe the families that they were born in? Were they professional? Merchant? Commercial?

Hulse:

It was a mix. I was actually born in a hospital in northern Manhattan, my mother tells me.

Kuhlman:

Oh, really?

Hulse:

But we moved our residence from northern Manhattan a whopping mile or so — maybe it was a little further than that — to the north Bronx, fairly shortly after I was born, and that’s where we stayed for the rest of our time in New York City.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

I left New York City and moved up to Amherst, Massachusetts when I started my graduate degree.

DeVorkin:

What about your dad’s employment? What did he do?

Hulse:

My father worked for Eastman Kodak Company, and as I understand it, his earliest professional job was as a photographer. He’d take wedding pictures and things like that.

Kuhlman:

And he also served in World War II. Right?

Hulse:

Oh, yeah. He was in World War II in Iraq.

DeVorkin:

Ah.

Hulse:

It was actually kind of interesting. I’m trying to remember what his rank was. I think he was enlisted.

Kuhlman:

He was a warrant officer, I thought.

Hulse:

No, he wasn’t.

Kuhlman:

No?

Hulse:

He wanted to be a warrant officer.

Kuhlman:

Oh, he wanted to be one. Okay.

Hulse:

But he was drafted into the Army, was sent over to Tehran to work with a railway company that was run by the U.S. Army. And if I recall correctly, he once said that the purpose of the railroad was to ship — it was a final leg of a supply route from the U.S. to Russia, of military supplies.

DeVorkin:

That’s right.

Hulse:

But my father was actually never in combat, as far as I understand it. He basically kept the accounts and kept other paperwork straight and organized the train shipment of the goods from Tehran into Russia.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

And he actually was physically in Tehran.

DeVorkin:

Okay. What was his training? Did he go to college?

Hulse:

No, neither of my parents went to college. They both went to high school.

DeVorkin:

When did your father acquire his interest and expertise in photography?

Hulse:

I think that was a do-it-yourself interest, and if you knew my father, it was hardly surprising, because my father was an enormous influence on me and my career and life. [Something] very distinctive about him was he was an avid do-it-yourselfer.

DeVorkin:

What about your mother? Did she have any college training or high school training?

Hulse:

Again, she finished with high school, and then I think —

Kuhlman:

She was a bookkeeper for a while.

Hulse:

She worked as a bookkeeper for Nehring Brothers.

DeVorkin:

Did she continue working while you were growing up?

Kuhlman:

No.

Hulse:

I’m trying to remember. I’m not sure I know the answer to that.

DeVorkin:

Okay. That’s alright.

Hulse:

Nehring Brothers, as I understood it, was a fairly large real estate company in New York City. My grandfather worked for Nehring Brothers, and among other things, he went around and collected the rental checks. The fact that he worked for Nehring Brothers turned out to be very much in our benefit, because he’d get early information as to available apartments. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

Aha. Yes.

Hulse:

The apartment that I lived in for most of my time in New York City, which was on 3021 Briggs Avenue in the Bronx, was a very nice apartment, and that’s because Grandpa kept his eye out for a very nice apartment for us. And before that, we had lived at 98 183rd Street, I think. I’m a little uncertain about that one. In any event, I think that was the address. It wasn’t too far away, but it was also in the Bronx, and that’s the first place I remember living.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

Apparently, I was born in that hospital in Manhattan, but my parents moved from there into the first apartment in the Bronx, something like just a few months after I was born.

DeVorkin:

Yeah. Okay.

Hulse:

I have no idea whether that’s [accurate], Don’t take that quantity seriously.

DeVorkin:

How would you describe your life as a child, your early memories of growing up in the Bronx? Did you have friends, and were you a popular member of your group? What kind of things did you do together?

Hulse:

I remember being relatively content. I wouldn’t say “happy” in the sense of — I’m trying to find the right words. Don’t take by what I just said the fact that I was really unhappy.

DeVorkin:

But did you feel that you fit in with your group?

Hulse:

Yeah. Well, let me give you a kind of précis of the general situation.

DeVorkin:

Sure.

Hulse:

I had friends who I made in school. They were generally my classmates. There were particularly three who I remember. We tended to hang out together, because we had similar interests. But similar interests didn’t mean necessarily a particular subject. It meant we were interested in intellectual [activities]. “Intellectual” sounds a little pompous, and I don’t want to sound pompous. What I mean is, we would get together fairly frequently, because we all lived in apartments. Everybody lived in apartments. Those were five-story brick apartments, the standard ones you see in that area. We were on the second floor. When I was younger there were really only two or three close friends, and we’d get together, and we’d talk about science, history, that sort of thing.

DeVorkin:

What kind of science fascinated you?

Hulse:

Everything.

DeVorkin:

Everything. Well now, when you were seven, Sputnik flew.

Hulse:

Yeah.

DeVorkin:

Were you aware of that? Were you impressed by that?

Hulse:

I was hugely interested in the space program.

DeVorkin:

“Hugely.” Okay. What fascinated you about it?

Hulse:

It’s so cool. And not only cool. It wasn’t just putting something into space, although that was a big part of it, which is obviously something humankind had never done before. But the potential of what you could do. You could take pictures, you could explore. It was just not another world, but a whole new dimension to human existence.

DeVorkin:

Had you been interested in that as a child, like reading Buck Rogers comic books and things like that?

Hulse:

I read some comic books, but not very many. I mostly read the real stuff. [Laughs]

Kuhlman:

Nonfiction.

Hulse:

There was a big, fat book that I think Walt Disney published, which for some reason, I remember. I think the reason I remember it is because it was done by Disney, [and] the illustrations were rather well done. It was also pretty big. It had a lot of interesting information in it. It was called Our Friend the Atom.

DeVorkin:

Oh yes, absolutely. What about the Collier’s series? They might have been a little too early for you, but it was a whole series in the famous Collier’s magazine about going into space. Wernher von Braun and others wrote for it.

Hulse:

I do not remember that.

DeVorkin:

Okay, that’s fine. Uh-oh, Roger’s got Our Friend the Atom. There you go. And you remember that. What about it fascinated you?

Hulse:

Everything.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs]

Hulse:

I was just very interested in science from the beginning. Let me tell you a quick little anecdote, which I always found useful as sort of defining when people wonder what I was like as a young child. My mother used to tell this story, so I know it’s true. [Laughs] But when she’d take me out for a walk or to go shopping or something, when I was very young, I was in a stroller.

Kuhlman:

Probably around three [inaudible].

Hulse:

And my mother had to use two sets of straps, not one, and the reason she had to do that was because I wouldn’t just sit in the stroller. I was forever leaning over the side as far as I could and was absolutely fascinated by watching the wheels go around.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs]

Hulse:

And apparently the wheels going around was a big deal. I really liked that. That was neat.

Kuhlman:

[Laughs]

DeVorkin:

Yeah, you seem to be fascinated by the world around you and the way worlds work. Would you say that’s it?

Hulse:

Yeah.

DeVorkin:

Okay. Let’s just go to your schooling, your hobbies. Did you have any major hobbies?

Hulse:

Yes, lots of them. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

What was your favorite?

Hulse:

Lots of them. An important part of the background is [that] my parents were not rich. They were not well-to-do, but we weren’t poor, either. I suppose we were what you’d call at that time, and still tend to call, “middle class.”

DeVorkin:

Sure.

Hulse:

My parents had enough money to buy Russell toys, and the toys that Russell wanted, as far back as I can remember were all science-oriented. I got a small microscope.

Kuhlman:

When do you ask for an oscilloscope?

Hulse:

When I finished confirmation from the Lutheran church that my family went to, my parents gave me a present that I really desired, which was an oscilloscope.

DeVorkin:

Aha.

Hulse:

And I was the only kid I knew who had his own oscilloscope. But I also had a biology dissection kit. You know, you could buy pickled frogs, usually. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

Sure. Did you read magazines and find out about these things, or did your friends have these things?

Hulse:

It was magazines and books.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

I spent a lot of time at the New York Public Library. And at the time, at least when I was younger, it was a very valuable resource.

DeVorkin:

How did you get there from the Bronx? Were you able to get on the buses or subways and go there yourself, or did your family take you?

Hulse:

It depended on the timeframe. As you might imagine, it depended on my age. When I was younger, any place I’d go outside of the apartment was with one or both my parents. We also would all go together as a family to the Bronx Zoo, American Museum of Natural History, etcetera, etcetera.

DeVorkin:

I was going to ask you about the Museum of Natural History. Did you go to the Hayden Planetarium, by any chance?

Hulse:

The American Museum of Natural History was my favorite place in New York City.

DeVorkin:

And what was the favorite part of it for you?

Hulse:

Actually, the planetarium was pretty neat. The problem was, at least when I was going there, it started to get repetitive. I knew that stuff. And it was a very impressive gadget. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

So, when you walked in, it was the projector that fascinated you?

Hulse:

Yeah, pretty much. I was interested by the programs too, at least parts of the program material. [They’ve got this expensive, fairly unique] projector that they can use to cover the sky and show you features of the sky, and so that’s what they tended to use, almost all the time.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

Not necessarily for the whole program. I don’t know how long it lasted, that you’d sit in there. But at some point, it got to be kind of repetitive. Actually, [can you] ask the question, “What parts of the museum do I remember the most?”

DeVorkin:

Yeah.

Hulse:

It is pretty much all of it.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs]

Hulse:

The dioramas they had — they didn’t call them “dioramas.”

Kuhlman:

Yeah, they are.

Hulse:

Where they had the stuffed animals?

DeVorkin:

Sure.

Kuhlman:

Yeah, they’re still dioramas.

Hulse:

[They] were remarkably well done and fascinating, because they really helped transport you to that place. If it was the American desert, or Arabia, or wherever, and the animals that were in it. So I really liked both the science and I suppose the artistic skill and capability of the people who made those dioramas.

DeVorkin:

Sure. Your memory about the [stroller] that you were carried around in by your mother is very interesting. You obviously wanted to know how it works. Did that carry through at the museum, when you would see artifacts, instruments, [and] things on display? Did they raise your curiosity about where they came from and how they worked?

Hulse:

At the American Museum, you mean?

DeVorkin:

Sure.

Hulse:

Absolutely.

DeVorkin:

Did any of your teachers help inform you? This is before high school, before you got to the Bronx High School [of Science]. Did you have any memorable teachers or experiences that helped shape your interests?

Kuhlman:

The one who refused to let you read — [Laughs]

Hulse:

Well, that’s an interesting question. Since [Jeanne] mentioned it, I’ll start with that.

Kuhlman:

I think you need to mention this one.

Hulse:

I will. I did not enjoy going to school, because there was a lot more to learn by going to the library and taking out books and going to buy microscopes or going down to Canal Street and Courtlandt Street, the electronics district, and buying electronics gadgets and putting them together, and buying Heathkits or Eico kits and putting them together, than it was to go sit in this classroom.

Kuhlman:

A lot of the teachers did not appreciate him.

Hulse:

A lot of the teachers didn’t appreciate me, and I think that’s probably true. Well, let me tell you a couple of anecdotes. I’m not quite sure when this one was…

Kuhlman:

It was before Bronx High School.

Hulse:

Yeah, this is all before high school.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

It may have actually been before junior high school. I don’t remember the exact age I was at. Let’s just say I did not have a happy time. It’s not that I was bad in the usual sense of being a cutup or having bad discipline.

Kuhlman:

Tell them about the book thing. I think that’s important.

Hulse:

Alright. I’ll give you the illustrations. I don’t know which grade it was, [maybe] third, fourth, [or] fifth grade, somewhere in there. The desks we had had a little metal shelf underneath the top. The idea was, that’s where you’d put your books and such. Well, it also turns out they were just big enough that you could kind of hold a book in there and read it while the teacher was teaching. And one of the teachers finally noticed that I was reading this book under the desk rather than listening to her, and she was not pleased at all.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs]

Hulse:

And I feel so sorry for my poor mother. She got called into the school several times. Let’s say we’re talking about elementary school now. Elementary school was not a happy experience for my mother, because I kept doing things that got me in trouble. And they were things like reading a book during a class. So, what would happen, and probably this was standard procedure back then, was if the kid was acting up, the teacher would have the parent brought in and have a conference with the principal to straighten the kid out and tell the parent what they needed to do to get the kid on the right track.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

[Laughs] So, I was reading the books under the desk during the class. The teacher finally noticed that that’s what I was doing. I still remember her looming over my left shoulder. I didn’t realize she had come around, so she could clearly see that I was reading this book. Okay. So, the usual routine started. They got my mother to come in. We met in the principal’s office, and I still remember the teacher saying, “And he’s reading these books under the table while I’m trying to teach. And even worse, when I ask him what I was just talking about, he knows the answer.” [Laughs]

Kuhlman:

Well, the one I was thinking of was the story you told me where you were told that you couldn’t read — he was reading science books…

Hulse:

All the time.

Kuhlman:

…and he was told he wasn’t allowed to do that anymore, something like that.

Hulse:

I was put on a ban. I [could not] read any science books for two or three months.

DeVorkin:

Were those in science courses, or English, or history?

Hulse:

Just in general.

DeVorkin:

In general.

Hulse:

Any science book.

DeVorkin:

[Did] any of your teachers ask you what you were reading and express any kind of interest in what you were doing?

Hulse:

No.

Kuhlman:

But he did skip a few grades.

Hulse:

Well, let me be careful about that. There were a couple of teachers who I think understood me. Let me tell you one other story.

DeVorkin:

That’s very important. Pursue that.

Hulse:

At one point, the biology teacher was saying, “Okay, what are the characteristics of life? Living things breathe.”

Kuhlman:

[inaudible]

Hulse:

I’m trying to remember what the —

Kuhlman:

One of them was “breathe oxygen,” you told me.

Hulse:

Breathe oxygen. I forget what the other couple things were. I raised my hand and said, “What about anaerobic bacteria?” [Laughs] I got in a lot of trouble.

DeVorkin:

How old were you?

Hulse:

I think the anaerobic bacteria example is somewhere between the end of elementary and the beginning of junior high school.

DeVorkin:

Wow. Now, that indicates to me that to any sensitive teacher, you would have appeared to be a really bright student. Is that why you skipped various grades? Why were you skipped?

Hulse:

Yeah, I presume that’s why I was skipped.

Kuhlman:

Because you skipped, what, three grades, I think?

Hulse:

I skipped two.

Kuhlman:

Two? Three?

Hulse:

I’m actually basically three grades ahead by age. One is — let’s see. I skipped I think it was fourth grade.

Kuhlman:

[inaudible]

Hulse:

I think it was fourth. But that was just a surprise. I just walked in one day, and they said, “No, you’re not going to this class. You’re going to go to that classroom.” And suddenly, instead of being in grade 4, I was in grade 5.

DeVorkin:

Well, that’s very important, and that could be very important in your life. I know that, because that’s what happened to my father. He was skipped several grades, and he found that he was out of synchronization, you might say, with his classmates. He was younger than they were, and he felt kind of separate from them. Did you have a similar experience, and how might that have affected you?

Hulse:

I didn’t really have a problem. That was actually one of the things that my mother worried about to some extent, and some of the teachers worried about significantly, was that I would be socially maladapted, because I would be too young.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

But it didn’t seem to be a problem. because I had three or four friends who were somewhat similarly inclined.

DeVorkin:

Ah. Okay.

Hulse:

In the sense we’d get together in one of our respective apartments and talk about whatever was interesting and what book we’d read or whatever.

DeVorkin:

That’s wonderful. How did that group form? Were you the one who put it together?

Hulse:

No, I think it just sort of self-assembled. I don’t remember how.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

We each noticed other kids that were — conversations started about things.

DeVorkin:

Sure.

Hulse:

And after they started, we found it interesting. We just sort of formed this kind of loose organization where we’d meet each other and talk about stuff.

DeVorkin:

Let’s move on and ask you how you ended up at the Bronx High School of Science.

Hulse:

You mentioned before: did any of the teachers actually support me? I just want to give kudos to [them].

DeVorkin:

Yes, yes.

Hulse:

I should mention that there were a couple that I really appreciated, because they broke the mold by appreciating me. I’m trying to remember. I think it was [in] elementary school. I don’t think kids do this sort of thing anymore, but when we got out of each grade, you’d get one of these little books, which was about 3 by 5. They were autograph books, and you’d [go around and] get everybody in the class and the teachers to write a few words about you in the book. Well, one of the teachers — I wish I knew who she was, and I wish I could meet her again, because I still remember that I was so surprised when I got the book. What she wrote in it was, “I hope someday I expect to hear of a great scientific discovery from Russell Hulse.”

DeVorkin:

Wonderful. And do you still have that book?

Hulse:

No.

DeVorkin:

Aww.

Hulse:

That’s why I said, it’s such a shame.

DeVorkin:

Well, we have it on the record that you had this book.

Hulse:

One other pair of teachers were science teachers in [maybe] seventh or eighth grade, in junior high school, who had a room between their two respective classrooms that had storage for the scientific gadgets that they had gotten to use in teaching their courses. Well essentially, none of it was used, because the teachers didn’t know how to use it.

DeVorkin:

Oh!

Hulse:

And I don’t want to sound like I’m showing off too much.

DeVorkin:

No, please tell us.

Hulse:

Both the teachers, after a couple of weeks of my usual asking questions, like anaerobic bacteria questions, got ahold of me and said, “How would you like to just go through this room and open it up and unpack stuff and tell me what it all is for?”

DeVorkin:

Absolutely fantastic.

Hulse:

That was the best time I ever had in school.

DeVorkin:

Fantastic. That makes me think: if these were demonstration instruments of some sort, did you watch any experiments being done in school, or actually have anything that you would call a lab in your elementary to schools before the Bronx High School of Science?

Hulse:

There were certainly what you would probably characterize as lab aspects of certain parts of what we did, but there really wasn’t very much.

DeVorkin:

When you figured out how some of this equipment worked, did you show that to the teacher, or did you share it with other students?

Hulse:

Yes, mostly to the teacher.

DeVorkin:

That’s really great. Do you have one memory of your favorite instrument that you figured out?

Hulse:

One that I definitely remember was they had a vacuum pump, and it came with two hollow [hemispheres] so you could do the classic experiment where you put the [hemispheres] together and pump the air out between the two [hemispheres], or half-spheres.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

You discovered that when you didn’t pump the air out, you could open and close them with no trouble, but when you pump the air out and formed a vacuum, they were stuck together.

DeVorkin:

Yeah.

Hulse:

That was really pretty neat.

DeVorkin:

Did you ever look and read in books where that instrument came from and who first played with it?

Hulse:

I probably did, but I don’t remember.

DeVorkin:

Let’s move on to the Bronx High School of Science. Isn’t that a school where you have to take an exam or be recommended?

Hulse:

That’s right.

DeVorkin:

And how did that happen?

Hulse:

First let me say, I think I mentioned that I was basically three years ahead of schedule.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

Well, one of them is obvious. That’s when I skipped fourth grade. Another [was when during the year my birthday was,] so I should say it was just by pure coincidence. I was just about as young as you could be to get into a grade.

DeVorkin:

Yeah.

Hulse:

So I was effectively two years ahead.

Kuhlman:

He was November 28, so at the end of the year.

Hulse:

Right. So, I went to junior high school. And you’re right. There were three specialized high schools in New York City, at least at that time: Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant [High School], and the [High School of] Music & Art. And you had to take a special exam to get into whichever one you wanted to apply to. I certainly wanted to apply to Bronx High, and fortunately I successfully passed the exam, so that’s where I went to high school.

DeVorkin:

Did that pose any kind of practical problems? How far away was it from your home?

Hulse:

I was very, very lucky, because one of the issues [was] that a lot of the kids who went there, went there because it had the best reputation of any high school in New York City. A lot of them weren’t particularly interested in science; they just wanted to get the best good education and the best advantage on getting into college. So, one of the annoying things I found about Bronx Science was that while there was certainly more emphasis on science than other high schools, a pretty good fraction of the kids really didn’t particularly care about science, and that disappointed me. But it was okay. I’m glad I got in. And this is where the real luck came in: fortunately, we lived within walking distance of Bronx High.

DeVorkin:

Yes, that’s right. You said that to Marcia. It was very interesting. But I’m curious. You mentioned that going to Bronx would increase your ability to get into college. Now, your father and mother did not go to college. Did they want you and encourage you to go to college?

Hulse:

Yes. Well, they wanted me to do whatever made me happy.

DeVorkin:

Did they talk to you about college and why it would be important?

Hulse:

Not really.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

They were very supportive, but since they hadn’t gone beyond high school, I think their understanding of why you went to college, what you’d learn, what you’d do with a college degree, which college you should go to, etcetera, was limited. They certainly cared and wanted me to do whatever made me happiest.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

And they understood my passion for science, so the fact that I wanted to apply for Bronx Science was hardly a surprise.

DeVorkin:

And as you told Marcia, you walked to the high school.

Hulse:

That’s right.

DeVorkin:

You brought that up. Did that mean it was unusual? Did other students come there in different ways?

Hulse:

Oh, yeah. A pretty good fraction of them came by bus or subway. I felt sorry for them because that was a big trip to take every day.

DeVorkin:

And for you, it was closer.

Hulse:

For me, it was closer.

DeVorkin:

Well, let’s talk about your years at the Bronx High School. When you were there, Sputnik flew, and I’m just curious as to how big an event that was in your life.

Hulse:

Like everybody, of course it had a huge impact on the world as a whole.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

And I remember going out in the dark sky night with my parents [to] watch it go by overhead as it passed.

DeVorkin:

Ah, marvelous.

Hulse:

And the very fact that it was up there was just stunning. Of course, after a few years, it just became more routine, but the first year or so —

DeVorkin:

Did it inspire you to make choices about what direction you would go in your life?

Hulse:

Probably not, because I already knew I was a scientist or an engineer.

DeVorkin:

What part of science?

Hulse:

Actually, the biggest problem I had when I went to college was to try to figure out what my major should be. By that point, I was still interested in essentially all parts of science, but my interest tended to focus more and more on engineering and physics.

DeVorkin:

Specifically, you talked about the radio telescope that you built.

Hulse:

Right.

DeVorkin:

How did you get interested in making something like that?

Hulse:

A part of that has a very easy answer. I found a book in the library written by some Englishman, with a title like, “Amateur Radio Astronomy.”

DeVorkin:

Ah.

Hulse:

Unfortunately, it didn’t have that much good information in it, as I recall, but it had never occurred to me that I could make a radio telescope myself. So, it inspired me to devote potentially all my science [inaudible] efforts towards that.

Kuhlman:

You did that up at Cuddebackville, didn’t you?

Hulse:

Oh, yeah. Jeanne mentioned Cuddebackville. I think that’s probably in Marcia’s book, isn’t it?

DeVorkin:

What is it?

Kuhlman:

It’s a small town in New York up near Port Jervis.

DeVorkin:

What about it?

Hulse:

One of my father’s relatives — I can never remember exactly what the relation is.

Kuhlman:

His aunt by marriage.

Hulse:

My father’s aunt by marriage, Aunt Helen, lived in Cuddebackville, New York, which is about two hours from New York City.

DeVorkin:

It’s not in the index, but she did indicate that your family went to a rural area, and that was important to you.

Hulse:

Yeah. It was a very important part of my life because my aunt and uncle had done a sort of rural thing of various kinds of activities on the property they owned. I think they originally owned about a hundred acres or so, although I’m not sure. By the time we were there, they had sold off most of it, but what was left were two fairly good-sized chicken coops that were somewhat dilapidated and a couple of rows of fully mature Norway spruce, and other trees and such. So, what it did was it gave a New York City kid a chance [to do] whatever I wanted to do in the outdoors, and that was great.

Kuhlman:

And help your father build the house.

Hulse:

That’s right. My aunt gave my parents the land, which was two acres.

DeVorkin:

Oh yes, and you built a house.

Hulse:

That’s right. And my father built the house himself, with my help as I got older, which I thought was pretty neat. I think that was an important thing in my life.

DeVorkin:

Did you learn new skills? Did he teach you skills?

Kuhlman:

He taught you power tools. [Laughs]

Hulse:

Yeah. Well, I already had done a bit of work with power tools and such, but I got better at it, and he taught me new skills, so I learned a bit.

DeVorkin:

But how did you get focused on building a radio telescope?

Hulse:

Well as I said, I was always interested in astronomy. I was always very interested in electronics. I remember I found a book in the library [on] radio astronomy for amateurs.

DeVorkin:

Right. Were there any teachers or any of your friends who were ham radio operators or helped you with getting to know the electronic technologies?

Kuhlman:

You were a ham.

Hulse:

I was a ham for a while.

DeVorkin:

Yeah.

Hulse:

I’m trying to remember. I think one or two of my friends were interested in electronics, but I think they didn’t have the opportunities that I had to play with it.

DeVorkin:

What gave you the opportunity?

Hulse:

My parents buying me toys.

DeVorkin:

Did they buy you anything that helped you learn about electronics?

Hulse:

Oh yeah, lots of things, like the oscilloscope.

DeVorkin:

Oh, yes. How old were you, again?

Hulse:

I’d just finished confirmation for the church, [so] that would make me around 12.

DeVorkin:

Did you join any clubs in high school? Were there any clubs?

Hulse:

There were clubs. I’m trying to remember [whether I joined them]. I don’t think so. The reason was very simple. It wasn’t that I didn’t think it was a good idea. I had my own agendas.

DeVorkin:

Sure.

Hulse:

So, I had my own oscilloscope and signal generator and voltmeters and all that sort of stuff. I think I just found what I was doing more productive.

DeVorkin:

Fair enough. I understand that.

Hulse:

And I’m not saying that because I was more brilliant or something. Some of the kids at Bronx Science were amazingly smart. They just weren’t that interested in science.

DeVorkin:

But did you have friends who were interested in science, and did you work with them on projects?

Hulse:

I did have a couple who were interested in science, and I did work with them on some projects. I can’t remember anything in particular.

DeVorkin:

So none of them went on to have recognized careers in science, where we would know the names?

Kuhlman:

No, I don’t think so.

Hulse:

No.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

The one closest to that would be this one fellow who I knew at Bronx Science. I don’t know whether I actually even stayed in contact with him. And lo and behold, he turned up at the University of Massachusetts in graduate school at the electrical engineering school.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs] That’s great. What about teachers and access to laboratories? I know that there were laboratories there, but what about the teachers? Who started encouraging you to do certain things or make you start thinking about college?

Hulse:

At Bronx Science?

DeVorkin:

Yeah.

Hulse:

If I recall, there were some teachers at Bronx Science who were definitely supportive of what I tried to do as my own hobbies, to the extent that they were familiar with things that I needed to [know], extra knowledge that I needed in my pursuits. They were helpful, but it wasn’t an enormous factor.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

Most of it I was doing on my own.

DeVorkin:

Now as a ham, that’s sort of a social thing where you communicate with other people, and you have a call sign. Right?

Hulse:

Right.

DeVorkin:

Did you choose your call sign, or was it given to you, and what is it?

Hulse:

The [Federal Communications Commission] FCC gives you the call sign. I forget what it was exactly, especially because they gave me a call sign, and then about six months later, they sent me a note saying, oops, they made a mistake. [Laughs] They’d already given that to somebody else.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs]

Hulse:

So, they changed it, and now I’m confused as to which one.

DeVorkin:

Now I remember, with my friends who were ham radio operators, they would keep a big map on their wall and tick off the places where they had contacted people. Was that a goal for you?

Hulse:

The problem was, I only got up to a technician class license, which only meant that I could only do five watts and only the higher frequencies.

DeVorkin:

Why was that? Why didn’t you go farther?

Hulse:

Well, the important part of it was you had to pass higher levels of Morse code, and I wasn’t really great at that.

Kuhlman:

Didn’t you also have problems with using the antennas and the neighbors getting upset with you?

Hulse:

Oh, that’s right.

DeVorkin:

What’s that?

Hulse:

Well, part of it was, like I said, you need to have the capability — higher data rates for Morse code, and for some reason, I just couldn’t catch onto Morse code.

DeVorkin:

Ah, I see.

Hulse:

And the other thing was that the only frequency I worked on was six meters, and the furthest I ever got was Iowa, and that was a big deal. Usually, I just talked to people who were maybe halfway across the Bronx or something. [Laughs] That was about it.

DeVorkin:

And in being able to communicate with people, what was more important: the fact that you could do it, or gaining new acquaintances, new friends, or what?

Hulse:

Yeah, it was interesting to get on the radio and talk with people who had the same interests. That was basically that.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

It was also interesting because I had to put together the equipment necessary.

DeVorkin:

That’s right. And is that what the challenge was? Is that where the passion was?

Hulse:

Yeah, pretty much.

DeVorkin:

I was just thinking, you went to Bronx High School in ’66, and I’d be curious if you knew that Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars in 1967. Were you following science at that time enough to know about pulsars?

Hulse:

I’m not sure. I mean, I was certainly following astronomy, and [that and] electronics had become a couple of my favorite scientific and technical activities. But I don’t remember whether I knew about Jocelyn Bell.

DeVorkin:

So, it wasn’t a big deal as far as that [goes].

Hulse:

Part of it is access to [inaudible] literature.

DeVorkin:

Let’s move on now from the Bronx High School. But before we do that, were there any other formative events or circumstances in your pre-college life that you feel need to be appreciated to better understand your career path?

Hulse:

The things that I’ve already mentioned, [like having] encouraging parents, I think the do-it-yourself aspect is important.

DeVorkin:

Did that come from your father, or did you just raise it in your own psyche?

Hulse:

It was probably both, but a lot of it was my father.

DeVorkin:

What about your mother?

Hulse:

She was very supportive. She was not technically inclined, so she just knew that this was what I wanted and that she’d help me get it.

DeVorkin:

She continued to work while raising a family?

Hulse:

She worked at Nehring Brothers, as I had mentioned.

Kuhlman:

She did some bookkeeping for a dentist too.

Hulse:

That’s right.

Kuhlman:

But I don’t remember when that was.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

When I was in high school, she did some bookkeeping for a local dentist.

DeVorkin:

Okay. Let’s move on to how you chose to go to Cooper Union.

Hulse:

Let me mention one thing about my mother [that] I was very proud of. I told you my aunt had lived up in Cuddebackville, New York. My aunt also ran, out of her house, a small antiques and collectibles business, and my mother learned from her and started her own antiques and collectibles business.

DeVorkin:

Great.

Hulse:

She didn’t become a billionaire, but she enjoyed it, and I was amazed at how much she had to know, in the sense of you’re trying to buy and sell antique pottery. You really had to memorize huge books of listing what manufacturers made what, when. And she would do it.

DeVorkin:

That’s marvelous.

Hulse:

So, I think in a different era, Mom would have been a quite successful student and gone on to more technical things.

DeVorkin:

Yeah. Did you appreciate that at the time?

Hulse:

No.

DeVorkin:

Okay. [Laughs]

Hulse:

I appreciated her a lot, because she was very supportive of me.

DeVorkin:

That’s very good. Would you say that Cooper Union was a very important part of your training that led you beyond there to [University of Massachusetts] UMass?

Hulse:

Cooper was certainly very important. The biggest, most important part was that it was free, and it had a physics major. The physics major was key to my [inaudible]

DeVorkin:

Did you have teachers there who were influential in directing you?

Hulse:

There were some who were helpfully inclined. I don’t think I made too many career decisions based on anything I was [inaudible].

DeVorkin:

I should ask this question about both the Bronx High School and Cooper Union. When is it that you first had a laboratory course in science?

Hulse:

Some of that depends on what you define as a lab course.

DeVorkin:

When you’re put in a place where you have to use certain types of instruments to answer certain questions. You know, electricity, building circuits.

Hulse:

I think they did a little of that in elementary, and certainly they did a little in junior high school. In high school, of course we did a lot more.

DeVorkin:

Was there anything like a chance to build an experiment or build some sort of display that would go to a science fair? Did you ever participate in science fairs?

Hulse:

Yes I did, several times.

DeVorkin:

What did you do for the science fairs?

Hulse:

I’m trying to remember.: One thing I do remember was I had — this company that made mechanical engineering construction sets. I’m trying to remember what it was called.

DeVorkin:

Well, what about the radio telescope? Did you ever enter that in a science fair?

Hulse:

Oh yeah, that was high school.

Kuhlman:

He wondered if you entered it into a science fair. I don’t think you did, did you?

Hulse:

What was that?

Kuhlman:

You never entered your homemade radio telescope into a science fair, because you never got it to work. Right?

DeVorkin:

That’s what you said in the interview with Marcia. That’s right.

Hulse:

Yeah. I never [did].

Kuhlman:

Because he didn’t have enough information. There was something missing that he didn’t know he was missing.

Hulse:

Yeah.

DeVorkin:

But as you told Marcia, that kept you wanting to work on it to improve it over time. Would you say that that was a very important part of your getting involved in radio astronomy?

Hulse:

The science fair?

Kuhlman:

No, your own radio telescope, dear.

Hulse:

Oh, being able to build my own radio telescope was very important.

DeVorkin:

Yeah.

Hulse:

I had certainly picked up the do-it-yourself bug from my father.

DeVorkin:

Yeah, absolutely.

Hulse:

And I just loved to build things.

DeVorkin:

Wonderful. Now let’s move on. You got your bachelor’s from Cooper Union, right?

Hulse:

Right.

DeVorkin:

Did you consider any kind of jobs at that time? How did you decide to go to graduate school?

Hulse:

I thought about jobs a little bit. Actually, I thought about them certainly in the context of, what if I can’t get — you’re talking about what would I do after Cooper?

Kuhlman:

Yes.

Hulse:

Yeah. I’m trying to remember what I thought. It was difficult because there weren’t very many opportunities.

DeVorkin:

Did any of your teachers suggest that you should go to graduate school and maybe to a particular graduate school?

Hulse:

I really don’t remember.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

Although I think I did not get very much advice.

DeVorkin:

You did not get advice.

Hulse:

Very much, anyway. I got some.

Kuhlman:

The physics program at Cooper was very short-lived. Right, Russell?

Hulse:

Yeah.

Kuhlman:

You have to take an admission test, first of all.

DeVorkin:

Take an admission test to Cooper?

Kuhlman:

Yeah, just like Bronx High School of Science.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Kuhlman:

And then it’s tuition-free if you get in, or it was.

Hulse:

It was sort of like the Nobel Prize. It was founded by Peter Cooper, who was a self-made, wealthy industrialist in New York City, who donated his money to form Cooper Union, which could offer free education, because he felt that was very worthwhile and important thing to do.

DeVorkin:

Was that important for the economics of what your family could afford?

Hulse:

Absolutely.

DeVorkin:

Yeah.

Kuhlman:

Russell always told me that his two college choices were [City College of New York] CCNY and Cooper Union, because they were both tuition-free.

DeVorkin:

Yeah, both good schools, certainly CCNY and Cooper Union. What about UMass? How did you decide on UMass?

Hulse:

I had decided on physics. There was some possibility I might do electrical engineering, but I decided physics would be broader and more interesting. I wanted to do physics, and then I was also still interested in astronomy, particularly radio astronomy, so the fact that UMass had the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory. It had a fairly good-sized combined physics and astronomy program. It made them particularly attractive to try to get into.

DeVorkin:

Did you have any other options for graduate school other than UMass?

Hulse:

I don’t remember whether I applied [inaudible].

DeVorkin:

You knew about the radio astronomy there. That’s important. Right?

Hulse:

Right.

DeVorkin:

So, when you got there as a first-year grad student, what faculty were most accessible to you? Did you have a faculty advisor?

Hulse:

Well, we all officially did, but it wasn’t important. The advisor wasn’t too important [until you passed your quals].

DeVorkin:

Oh, I see. What was the nature of the courses, and do you remember any of your teachers?

Hulse:

It was probably standard graduate-level physics. A lot of the department was high-energy physics, so I think there was a tendency to put emphasis on that in the classwork. I took all of the courses and did okay, but they weren’t something I was particularly interested in, per se.

DeVorkin:

Did you say you hated them?

Kuhlman:

No, he just said it wasn’t a primary interest.

DeVorkin:

There was one very, very well-known astronomer who was also an instrument maker at UMass at the time, John [D.] Strong.

Kuhlman:

Yeah. John Strong. Do you remember him? He was an optical astronomer.

Hulse:

Right.

DeVorkin:

Did you have any contact with John Strong?

Hulse:

No, not really, because he did a certain type of optical astronomy which I wasn’t interested in.

DeVorkin:

So you went for the radio. And of course, [Joseph H.] Joe Taylor [Jr.] was there.

Hulse:

Yeah, that’s right.

DeVorkin:

But of course, there were other radio astronomers there too. Taylor was an assistant professor when you were there, but there was a fellow who actually built the observatory. I’ll find his name here.

Hulse:

[G. Richard] Huguenin.

DeVorkin:

Huguenin. You got it. Yeah. Did you have courses from Huguenin?

Hulse:

I didn’t have courses from him, but I did remember interviewing with him when I was applying, and I was impressed. I enjoyed the conversation with him and what he was trying to do, and the fact that he was there was a plus for my continued interest in getting into UMass.

DeVorkin:

That’s wonderful. In an interview that was taken of Joe Taylor by the American Institute of Physics people, he indicated that he started talking with you at an afternoon tea, about what he was doing and whether you were interested in the work he was doing, building the pulsar survey. Do you remember that tea?

Hulse:

I don’t remember the — did you say a tea?

DeVorkin:

You know, an afternoon social, sort of a social hour.

Kuhlman:

Maybe it was a journal club. I don’t know.

Hulse:

I don’t remember that tea, per se, but certainly Joe Taylor approached me about working with him on a radio astronomy project.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

A pulsar search, and I was very interested because that was the sort of project I was looking for, and also, I liked him too, so it was a good combination.

DeVorkin:

So, it was improving the computer systems and other things that could help discriminate pulsar sources. Is that what fascinated you?

Hulse:

Yeah, it was exciting to explore the whole galaxy and look for pulsars.

DeVorkin:

Yeah.

Hulse:

And it connected to some of the technology that I knew and enjoyed the most.

DeVorkin:

That’s right.

Hulse:

Computers, and not just regular computers, but all the programming was in computer language. I had to know the computers in great detail, which was something I enjoyed, and I had to know about the radio receivers and antennas. So, it was a combination of a wide variety of different types of engineering and science that went into it.

DeVorkin:

Yeah.

Hulse:

That was just the sort of thing I loved.

DeVorkin:

When did you first encounter a computer, and how did it make you think?

Hulse:

My first computer I ran into was at Cooper Union. It had a very early IBM computer that was given to them by IBM when it became obsolete.

DeVorkin:

Did you program it at all in Fortran?

Hulse:

Yes, I did. It was great because there were no restrictions on it. It just sat there, and if you wanted to use it, you could walk up and use it.

DeVorkin:

That’s right.

Hulse:

That’s where I learned Fortran and how to run a computer.

Kuhlman:

Was it a 1620?

Hulse:

It was an IBM 1620.

DeVorkin:

A 1620, exactly. So, you learned how to use the computer as well as program with the computer. Is that right?

Hulse:

Yeah, that’s right. Different computers used means a variety of different things.

DeVorkin:

That’s right. I read some of Taylor’s papers, and he talks about his original proposal to the National Science Foundation for his survey, and one of the things he said explicitly about performing the survey was that he hoped to be able to find a binary pulsar so that he could deduce the masses of the systems and that sort of stuff. Did he describe that to you as one of the goals?

Hulse:

I certainly knew about it because I knew about the whole proposal, but I didn’t focus on it.

DeVorkin:

You didn’t focus on it?

Hulse:

It was kind of a long shot.

DeVorkin:

Oh, of course. How would you describe what you focused on? What was the main excitement for you in working with Taylor?

Hulse:

Making the highest possible sensitivity search for new pulsars across our galaxy and finding out what they looked like, what their distribution was like, and therefore learn more about their formation, etcetera, etcetera.

DeVorkin:

At one point, Taylor sent you to the factory in Florida where those computers were built. These were not IBM. This was a different computer.

Kuhlman:

MODCOMP.

Hulse:

MODCOMP.

DeVorkin:

Yeah. What did you do? You were there for several days on what you called a “crash course.”

Hulse:

Yeah. They basically taught us how to program their computer in their machine language. I frankly didn’t find it very useful. I mean, this is not arrogant. This is just a matter of fact. I had spent so much time playing with do-it-yourself sort of stuff, including programming the 1620. But it was useful to go down there. I picked up some information that I wouldn’t have picked up elsewhere, but it wasn’t a make-or-break decision from my point of view for me to go down there.

DeVorkin:

Okay. Certainly, you’ve written and talked about your time observing at Arecibo [Observatory], and I know it was quite a fascinating experience for you. But I’m curious. In your first paper that you published with Joe Taylor on the binary pulsar, you were the first — sorry, Taylor was the first author.

Hulse:

I was the first author.

DeVorkin:

Okay. This is 1974. Maybe I have it wrong. You and Taylor were the authors, but there were 16 other authors on this paper.

Kuhlman:

It must have been a subsequent one.

Hulse:

I think we’re talking about different papers.

DeVorkin:

Oh, okay. I could check that out real briefly. You want me to do that?

Kuhlman:

Yeah, try that too.

DeVorkin:

Let me do that. Okay. Oh, yeah. The very first paper was the “Discovery of a Pulsar in a Close Binary System,” and you were first author. That’s quite right.

Hulse:

Okay.

DeVorkin:

And that was a paper at the American Astronomical Society. Did you give that paper? Were you the speaker?

Hulse:

I think so. I was the author [inaudible] the speaker.

DeVorkin:

Right. What was the response? Do you remember the response in the audience?

Hulse:

People were really excited.

DeVorkin:

Very excited. Yeah, I believe it. Now, the paper that I was referring to, also in 1974 — sorry about that — was in the International Astronomical Union’s contributions, where there were 17, 18 authors. You and Taylor were up front, but then there was Bruce Margon, Art Davidsen, Bill Liller, Victor Regener, [Carl] Pennypacker, [Jeffrey] McClintock, a lot of names. Could you describe what that was? Do you have a memory of that?

Hulse:

I do not remember. It wasn’t a telegram, was it? An Astronomical Telegram?

DeVorkin:

It might have been. There’s very little data. It’s an IAU Circular, which is like a telegram. That’s right.

Hulse:

Right. Yeah, that’s just something astronomers use if you make a discovery, and you want other people to know about it quickly so they can look at it themselves.

DeVorkin:

So, I’m wondering, who are all these other people, and how were they collaborating?

Hulse:

Actually, they didn’t really collaborate at all. It was an informational distribution.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

Astronomers long have had this system where, for instance, if you see a supernova, you’d send out one of these telegrams so everybody who has a telescope can [take a] quick look at it.

DeVorkin:

Right, so they did the same thing here. So, it’s possible that all these other people went out and made the observations after they heard about yours. Is that it? Could that be it?

Hulse:

I think I’d emphasize “could.”

DeVorkin:

Yeah.

Hulse:

Not necessarily. I have no idea how many of them actually had the time or the facilities or the equipment to make a useful observation. Don’t forget, I was using the biggest radio telescope in the world.

DeVorkin:

That’s right. Arecibo. And you talked about how while you were using it, Arecibo was going through refinements to improve the dish.

Hulse:

Right.

DeVorkin:

Did that create any kind of tension between you and the people at Arecibo, in terms of your wanting to use it?

Hulse:

No, actually it was a great thing, because I got more telescope time…

DeVorkin:

[Laughs] Oh, really? That’s great.

Hulse:

…because they were resurfacing the telescope so it could go to higher frequencies, but I didn’t need that. I just needed the collecting area.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

The way it was, it was just fine. And the fact that it got the telescope [inaudible] somewhat —

DeVorkin:

Now I noticed — and maybe this is just coincidental — that you made the presentation of your work in December ’74 at an American Astronomical Society meeting. The very same month, the Nobel Prize was given to [Martin] Ryle for the —

Kuhlman:

[inaudible]

DeVorkin:

Yeah. The Nobel Prize was given for his observation of pulsars. Did the fact that they got the Nobel Prize at that time affect you in terms of how you were focusing on that problem and working on it? Did that make pulsars more popular or more appealing?

Hulse:

[inaudible] a whole new class of astronomical object that people would need to understand.

DeVorkin:

Absolutely.

Hulse:

My focus was still on doing the search, as originally stated.

DeVorkin:

But it made a lot of people curious at that time. Do you know the astronomer [Winardi] Sutantyo, from Bosscha Observatory?

Hulse:

No.

DeVorkin:

No? Okay. Well, he commented, and I’m quoting him. “It is indeed very interesting that at the very moment when a lot of attention is being given to X-ray binaries, the first binary pulsar is discovered.” Was there any discussion of that coincidence, or was that just purely conjecture on his part?

Hulse:

I think it was conjecture.

DeVorkin:

Okay. Now while you were at UMass during all of this time, and you presented the paper, and then you went, of course, back to UMass, how did everybody react to this incredible discovery at UMass?

Hulse:

The binary pulsar?

Kuhlman:

Yes.

Hulse:

It was very exciting.

Kuhlman:

It ended up actually being in The New York Times. Didn’t it?

Hulse:

Yeah.

Kuhlman:

They actually published something in The New York Times on it.

DeVorkin:

That’s wonderful. Now Taylor, in his oral history, felt that you were more a colleague than a student from the very start. I’m fascinated by that. How did he know to seek you out as his colleague? Were you a first-year or a second-year graduate student by then?

Kuhlman:

Second, at least.

DeVorkin:

Second year.

Hulse:

It was probably the second or third year. Second.

DeVorkin:

What do you think it was that he sought you out instead of other graduate students?

Hulse:

The breadth of my technical knowledge.

DeVorkin:

Ah, so Taylor was looking for somebody who had technical expertise, who could carry on and continue his work developing the computer systems.

Hulse:

I developed it. I did essentially all the work.

Kuhlman:

All the computer work.

DeVorkin:

Yeah.

Hulse:

The whole system.

Kuhlman:

He even ended up basically rewriting the operating system.

Hulse:

Yeah, I did. I wrote my own operating system.

Kuhlman:

Because the one that it came with didn’t give him enough memory, so he had to write his own operating system so he could fit the rest of the program into the computer.

Hulse:

And it was too slow.

DeVorkin:

Taylor’s recollection in his oral history was that he had done the basic programming, but he needed somebody to refine it. Is that accurate?

Kuhlman:

I think he’s talking about the chainsaw-and-tree thing.

Hulse:

Yeah. I think that’s true.

Kuhlman:

The data analysis part.

DeVorkin:

Oh, yes. Sorry. Okay, let me change the subject to a personal one for both of you. How did the two of you meet?

Kuhlman:

Want me to take that one?

Hulse:

Sure.

Kuhlman:

I’m going to take that one and give Russell a rest. He had come back from Arecibo. I was a junior at Smith College, and the astronomy department up there is a five-college astronomy department, meaning that after the “Astronomy for Poets” sort of classes, pretty much all the other classes were taught at the University of Massachusetts. Regardless of whether you went to Amherst, Smith, Hampshire [College], Mount Holyoke [College], we were all over at UMass. And one of his housemates, actually, another graduate student by the name of Tom Balonek had put together a very funny movie called A Day in the Life of a UMass Graduate Student. And Smith College had had a special astronomy event, and they played the movie. And Russell did not star in it, but he narrated it.

DeVorkin:

Aha.

Kuhlman:

And after I watched it, I thought his voice was so wonderful. I thought he did such a great job. I found out who did it, and I walked over and introduced myself, and there we were. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

What kind of courtship did you have? How would you describe it? Was it technical, based upon physics?

Kuhlman:

I would say that we spent a lot of time talking with each other and just found so many commonalities. Somebody asked me about it, and I said, it was discovering the best friend I never knew I had.

DeVorkin:

That’s lovely.

Hulse:

[inaudible]

Kuhlman:

And Russell agrees with me. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

Now certainly, Jeanne, you had career ambitions as well.

Kuhlman:

Yes.

DeVorkin:

You were in physics?

Kuhlman:

I was a double major in physics and astronomy.

DeVorkin:

What were your plans? Did they sort of blend with Russell’s?

Kuhlman:

Well actually, it was interesting at that point in time. A lot of astronomy majors were being discouraged from going to graduate school, because there was such an employment problem, post-graduate. But I was interested in physics anyway and having done an internship at Ames National Lab at Iowa State University, I became very interested in solid-state physics. I went on to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in that but did not get my Ph.D. I left with a master’s. The two of us had been coordinating our physical locations [Laughs] based on that. Part of the reason I went to University of Pennsylvania was that he was doing a postdoc at [National Radio Astronomy Observatory] NRAO in Virginia.

Hulse:

It wasn’t a post doc

Kuhlman:

It wasn’t? Oh, I thought it was. Okay.

DeVorkin:

I’m sorry?

Kuhlman:

He had a position at NRAO, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

DeVorkin:

That’s right. He had a postdoc there.

Kuhlman:

Yeah, and I did my graduate work at University of Pennsylvania, because it was on the east coast, because the other schools I had gotten into were in the Midwest. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

So just to be clear, Russell was already a postdoc at NRAO, and that made you choose to go to [Penn].

Kuhlman:

Yeah, I had chosen Penn because it had a great program in solid-state, but there were a couple of other universities that did, too. Then when he left NRAO, he got a position here in New Jersey at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, which was also on the east coast, as opposed to, say, going out to Arizona to the [Very Large Array] VLA or anything out there. Then after I left Penn, I came here, and here we are together.

DeVorkin:

That’s right. Just to finish off [talking about] your relationship: when you were both interviewed by Marcia, you made a point that you were together but not officially married.

Kuhlman:

Yeah, that’s pretty much true. We were together for a long time, [and] 2010 is when we got married.

DeVorkin:

So, you did.

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

DeVorkin:

What finally convinced you to get married?

Kuhlman:

I almost died.

DeVorkin:

What? Oh, no!

Kuhlman:

I have chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and my first round of chemotherapy caused my immune system to go haywire. I lost all my platelets and spent six days in the hospital trying to stop bleeding internally before they got them back. And after that, we decided, “Maybe we should make this official.” [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

I mean, that’s a tragic state to be in, but in a way, it’s really quite something. How did your families react to your being together but not officially married?

Kuhlman:

I think they accepted it. I don’t think there was a real problem. Do you, Russell?

Hulse:

They weren’t happy about it, but they were tolerant.

Kuhlman:

Yeah. My father really didn’t care. My mother might have cared, but she had died a number of years ago previous. Unfortunately, she died fairly young, and his parents were accepting of it.

DeVorkin:

Okay. That was what I wasn’t aware of. You were at Penn.

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

DeVorkin:

Is that a reason, Russell, why you chose NRAO for a postdoc?

Kuhlman:

It was the other way around. He chose NRAO first.

DeVorkin:

Oh, I’m sorry. Yes, of course. Yeah, so you chose Penn.

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

DeVorkin:

So then I must ask, Russell, why did you choose NRAO for a postdoc?

[pause in the recording]

Answered after the interview, by Kuhlman:

Russell said that he went to NRAO because they had an active pulsar research program and, well, it was the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. He didn’t stay at UMASS because there was no funding for a post-doc position there.

Russell told me that he met a graduate student at NRAO whose father (Tom Styx) was a physicist at PPPL and that student recommended Russell to his father (PPPL was expanding due to TFTR). Russell was originally hired as a tech staff member. However, shortly after being hired, Bill Tang (a physicist at PPPL) had him moved to the research staff.

[END OF PART 1]

[PART 2]

DeVorkin:

What did you want to go back and talk about?

Kuhlman:

Well, you had been talking to Russell about UMass and why he went there and everything else, and he had been telling me that a little while ago, before he crashed.

Hulse:

Yeah.

Kuhlman:

[Laughs] I thought maybe it would be nice if he told you guys, too.

Hulse:

I suppose [for] most people when they’re going to college, making that decision is a big deal. I mean, you’ve got to think about where you want to go. In my case, it was slightly less of a big deal, because my parents couldn’t afford to pay tuition for anything, so there aren’t many places you can go for free. And the two places I applied to in New York City were CCNY, City College of New York, which at the time was actually called — it was CUNY.

Kuhlman:

Right.

Hulse:

Anyway, it’s now CUNY, and it was CCNY. I forget which way it went.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

In any event, they actually had a physics department, so I suppose I would have survived. The other possibility was Cooper Union, the full name of which is the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

I had the impression you hadn’t heard of that.

DeVorkin:

Oh, no, I’ve heard of it.

Hulse:

Okay. It was created in the mid-1800s by Peter Cooper, who was a truly self-made man, industrialist, wealthy man, who left all his money to creating this Cooper Union, One of his bits of philosophy was, “Education should be as free as water and the air.”

DeVorkin:

[Laughs]

Hulse:

So, he put all his money into creating the Cooper Union, and if you got in, it was in the charter: they couldn’t charge tuition. As you might imagine, this resulted in a fairly high application rate. [Laughs] I still remember going down [there]. It was, and still is, on 8th Street in lower Manhattan, and I lived in the North Bronx with my parents. So, I had a subway commute each day from the North Bronx to southern Manhattan, which was interesting at times. Let’s just leave it there.

DeVorkin:

Just let me quickly ask where you lived. I can’t remember the Bronx geography. You said the North Bronx. Did that mean you were above Jerome Avenue?

Hulse:

Yeah.

DeVorkin:

How far was it for you to even get to the metro?

Hulse:

It turned out from where I lived with my parents, I could either take the C, which was the underground, or the L.

DeVorkin:

The only reason I ask was because you were very poignant about being able to walk to high school, and I thought that was a very interesting point. How you commute to something really can affect your experience, so that’s why I asked that.

Hulse:

Certainly, it was not easy, because among other things, my commute or walk to high school involved walking across the [inaudible] subway yards.

DeVorkin:

Aha.

Hulse:

So, there was this section of commute — I keep calling it a commute. It seems odd to call walking a commute.

Kuhlman:

Call it a commute.

Hulse:

It’s a commute. Okay. So, I came down the steps from the apartment, because we lived in a walkup apartment. Oh, and I’ve got to tell you my mother’s joke about the walkup apartment.

DeVorkin:

Oh, boy.

Hulse:

This really fills this out. We lived on the fourth floor, and it was a walkup.

DeVorkin:

Wow.

Hulse:

It’s one of the reasons I never had soda as a kid, because my mother…

Kuhlman:

Refused to carry it.

Hulse:

…was not going to drag all that heavy soda up the stairs. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

Oh, no.

Hulse:

That’s what we did occasionally. Anyway, one day — I think it was a UPS delivery guy dragged himself up the four flights of stairs to our apartment, 4A, rang the doorbell, and was huffing and puffing when my mother answers and takes the package. And he says to her, “I kept looking for the elevator, and I couldn’t find it.” And my mother said — and my mother was great at these, because she had a perfectly straight face.

Kuhlman:

She had a very dry sense of humor.

Hulse:

Very dry sense of humor. She said this with a perfectly straight face. “I’ve been looking for it for 10 years, and I haven’t found it yet, either.” [Laughs] And it was also particularly interesting when I essentially broke my ankle and had to walk home, which was interesting.

Kuhlman:

Let’s not go into that story.

Hulse:

Let’s not get off into that sort of thing.

DeVorkin:

That was at Bronx, right? So, you’re going back to Cooper Union now?

Hulse:

No, I’m talking about Bronx.

DeVorkin:

Oh.

Kuhlman:

You had started off talking about Cooper, and then you went back to Bronx. So back to Cooper or on to UMass.

Hulse:

I’m going to go back to Cooper. Quickly, I just want to throw in a comment about Bronx Science. I was thrilled to get in. It was an honor to get in. I didn’t believe that I got in. I still remember standing by the chain-link fence outside of the property, talking to a friend of mine, and saying, “That’s the last I’ll ever see the inside of that place.” [But] lo and behold, I was accepted.

DeVorkin:

Wow. Yeah.

Hulse:

So anyway, I did a couple of interesting things there. I was thrilled that I got into Bronx Science, because the quality of the education was clearly better than at any other high school in New York City, with the probable exception of Music and Art. What’s the other one?

Kuhlman:

I don’t know. Athletics? [Laughs]

Hulse:

I forget. No, there’s nothing there.

DeVorkin:

Did you have any friends who were going to Bronx Science, maybe a year ahead?

Hulse:

Yeah, the friends of mine who I had from junior high school, which was also within walking distance of the apartment. I didn’t have that many. [Laughs] I had like three or four friends, and they all got into Bronx Science. So, we were all happy we got in and could stay together, and we did. We kept hanging out with each other until we went off to graduate school or whatever, and now of course, I haven’t seen them for a long time.

Kuhlman:

Yeah, except one.

DeVorkin:

Did any of them become scientists or have scientific careers?

Hulse:

One. Of the four I’m thinking of, Ronald Bleeker, became a Washington lawyer, and I keep thinking I should write him a note and ask him what, if anything, he has to do with the current…

Kuhlman:

Mess?

Hulse:

…shall we say, “interesting goings-on.”

Kuhlman:

He’s probably retired by now.

Hulse:

He’s probably retired and glad of it. He was a very bright guy. He was very interested in history, and he was interested in science. There were four of us that really hung out together a lot, and we were all interested, to varying degrees, in science and history and other things like that. The one I was probably closest to was the one I was just talking about. He went to Columbia, I think, and he got a law degree, and he now is a lawyer in Washington, D.C., or as Jeanne says, he’s probably retired. And we’d go to movies together, talk about science articles we found interesting. You know, one of us would find an interesting article in Scientific American and bring it in and say, “Oh, look at this.” I was the one who built the most stuff, so I was probably the one who was most often being the real nerd who was dragging over a gadget that supposedly did something, and saying, “Look at this! It almost works.” [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

Did you think you were a nerd? I mean, back then, I don’t even think that the class of “nerd” was known. [Laughs]

Hulse:

No, it wasn’t, I don’t think.

DeVorkin:

I mean, did you feel —

Hulse:

I didn’t think of myself as a nerd. I knew I was different.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

But actually, the main way I was different was just something that didn’t occur to me until much later, and it’s actually sort of relevant nowadays, as I think of it. It first reoccurred to me just a couple years ago. I was actually a minority, because I was not Jewish. Usually, people think of the Jewish culture in the United States as being a subgroup, and they are, except the North Bronx. [Laughs] Everybody I knew was Jewish, except for me. It didn’t matter. It didn’t make any difference, in terms of our relationship really, except that when we got a little older, my friends decided I was invited to the wedding of one of my friends. A lot of it was done in Hebrew, and I didn’t know any Hebrew. [Laughs] So it was a little awkward.

DeVorkin:

Did your family attend a church?

Hulse:

Yes, my family did. It was mostly on my mother’s behalf. She was the one [who] kind of drove that.

DeVorkin:

What denomination?

Hulse:

Lutheran.

DeVorkin:

Did you go to any religious training or school?

Hulse:

Religious training?

Kuhlman:

You can tell them about your experience with your confirmation classes where they had a little problem with the science. [Laughs]

Hulse:

If you want to know about me and church, I’ll tell you a couple of very quick, interesting stories.

DeVorkin:

You bet.

Hulse:

I suspect you’ll probably find this not to be surprising. Russell was always getting himself into trouble by not having the right answer. In the same spirit of…

Kuhlman:

Anaerobic bacteria. [Laughs]

Hulse:

…this anaerobic bacteria. For example, the one I remember most clearly was in Sunday School, which was in the basement of the church. We went every Sunday until a certain age, and then you went to confirmation class, etcetera. But I remember going, and the subject du jour was creation, “The Creation,” Genesis. The woman who ran that particular section of Sunday School sort of asked everybody what we what we thought of creation. And my response was that I thought the dust cloud theory was the best. I wasn’t being difficult. That’s true. I had read about it recently, as it turned out. I knew that there was the impact theory, where at least at that time the main theories involved, and they still do involve, impacts of asteroids or dust cloud accumulation. And I had read about them, so I answered. I said the dust cloud was the best.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

And she kind of looked at me, like, uh oh. [Laughs] Here we go again. So, I didn’t make trouble. I just gave the best answer I could.

DeVorkin:

That’s just a wonderful story. Were you chided by your classmates?

Hulse:

No.

DeVorkin:

Okay, good.

Hulse:

I don’t remember being chided. The thing I do remember, which totally floored me, was I went to the Lutheran church through confirmation. The pastor of the church, who at that point taught a few of the confirmation classes, because we were all about to get confirmed, started to put in his two cents’ worth about religion and being a good Lutheran, etcetera. And I liked him. He was a good guy. He seemed pretty smart. He just totally floored me one day after the confirmation class was over, and we were walking back out from the church, he asked me to come over, because he wanted to talk for a few minutes, and he asked me if I ever thought about becoming

Kuhlman:

A minister.

Hulse:

…a minister. I practically fell over. He knew I was a troublemaker. [Laughs] Not a troublemaker in any deliberate sense, but I was answering questions like, dust-cloud theory. I was impressed. I thought that meant he was fairly broad-minded.

DeVorkin:

Well, for me, religious school was a different experience, shall I say. It sort of separated me from the rest of the world, and I just was wondering, in terms of the fact that you are so interested in the world, in this world, did you have any resistance to thinking about the ethereal, religious world that you were being trained in?

Hulse:

I remember being in pageants at Christmas. And then, you know, the standard stuff. Again, I’m not sure, but I think it was my mother who ensured that I went and my sister went and my father went. Actually, I think my father didn’t go as often. I forget exactly. She was not extremely religious. It was my grandmother who was very religious.

DeVorkin:

Ah, yeah. Through your life, are you still — are you both religious?

Hulse:

No.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Kuhlman:

Atheist here.

DeVorkin:

Well, that brings up a very important point that we would like to have both of you cover as you see fit, and that is: how would you describe your relationship, all these years? Jeanne, your career and employment, how did it fit in with Russell’s, and vice-versa? You talked about wanting to be together and that being influential in your choice of position, but it must have worked both ways. How would you define it?

Kuhlman:

I’d say, best friends?

Hulse:

Yeah.

Kuhlman:

Best friends. Yeah.

Hulse:

Best friends.

Kuhlman:

We did a lot of stuff together because that’s what we enjoyed doing.

Hulse:

Yeah. Actually, that was one of the things I thought was the most special about our relationship, if I thought about its structure and how my friends’ relationships were structured, was that Jeanne and I did essentially everything together. We had some separate interests. I don’t crochet. [Laughs]

Kuhlman:

Yeah, I don’t build electronics. But anyway — [Laughs]

Hulse:

Yeah. And Jeanne’s not as much into —

Kuhlman:

I’m more into gardening.

Hulse:

Gardening.

DeVorkin:

But you were in physics and astronomy, were you not?

Kuhlman:

Yeah, definitely. When I left graduate school, I ended up working in succession for a couple of small defense contracting firms doing technical support. Actually, I ended up being their system administrator on their computer stuff. From there, when I left my last of those two consulting firms, I ended up going to Merck & Co. in their IT department, and we supported primarily the laboratories and the manufacturing areas. So, I was deeply involved working with the scientists with Merck, and it was a lot of fun. I loved doing that with them. Microbiology, biochemistry, translational medicine, drug metabolism. My last bit there before I left was I was supporting the process R&D and analytical research group, and my office overlooked the back part of the plant in Rahway, where you could see the pilot plants. I’d laughingly look out my window at the pilot plants and go, “Haha, mine, all mine.” [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

Russell, she mentioned she was getting into computers. Did you have that in common?

Hulse:

Yeah. I also basically turned into a computer nerd. [Laughs]

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

Hulse:

I was clearly much more into physics and the sciences than Jeanne, in the sense of detail, understanding, and application. But after getting my PhD, I went to a postdoc, where I did radio astronomy at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, although not much, frankly, because I couldn’t find anything that seemed to suit me, and it’s only a year and a half position.

DeVorkin:

You were continuing the survey work. Is that right?

Hulse:

I did, yes. But the survey work I did for my PhD was so thorough.

Kuhlman:

The fact that Russell’s search was high sensitivity was key to the discovery of the binary pulsar. The cutoff for signal acquisition was 7 sigma. The signal strength of the binary was 7.25 sigma, just detectable.

DeVorkin:

Yeah.

Hulse:

I don’t mean to show off, but there wasn’t much left to do until you got a much bigger telescope, because what I had done was — and I was talking to Jeanne about this earlier, and if you want to look at my Nobel lecture, you’ll see — you know what a flowchart is?

DeVorkin:

Yeah, sure.

Hulse:

So, this is an analysis flowchart that I designed that came up with the highest possible sensitivity search for new pulsars that one could do, and that was what drove me. Jeanne claims I’m obsessive-compulsive, and I’m beginning to believe her more and more.

DeVorkin:

Did you say that at the time, Jeanne?

Kuhlman:

No, I just thought he was very focused, and I’ve come to realize in hindsight that it was obsessive. [Laughs]

Hulse:

Of course, I didn’t know quite how to react to that, and then I read a little more about it and finally came across in a psychology book the very clear statement that scientists and engineers tend to find being obsessive-compulsive very useful in their careers.

DeVorkin:

Aha.

Hulse:

Then I kind of went, “Bingo.” And I can see it’s true, because you’ve really got to focus. And I was just talking to Jeanne. I was going back over the flowchart for how I did my pulsar search, and my objective, when I did the pulsar search, was — let me just sum this up this way. Joe Taylor, who was my thesis advisor, had been doing pulsar work at Harvard before he came to UMass. He was a pretty young professor.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

He’d only been a professor for a few years, I guess. But in any event, we got along well, both because he was a very techie nerd and so was I, in the sense [that] he came up with mathematical approaches to searching for pulsars, which is of course what I did my PhD on and [which] eventually resulted in a Nobel Prize. Oh, where was I?

Kuhlman:

You were working your way down that flowchart. [Laughs]

Hulse:

Oh, yeah. Okay. So, I like to build things. I like to make things happen, make useful things, understand things. I love nature photography. That’s another thing I love to do, and the beauty it represents.

Kuhlman:

Yeah. I think you’re drifting off topic a little.

Hulse:

I’m drifting off topic.

DeVorkin:

I would like to get back to your relationship, if that’s okay.

Hulse:

Okay.

Kuhlman:

Sure.

DeVorkin:

Did you talk science over dinner?

Kuhlman:

I don’t know exactly how you’d put it, because certainly we tended not necessarily to bring our work home, but we loved watching things like Nova and science programs. And if one of us had read something interesting, we shared that [with] each other. Then as Russell said, we were very interested in nature, so that was a big part of it.

Hulse:

Yeah. From as long as I can remember, I also had a very strong interest in photography, nature and wildlife photography in particular.

Kuhlman:

He taught me.

DeVorkin:

Oh?

Hulse:

And macro photography.

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

Hulse:

Which, if you’re really doing that intensively, which is what I was doing, I wasn’t just wandering around with a camera taking pictures. I was the crazy guy with the six-foot-long, heavy-duty tripod strapped across his back, [and] the big camera bag with a Nikon F3. I was so happy to get a Nikon F3.

Kuhlman:

And a long lens.

Hulse:

And a long lens. We’d go out and take long-distance photos of birds off the shore of New Jersey or macro shots of tiny little flowers.

Kuhlman:

I’ll tell you a little thing that kind of gives you an idea. We were on vacation up on Mt. Mansfield in Vermont many years ago, and we had a backpack of camera equipment, and the ranger saw us and said, “Oh, how long are you going in for?” [Laughs]

Hulse:

He thought we were going to go camping up there.

DeVorkin:

Yeah, you had that much equipment.

Kuhlman:

Yeah, we were doing a day trip. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

Amazing. How did you two meet?

Kuhlman:

I think I told you that last time.

DeVorkin:

Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

Kuhlman:

That’s okay.

Hulse:

What was that?

Kuhlman:

He asked how we met, and I said I told him. I’ll tell you again, which was that Russell had a housemate named Tom Balonek, who was a very funny guy.

DeVorkin:

Oh, yeah. That’s right.

Kuhlman:

He made that movie, and then it was shown at Smith, and I talked to him afterwards, because I thought he did a great job narrating it.

Hulse:

Oh, thank you.

DeVorkin:

Okay. Sorry about that.

Kuhlman:

It’s okay.

Hulse:

It was a fun movie, I have to add.

Kuhlman:

It was hysterical. [Laughs]

Hulse:

[I’ll describe] a couple of little snippets of it, which I think you’ll enjoy. One was after the binary pulsar discovery, and one of the shots consisted of a classroom, including me I think, sitting at kind of a big blackboard that was the favorite place for the physics faculty to demonstrate the wonders of physics with chalk and drawing figures. And Howie had written in big letters and underlined, “Binary pulsars cannot exist.” [Laughs] And that was the in-joke.

DeVorkin:

Did that go anywhere? How did people react? How did you react?

Hulse:

It was funny.

Kuhlman:

It was hysterical. There were a lot of funny things in there.

Hulse:

And — who was Clark?

Kuhlman:

Oh, John Bally was Alvan Clark with the telescope.

Hulse:

Amherst College has one of the larger classic optical telescopes.

DeVorkin:

Oh, yeah. It’s an 18-inch Clark.

Kuhlman:

Yeah. One of the graduate students played Alvan Clark.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs]

Hulse:

And the basement of the observatory, lo and behold, had a complete darkroom, which was wonderful, because it gave me someplace to go and develop my black-and-white shots that I did.

DeVorkin:

Oh, yeah. Observatories like that at the time, for me too, had darkrooms.

Hulse:

So I basically shot almost exclusively Kodachrome. I was a high-resolution freak, sort of like all the stuff I did.

DeVorkin:

Did you ever use the Amherst telescope, either one of you?

Kuhlman:

Actually, that telescope wasn’t for general use.

DeVorkin:

Really?

Kuhlman:

It was really more of a historical thing at that point.

DeVorkin:

Ah.

Kuhlman:

There were other optical instruments that we used. When I had my optical observational class, we usually used the one on Mount Holyoke’s campus. Smith had one that was out in Whately [Massachusetts], I believe…

DeVorkin:

That’s right.

Kuhlman:

…that was in somewhat poor repair, although we did use it once. But we used the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory dishes out at Quabbin [Reservoir] for the radio astronomy class I had.

DeVorkin:

Did you both use them together? Did you work together?

Kuhlman:

No. He was past doing anything with students when I was taking that class.

Hulse:

Yeah.

Kuhlman:

He was in Arecibo when I had that class with Bob Hugenin

DeVorkin:

But did you talk about radio astronomy together?

Kuhlman:

I don’t know. It’s kind of hard to say, because you were writing your thesis when I was a junior, and then you were down at Virginia when I was a senior.

Hulse:

Yeah.

Kuhlman:

So, we probably didn’t have much opportunity.

Hulse:

We had a hard time staying physically close together, because postdocs don’t last that long, and she was at the point in her career where she was going from undergraduate to graduate to employment.

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

Hulse:

And then she switched employment. Actually, one of the things I think you should add was that change — it is in the category of changing our relationship, although not in a really bad way — was that our careers really drifted apart in the sense that —

Kuhlman:

You went to the lab, the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab.

Hulse:

I was still a hardcore physicist…

Kuhlman:

Right

Hulse:

…and computer programmer. What I primarily worked on at Princeton at the Plasma Physics Laboratory, which is a Department of Energy-funded laboratory that does control some nuclear fusion research — it’s owned by Princeton University, but I’m not a faculty member there. I’m an employee.

Kuhlman:

Right.

Hulse:

It had a hundred to two hundred people there.

DeVorkin:

Oh, it was a big place.

Hulse:

Yeah.

Kuhlman:

It’s smaller than what it used to be.

Hulse:

Yeah, and these devices are pretty big-sized.

Kuhlman:

When I was working for those small consulting firms, I was doing some physics with them. We were mainly doing support for various Department of Defense projects. Then because it had a computer, and I knew computers, it basically fell to me. But when I went to Merck, I was doing programming, but what it turned into was I was the system analyst and project manager, and I became what I liked to call a “lapsed physicist.” [Laughs] Then after that, I ended up at Celgene, which was a biotech firm. And I did lots of different things. We did software validation, documentation, training, all in the IT sphere.

Hulse:

She was really an IT…

Kuhlman:

Generalist.

Hulse:

…administrator.

Kuhlman:

No, I was not an — well, I mean, yeah, I ran a group, but I still amazed the people at Celgene when I put together a requirements document by giving them a working Excel spreadsheet that had macros all over it.

DeVorkin:

Just getting back to the two of you: when did you start living together, physically?

Kuhlman:

Oh, right after I got out of graduate school, back in ’78. We’ve been together a long time. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

So, you moved to Princeton?

Kuhlman:

Yeah. Well, he had been down here when I was at Penn, and when I left Penn, I knew we were going to be together, so I found a job in this area, which happened to be with this small defense contractor.

Hulse:

We spent a lot of energy trying to find jobs that would be within reasonable physical proximity to each other…

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

Hulse:

…and correspond to our talents and inclinations, which is not easy.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs] Yeah.

Hulse:

For instance, I could have gotten a job at the Very Large Array in New Mexico, but that wouldn’t work out. That would be a long commute.

DeVorkin:

Oh yeah, I could believe it. And it’s a very different place to live, too.

Kuhlman:

Yes.

Hulse:

That’s true, too. We like the northeast. We enjoyed Alaska a lot.

Kuhlman:

But both of our families were in the northeast.

DeVorkin:

How about social life? When you were together in Princeton, did you have dinners? Did you have social contact with others? I’m just kind of curious, if you could describe your lives there. First off, where did you live in Princeton?

Kuhlman:

Plainsboro [New Jersey]. We’ve been in Plainsboro since ’78, precisely because it’s right next to Princeton. The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab — I don’t know whether you can see me reaching, pointing over my shoulder. It’s about two miles that way.

Kuhlman:

[Laughs] It’s in the wrong direction. It’s actually in that direction.

Hulse:

Well, yeah.

DeVorkin:

So, did you have a social life? The reason I’m asking that is I’m interested in what would happen while you were at the Princeton physics lab, and if you had social contacts with people. You might call them “regular people.” How did you explain what you were doing at the Princeton [lab]? Did they ask you, and what did you say?

Kuhlman:

Well actually, no. It wasn’t regular people. Most of our social contact was with people from the lab because for the most part I worked at those small consulting firms. I worked up at Merck in Rahway [New Jersey], and all my coworkers were not located down here. So it was very hard to have social activities with them, except my van pool. [Laughs]

Hulse:

Your main social interaction was the van pool.

Kuhlman:

My main [social interaction] was my van pool. But mostly, the people we interacted closely with were his colleagues, because he was only four or five miles away from PPPL, and I was 25, 30 miles away from where I worked until I went to Celgene, and then I was 50 miles away. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

Oh boy, that’s a big commute.

Kuhlman:

Yeah, it was a pain.

DeVorkin:

Did you ever consider moving someplace in between?

Kuhlman:

No, because Princeton University had this nice little thing, which is if you were an employee of Princeton and you lived within seven miles of the university, you got a discounted mortgage.

DeVorkin:

Whoa!

Kuhlman:

Yeah. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

Not bad.

Kuhlman:

So yeah, it kept us anchored here.

DeVorkin:

Describe your house.

Kuhlman:

Our current one?

DeVorkin:

Anything you want. The first one, your present one.

Hulse:

The first place we would —

Kuhlman:

It was in the Princeton Collection. Oh, you mean in the apartments.

Hulse:

Have you ever been in Plainsboro?

DeVorkin:

I may have been. I spent nine months on sabbatical in Princeton, but I was at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Kuhlman:

Oh, sure. Okay.

DeVorkin:

I just lived there.

Kuhlman:

Well, Plainsboro has this set of apartment complexes, and when we first moved into the area, they were about the only ones, and there were like three or four of them. And we used to joke that everybody in central New Jersey had lived there at one point or another. [Laughs] But we were both there for about a year or so, a year to two years.

Hulse:

In the apartments.

Kuhlman:

In the apartments, yeah. Then Russell got a house over in the Princeton Collection, which was a nice three-bedroom colonial.

Hulse:

Which I still remember, being as I had exactly $1,000 left to my name after we got the house. [Laughs] Cut it pretty close.

Kuhlman:

And we were there until about 1999, 2000…

Hulse:

I’m not sure.

Kuhlman:

…which is when we traded up to this house, which is a bigger colonial. We joke, because Princeton Collection was in North Plainsboro, and we’re now in South Plainsboro, which means we’re about six miles further south from where we were. [Laughs]

Hulse:

I think it’s closer, by like three [miles].

Kuhlman:

Oh no, it isn’t. It’s like, maybe five, six miles.

Hulse:

The Princeton hospital is now in Plainsboro.

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

DeVorkin:

Now, you helped your father build that house, as you talked about. Did you do any building or carpentry or anything in your new house?

Hulse:

I was always interested in doing carpentry. In fact, at one point, I think it had gotten to the point where I went and bought a welding set so I could do oxyacetylene welding, just because I wanted to do it and see how it worked.

Kuhlman:

Didn’t do that much, though.

Hulse:

I didn’t do that much, because [there] wasn’t too much to make, [Laughs] and also I was a little afraid that the neighbors would get upset or something.

Kuhlman:

Actually, our big recreational activity was that a year before Russell won the Nobel, we bought a camp up in the Adirondack, which we loved, and we would go up there very frequently, because we had the nature. We were on a small, non-motorboat lake. And a lot of our friends were up there actually, because as Russell used to like to say, they were self-selected to be interested in the same things we were interested in, unlike a lot of our neighbors, who were not.

Hulse:

Yeah, that’s a good point. Most of our neighbors around here…

Kuhlman:

We don’t really know.

Hulse:

…we don’t really know. I mean, it’s not that we’re not…

Kuhlman:

Friendly.

Hulse:

…friendly, it’s just that they do different things, and they’re not interested in —

Kuhlman:

Well, and also the fact that a lot of people I know have local friendships because of kids. Well, we don’t have kids, so we never got pulled into that particular cycle.

Hulse:

Yeah, especially when we first moved in here. There were kids all over the place.

Kuhlman:

Yeah. But up in the Adirondacks we were in a small community of houses, and we socialized with them quite a bit.

DeVorkin:

Well, that’s good, because I’d love to know when you interacted and socialized, and they’d probably ask both of you, “Where do you work? What do you do?” I’d love to know how you explained it to them.

Kuhlman:

I think rather well. I mean, nobody had an issue. Everybody seemed to kind of get it at some level. Of course, most of the conversation there didn’t revolve around that. That was the introductory stuff. And then we talked about what trails we were hiking, and where was a good place to go canoeing. [Laughs]

Hulse:

And which woodpeckers we’d seen.

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

Hulse:

And also, Jeanne and I took up hunting and sporting clay shooting.

Kuhlman:

Oh yeah, sporting clays.

Hulse:

That became really big.

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

Hulse:

We’d go almost every weekend to a sporting clay [course]. Do you know about sporting clays?

DeVorkin:

No. Oh, well, okay. Kristen, you do. [Laughs]

Hulse:

Okay. Clay target shooting?

Kuhlman:

Think of them as small clay frisbees that get thrown by a machine.

DeVorkin:

I understand.

Kuhlman:

And then you shoot at them, and they break up, hopefully.

DeVorkin:

Okay. Yeah, I didn’t understand what you said. I’ve got it now. Boy, that’s pretty tough. That’s a pretty quick reaction. How did you do?

Kuhlman:

Russell did better with clays than I did, but what I was thinking of was pretty quick reaction — was that we were wing shooters, which meant we shot wild birds. And two of the ones that we hunted the most were grouse and woodcock, neither of which are known for being slow animals.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs]

Kuhlman:

And there was a game preserve here in New Jersey that we went to once to shoot pheasant, which by comparison are slow. The first time we went there, a pheasant got up, and we both went, [BANG], before it got very far off the ground. Then we looked at each other and said, “I guess we could have waited a little.” [Laughs] It’s just because the grouse and woodcock you hunt in thick forested areas, so your window of opportunity tends to be rather small, and they happen to be rather fast.

DeVorkin:

Yeah. Were these food sort of things? Did you cook [them]?

Kuhlman:

Yeah, we ate them.

Hulse:

Yeah, we ate everything we shot.

DeVorkin:

That’s great. Okay.

Hulse:

Grouse, in fact…

Kuhlman:

Are delicious.

Hulse:

…are delicious.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs] Really?

Kuhlman:

They’re the best ever. [Laughs] Unfortunately, you can’t domesticate them, but they’re fabulous.

Hulse:

Yeah, it’s very weird. People have tried and tried again to domesticate them, because they’re basically a woodland turkey.

Kuhlman:

No, woodland chicken.

Hulse:

Chicken. I’m sorry.

Kuhlman:

Yeah, but they’re better than any chicken you ever had.

Hulse:

And they have a slight sweet taste which is superior to a chicken.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs]

Hulse:

But the problem is, they live in the deep woods, and they hide very effectively behind brush and such, and they — “explode” is the only word for it — out of hiding.

Kuhlman:

And they’re very clever. They wait till you walk past them, and then they flush behind you with a loud bang, so that you’ll drop dead of a heart attack. [Laughs]

Hulse:

Their wingbeats are very loud. So, we would do grouse hunting, and then also there were places where we could hunt pheasants and chukar and whatever, and just because I was interested, I did turkey hunting twice.

Kuhlman:

Two or three times.

Hulse:

Yeah.

Kuhlman:

Not my cup of tea.

Hulse:

Yeah. That’s a very different kind of hunting than you’re familiar with.

Kuhlman:

Yeah, that’s a “Sit still and wait for something to walk by.”

Hulse:

Yeah, which is sort of like deer hunting, which I did three times, too.

DeVorkin:

Oh, boy. Yeah.

Kuhlman:

But one of the fun things about other wingshootingers, like the pheasant and the preserve birds or the wild birds, is we always had a guide, because we didn’t have a hunting dog. And watching the hunting dogs work — oh my god, is that fun. It is really fun. If you like dogs — we both like dogs. We never had one, because both of us were working. We didn’t think it was fair to have the dog locked up all day.

Hulse:

We had dogs when we were kids.

Kuhlman:

Kids, yeah. But watching them work is just a joy.

DeVorkin:

That’s great.

Hulse:

Have you ever been around hunting dogs?

Frederick-Frost:

[Nods Enthusiastically]

DeVorkin:

[Laughs] Ah, okay. Not me.

Kuhlman:

Okay.

Hulse:

Okay, just to give you a picture, they’re very energetic, very lively, and very well-trained for their task. So, if you’re doing bird hunting, we as the two hunters walk with our loaded shotguns…

Kuhlman:

Held very safely.

Hulse:

…parallel to each other. And one of the things you have to do is you learn to — there are certain safety precautions in terms of how you do this to make sure you don’t accidentally shoot somebody.

Kuhlman:

Somebody, like [Vice President Dick] Cheney did.

DeVorkin:

Ah. [Laughs]

Hulse:

But, knock wood, we never did.

Kuhlman:

No.

Hulse:

In fact, we were very proud of the fact that one of the hunting guides once said to us, “You are the only two hunters who I will let get behind me with a loaded gun.”

DeVorkin:

[Laughs]

Kuhlman:

Yes. But the dogs will run around, and they’ll cast around with their noses, looking for scent, and they run around like crazy. Then they will lock up, and it’s really funny, because the dog will come running along, and then all of a sudden, his nose will catch a scent, but he’s going so fast, his rear end [Laughs] swings around like this, because he can’t stop the back part as fast as the front part stops.

Hulse:

And we mean swing, almost 180 degrees. The nose stays where it picked up the scent.

Kuhlman:

[Laughs] It’s the pivot point.

Hulse:

And the rear end —

Kuhlman:

Keeps going for a little while.

DeVorkin:

This sounds like a real bonding between the two of you.

Kuhlman:

Yeah. Well, it was. We had a lot of fun doing it.

Hulse:

It was definitely one of the things we enjoyed doing.

Kuhlman:

Yeah. And in fact, another sort of thing like that was we were with a guide once, and we were hunting together, and he saw how much fun we were having with each other. And he says, “Boy, I wish my wife would come out with me.”

Hulse:

Yeah, we really enjoyed that. And then clay target shooting, very challenging.

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

Hulse:

So you’ve got this clay target, and they come in different sizes. The standard target is maybe, what, five inches? Four inches?

Kuhlman:

[Makes a small circle with hands] Yeah, it’s about that big around.

Hulse:

It’s orange-colored, and it’s launched from a —

Kuhlman:

Mechanical arm.

Hulse:

It’s called a trap.

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

Hulse:

It launches the bird — they call [them] “birds” — at about 50 or 60 miles an hour, so they’re moving pretty fast. You’re holding the gun low. In other words, you don’t have it up on your shoulder.

Kuhlman:

It’s like hip height, or underneath your arm, like the armpit.

Hulse:

And when the bird goes up, the idea is that it’s simulating hunting.

Kuhlman:

Yeah. Sporting clays [are] designed to simulate hunting. Some people call it “golf with shotguns,” because like golf, where you have different presentations at each hole, [at] each stand at a sporting clays course, you have a different presentation of clays. So sometimes they spring straight up in the air and come back down. That’s called a springing teal. Sometimes they will fly left to right, right to left. They have “rabbits” that bounce on the ground like a rabbit. They combine the two, so one will be a rabbit and one will be a bird. And each presentation is different, and the degree of difficulty changes with each presentation.

Hulse:

Yeah. There’s the ones that go across, as Jeanne described, except there’s a good-sized tree.

Kuhlman:

Tree right in front of you. [Laughs]

Hulse:

Several trees. So, you have to shoot between the trees.

Kuhlman:

In the trees.

DeVorkin:

Yeah, that’s really something.

Hulse:

It takes a lot, but it’s very satisfying once you get the hang of it.

DeVorkin:

Did this appeal to you because it was so different than your experience at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab?

Kuhlman:

Well, Russell actually was on the rifle team in college.

Hulse:

Yeah, and rifle is a bit different from shotgun.

Kuhlman:

It’s a lot different.

DeVorkin:

Oh, yeah.

Hulse:

[inaudible] shotgun interesting because it’s balletic, to use that word.

Kuhlman:

It’s a game of motion.

Hulse:

A game of precise motion.

Kuhlman:

So, like a rifle, it’s all about aiming and control.

Hulse:

And steadiness.

Kuhlman:

And steadiness. You control your breathing. It’s steady. You’re aiming. With shotgun, it’s actually more instinctive, and if you aim at a clay with a shotgun, you will miss, because the target is moving. You never have a stationary target. They’re always moving.

Hulse:

There’s an interesting dictum in clay shooting, which is, “If you think, you stink.”

Kuhlman:

And it’s because if you start thinking too much and getting too analytical, you will miss every time. [Laughs]

Hulse:

Because your brain can’t keep up.

DeVorkin:

That’s fascinating. I would like to get back a little bit…

Kuhlman:

Certainly.

DeVorkin:

…to the Princeton Plasma Physics years, and what work was like there. Did you need an escape from there? Is this another reason for, let’s say, going hunting and going out of town a lot and that sort of thing?

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

Hulse:

By the way, let me just interject. If you get a chance to do sporting clays, do it.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs]

Hulse:

Or trap or skeet.

DeVorkin:

I will take that under consideration. I don’t think at this present time that I could move fast enough. [Laughs] But okay, go ahead.

Hulse:

So, let’s see.

Kuhlman:

He was asking, “How was your experience at PPL? What did you do?” Things like that.

Hulse:

Okay. What I did at PPL was basically scientific computer modeling, because — okay, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab does controlled thermonuclear fusion research.

DeVorkin:

That’s right.

Hulse:

Are you familiar with fusion?

DeVorkin:

Well, yes. [Laughs] I know how to spell it.

Kuhlman:

Well, it’s been in the news a lot recently, by the way.

DeVorkin:

But controlled fusion — I mean, I’ve worked on the life of Lyman Spitzer.

Kuhlman:

Okay, there you go.

DeVorkin:

And he was, of course, one of the builders of the original Princeton Plasma Physics building, and he was into creating stable fusion reactions, that sort of thing.

Hulse:

And they’re still doing the same thing, which shows you how hard it is.

DeVorkin:

When you went there, how associated were you with the goals of the Plasma Physics Lab? Did you take them as your goals?

Hulse:

Yeah. I mean, I was there to do my job, which [was] computer modeling of atomic and molecular physics in the fusion machines. They didn’t have anybody else who did that. When I arrived, I was interested at the time in molecular physics, and I knew computer modeling pretty well, because I had done a lot of heavy-duty computer modeling for my thesis and other things. You know, kind of square peg, square hole. Okay, this is what you do. If I had wanted to change over the years, I probably could have.

Kuhlman:

He worked with the experimental physicists a lot, too.

Hulse:

Yeah, because I wrote programs which — I should give you background here. Okay, so [in] controlled thermonuclear fusion, what you try to do is reproduce the Sun and its source of power. So, you’re trying to take hydrogen atoms [and] heat them up enough that they will fuse together and release energy.

Kuhlman:

Hence, more fusion.

Hulse:

Yes, hence more fusion. Now this is very different, as you probably realize, from fission, which is the nuclear reactor, or Hiroshima, or whatever, which is where you take very heavy elements and split them apart.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

So, Lyman Spitzer, you correctly identified, was the father of modern fusion, at least particularly in terms of magnetically confined fusion.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

Because the problem with fusion is you have to make it not only hot, but you [also] have to make it dense, and that means you have to find some way of confining it. And confinement is the incredibly tricky part. If you’ve got a couple-hundred-million-degree plasma, and you want to make it dense, that’s a hard thing to do.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs] Yeah.

Hulse:

It’s got a lot of energy, and it wants to expand.

Kuhlman:

And it wants to melt all the metal in between.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

So, there are a couple of different ways of doing it. The main ones — well, the one that we know really works is hydrogen bombs.

Kuhlman:

They’re not confined. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

That’s right.

Hulse:

A hydrogen bomb is hydrogen, compressed and heated by an A-bomb to the point where the plasma — but the hydrogen in it was actually deuterium and tritium isotopes of hydrogen. [It] gets compressed and held in a compressed, hundred-million-degree state long enough that the strong internuclear forces get [them] close enough together that they bind the hydrogen, deuterium, tritium nuclei, and that releases an enormous amount of energy. Now, the question is: how do you hold them together? You don’t put them in a bottle and squeeze it. [Laughs] You had to come up with something a lot more clever. And Lyman Spitzer came up with one very clever approach. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked yet.

DeVorkin:

That’s right.

Hulse:

I mean, it works in the sense that you get things pretty hot, but not hot enough.

DeVorkin:

Right. When I interviewed Lyman Spitzer many years ago and asked him about the stellarator. I asked him, naturally, “Why did you move into this field at Princeton?” I was looking at the history of the astronomy department at Princeton. He was saying he understood that there were very important applications of this, theoretically, but he also really hoped that this would help him better understand how a star works.

Hulse:

Right.

DeVorkin:

Do you share that sort of dual goal?

Hulse:

At least in my point of view, it’s a lot easier to understand how a star works than to build a stellarator.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs]

Kuhlman:

The engineering is a lot trickier. [Laughs]

Hulse:

Because a star will form by itself. That’s how all those stars are out there.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs] That’s great.

Kuhlman:

You get enough mass together.

Hulse:

It is increasingly complicated, even for a physicist or astrophysicist, mind-boggling and harder to come to grips with theoretical notions as to the origins of the universe. Where did the hydrogen come from? What state was it in when it was created out of nothing? Was it created out of nothing? Etcetera, etcetera. That’s all very complicated stuff, but once you’ve got the universe old enough that it has turned into hydrogen atoms, basically, now you’re all set to form stars, and you just wait, because the gravitational attraction of the stars, of the hydrogen gas, will cause them to clump up.

DeVorkin:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Hulse:

They’ll clump up, and the gravitational attraction causes them to heat up and emit radiation, which starts out as infrared.

DeVorkin:

Exactly.

Hulse:

At least it’s not very hot, and then as they lose more energy, they collapse more, and eventually, they hit a magic threshold where the star ignites.

DeVorkin:

That’s [inaudible].

Hulse:

And fortunately, ours did, but not too much. [Laughs] Ours is just what you want.

DeVorkin:

So, I’m curious. I mentioned to you what Spitzer’s dual goals were. Did you or other people at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, by the time you moved there, share those two goals, or was it really the tool-building that was the primary challenge?

Hulse:

A lot of people are really inspired by the goal and the physics. It’s complicated physics. It’s very deep physics. Actually, the practical reactors that one would build on Earth don’t work by the mechanism I told you that the stars work, because there’s just not enough mass here. So, what you do is you need to artificially compress the hydrogen to make a stellarator or an inertial confinement fusion.

Kuhlman:

Which is Livermore.

Hulse:

And the first approach is basically to use something — and there are variations on this — but the main one is strong magnetic fields to compress the ionized hydrogen and get it up to a density and heat that it won’t ignite and release energy. That’s pretty hard to do. We’ve been working on it for — let’s see. When did Spitzer start? I think it was just after World War II.

DeVorkin:

Yeah, it was just after World War II.

Hulse:

1955 or something? It was the international —

DeVorkin:

It was about ’48, ’49 that he got interested in it. That was a good while before he got enough support.

Kuhlman:

About 75 years.

Hulse:

Right. And it was classified for a while.

DeVorkin:

Absolutely. That’s right.

Hulse:

And then people realized how impossibly difficult this was going to be, and they said, “Forget the classification. Just do it.”

DeVorkin:

Oh, really? When did that happen?

Hulse:

I think it was 1950-some-odd.

DeVorkin:

So, it was all declassified by the time you moved there.

Kuhlman:

Oh, yeah. The magnetic confinement —

Hulse:

You have to be careful what’s declassified and what’s not. What’s classified is the physics that has overlap with building a thermonuclear bomb.

DeVorkin:

Yeah.

Hulse:

That is very highly classified. I should know. I’ve been out there. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

Well, did that concern you, about what you were working on, working on things that had classified value?

Hulse:

I’m very proud to have worked on classified data. In fact, the classified data I worked on, in recent years, [inaudible] I probably shouldn’t be carrying on about this too much.

Kuhlman:

No.

Hulse:

But the magnetically confined fusion, which was the stellarator and the tokamak and the variants on that theme, used very strong magnetic fields to try to compress hydrogen and hold it in a compressed state long enough that it will ignite and release more energy than you put in to make the initial conditions of compression, etcetera. People have been unable to do that yet. You can get close, but no cigar. And they’re very complicated, expensive.

DeVorkin:

Oh, yeah.

Kuhlman:

That’s why they tend to be international these days.

Hulse:

Yeah. The big one now is ITER, International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.

DeVorkin:

That’s right.

Hulse:

It’s too expensive.

DeVorkin:

I apologize deeply, and I’m really regretting this. Kristen is going to take over. I have a very important appointment that I must absolutely finish getting dressed for and somehow fight the traffic. But I look forward to our third session. Kristen, could you please take over [and] continue on with Princeton Plasma Physics, and maybe go as far as the fact that Russell started consulting?

Frederick-Frost:

Yeah.

DeVorkin:

Doing consulting work during that —

Frederick-Frost:

First, we’ll allow you to step off. Bye, David.

DeVorkin:

I’m really sorry, [inaudible] go.

Frederick-Frost:

No, that’s okay.

Hulse:

We understand.

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

[BRIEF BREAK]

Frederick-Frost:

So, one of the things I’m interested in is [that] you’ve talked about how throughout your life you’ve been so hands-on with so much. And it sounds like when you got to Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, you really transformed yourself mainly into someone who did simulations and working primarily with computers. I think you described yourself in that way. Did you miss the hands-on experimental work?

Hulse:

Did I miss the hands-on experimental work? Yeah, I did. The computer work is, however, pretty intensive, intellectually challenging.

Kuhlman:

It’s also a very creative endeavor, too.

Hulse:

Yeah, it is creative.

Frederick-Frost:

You’ve mentioned a couple times how intensive and difficult it is. Can you tell me about when you first arrived at the lab? What was the most difficult problem you threw yourself at?

Hulse:

It’s the one that I was instructed to throw myself at.

Kuhlman:

[Laughs]

Hulse:

It’s the one that I continued to throw myself at, pretty much continuously until I retired, which was I modeled atomic and molecular physics [inaudible] controlled thermonuclear fusion machine, with occasional side trips to other things, related things. Astrophysics.

Frederick-Frost:

How long would you say you worked on that topic at Princeton?

Hulse:

The whole time I was there.

Kuhlman:

Twenty-five years?

Hulse:

Yeah. I arrived in —

Kuhlman:

I remember you celebrated your 25th anniversary before you retired, so it was at least 25 years.

Hulse:

Yeah, at least 25 years.

Frederick-Frost:

A lot happens in 25 years with computers.

Kuhlman:

[Laughs]

Hulse:

Yeah.

Frederick-Frost:

[Laughs] Can you tell me how the technology impacted your work?

Hulse:

It had an enormous impact. You couldn’t do what we’re doing now without modern, advanced computing.

Kuhlman:

Because you ended up going into object-oriented [programming].

Hulse:

That was a little different, because that was my only choice to —

Kuhlman:

Yeah, but I meant there was the other — parallel processing in the supercomputers [inaudible].

Hulse:

That’s true.

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

Hulse:

Well, the thing about computing and controlled thermonuclear fusion is that the physics involved is sufficiently complicated that to do theoretical modeling, you’re building the device, and you’re figuring out its properties mathematically inside the computer. Not physically, but in terms of conceptually and mathematically. So you need a lot of the relevant data, whether it be atomic physics, or nuclear physics, or physics of materials, and the behavior of materials under high magnetic field stresses, behavior of pellets of hydrogen at high temperatures, because one of the ways that you fuel up the — people [inaudible] busting their chops over 20 years now or something to try to figure out how to get these machines to produce net power, and it’s obviously not easy. You had some very smart people, like Lyman Spitzer, devote a lot of thought to that, and people elsewhere at other laboratories. And we also have supercomputers now to help us model.

Kuhlman:

I think with the computer thing in particular, you were using Crays when they came out.

Hulse:

Yeah. One of the nice things [is that] I was always on the most advanced supercomputers available. I started using a Cray-1. I don’t know how familiar you are with supercomputers. But Seymour Cray was one of the first developers of supercomputers. He sold them mostly to the military, but the rest of them went to fusion labs, especially ours. Livermore National Lab has the — I think it’s called the U.S. supercomputer center, or something like that.

Kuhlman:

Well, they had like four supercomputer centers at one point, and Livermore had one of them.

Hulse:

And of course, if you’re using supercomputers, you have to figure out not only how to build the supercomputer, which is not easy, but how to make it really fast. Otherwise, what’s the point? And [you have to make them] not melt down, [Laughs] [which could be the point] because to make them go fast, they end up getting very hot.

Kuhlman:

We were laughing the other day about one of the ones that was nicknamed “Bubbles.”

Frederick-Frost:

The computer?

Kuhlman:

Yeah. If you remember, it was the Cray computer that had the cooling fluid that you could actually see, and it was named Bubbles because the heat would cause it to boil. [Laughs]

Hulse:

It sat in the middle of the computer room, and it bubbled. [Laughs]

Sherman:

Can I ask a question? When you got started with this work, did you anticipate that it would be such a big, long project that would take 25 years and still not be finished?

Hulse:

I guess I could have guessed. That was because the fundamental understanding wasn’t there.

Kuhlman:

And also, because the engineering challenges were extreme.

Hulse:

Yeah, combining the two. It’s not just the physics, but how do you build something that’ll handle the stresses and heat?

Sherman:

So, you anticipated at the beginning that it would be difficult, but did you think it would take you 25 years?

Hulse:

No. I didn’t think about it. [Laughs] Well, the reason I went to Princeton was not so much to do with fusion. It was because it was near her, and I could get a job.

Kuhlman:

Okay. It’s my fault. [Laughs]

Hulse:

It’s her fault. And that’s not to say anything against fusion, because I was excited about going there. Fusion was then somewhat less — I guess it is now still considered to be one of the great challenges of modern science and engineering.

Sherman:

Sure.

Hulse:

So that was a pretty high honor to be asked to get a job at the Plasma Physics Lab, and it was located in the right spot so I could continue my relationship with Jeanne. And [it was] not a bad section of New Jersey to be in.

Sherman:

Sure.

Hulse:

So, it was a winner. I must admit, after a number of years of seeing things go by — by which I’m trying to say, not everything — I did stuff which was successful in its purposes. In other words, the main purpose of the work I was doing was to understand the behavior of impurity — ions in the machine, and that’s because you want — the inside of the machine should be pure hydrogen, but it’s not, because you simply have too much radiation and heat going on for the surface to not have some atoms of iron [inaudible].

Kuhlman:

I’m trying to remember. How long did they have to pump the chamber down before they could actually use it for firing? It was a long time.

Hulse:

Weeks.

Kuhlman:

Weeks. Yeah.

Hulse:

Yeah. So it was obviously very challenging, and doing the computation — just looking at what I did, which was — the way you really understood it — to help understand anything that was going on in a complex system, and I’m broadening it out to any complex system, both in the formal definition of complex system and the informal definition requires, these days, supercomputers, because you need a tremendous amount of very clever computer power to calculate what is going to happen.

Sherman:

Okay.

Hulse:

And the supercomputers’ technology in itself is really challenging and fascinating. So, it looked like I had a secure job for the rest of my [life]. [Laughs]. [But] in fact, I think it was only a couple of months, maybe a year. How long was it before I went to England?

Kuhlman:

Oh, it was probably one or two years, because we were in the old house, so it was after we moved out of the apartments.

Hulse:

Right.

Kuhlman:

So maybe two to three years, at most.

Hulse:

And fusion is also interesting in that it’s a very international effort, because it’s so complicated. All the participants basically agreed; there’s no point in trying to keep this to ourselves, because we’re never going to do it by ourselves. We’ve got to work together.

Sherman:

Yeah.

Hulse:

A novel human concept we should work on some more. Anyway, so as I was just sort of sotto voce talking to Jeanne here, I was trying to remember what I — I hadn’t been into the lab too long before I was invited to go to England.

Kuhlman:

Culham [Centre for Fusion Energy].

Hulse:

To Culham, at the English tokamak, the magnetic confinement fusion device that they were working on, which is equivalent to what we had here, because I had this computer code that they didn’t have.

Sherman:

Aha.

Hulse:

And so they invited [me]. I spent a month over there, bringing the code over and converting it to work on their computers and then doing some calculations and physics with them. This was clearly the purpose of my being there. I probably could have changed it if I wanted, you know, complained or something. But [it] was to write computer codes that would allow the experimentalists to understand the spectroscopic data they got from the machines and thereby understand what the physics. There are a couple of nice things about the impurities. Impurities are bad because they cool the plasma off. They damage the interior of the vacuum vessel, and generally you wish they weren’t there. However, in some ways, you’re glad they’re there, because they form tracers.

Sherman:

Ah.

Hulse:

Hydrogen leaves no spectroscopic lines when it’s ionized that much, but heavier elements do. In fact, one of the things that is done is to deliberately inject a tiny amount of some other element that has good, strong spectral lines into the machine to see where they go.

Sherman:

Okay.

Hulse:

And guess who has to do the model [Laughs] of what that means? One of the things that Jeanne mentioned, and for completeness, I should mention, was that after I got the Nobel, opportunities opened up for me, shall we say.

Sherman:

Sure.

Frederick-Frost:

At the lab, or are you saying just in general?

Kuhlman:

In general.

Hulse:

In general.

Kuhlman:

At that time, the lab was actually going through a really rough patch. They were laying off people. They were sort of farming people out. They were using their staff as consultants to other areas, because they were in a really rough funding patch.

Frederick-Frost:

So, were some of the other opportunities that you’re referring to your work on various boards or in consulting? What were some of the main things that opened up to you after?

Hulse:

It was a possibility. One of the strong possibilities was — do you program computers?

Frederick-Frost:

I did a little bit, just for data processing. [Laughs]

Hulse:

Okay. You know what Fortran is?

Frederick-Frost:

I do. I have not programmed it, but yes, go ahead.

Hulse:

So, to use computers, you need to be able to program them in computer language — languages the computer understands and in a format that it can deal with. And there’s lots of different computer languages, and they’re designed differently, some of them structured incredibly differently, to do everything from calculate a thermonuclear bomb to human speech. So, knowing how to program computers is kind of a cool thing, because a lot of interesting stuff goes on, and you can do it with a computer. So, to be frank, after the Nobel, I was sitting in the plane, flying back, thinking, well, I guess my life is going to change. [Laughs] I may have new job opportunities, I could say. What do I really want to do? And that wasn’t obvious, because what is probably obvious from our previous discussions is [that] I like to do lots of things. I’m a tinkerer, and I like to build things.

Kuhlman:

And also one of Russell’s strengths, which I think he didn’t get a chance to really realize, is that he’s really good at integrating things across disciplines, and he never really had the opportunity to do that until after the Nobel.

Hulse:

Yeah. That was one of the problems for me at the Plasma Physics Lab. My scope was pretty limited in what I could [do].

Sherman:

It sounds as if you had two chief interests there. One was the fun of programming computers to do amazing things, and the other was the physics that the whole project was working on. So, I was wondering, how did you balance those two in your work?

Hulse:

Oh, that’s a hard one to answer. The basic assumption of the question is that there is only one type of computing and there’s one type of physics, but there are many types of each.

Sherman:

Of course. Yes.

Hulse:

So, you see where I’m getting at.

Sherman:

Yes.

Hulse:

There’s really no answer, because there’s several types of computing I found interesting over the years, several kinds of physics which — I’ve got a bookshelf upstairs filled with books which I’ve picked out thinking, that looks really interesting. I should read that. And I haven’t yet. [Laughs]

Kuhlman:

And a lot of them have nothing to do with physics. They have to do with quorum sensing in biological systems.

Hulse:

Yeah. As Jeanne said, one of the things that fascinates me now is biological systems. How do biological systems work? Quorum sensing is one of them, which is really fascinating. One of the faculty here at Princeton, Bonnie [L.] Bassler, is one of the world leaders in quorum sensing, and I had some great conversations with her. I was actually considering trying to see if I can do something — actually, I did write a quorum-sensing program. But it’s hard to change fields entirely.

Sherman:

Yeah.

Hulse:

There’s a lot to know. There’s a lot of smart people who are already doing it.

Frederick-Frost:

Did you ever think about going back into astronomy, or were you pretty set in the course that you were in?

Hulse:

I could imagine things that would be interesting [if I were] to go back into astronomy.

Kuhlman:

Especially now. There have been so many marvelous —

Hulse:

Oh, yeah. They’re really great.

Kuhlman:

I mean, the past five, ten years have been incredible, from Hubble [Space Telescope] up to the James Webb [Space Telescope] and all the other ones — Chandra [X-ray Observatory], the other observatories, and what’s coming out of that, and all the new physics that they’re having to deal with.

Hulse:

[Chanting] JPL! JPL! [Laughs]

Kuhlman:

Russell is a JPL fan, especially…

Hulse:

I’m a big JPL fan.

Kuhlman:

…of all the remote satellite explorers.

Hulse:

I love all those robots. It’s just amazing. And JPL is a brilliant place that deserves enormous credit for pulling these things off.

Kuhlman:

Russell has a good friend [John Armstrong] who used to work there. He’s since retired.

Hulse:

Yeah. I have a friend of mine who used to work there.

Frederick-Frost:

What did you think about the [Ingenuity Mars] Helicopter?

Hulse:

The Mars helicopter?

Frederick-Frost:

Yeah.

Hulse:

Yeah, that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about.

Frederick-Frost:

[Laughs]

Kuhlman:

And also Voyager. We’re huge Voyager fans.

Hulse:

Oh, yeah. Voyager. It’s out there in interstellar space.

Kuhlman:

It’s still sending back data, as best it can.

Hulse:

It has a problem.

Kuhlman:

I know about that, but they think they can fix it.

Hulse:

Yeah.

Kuhlman:

Which still boggles the mind. I’m sorry.

Hulse:

The presence of humans will be known in the universe…

Kuhlman:

As long as those little guys exist.

Hulse:

…as long as the universe exists, because of Voyager. And that’s pretty heavy-duty.

Sherman:

Sure.

Hulse:

Now, if we could just get the data back faster. [Laughs]

Kuhlman:

They just had a thing recently about them going to use optical.

Hulse:

Yeah.

Kuhlman:

Yeah, the new data transmission.

Hulse:

That was the new JPL thing. It’s wonderful when you get brilliant people together. All sorts of interesting things happen. Anyway, so I’ll shut up about JPL.

Frederick-Frost:

It’s a great topic. I almost do not want to leave it, but I do want to talk about some of the work that you did with consulting and how those things opened up for you after the Nobel. Can you tell me a little bit about the different types of positions you held with that?

Hulse:

Oh, yeah. That was another unexpected —

Kuhlman:

Wrinkle.

[SHORT OFF-TOPIC BREAK]

Hulse:

I really liked [consulting]. It’s great, because I get the opportunity to meet lots of really interesting people and find out lots of interesting things and, in some cases, make some decisions which, I have to say immodestly, are pretty important. It’s kind of scary sometimes, but I didn’t really expect that. Somehow, it’s not that I thought that it would never happen because I would never be a consultant. It was just [that] consulting was never anything I did, so it just didn’t pop into my head, but it certainly popped into lots of other people’s heads.

Kuhlman:

I think the first thing you were doing was with the University of Texas [at Dallas], at first, through Da Hsuan and then 3rd Security. Right?

Hulse:

Right. I’ll just go down the list.

Kuhlman:

Okay.

Hulse:

What was the first one you mentioned?

Kuhlman:

UTD, when Da Hsuan got you —

Hulse:

Okay. Actually, what I should preface this with is one major area of interest, which I had started to dedicate myself to and spent a lot of time on, because I thought it was very important. And it was very conscious in the sense that I thought about, “What are the good things I could do? That’s what.” I still remember the moment when it came to mind. I was sitting next to Jeanne on the airplane coming back from the Nobel ceremony. I was sitting there, still somewhat shellshocked, [Laughs] you know, for what had happened, thinking: well, I guess my life is going to change. I could probably do all sorts of things different from what I did before. And it really appealed to me, because frankly I really didn’t want to do computer modeling and fusion anymore. I had done that for 20-some-odd years.

Kuhlman:

Enough. [Laughs]

Hulse:

It was just enough. What occurred to me as the primary objective, to which I dedicated [myself], I said, okay. This is the main thing I’m going to work on, is improving science education for young kids.

Kuhlman:

Are you going to talk about Contact Science?

Hulse:

Yeah, because it was so important to me as a kid, that access to the enthusiasms, the toys, the hands-on, the contemplation, the joy of science and engineering. And I see most kids don’t have that, and most schools do a lousy job of providing it, frankly.

Kuhlman:

And as he found out, a lot of the problems were structural, in the sense that the curriculums that the teachers had to follow did not allow them any flexibility.

Hulse:

Yeah. Even the good teachers were hamstrung by limitations, as Jeanne said, on what the agenda was. The way I put it — which is exaggerating, but that’s what exaggerations are for —the basic model was: you’d come in on Monday. The teacher would say, this week we’re going to work on textbook chapter 1 and 2, and then [on] Thursday, we’ll do a review. We’ll do 3 and 4 and review everything, and then your homework will be on 4, [and] then we’ll have an exam on chapter 5. It was just turning the crank. There is stuff you have to learn out of books. I learned a lot of stuff out of books. But I learned a lot of stuff by using my hands [and focusing] on using everything available at my disposal. [I had] an instinctive knowledge of how things worked, having watched the world around me, from having built things myself, from having talked to friends of mine who had built things. Having worked with friends who —

Kuhlman:

And your father.

Hulse:

Having built a house with my father, where I was up on the roof, nailing the roof on. I mean, those things are — I look at kids, and I think the school systems do not provide them with the opportunity to expand their souls and their knowledge and their intellects to understand all this stuff. And not only is that a shame because it’s fun and they’ll enjoy it, but it’s a shame because we need them to know it, otherwise we’re in big trouble. I’ll get off my soapbox.

Kuhlman:

So, one of the things he did was he worked with the librarian, this woman named Jinny Baeckler, who was the librarian here in Plainsboro at the time. And they came up with this idea, which they called Contact Science.

Hulse:

I came up with that.

Kuhlman:

I know, that’s what I just said. You and Jinny.

Hulse:

No, it was you and I.

Kuhlman:

Oh, okay.

Hulse:

Yeah, with the name.

Kuhlman:

With the name, yes. I meant with the concept.

Hulse:

Okay, the concept [inaudible].

Frederick-Frost:

And I think we want to explore most of that kind of outreach and educational stuff, if that’s okay, tomorrow.

Kuhlman:

Okay.

Frederick-Frost:

I think this would be a really good place to pick up with, because this is definitely something we want to cover in detail, and I don’t want it to get chopped up over the two sessions.

Kuhlman:

Okay.

Frederick-Frost:

But if that’s alright, we’ve been going for a while now, and I want to make sure I don’t tire you out too much, because we are going to meet again tomorrow. [Laughs]

Sherman:

Right.

Frederick-Frost:

Let’s go ahead and I’ll stop the recording, unless you wanted to add anything on for today.

Kuhlman:

The only thing I want to say, and you can stop the recording if you want to, is that there were some things that Russell had wanted to go over that we didn’t, when he was going to be talking about his time at UMass. So we kind of jumped over that.

Frederick-Frost:

Okay.

Sherman:

Maybe we could start with those first thing tomorrow.

Kuhlman:

Yeah, basically why he went there, and just some fun stories about him helping build their radio astronomy observatory.

Hulse:

Yeah. Actually, also I will add consulting. I’m glad you brought that up, because for some reason, I hadn’t put it up [inaudible].

Kuhlman:

We’ll get that tomorrow. Yeah.

Frederick-Frost:

Okay, so we’ll start with UMass, and the building of the radio astronomy program, talk a little bit about consulting, and we’ll make sure we leave some good time for talking about the educational outreach.

Kuhlman:

Yeah. Contact Science.

Hulse:

Just overall, I want to say that consulting has been the most exciting thing I have done in many years. And you know, some organizations are better than others [Laughs] and more fun than others and more important than others.

Kuhlman:

We’ll go into that tomorrow.

Hulse:

But it’s been very meaningful for me, especially when I feel that the consulting, more than anything else, has provided me with an opportunity to contribute to our society. I don’t want that to sound pompous or anything. If you can develop a sufficiently useful background in various things and are good at working with people and good at discussing sometimes tricky topics and making progress on said topics with a wide range of people, you can make an enormous difference in this world. That’s very exciting, and I think that’s really what [inaudible].

Kuhlman:

So, we’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Hulse:

Yeah.

Kuhlman:

Okay?

Frederick-Frost:

Okay. I’m going to stop the recording.

[END PART 2]

[PART 3]

Frederick-Frost:

It’s March 22, 2024, and we’re continuing with our third session here. I would like to recap on some of the things we decided we wanted to talk about today. You expressed an interest in wanting to return to your time at UMass, specifically in building the radio astronomy program there. David will take us through that time. What I think we’ll do is return to your time at UMass and think about your help in building their radio astronomy program, then David will also lead us through a discussion to figure out if there’s anything you want to add to some of the remembrances that you’ve already had and been recorded with for the discovery with the binary pulsar. Then I think we would like to jump into what you described as some of the most exciting and rewarding work of your life with consulting and save a good bit of time as well for talking about your outreach work. [Does] that sounds like a good plan for today?

Hulse:

It sounds like a good plan. I just want to add [that] there are three different short items I wanted to mention that I realized yesterday evening belonged in with things we’d already discussed, but I forgot to mention them.

Frederick-Frost:

Okay.

Hulse:

So, if you don’t mind, I’ll just run through them quickly.

DeVorkin:

Please, go ahead.

Hulse:

One of them is Cooper Union. [I got] the impression that you were not familiar with Cooper Union. Is that correct?

Kuhlman:

No, he told you he was familiar with it.

Hulse:

Had you heard of Cooper Union before?

DeVorkin:

Oh, sure.

Frederick-Frost:

Yes.

Hulse:

Okay. So, you know that it’s pretty small. Let’s see. It’s got engineering and science and art and architecture. Let’s see. I’m trying to remember the calculation. I think there was electrical engineering, chemical engineering, [and] civil engineering. I’m missing one.

Kuhlman:

I don’t know. I think that’s probably about it.

Hulse:

Anyway, they had 20 or 30 students each, and there’s four years. Anyway, so the upshot is I think there’s like 600 students. What I did not realize at the time when I applied there, as you probably know, applying and getting into Cooper is not easy. I was really lucky and glad that I could get in, because it’s a day-long entrance exam at Cooper.

DeVorkin:

Ah.

Hulse:

And you literally sit there all day, meaning from when you arrive in the morning until dinnertime when they finally let you out, in a brain-addled state [Laughs] from having answered way too many multiple-choice questions. The way I put it was, I think they went to ETS and ordered one of every test they made, because there was a test on practically everything. There was one I remember [that] was kind of interesting, which was a line drawing of cubes sitting on top of each other, and the question was: how many cubes are required to make this self-supporting? And the trick, of course, is you could easily count the ones in the front that you could see, but the real question was, how many were necessary underneath and behind it to keep it from falling down?

DeVorkin:

[Laughs]

Hulse:

And that took a bit of thinking. Then the other one I remember was the last one, and it had something like — I don’t want to say 400. Maybe it was more like 200 true/false questions, and you had 20 minutes to do it, or something. It’s very fast. And you just looked at it and went, this is crazy. You can’t do this this quickly. Well, it turns out you can. What I realized later, I think the whole point was you couldn’t think about what your answer was. You had to just take your proverbial No. 2 pencil and just go as fast as you could down the list and mark them out. What they were trying to do is get you out of a conscious thinking mode into an instinctive mode and seeing what you did. At least, I think that’s what they were trying to do.

Anyway, [Laughs] the upshot that was really funny was, after I was there for a couple of years, I thought back to this, and I remember that one of the most curious questions was: “I prefer raw carrots over cooked carrots.” And I thought it was a pretty curious question to ask on a college entrance exam. So, I asked all of my friends there what their preference was. Every one of my friends preferred raw carrots over cooked carrots. So my conclusion was, the way to get into Cooper Union was if you like raw carrots. [Laughs] So there you go.

The other interesting thing about Cooper was I had no idea — actually, I didn’t realize this until I went back years later and found out that they always had a physics department, because you need to teach introductory physics to all the engineers, but they did not have a physics major. What I didn’t realize was — I said that the physics as a major had only existed for, let’s say, four years or five years before I went. Maybe it was even less. I don’t know, three years. But in any event, I took it as a given, but it was not. It had just been created, and it was actually eliminated as a major just a few years after I left, and the reason was because Cooper was running into severe financial problems, and the obvious first thing to do was to eliminate the “last in, first out,” as it were. They eliminated the physics major.

So, I remember when I was up there for some function, and I was walking along next to an art professor who I didn’t know particularly, but she was very pleasant, and we were chatting about things. [Laughs] And she pointed out the fact that I was unusual in the sense that I was a physics graduate who had a physics bachelor’s degree from Cooper Union, because there weren’t very many of them, because of this limited period of time that Cooper actually offered a physics major. [Laughs] The way she put it was, Cooper Union has the highest percentage of its undergraduates getting Nobel Prizes in physics of any college in the world, and always will.

DeVorkin:

Wow.

Kuhlman:

[Laughs] Because it was such a small pool.

Hulse:

And of course, the reason is — I mean, Cooper had its virtues, but the point of that was, of course, not so much the virtues of its students, but simply the fact that there was only a few years that it offered the degree. [Laughs] And they got one, so they’re always going to have the highest percentage.

DeVorkin:

Well, that definitely means that she was proud of you.

Sherman:

Yes.

Hulse:

Okay, so while we’re talking about Cooper, I was on an advisory committee for the dean of engineering for a while, but then when the big problems started to occur with the finances, they dissolved that. In any event, I was no longer involved.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

They were looking for other types of people, I guess.

Kuhlman:

Financial ones.

Hulse:

Financial, yeah.

DeVorkin:

So, should we move on?

Kuhlman:

Yeah, did you want to finish the UMass stuff?

DeVorkin:

Yeah, that was the next step.

Kuhlman:

You had talked about the fact that FCRAO, the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory, the dishes didn’t actually exist. And when you first got there, that you helped build them.

Hulse:

One of the interesting aspects of going to UMass for radio astronomy was that while I was there, they actually built their own radio telescope of the same type as Arecibo…

Kuhlman:

A lot smaller. [Laughs]

Hulse:

…although a lot smaller. The way Arecibo was built was using wire mesh, strung in a spherical shape, so should the radio waves coming down from straight above would hit the wire mesh surface and be reflected back up to a focus…

Kuhlman:

Linear focus.

Hulse:

…and that’s where the radio receiver would pick up the signal.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

The tricky part is that if you want to do anything except look straight up, you have to move the feed antenna off of straight up.

DeVorkin:

That’s right.

Hulse:

And that produces a problem, because spheres focus to lines and not points, so they actually use line feeds so the feed was actually made of — constructed out of a piece of — had inputs all the way along a fairly long piece of metal that combined the signals in such a way as to simulate getting a point feed. Anyway, that’s probably more than he wants to know. What was the other thing?

Kuhlman:

Well, the fact that you were on the truss and catenary crew.

Hulse:

Oh, yeah.

DeVorkin:

You have told us a little bit more about UMass, but I’m still a little not clear. Did you go to UMass knowing that there was a lot of work to do on the radio telescopes?

Hulse:

I don’t know whether it was actually approved to be built when I went. There was national observatories that you could apply for time on, and most of the work that was done was with those. I had an NSF [National Science Foundation] traineeship, which paid for most or all of my tuition, which was very nice.

DeVorkin:

Did you apply for that, or was it given to you with admission?

Hulse:

That was given to me with admission.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

I think the fellowships are given out by the NSF on a nationwide basis if I recall correctly. NSF gives them to the universities to decide which of their incoming students they want to support with them.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

And I got one of those.

Kuhlman:

Russell and Joe were given honorary degrees by the university, and Russell had a little funny story about what happened when we went back to UMass. His professors apparently, once he won the Nobel — go ahead.

Hulse:

Oh, yeah. Okay, this is kind of funny. Well, the honorary degrees were really not part of that.

Kuhlman:

I thought that’s when they told you the story.

Hulse:

No, this was just this one professor telling me this story. [Laughs] The story was, when I received the Nobel Prize, the physics faculty and astronomy faculty all rushed back to their offices to look for the grade books to make sure that I had gotten an A from them.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs]

Hulse:

Because they would have found it much too embarrassing if they’d given a prospective Nobel laureate anything except an A.

DeVorkin:

Ah, that’s funny.

Hulse:

I thought that was pretty funny.

DeVorkin:

And did you get anything but A’s?

Kuhlman:

One.

Hulse:

I got one. Everything except one course was an A, so they were all really relieved, except this one faculty member I think who had left by then anyway.

DeVorkin:

What was that course?

Hulse:

Well, believe it or not, it was atomic and molecular physics, which was strange, because that was what I worked on for most of my career at Princeton.

Kuhlman:

Well, you said part of it was because it was the last course you were going to take.

Hulse:

That was exactly it. I was just so sick and tired of sitting in classrooms and reading textbooks. [Laughs] I wanted to do things, not sit and read textbooks.

DeVorkin:

Oh, good. Yeah.

Hulse:

So, it wasn’t the fault of the professor. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was mine. I just couldn’t focus on it, so I got a B.

Kuhlman:

You said there was another reason why you weren’t focusing on it, which was the library construction.

Hulse:

Oh, yeah. Over yesterday evening, I kept popping out these little odd recollections. Unfortunately, she’s remembering most all of them, or all of them so far.

Kuhlman:

I took notes. [Laughs]

Hulse:

One was that UMass Amherst has a — what is it, 20-story?

Kuhlman:

It’s a huge library.

Hulse:

It’s a very tall, brick library. And at the time I was doing my PhD, they were building this library. Now, the interesting thing about it was this library was being built in plain sight of the classroom that I was taking the atomic and molecular physics course in. And it was greatly distracting to all the members of the class, [Laughs] because as they do in any large building construction, they have to have cranes [brought] in that hoist large amounts of steel and weld it in place, etcetera. So, we’re sitting there, and the professor is discoursing on whatever atomic or molecular physics topic is the topic of the day, and we’re sitting there watching him, but also glancing over at the library to see what’s going on. And every now and then, they’d do a big lift, meaning they’d lift a huge piece of steel up, and the class would go, “Ooh!” And the professor would immediately brighten up and smile thinking that we were being very impressed by what a quality job he was doing.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs]

Hulse:

Whereas actually, we were being impressed by what a large tonnage of steel was being lifted into the air. Anyway, don’t tell them that.

DeVorkin:

That’s alright. But that’s cute. That’s good. Were there other stories?

Kuhlman:

I think that was the main one. He did note that when he had gone to UMass for an interview before he went there, that he had had an interview with Bob Huguenin and was very impressed with him, and that was also an influential reason why he went.

Hulse:

There were several reasons I went to UMass, and one of them was that I needed to get a physics PhD and do radio astronomy research, because I had pretty much decided to do radio astronomy and you could do that.

DeVorkin:

Right. And when you interviewed with Huguenin, did you find him somebody you wanted to work for, or was that just too early to think in terms of —

Hulse:

It was a little too early, but the answer is yes, I did find him a very social and interesting guy to talk to, and he offered me the position, even though I dropped one of his electronics.

DeVorkin:

You did what?

Hulse:

He was showing me one of the very expensive, high-sensitivity transistors that they used in the radio telescope they were about to start building. And when I picked it up, I dropped it on the floor.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs]

Hulse:

And fortunately, it still worked, which it probably would, because that’s not going to damage it. But you could just hear the sharp intake of breath. [Inhales deeply]

DeVorkin:

Ah, that’s great.

Hulse:

I was pretty upset too, but they let me in anyway.

DeVorkin:

When Taylor invited you to work with him, were there other professors who wanted you to work with them at the same time?

Hulse:

That’s a good question. Let me just kind of give that a pass, because I’m not quite sure. It may be that some of the other ones were interested, but it was probably more likely I had already made contact with Joe Taylor, and I knew what he was doing, although we hadn’t decided to do a pulsar search. You know, there was a relationship [that] had been formed.

DeVorkin:

So, by the time you had that tea together and he invited you, you already knew.

Hulse:

Well, I didn’t already know, but I was not surprised.

DeVorkin:

Aha. Very good.

Hulse:

I was surprised in the sense that I had never had a faculty member come up and say, “I’d like to have you work with me,” because that’s not the sort of thing that happened in our educational system, until you get to graduate school.

DeVorkin:

Were there other students who envied you and wanted to work with Taylor?

Hulse:

I think there may have been another student or two who worked with Taylor. I know he had a couple of first- and second-year graduate students who worked with him on various things. He didn’t have any other PhD students at the time I was there, at least, as far as I remember.

DeVorkin:

Right. While we’re on this question, which leads to the pulsar binary discovery, we were just wondering if there are any details that we haven’t covered in the other interviews that you would like to have recorded.

Hulse:

Let me just think for a minute.

Kuhlman:

Well, I will tell you that the other day, before we met with you, Russell had actually started talking in great detail about the technical aspects of the search and everything else. And I recorded most of that on our iPhones. So, if at some point you’re interested, I can always ship those audios off to you.

DeVorkin:

Oh, sure. Yeah, that would be very, very helpful.

Hulse:

I do remember at one point sitting in the cafeteria, talking to a couple of friends of mine after Joe had offered me the position, and being very happy, because I thought it was perfect. The reason was because it was hands-on, [and] looking for pulsars was an exciting prospect. Working at Arecibo was an exciting idea because it was the biggest telescope in the world. I also liked Joe. He and I were not identical people, but we shared some similar interests. Obviously radio astronomy, but also, he was a very avid amateur radio operator, by the way. I wasn’t a very avid one, but it sort of gives you an idea that we had some overlapping interests within radio astronomy.

DeVorkin:

Since you talked about the details with Jeanne, that’s really great. I also know that you talked with Marcia about when you were convinced that you had seen something, that that was real.

Hulse:

Right.

DeVorkin:

Anything you might want to add to that?

Hulse:

Did I mention to Marcia the drive back to — that evening after I decided that it was in a binary system?

DeVorkin:

Yes, that’s true. But give us a sense of that, though.

[SHORT BREAK]

Hulse:

Well, it was a very stressful few weeks, several weeks, because at that point, by the time I discovered the binary, the process of doing the pulsar search had become fairly routine. Thank goodness, [Laughs] because I had enough trouble. That’s right, I probably never mentioned that I actually ended up being a computer tech too, even though that’s not exactly what I wanted to do, because the computer I was using was Modcomp. There were no service engineers for it in the area. So, when certain things went wrong, for instance, with the 64-channel input. Something went wrong. I forget what.

Kuhlman:

The [inaudible] you said, yeah.

Hulse:

The analog to digital converter, that was it. I called up Modcomp and talked to one of their engineers, but basically I went in there with an oscilloscope and puttered around and had to figure it out for myself what was wrong, and I did. And then I called up Modcomp and asked them to send the appropriate new part, which they did. I put it in, and it worked again, which sounds simple, but it’s not exactly a relaxing experience for a graduate student.

DeVorkin:

But when you did it, you must have felt good about it.

Hulse:

I felt a great sense of relief, at least.

Kuhlman:

Tell them the Modcomp story. Yeah.

Hulse:

Modcomp was the computer company that was headquartered in Fort Lauderdale that we had gotten this computer from. If you’re familiar with the PDP-11, it was a PDP-11 class computer, meaning about the same power and size.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

So, for whatever reason, that’s the one we got. To make a long story short, because it did take a couple of very painful weeks, they had made a construction error on the machine they had sent me, and I believe it was the fact that there was a connection on the motherboard that had not been soldered into place properly or connected properly. So, I spent at least a couple of weeks driving myself crazy trying to figure out why this brand new computer was doing weird things and trying to narrow down exactly what was wrong. Well, I was unsuccessful, so I called up Modcomp, and they sent a service engineer who gave up after a few hours, because he couldn’t figure out what was wrong. By the way, fortunately I had managed to take the computer program which I had been writing, you know, to do the pulsar search. It was all in assembly [language]. It was pretty long: 4,000 assembly language statements.

DeVorkin:

Boy.

Hulse:

So, it’s big, and you don’t just randomly code something through it. You have to figure out where you’re going. Anyway, I managed to reduce it down to a pretty short program that would fail which was, of course, a great relief, because I figured, okay, now they’ll be able to figure it out pretty quickly. Well, the first service engineer they sent, I felt sorry for the poor guy, because he couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I could show him the error easily enough, but he couldn’t figure out why it was making that error. So, he called up his boss, and I was sitting in the room while his boss was reaming him out for being so stupid that he couldn’t figure out what the answer was.

DeVorkin:

Oh, boy.

Hulse:

Which — this is really not how you’d handle these things. [Laughs] So, that guy’s local boss ended up meeting, I think, with the regional boss who came out to fix it. And he swaggered in. At least, my impression was that that’s the right word. He kind of swaggered in to fix it, because he was going to walk in and fix it in five minutes, walk out, and that would be it. Well, guess what? He couldn’t fix it either. [Laughs] And he got really upset, and he came up with all sorts of strange, specious arguments as to why it was my fault, not the computer.

DeVorkin:

Oh, boy.

Kuhlman:

Did he use the cosmic ray excuse? I’ve heard that one a lot. [Laughs]

Hulse:

Yeah, so the next thing I did is I called up Modcomp again and said, look, this is what the situation is. I’ve got to get this thing fixed. Actually, I sort of think back on it and think, that was a pretty audacious situation that a graduate student should be put into — shouldn’t be put into such a difficult situation, because graduate students are slow-maturing. I was kind of frightened of what was going on. Maybe I really was being completely stupid, and that would reflect badly on me.

DeVorkin:

Did you think you were being tested?

Kuhlman:

No.

Hulse:

No.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

I just thought something — I didn’t know what was going on, but I thought it was very important that I managed to generate a program which was only — I think maybe a hundred or two hundred…

Kuhlman:

Instructions.

Hulse:

…assembly language statements long into one that would fail, because that made it simpler to look at everything and see what was happening.

DeVorkin:

So, you created a new — or you corrected the operating system?

Kuhlman:

No.

Hulse:

Well, I made a short —

DeVorkin:

Shorter operating — okay.

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

Hulse:

It wasn’t really an operating system. It was just a set of instructions. It didn’t really matter what it did. What mattered was, it didn’t produce what it should have produced, if you see what I’m saying.

Kuhlman:

Need a really good test case.

Hulse:

It was a test case.

DeVorkin:

Yeah. Now when you succeeded, did you report this to Taylor, and was he appreciative?

Hulse:

Oh, he was certainly appreciative, and I think he helped by calling up by Modcomp and adding his [inaudible].

DeVorkin:

Oh, yeah. Okay.

Hulse:

[inaudible] fix this. So, what happened was they sent one of the design engineers up to look at it. So finally, the obvious problem had turned out to be the first two guys, where they didn’t know enough to figure it out. The design engineer didn’t know what was wrong, but he knew enough to be able to — he came in and within like 15 minutes — I had this very short…

Kuhlman:

Test case.

Hulse:

…demo program I could run that would fail. And I showed him the program failing. We ran it a couple of times, and then he walked — he said, “Okay, there’s something really wrong here,” and we came up with a way of achieving the same operational requirement without using those instructions, and he left to go back home to Fort Lauderdale and go to the design lab and try to figure out what the hell was going on, which they did, but it took them a couple of months — a month or two. So, I basically came up with — I forget how long it took, but in any event, they had to go back to their design engineers, the people who really understood the computer very thoroughly, to figure out what was wrong. What they discovered was that there was a problem in building that particular machine. Again, there was a connection which had not been properly made.

DeVorkin:

Oh, boy.

Hulse:

And once they made the connection, everything was fine.

Kuhlman:

Feather in the cap. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

Yeah. Amazing.

Kuhlman:

The other thing — I was just going to mention one other thing. I had sent you a photograph of Russell standing in front of the Modcomp with the teletype, and the Modcomp is in this wooden box. And as Russell has always told me, he built that, too. [Laughs]

Hulse:

Yeah, because —

DeVorkin:

And you also said it does not exist anymore.

Kuhlman:

No.

Hulse:

No.

DeVorkin:

Okay, because that would certainly be something that we would be interested in collecting.

Hulse:

Yeah. I would, too.

DeVorkin:

Do you have any memorable objects from that project that still do exist that you would be in a position to donate?

Kuhlman:

You don’t have any hardware. But I found a printout of the CHAINSAW program, so we’ve got that.

Hulse:

Yeah, we have a printout of the software.

Kuhlman:

And the data. Your notebooks. We have your notebooks.

Hulse:

Notebooks. I’d have to check. I don’t think there’s any hardware.

Kuhlman:

If it was, it would be at UMass.

Hulse:

Yeah.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

I’ll look, though. I don’t remember anything, but maybe there was something and I just forgot.

Frederick-Frost:

Can I ask about your recordkeeping? How important was that to you throughout your scientific career, and how did you learn how to do it well?

Kuhlman:

Russell does notebooks, a lot of lab notebooks. [Laughs]

Hulse:

Yeah. I decided to keep notebooks of things, just to record things that I think might — just to keep track of what’s going on, because when you’ve got a complicated system, it’s very important, often critical, to be able to look back and see in detail what you did earlier and verify that you did what you thought you did and whether it did or did not work. It’s important.

Kuhlman:

His notebooks are very meticulous.

Frederick-Frost:

And how did you learn to do that sort of recordkeeping? Were you trained to do it, or did you just figure it out?

Hulse:

I just did it, because that’s what was needed — on my own instinct.

Kuhlman:

I’ll tell you how much it permeates Russell. I mentioned earlier I had chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and before I had to go in for chemo, Russell had been charting my white blood cell counts, and he discovered that they fell along a very nice…

Hulse:

Parabolic.

Kuhlman:

…parabolic curve, so when we went to go and find a clinical oncologist to consult with, he brought his chart along with him. [Laughs] And one of the oncologists we eventually went with down at Penn Medicine took one look at it and said, “Wow, this is really interesting. Maybe we should use this for prediction.” [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

That’s great. When was that?

Kuhlman:

Oh, let’s see. I want to say it was around 2004.

DeVorkin:

Okay. So, you were in Princeton.

Kuhlman:

Oh, yeah.

DeVorkin:

Yeah. Okay, where should we go from here?

Kuhlman:

You wanted to go to the consulting stuff, I think.

DeVorkin:

Yes.

Kuhlman:

He had started talking about doing Contact Science. I think that was the first thing you were going to talk about. And also, he had been on the advisory committee for UMass for a while too, Dean [Linda] Slakey’s —

Hulse:

Dean of engineering.

DeVorkin:

You mentioned to Marcia that one particularly enjoyable opportunity was to serve on an advisory committee to Dean Linda Slakey’s School of Natural Sciences. What was the connection there? You said she was a landlady.

Kuhlman:

[Laughs] Yeah. This is funny. Yeah, go ahead.

Hulse:

This is kind of a funny story, because the reason — she was dean of engineering at the time, and what was funny about it was I discovered that — let’s see. When I was at UMass, the first year I lived in the graduate dorm, but in the subsequent years, I lived with several other graduate students in a house just off campus. It was a rental, and we had no idea who owned it, just the real estate agent who would collect the check. And it turns out the owner had been Linda Slakey. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

Or maybe if it wasn’t her, she at least had bought it…

Kuhlman:

At some point.

Hulse:

…at some point, because she wanted to fix it back up and turn it into her residence.

DeVorkin:

Okay. Was this the first consulting job you had, or what was the first?

Kuhlman:

No, because he had some consulting jobs before he won, or right after he won the Nobel. I’m trying to remember. No, because you were doing — I’m trying to remember how that worked out. Yeah, I think they were all done after the Nobel, because like third security and that stuff.

Hulse:

Yeah, I think they were after the Nobel.

Kuhlman:

They were all after the Nobel.

DeVorkin:

Yeah. In the chronology that you sent me, they’re all after the Nobel. That’s right.

Hulse:

Actually, I hate to ask this, but would it be possible for me to take a break for a little while?

Frederick-Frost:

Yeah.

DeVorkin:

Of course.

[END OF PART 3]

[PART 4]

Frederick-Frost:

Yeah, just a sec. There we go.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

Okay. And Jeanne, you’re going to take some notes…

Kuhlman:

If I need to, yes, I will.

Hulse:

…in case, just to make sure if I forget something.

Kuhlman:

Yes, I will.

Hulse:

[inaudible] point or something if I want to [inaudible].

Kuhlman:

I’ll take care of it. Yeah, that’s fine.

Frederick-Frost:

We’re starting the fourth session of our interview, and it is March 26, 2024. David, will you please take it away?

DeVorkin:

Yeah. I know that when you got the Nobel Prize in ’93. In one of your lectures, you implied very strongly that this stimulated an interest that you had in outreach and sharing your experiences and helping others to gain them. When did you first get interested in outreach, going beyond the walls of UMass or NRAO, or Princeton Plasma Physics [Laboratory]? When was it, and what prompted you to get active in outreach?

Hulse:

That’s an interesting question. [Laughs] That’s what one says when the answer isn’t neat and tidy.

DeVorkin:

That’s quite alright. Just give us what you please.

Hulse:

Okay, so here we go, ad-lib. Let’s start back when I was the proverbial science nerd of an elementary school and went on through high school, a kid who was just really interested in science. I expressed that interest primarily through my own activities, my own hobbies, building oscilloscope kits and going places where I could do some geology and dig up some interesting rocks and a wide variety of things. It was not so much through the schools, because the schools weren’t interesting. They didn’t present that much science as far as I could see, and most of what they presented, or much of what they presented — let me be a little more modest — I already knew. But it was also presented in such a dry fashion. When I have the opportunity, you were referring to in later years, to start doing outreach, it’s inspired by the fact that I — first of all, it seems to me that science is such an exciting field that everybody should know something about it, should enjoy the excitement and understand what’s going on. They don’t have to be scientists. They just need to — I shouldn’t say “need to.” I thought it was a shame that they —

Kuhlman:

Lacked the curiosity?

Hulse:

Jeanne just said, “lacked the curiosity,” and I think that’s a good point. Or [they] found science off-putting. It’s not something they wanted to get involved [in], or it was for nerds, and they did other things. They played baseball. They did volleyball, or something, not that Hulse kid. Lord knows what he’s doing. [Laughs] Anyway, I don’t want to carry on too much on that subject, that aspect of it. I basically found a few friends who also had some interest in science. That was primarily in my early years, like through junior high school, expressed by friends who had similar interests, not identical interests. And we didn’t all want to become the same type of scientist or something, but we were all interested in science, and we all enjoyed getting together and talking about it, mentioning what we had read in Scientific American or some magazine, or our opinion of something. By the way, I’m sorry if I’m bouncing around a bit. My Parkinson’s is giving me [inaudible].

DeVorkin:

That’s quite alright.

Hulse:

So, I don’t know whether all that I’ve been carrying on [about] makes sense. I’ll try to summarize this. I had my own personal deep, internal interest in science for as long as I can remember. I’m not sure where it came from. As I mentioned, the most amusing example, and perhaps the earliest example of this, is probably my mother —

Kuhlman:

Yeah, you had told them that story.

Hulse:

Yeah, I know.

Kuhlman:

Okay.

Hulse:

But I was just going to repeat, just to kind of set the sequence.

Kuhlman:

That’s fine.

Hulse:

My mother [said] that she had to use a double set of straps on me when I was a baby in the stroller, because I kept trying to lean over the side of the stroller, because I wanted to watch the wheels go around. Apparently, the reason I wanted to watch the wheels go around was because it was interesting to see wheels moving. I don’t think I mentioned last time [Laughs] the other thing, which my mother found a little embarrassing.

We grew up in the Bronx. One of my favorite things that would happen is if I was out as a young kid walking along with my mother. I’d get really excited if the garbage truck came along, because the garbage trucks that they used in the city were these huge things with similarly huge hydraulic pistons in the back that were used to raise a large hopper with the garbage and throw it into the back in the garbage truck. The garbage men who came along, their role was basically to pick up these steel garbage cans that had been filled with garbage by the residents and pick them up and dump them in the hopper. Then when the hopper got full enough, they’d signal to the guy in the driver’s seat, who’d push a button. The engine would rev up and start using hydraulic power to lift this fairly large, as I recall — at least, [Laughs] in the view of a kid — bucket of garbage and throw it into the truck. I did wonder later: why did I find that so interesting? I’d say it's because it’s sort of like the baby carriage. It was something that moved. It did things. How did it do that? And I didn’t know how it did that. I probably asked people how it did that. They didn’t know either. So, it was another example of my interest in the world.

DeVorkin:

Sure.

Hulse:

I almost said, “natural world,” but those garbage trucks are not part of the natural world. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

Well yeah, that’s true.

Hulse:

But it’s the same thing. How do things work? And I was interested in most anything. Once I got older, the main function of school in helping support my interests was that I started meeting kids with similar interests. Not necessarily identical interests, but we were all interested in hearing about what the other kids in our group were interested in, which was the four of us. It was between three or four of us. And the group was fairly stable during most of the time I lived in the Bronx.

Sherman:

In that period of your childhood that you’re discussing, did you have any construction sets or building set toys, like Erector sets [inaudible] toys that you enjoyed?

Hulse:

I missed that, and I should have mentioned it, because I certainly enjoyed whatever toys my parents could get for me that supported that interest. Depending on my age and varying interests, that would change over time, and it would change as I grew older, not surprisingly. I’m trying to remember. They had these construction sets.

Kuhlman:

The Erector sets?

Hulse:

Erector sets. Thank you.

Kuhlman:

That’s what Roger said. Yeah.

Hulse:

Right. So, I had Erector sets, and I started out with little ones, and eventually, my parents got me bigger and bigger ones. That was a lot of fun. I have to mention the important role of my father in this, I’m sure. My father was very much a do-it-yourselfer. He was instinctively a do-it-yourselfer, in the sense that the best option from his point of view, if it was available at all, was to do it himself, whether something broke or whether he wanted to build something. He passed that along to me, in part by not only encouraging me in my interests, but also allowing me to use power tools and such at a relatively young age.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

One thing I remember was that my parents’ relatives were absolutely appalled that my parents, specifically my father, let me use power tools at a relatively young age. I don’t know quite how old I was, but I was running around with a power drill or something. I had the feeling the relatives were all running for cover. [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

But you obviously were very excited about getting to know how things work. What we want to talk about is how and when you started to share this excitement with other people. Did you do this in school and try to get your friends to get interested in what you were interested in?

Hulse:

That’s a good question. Let me think about that [inaudible]. Certainly, I would say a key aspect was, first of all, my parents. My mother was not that interested in science and engineering, but she was certainly supportive of my interests in the sense that if I wanted something, she and my father would try to make it happen. Could you repeat the rest of the question?

DeVorkin:

When did you feel that you wanted to share your excitement about what you’re building, like with Erector sets, and what you’re learning about the world with your friends or with other people? For instance, did you invite your friends over to your house to see your Erector sets and to explain to them how they worked?

Hulse:

Yeah. The answer is that I met kids through different social outlets, which was probably when I started going to school and to some extent through Sunday School at church. That was probably the only two outlets. How else would a young kid get to meet other young kids?

DeVorkin:

But did you join any clubs? Was there any science club?

Hulse:

I don’t think that —

DeVorkin:

Or maybe at Bronx High School?

Hulse:

Well, at Bronx High School of Science, they certainly had science clubs. The younger ages, I’m not sure that they had science [clubs].

DeVorkin:

Oh, that’s okay. We can start with Bronx Science. In the clubs, did you ever present what you were doing, present your projects, to the other members of the club?

Hulse:

Yeah. First of all, when I was younger, I think what happened was [that] as I met kids, there was a self-selection effect, which probably applies to everything. The kids who were interested in baseball all got together and played baseball. The kids who were interested in science got together and talked about that, although when they got together, it was mostly that we would get together occasionally at one another’s houses and talk about things. Or I could show what I was doing, and my friends could show what they were doing. To the best of my recollection, there weren’t that many kids who were really interested in science, at least at the level I was interested.

DeVorkin:

But did you try to get them interested?

Hulse:

I didn’t actively try to get them interested. I just talked about what I thought was interesting, and we sort of self-selected into — I think “self-selection” is the keyword, probably.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

It was friends of mine who were — actually, it wasn’t just science. It was interest in the world around them and understanding it and talking about it.

DeVorkin:

Sure. I understand. I’m just trying to find that part of your life when you began to realize that it would be a good thing to get more people interested in the way you look at the world and through science. Were you a TA [teaching assistant] or anything like that at UMass?

Kuhlman:

You were briefly, right? You told me once that you TA’d for one class, I think.

Hulse:

That’s right. Before I get into that, let me finish up on the [social group].

DeVorkin:

Sure.

Hulse:

It was mostly a matter of self-selection. I talked about science with various kids, some of whom were good friends. There were maybe four of us who were close friends. And we would talk about an article you might happen to read in The New York Times or something that wouldn’t necessarily have something to do with science. It was just something that was interesting. Now if we move on to — I remember that there were formal science classes in the public schools.

Kuhlman:

Classes, or clubs?

Hulse:

I’m talking about whatever we were taught. They were obviously part of the official curriculum, but there weren’t too many. I guess once I got to junior high school they started to have clubs, where you’d have a biology club and a chemistry club and whatever. And I participated in some of that, but mostly the clubs that were created as part of the school curriculum were not as interesting as the things that I was doing or that my friends were doing.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

I think that’s not surprising partly because the schools were doing it because that was part of their job. They had this long list of things that they had to go through. Science was on that list, but it also included pretty much everything else about life that you try to teach a young kid. So, you get some kids who are interested in science, and you get assignments that [inaudible].

DeVorkin:

Sure.

Hulse:

It wasn’t a focus. The other thing, I suppose, was that the friends I had — I don’t want this to sound arrogant, but they were similarly smart about science. They weren’t just ooh-ing and ahh-ing about something they happened to see on TV.

DeVorkin:

Yeah.

Hulse:

That would happen, but we’d actively talk about things. One of the group actually started writing science fiction, because he found it more interesting.

DeVorkin:

Ha! That’s lovely. But what I was thinking of is when I was in high school and I was in a science club, one of the things that the teacher who was the advisor insisted that we do was to get other people interested in joining the club, and therefore joining into science. Did you have anybody like that encouraging you to do that?

Hulse:

I do not recall anything like that happening.

DeVorkin:

Okay. Is there more to say about this period, or can we move on into your college years and find if there was a larger urge to open up science to the world?

Hulse:

The one thing I would say is we skipped Bronx High School of Science, and we need to include that.

DeVorkin:

Go ahead. It’s okay. Anything you have to say about it, please do.

Hulse:

First thing, I think I already said last time, was I was quite disappointed in certain ways in Bronx High, because the average student wasn’t nearly as passionate about science as I was. In fact, I would say the majority of them weren’t particularly interested in science at all.

Kuhlman:

Yeah, you had mentioned that before.

Hulse:

Yeah, [there were] three or four selective high schools in New York City that admission was by competitive examination. There was Bronx Science, which was perhaps the most famous; there was [Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of] Music & Art; I can’t remember quite what the others are right now. I think there were one or two more, particularly Music & Art. Anyway, I was a part of one of the biology clubs for a while, and a couple of other of the activities offered. And I enjoyed that to some extent, but the thing that I’m trying to put the right words to is that there was some level of disappointment, in the sense that when I got into Bronx, capital letters, THE BRONX HIGH SCHOOL OF SCIENCE, which had this great reputation — when I got there and started to talk to the other students, I discovered that in general, they weren’t nearly as interested in science as I was, and in fact, I think it would be fair to say most of them didn’t have any particular interest in science. They just had an interest in going to the best high school that they could, so that they could get into the best college, etcetera, etcetera. As a final thought, thinking about it now, I wonder how much parental pressure was involved there too, that parents who wanted their kids to be very successful wanted them to go to Bronx Science, because that had the best academic reputation of any high school.

Kuhlman:

In the city.

Hulse:

Well, maybe Music & Art and the other one — I forgot — also had good reputations. But they wanted their kids to go to Bronx Science because it had such a great reputation that it increased their chances of getting into a good college, which increased their chances of getting a good job, etcetera, etcetera. And that was kind of disappointing to me because I thought I was walking into a place where everybody would be thrilled about science, and it just wasn’t true.

DeVorkin:

Did you want to do something to get everybody thrilled about science?

Hulse:

Not really. I had my own interests and my friends, and that was sufficient. And I think part of it was [that] I was busy enough trying to keep up with my schoolwork and everything that I didn’t feel like I should go around and try to recruit people.

DeVorkin:

Okay. Kristen has a question.

Frederick-Frost:

Yeah. I was particularly struck how in a previous session you talked about how during your school days, it sounds like you got let into a cabinet or a room that had a lot of demonstration apparatus. I don’t know how much of that kind of stuff also came through when you were at Bronx Science. But were these the kind of things, the kind of experiences, that informed your work later on with the science outreach? Was it hands-on activities that were similar to what you did in your early schooling, or was this completely different? What was your work like with outreach?

Hulse:

I think most of it would be described as this way. Do you want to talk specifically about the unique opportunity I had when these science teachers let me play with the apparatus they had own my own during school time? That was very unusual. I was the only kid I ever knew who ended up being allowed to do that.

Frederick-Frost:

So, your work later, when you did a partnership with your local librarian, was that also hands-on science like that?

Hulse:

Yeah, that was definitely hands-on science, but that’s a different category and many years later.

Frederick-Frost:

Yeah.

Hulse:

Let me just characterize the specific, I would say unique — maybe it was only a year — where the two science teachers saw my interest in science and saw that I was doing very well on the exams, etcetera, so they weren’t worried about my academic performance, I think, at least to the best of my recollection. In any event, what they did was [that] they had all this demonstration equipment for science experiments that were definitely part of the curriculum. These were not just random pieces of equipment. These were pieces of equipment that somebody, somewhere, had decided should be part of the curriculum taught in — this was probably junior high school science.

And the difference in my case was that I knew enough myself and was interested enough, and these teachers were wonderful enough, to see my interest and say — and I mean that in a positive way — “Why don’t you just go in the back and play with this stuff and see what you can come up with?” Part of it was [that] they were just finding out what they could do with it, because they didn’t know. I actually knew more than they did about some of it. And I didn’t play with a lot of it. Any parts of it where it involved equipment [that] I really didn’t understand, I didn’t take the risk of fiddling around with it. I stuck with the things I could understand.

DeVorkin:

Yeah.

Hulse:

And the vacuum pump was probably the best, most coherent example I can give.

DeVorkin:

The example of the vacuum pump, keeping two hemispheres together?

Hulse:

Right.

DeVorkin:

Right. When I took lab courses in high school and also in college, we were teamed up; two people would work together. Was that the case for your school?

Hulse:

I think the answer is yes. I’m not entirely sure, but I think that was true.

DeVorkin:

Okay. The reason I ask that is because in a team like that, usually one person takes control and directs the other person.

Frederick-Frost:

You told us a couple of times about how on the way back from the Nobel ceremony, you thought to yourself, “Well, I guess my life is going to change,” and, “What do I want to do next?”

DeVorkin:

Right.

Frederick-Frost:

I wondered if we could step into that “what’s next” thinking and how you ended up realizing some of those ideas.

[SHORT BREAK]

Hulse:

I’m very happy to talk with you about this.

DeVorkin:

Could I build on what Kristen asked? I think it was around the time of your Nobel, and in a talk, you said, and I’m now quoting you, that you wanted to “increase the personal engagement, understanding, and enjoyment of science and engineering of youth and the general public via community outreach.”

Hulse:

Yeah. That is certainly a good summary of one of the things I really wanted to do. It struck me, literally on the plane flight back from Stockholm, that being a Nobel laureate would probably give me more opportunities to get involved in fostering such things than I had ever had before. So that was a very significant revelation, which I followed up on for many years afterwards.

DeVorkin:

Can you recall when you made definite plans to put this desire, this goal, into action?

Hulse:

Well, what I needed was the venue and the opportunity.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

And it turns out, I had one of those right here in Plainsboro: the Plainsboro library. The librarian in Plainsboro was a wonderful woman by the name of Jinny Baeckler, and she was very dedicated to doing science projects and science education in her public library, which was the Plainsboro Public Library. So, she and I naturally became good buddies, and I worked with her on some of the things she was doing. Yeah, she was a really wonderful person, and she was personally very interested in exactly what you [inaudible]. And she had been doing it for years in the library.

DeVorkin:

That’s very interesting. So, did you work with her? Did you begin to have programs? What kind of programs were they?

Hulse:

Yeah, I started working with her when the opportunities presented themselves. We weren’t going to force anything. And of course, there were limitations to what we could do in terms of time, money, space, etcetera. But Jinny was very creative and did a wonderful job.

Kuhlman:

Shall I tell them about the “Microbemania” thing, and I can give that as an example? There was this one that Russell took me to that was early on, that they were sort of trying out. Russell also had this conversation to some extent with a professor at Princeton, Bonnie Bassler I think, and enlisted some of some of her graduate students to help out. And they called it “Microbemania.”

DeVorkin:

[Laughs]

Kuhlman:

They had a whole bunch of elementary school kids and a whole bunch of petri dishes, and they gave them some background on microbes, then they set them out in the library with swabs and told them to swab everything they wanted to. So, kids went into the bathrooms. They went onto the counters. They checked book covers, and they swabbed them all, then they incubated them. Then [they] came back — I don’t know whether it was a couple days later or a week later — and looked at what they had grown and then tested various cleansing products, such as soap and water or bleach or Windex , to see which ones were most effective at killing said microbes.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs] Yeah.

Hulse:

Right, I had forgotten about that specific example. That was an excellent example. I’m glad you remembered it. Thank you.

DeVorkin:

Now, how was the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab? Were they interested in your interest in outreach?

Hulse:

Not really. Institutionally, it wasn’t part of their agenda, really. There were, of course, some of the staff who were interested in science education and did a few things, but it was really minimal.

Kuhlman:

There was a teachers’ program that you participated in. Was that one through the university or the lab, where they had high school teachers come in?

DeVorkin:

Right. That’s right.

Hulse:

That’s right. I think that was run through the lab.

Kuhlman:

It was run through the lab? Okay.

DeVorkin:

Yeah, it was a science education laboratory, and I think it started in the summer of 2002. I was wondering: what was your role? Who did you have to convince, and where did you get the funding?

Kuhlman:

But I actually think that it was earlier than that, because what I remember was [that] Russell had gotten invited to give a talk at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. We had flown out, and we were in the Anchorage airport while we were waiting to change planes, and a woman came up to him and said, “Russell!” And it turned out to be a teacher who had been in one of these things, and that was back in ’94. So, there was something you had been doing with the teacher thing prior to that.

Hulse:

I’m trying to remember.

Kuhlman:

But I don’t remember whether that was through the lab or through the university.

Hulse:

I think it was probably through the lab.

Kuhlman:

I think the program was called “Science and Scholars” but I can’t find any independent reference to that. It was a program for high school science teachers.

DeVorkin:

You had a collaboration with Andrew [P.] Zwicker at Plasma Physics, as well as Sophia Gershman, who was a local high school teacher. And it was the three of you who were somehow instrumental in the establishment of the [Plasma] Science Education Laboratory. Is that ringing any bells?

Hulse:

Andrew Zwicker certainly does. Apologies to Sophia; I don’t remember that person particularly.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

Andrew Post-Zwicker certainly was interested in science education, and we talked about it a bit. We both had programs of one sort or another that had [an] objective of science outreach and were active in that. And I think he actually got some formal support, perhaps — this is a question mark — from the lab [inaudible] money to do some activities. Actually, maybe it was a Department of Energy opportunity, some sort of request for proposals, or maybe Andrew himself. I forget. But anyway, he did do some things. The things I did were much more on my own. Not surprisingly, our personalities were a little different, but we got along pretty well. We approached these things a little differently, so the programs that resulted were a little different. We both got some support, and I’m trying to remember from who. I could be incorrect in this, but I think Andrew may have gotten some more formal support as part of a Department of Energy program that offers [inaudible], this is a good thing to do in a Department of Energy laboratory. I don’t think I ever [had] additional support, but then as the resident Nobel laureate, I sort of had more freedom of action in general than most people.

DeVorkin:

How did your colleagues at the Plasma Physics Lab regard what you were doing? When did it become visible to them, and did they congratulate you or assist you? Was it considered a good thing for the lab?

Hulse:

The other lab people really didn’t care much. We were just ignored. There wasn’t a very particularly large fraction of the lab that was actively involved. There wasn’t that much interest. However, I think there were probably some other lab members, including physicists and technicians, etcetera, who contributed in some way or another. I don’t remember exactly what, but there wasn’t a giant program.

Kuhlman:

Well, DoE requires some science education participation from their labs, don’t they?

DeVorkin:

Yes. From what I understand, it was actually located at the laboratory. Is that correct?

Hulse:

Andrew’s program, yes. I think Andrew’s was more formally associated and supported by DoE as a science education program.

DeVorkin:

So, you were more with the high schools? What about the The Lewis School [of Princeton]? Does that ring a bell?

Kuhlman:

The Lewis School?

Hulse:

Not really.

Kuhlman:

Nope. I mean, Contact Science was completely independent of the lab.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Kuhlman:

That was strictly between him and Jinny, getting it started.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

[SHORT BREAK]

Frederick-Frost:

Thank you for taking time to share your stories with us.

Hulse:

I hope it’s useful because I see it as very important.

DeVorkin:

Certainly, we want to go a little farther and ask you questions about your connection with the University of Texas and how you decided finally to retire from Princeton Physics and move to the University of Texas. Can you give us a general history of that?

Hulse:

Well, the real point was [that] especially for the first couple of years after the Nobel, not surprisingly, I was invited to give talks everywhere and spent a lot of time in the next couple of years [invited to visit] various universities.

Kuhlman:

Elementary schools, whatever.

Hulse:

Elementary schools, and even to General Motors, surprisingly. They asked me to come out and give my binary pulsars lecture. So I was pretty busy doing that.

Kuhlman:

Do you want to tell them the little funny GM story? David might appreciate this.

Hulse:

Sure.

Kuhlman:

Well, Russell told me earlier that it’s the one talk where he actually got a question he couldn’t answer from the audience: apparently a very detailed question on general relativity theory. Russell was never a theorist.

Hulse:

As you remember, I never really studied general relativity. I was doing a pulsar search and found something that helped prove general relativity. So, I knew something about it to begin with and learned more, but I was not a theoretical, Einsteinian, general relativity theorist. [Laughs]

Kuhlman:

And he told me that fortunately the person, the way he posed his question was, as you said, a very elaborate, detailed thing. And the end, he said, “Would you care to comment?” And Russell said, “No.” [Laughs]

Hulse:

And the audience completely broke up. It was great.

DeVorkin:

That’s great. Where was that again?

Kuhlman:

General Motors.

Hulse:

General Motors, R&D lab.

DeVorkin:

[Laughs] Wow, that’s great. So, you said that getting the Nobel Prize made you a target for many, many groups.

Hulse:

People want this hot commodity, as far as the speaker circuit, and I got some job offers. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, given the reality of the Nobel and the fact that it opened a lot of new opportunity. So as I went around and gave these talks, they were interested in [inaudible] giving the talk. I was happy to give the talks. It was kind of wearing on me, because there was a lot of traveling involved, and it was kind of high stress. But I was happy to do it, because it was a science, in the sense of being a science education program. People were really interested in what I had done, and I had the opportunity to speak to hundreds of thousands of people and tell them about science and why I was excited about it.

Kuhlman:

I mean, he gave a talk at the Liberty Science Center here in New Jersey and a number of local schools [like] Lehigh University. And there was a group down in Texas, besides UTD. I remember you went down for a Princeton alumni group down in Texas. [Laughs] So he got around.

DeVorkin:

Now, you started as a consultant to Texas while you were still at the Plasma Physics Lab. How did that link happen?

Kuhlman:

First you did a lecture at Drexel [University].

Hulse:

Yeah. I think it was Drexel.

Kuhlman:

And there was a professor there, Da Hsuan.

Hulse:

Da Hsuan Feng.

Kuhlman:

He was very enthusiastic.

Hulse:

He was a very active sort of guy who did all sorts of things, and one of the things he did was invite people down to Drexel to give talks. So [he contacted me] at some point to give the binary pulsar lecture at Drexel, which I did.

Kuhlman:

And then he moved to Texas.

Hulse:

I forget what his position was at Drexel. But the next thing I knew, I heard from Da Hsuan, And he had become the associate vice president for research at the University of Texas at Dallas. So he had moved, and he invited me to come back down and give a talk there. So I did that, and one thing led to another, and it turned out that they were very interested in hiring me at UT-Dallas. In fact, Da Hsuan and the provost of UT-D flew up to Princeton to talk to me about it, which really impressed me, because usually it was the other way around. I did the flying. [Laughs]

Kuhlman:

And you had not yet retired from Princeton.

Hulse:

That’s right. I was not yet retired from Princeton. [inaudible] mention the first thing that happened was I stayed — partly that there were family things here, because both Jeanne’s and my parents were having severe health problems.

DeVorkin:

Both of your parents were having health problems?

Kuhlman:

Both sets of parents.

DeVorkin:

Oh, yours too.

Kuhlman:

Yeah, mine too. Mine were up in Connecticut, and his were in New York, near Port Jervis, New York.

Hulse:

Right. So that complicated things. So, for the time being, I figured I can just stay at Princeton and keep doing what I was doing. I was doing science education, but I was also — I had done a lot of my work at Princeton had included work on high-performance supercomputing and such, and computer modeling. That was interesting to me too, so I also used the opportunities I had to make some contacts to talk to people who were basic computer scientists and shared some ideas I had about a hybrid — computer languages that were at that time used primarily by computer scientists but that I thought might be adapted for use by physicists to more efficiently create large high-performance computer programs. So, I was doing that too. That kept me pretty busy. So, we made an arrangement whereby I never moved down to Texas, because it was clear all throughout this that we were not going to move down to Texas, because of the family issues.

DeVorkin:

Oh, yeah.

Hulse:

So, what I had to do had to fit into the context of our continuing to live here. So, what happened was [that] I spent a lot of time flying back and forth to Texas.

Kuhlman:

He had been a visiting professor until he retired, and then when he retired, he became a regental professor at UTD.

Hulse:

Right. What happened was [that] at first, UT-Dallas was just so pumped. They were really excited about me coming down there and were going to offer me a lot of opportunities to do what I wanted. [The] fact that it was all the way down in Texas was a problem but compared to their enthusiasm for me coming down and doing whatever I wanted to do, with the emphasis on “whatever I wanted to do,” supporting whatever I wanted to do, was enough to convince me that I would want to go down there for at least a little while. As Jeanne said, I wasn’t of retirement age yet, but I was close. So, I made an arrangement whereby for two years I worked at UT-Dallas, but my employment was still with Princeton, so that all my benefits still remained the same.

Kuhlman:

They sort of sub-let him out to UTD. [Laughs]

Hulse:

And University of Texas paid Princeton for my time. That worked out reasonably well for a couple of years. And I decided that at that point I was old enough to retire. And I did enjoy the opportunity. Commuting back and forth to Texas was a pain, [Laughs], but they were offering me basically, “Do whatever you want, and we’ll support it.”

Kuhlman:

What did President David Daniel tell you your mandate was? “To do good things”? Wasn’t that it, for the university?

Hulse:

Yeah.

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

Hulse:

He meant it. I could do whatever I wanted. The only criteria was [that] I was to do good things for the university. You can’t get a better job offer than that.

DeVorkin:

Yeah, I can imagine. Was creating SEEC, the Science and Engineering Education Center, one of the first things you did?

Hulse:

Yes. I had been thinking about how to organize science education, taking advantage of university resources, being both students and laboratory equipment, etcetera, etcetera. SEEC was the general idea that I had come up with. Jeanne had also contributed to that, in helping — because you know Jeanne, my wife here, has a master’s degree in physics and astronomy.

DeVorkin:

Right.

Hulse:

And she worked at a couple of different places in New Jersey. The main one at that time was she worked at Merck Pharmaceuticals, and she didn’t do physics, but she did do computer work and did administrative — what’s the word I’m looking for?

Kuhlman:

Managerial.

Hulse:

Managerial, or —

Kuhlman:

Yeah, I ran a group of IT people.

DeVorkin:

Now, you were doing this while Russell was still at the Plasma Physics Lab, but he was going down to Texas quite frequently. Right?

Kuhlman:

Yeah. He went a week a month.

DeVorkin:

Was being separated tough for you?

Kuhlman:

No, I think we managed quite well. It’s not like we weren’t in communication.

DeVorkin:

Yeah.

Kuhlman:

I remembered him calling me one summer evening when it was about 9:00 there, and he said, “You would not believe it. It’s 9:00 here, and it’s 95 degrees out.” [Laughs]

DeVorkin:

I can believe it. Now when you moved to the University of Texas, did you both move there together?

Hulse:

No, I never moved there. I just stayed in a hotel.

DeVorkin:

Oh, even when you were on the faculty?

Hulse:

Yeah.

DeVorkin:

Ah.

Kuhlman:

We’ve always been in New Jersey. He just went down a week a month, and he stayed in a hotel. I made a couple of trips with him once for social reasons, and one when they were trying to recruit us to move down there and said, “Why don’t you just move your parents?” And it’s like, “Ah, not going to happen.” [Laughs] His mother was running a business. My father had a large circle of friends. It’s like, no, we’re not going to relocate them to Texas.

DeVorkin:

So, you were really tied to New Jersey and your home.

Kuhlman:

We were tied to the northeast, is what it really was.

Hulse:

Yeah. Both our home and parents, especially the parents [inaudible].

Kuhlman:

And even extended family are up in the northeast.

DeVorkin:

So, you had quite a few programs based in Texas. Certainly SEEC, working in close cooperation with communities. You must have built up a staff. I would like to know: where did you get support for this staff, and how big was the staff?

Hulse:

That was one of the great things about UT-Dallas, being a regental professor, which means that you’re paid for by the regents of the university, not the university itself. So, my mandate was, “Do good things for the university.” One of the things that helped was that, David Daniel, the president of the university, was really a great guy, [and] he supported me as best he could and helped arrange for the university to do things that I needed to have done, like have space [inaudible]. I just wanted to say the regental professor position was really — it doesn’t get any better than that, because I had personal support from the — well, the regental professor position doesn’t necessarily involve the president of the university, per se. [It’s] that the regents are the board of directors of the UT system, and they have a certain number of regental professors who are professors. I had a rank as a professor. But it was a regental professor, which meant that I was paid to do whatever I wanted to do, which is not such a bad deal. Also, you had funding to set up lab space.

Kuhlman:

And that money came from the UT system.

Hulse:

Right.

DeVorkin:

Was this the realization of a dream? Did you feel like you were in a perfect position now?

Hulse:

In some sense, that was really the perfect position.

Kuhlman:

I would say it would be that, plus when you got onto the board at Battelle.

Hulse:

Yeah. But just to finish this story, what I wanted to do was to spread science education programs throughout the area and to do so not necessarily through the university facilities, but to actually go out into the community and in particular focus on libraries.

Kuhlman:

And science centers.

Hulse:

And science centers [inaudible] basically set up science centers around the state.

Kuhlman:

One of the things was that Russell had talked to teachers and had found that it was very hard to fit in the sort of thing he wanted to do because of the rigid curriculum that they had to follow. Right? That’s what you told me.

DeVorkin:

Ah, yeah.

Hulse:

Yeah. So, what I did was I went and tried to create little mini science centers throughout the community. Public libraries were a perfect place to do it, but [it] could be other places, too. And it was quite successful.

Kuhlman:

He also sponsored some things like some robotics competitions.

Hulse:

Yeah, that was part of it.

Kuhlman:

Yeah.

Hulse:

We’d do things like robotics competitions. If it was good, interesting science, it was in, and we had enough money to hire some people to work for me.

DeVorkin:

That’s wonderful. Now, when Marcia Bartusiak interviewed you in 1998, that was before all of this happened in Texas. In 1998, you said to her, “But I’m still working on the correct niche for myself in the world.” I would like to ask you: do you think you found it in Texas?

Hulse:

To a large extent, yeah.

Kuhlman:

I think from what Russell has told me, it was a combination of Texas, Battelle, and then the work that he did for [Institute for Defense Analyses] IDA. Right?

Hulse:

Yeah.

Kuhlman:

Those three things together really managed to touch on — I think —

Hulse:

I felt like I was [inaudible].

Kuhlman:

He finally met his potential.

Hulse:

I was just doing really interesting things, and they’re very worthwhile things, and I was making a contribution to the country.

DeVorkin:

And you described briefly what you did for Battelle, because I know you remained a consultant for them for quite some time as well as the Institute for Defense Analyses. How would you describe how you were valuable to them?

Kuhlman:

He was on the board at Battelle.

Hulse:

I was on the board of directors, which I think was about nine or ten people. So, we decided what the company did. It’s a private institute, so in fact, we completely ran the company, and the only [person] we reported to was the attorney general of Ohio. So, it was great.

Kuhlman:

And also, because they’re broadly involved with a lot of different science and education activities —

Hulse:

It’s a big place. It’s a multi-billion-dollar corporation. They do everything from aerospace to a lot of medical and biological studies, so it was a great place to be.

Kuhlman:

Then one of his board members was Healy.

Hulse:

Yeah, Bernadine Healy, who had been head of the [National Institutes of Health] NIH, etcetera. Battelle was a great place, and I was very proud to be there.

DeVorkin:

Wonderful.

Hulse:

Then the other is [that] I was asked to join the consulting groups for decisions — the intelligence services for the country, for the defense department [Department of Defense], and I can’t say much more.

DeVorkin:

And your role there, too?

Kuhlman:

Consulting.

Hulse:

I was a member of committees that they put together to evaluate programs.

DeVorkin:

And specifically, which programs?

Hulse:

Well, some of it was missile defense, and then there were other things. But as I said, it was all top secret, so I can’t talk about it very much.

DeVorkin:

We could use a little more information on Battelle. What did you do at Battelle?

Hulse:

Well, I was on the board of directors.

DeVorkin:

But being on the board, how did you contribute?

Hulse:

Questions would come up about what business activities should they engage in, and which ones should they not. I would give my perspective on that.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Hulse:

I also would contribute where I had specific, special knowledge about physics or computing. I would contribute that. Anything and everything that I could do, I did for them.

DeVorkin:

That’s wonderful. Well, we’ve gone a good while, and I have two questions to wrap it up. Is that okay?

Hulse:

Yeah.

DeVorkin:

First of all, what do you feel we have not covered in these interviews that you feel is important? What is it about your life and career that you feel is most important for historians and for the public to appreciate?

Hulse:

I guess my commitment to improving the country and the lives of people in it, which includes their enjoyment of life as well as practical things. So that covers essentially all the things I did. I helped make the country more secure in an intelligence/military sense. I helped a major corporation do the best work it could to make better products, including medical products. And I guess that’s it.

Kuhlman:

And you furthered scientific education.

Hulse:

Well, I sort of covered that in the first one.

Kuhlman:

Yeah. Okay.

DeVorkin:

No, but it’s very important. And I’m just looking for things that we may have overlooked or things that you would like to have recorded about your contributions.

Hulse:

Let me think about that, if I could.

Kuhlman:

You can get back to him.

Hulse:

Yeah.

DeVorkin:

What we can do is certainly — you’ll have the chance to think that through when we send you the transcript, and you will be welcome to add anything you want to it. If you want an additional interview to put it down, we can probably do that. So, do you feel this is a good place where we would now stop and put all of the audio files together, get it transcribed, and get it into the system so that you will have a chance to see if there’s anything you missed?

Hulse:

I think so.

Kuhlman:

I’m going to send David — also I had recorded what you had talked about on the technical side about the pulsar search.

DeVorkin:

About the what? Sorry.

Kuhlman:

Russell had talked to me extensively about the technical side of the pulsar search, and I did record that. And I owe you those audio files, so I’ll send those to you.

DeVorkin:

Oh, wonderful.

Kuhlman:

Russell had told me this technical stuff that I was going to send to you.

DeVorkin:

Okay.

Kuhlman:

In case you want to use that to fill in places.

DeVorkin:

We certainly want to preserve it. So, the next steps will be to take the interviews, and we’ll have a transcriber work on them. The transcriber will probably identify things that need to be clarified. I use a very good transcriber who does that sort thing — like a name, or that sort of thing, making sure it’s spelled right. Then we’ll get it back to you, and I can’t say exactly when, but we certainly put a push on it, and give you the chance to look through it and say, “What have we missed?”

Kuhlman:

That sounds great.

Hulse:

Thank you. We really appreciate it. It sounds great.

Kuhlman:

And I know I need to speak with Roger and Kristen about what artifacts you folks are going to want.

DeVorkin:

Sure.

Frederick-Frost:

That would be great. I will do that as a next step.

Kuhlman:

Okay.

Frederick-Frost:

Many thanks for taking the time to do this oral history with all of us.

Hulse:

Yes, indeed.

DeVorkin:

Really, really appreciate it.

[END PART 4]

Editor’s note: In parallel to the interview above, Jeanne Kuhlman recorded and transcribed a discussion with Russell Hulse about his pulsar work at Arecibo Observatory. The text was provided to the interviewers in four parts below. Mrs. Kuhlman also wrote two additional remembrances that cover the moment they found out about Hulse receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics and some of their experiences at the related events in Stockholm.

Pulsar work, part 1

Kuhlman:

Explain what “TREE” was.

Hulse:

A mathematical way of looking for a dispersed signal across several adjacent frequency channels efficiently. Joe found a few pulsars himself that way before he came to UMASS. He thought he should go to Arecibo because it was a bigger telescope and should get a faster computer so we could look for shorter pulses and do it more quickly and that would be my thesis. I wanted to do more than that. I thought (it occurred to me)—the computer (for that era) could do more—so I thought about it – so what I did was design the ultimate system. This was entirely my work. I did use TREE – I copied the mathematics.

Kuhlman:

Did TREE run on the Modcomp or the mainframe?

Hulse:

No, it ran on the Modcomp. I had 64 frequency channels which covered 32 adjacent frequency channels in 2 different polarizations. So, each frequency channel had 2 polarizations. You get more signal that way. This was one way that I was going to get the most out of this that I could.

Then the really complicated part came – how do I search in period? That was a challenge. By the way – I don’t know how to put this because I don’t want to sound like I’m being arrogant or insulting Joe – but I did this all myself. But every now and then, I’d stop by and tell him what I was up to and see if he had any comment. I was very proud of this.

We had the Modcomp and it had 64 adjacent channels and we had a 430 MHz receiver that we were going to bring down to Arecibo and search for pulsars. The really hard part was searching for pulsing sources. So, how do you search for pulses? What I decided to do was to use Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). If there was something in a given data sample with a regular frequency of pulsation, you’d get a peak – analysis would show a peak at that pulse period. So, I programed the computer to do a FFT on all the data across the channels. It turned out that that was really pushing it. That was at the limit of what the Modcomp could do. I had to come up with a couple of cleaver things to make the calculation more efficient and clearly have the most sensitive pulsar search possible with the equipment that I had. So, I put that together. It was kind of tricky – mathematical analysis wasn’t my thing – folding algorithms and FFTs, etc.

The first step was - You sweep the sky and take 136.5 sec length signal integrations from Arecibo, then you send it into the 64 channel receiver and turn it into 32 frequency adjacent channels – that was TREE. That’s what Joe had done before and, if you saw a pulse, you just looked at the chart recorder and you could see it. That wasn’t the most sensitivity you could get out of it. So what I did was I spent some pretty heavy duty time wrapped within myself trying to figure out what was the best approach to get the maximum sensitivity out of the system. So, what I did was I used the FFT to turn the signal into the 32 adjacent frequency channels (spectrum) to see if anything was pulsing. I wrote a program to look for pulsing in each block of data – a block of data was 132 sec. You now had a plot of pulsing strength vs pulsing period.

First, I looked for the strongest 5 or 10 and went back and did a fast-folding version of the same thing – a more detailed and sensitive periodicity search using the FFT to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I then searched through each block of data through different dispersion measures – TREE produced 32 dedispersed dispersion measures. That was done in real time as the data from the telescope was sampled by the computer. I was also looking to see if there was a whopping signal pulse saying “Look, Look, Look.” [Laughter] But I never found one that way.

I did the periodicity analysis. That was the tricky part the FFT is a compact analysis which minimizes the number of mathematical operations you have to use to transform a signal into a [inaudible] of different frequencies. Which is what I wanted. But it was a bit slow. What I did was to come up with a clever thing….

Pulsar work, part 2

Hulse:

So far, we’ve taken the signal from the telescope, broken it up into 64 channels, blended into 32 adjacent frequency channels at different dispersion measures and then did a quick check to make sure if any one of them was huge – never found anything that way – and proceeded to do the periodicity analysis. Took the same data, 32 dedispersed channels, from each section of sky and did a FFT in chunks. The FFT would turn the signal strength vs time into signal strength vs period. That’s obviously what you are looking for.

Kuhlman:

You also had a threshold below which you ignored data, right?

Hulse:

Yes, that that’s right. [I looked at] what the strongest pulsating signal in this chunk of data was and how strong it was and if it was below the limit, I ignored it. 132.5 seconds was the length of the integration. That was a fast as it could go… I had that machine speed-freaked! The normal FFT wasn’t short enough and efficient enough for me. I was a crazed fanatic and was trying to get every last tiny bit of signal, I was going to get it. You know I can be obsessive [smile]. The signal came from the telescope feed to a FCRAO [Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory] 430 MHz 64 channel receiver and then to a FCRAO dedisperser.

The only strong signals I ever found by examination were some previously discovered strong pulsars.

Kuhlman:

Which was a nice control.

Hulse:

The actual program was called “ZBTREE” – the “ZB” stood for “zero beat”—that problem was that when I got this all put together and turned in on at Arecibo, 60Hrz interference blanketed everything. I was screwed. [Laughs]

Kuhlman:

Oh my God.

Hulse:

I can’t turn off the 60Hz. We kinda need that. That was a very stressful day or two. I realized the thing to do was to shift the sampling rate to be synchronous with the 60 Hz – that moves the FFT spectrum such that the lowest frequency it can see goes into the low DC end of the spectrum and it doesn’t see it anymore. I was so proud of myself. That worked great!

So, I got past that. I didn’t have a heart attack. So far I’ve used the Arecibo telescope, and receivers, FCRAO multichannel IF (intermediate frequency) receiver and XBTREE. We now have the signal in the Modcomp. The Modcomp was a normal minicomputer of its era – it could come with a disk drive but the drive parameters weren’t useful for the search so we didn’t have that and it came with an operating system but it was too slow for us. So, I wrote my own operating system. It didn’t do the wide range of things that a typical OS would do – it was an OS that only knew how to do a limited number of things such as FFT that I needed. The signal would be divided into the frequency channels and then add them together with incremental shifted delays (dedispersed). All machine language (not assembler) – I spoke Modcomp. I told you, I once went to the bank and started filling out my deposit slip in hexadecimal (e.g., 6 + 6 = C) because the Modcomp was a hexadecimal machine – oops! You’ve gone past the point of no return here [Laughs]

I actually got pretty good at hex. The picture of me standing in front of the Modcomp controls – the switches [on the front panel] actually set bits into the registers- I knew the instruction set. When I was standing there, I wasn’t showing off. I was entering …

Kuhlman:

As I recall, you also used those switches to enter the bootstrap instructions to boot the machine.

Hulse:

That’s right. I did that. You didn’t have any choice.

Pulsar work, part 3

Hulse:

I was telling you where the data was stored. [It] came in on a wire into the receiver etc., into the digital analog converters. And it turned out that I had to be my own computer tech too because one of the A/D channels died. I had to go in and figure out which channel died. Because of course, it didn’t say on the screen “A/D channel X is dead;” it just didn’t work right. So, I toiled away and figured out which channel it was. The Modcomp computer company in Fort Lauderdale Florida sent me a new one and I put it in and got to play computer tech to fix it. I remember thinking, I shouldn’t be playing computer tech, that’s what you pay those folks for.

Oh, there was the design engineer story! We’ll get back to that story later.

We’ve got the signal coming in from the telescope, its being dedispersed, broken up into the adjacent frequencies so that the ZBTREE program (so the 60 Hz doesn't overwhelm everything) would have taken a digital sample of strength each main frequency in dispersion and add them together in range of different possible combinations to find out if there was a particularly strong combination which when added in certain way that gave you a strong signal which was a strongly pulsing pulsar. Most of the time, of course, it didn’t. So that was the dedispersion analysis.

And that data was recorded on a computer tape, one of the big computer tapes because I had to store it somewhere and I didn't have any disks. Data was written to tapes – I had a 100 of them.

Kuhlman:

So where did CHAINSAW come in?

Hulse:

CHAINSAW was run on a CDC 7600, the house observatory computer and so what I did I hooked that up to record the output of the Modcomp. It had a tape drive and I had between 50 and 100 of these big magnetic tapes. Those were the tape drives with a vacuum column [sucking sound] -that was great! The data was recorded on 100 of the big tapes that we'd gotten that had written on them in large magic marker “Defective” [Laughs] Gives you a warm feeling how your work is valued. Well, we got them for free from GSA so part of my time down there was spent running tapes through the drive on 7600 to find the ones that were really bad and really throw them out. The ones that were actually physically damaged in such a way that they couldn't be used so I couldn't make a mistake. So that they were basically a storage medium to put all this data on because there was no disk drive on the Modcomp and I had to put the data somewhere because I could go for couple days before I could run CHAINSAW to do the final data analysis.

Pulsar work, part 4

Hulse:

So here is the B tree part - it is just going to turn the 8 MHz of bandwidth into 8 MHz of equivalent dedispersed in real time and then go and save them on the CDC tapes. It did something really simple and important—repack the data to save storage space—in order to re-organize everything because there's a lot of data floating around. It might be me being as usual a little paranoid. If you saw the little histograms from ZBTREE printed out, you saw the signal level as a function of frequency sweep produced the histograms which are not very important, the data went back on tape again. And period and pulse width analysis and this is the hard part, intellectually and mathematically, because I needed to search across pulse periods and pulse widths. Pulse widths, if you have narrow pulses, have broader frequency. You don't know the frequency either, so you got a lot of things to search over. Subharmonics sums on a sequence isn’t adding them together because you don't want to see them [???] Ever hear of fast folding? It’s another way of getting a picture of what a pulse signal looks like. Wha this did here, this was just part of the FFT which could be the most clever thing I did.

Nobel Prize memory, part 1

Written by Kuhlman on Jun 13, 2024:

Finding out Hulse won the Nobel Prize.

You know, they always say that when you're going to win the Nobel prize you get this 3 AM call from the Royal Swedish Academy Sciences. Well, that didn't happen for Russell on October 13, 1993. I was getting ready to go to work. I had to travel down to Pennsylvania to a Merck site there. I had some consultants coming from Connecticut who we're going to be doing a software demo and that morning I was downstairs having breakfast and it was around 7 o'clock in the morning. We don't like waking up to buzzers on our alarm clock, so we would wake up to the clock radio playing WCBS radio, the news radio out of New York City. I was listening to it down in the kitchen area as well when the 7 o'clock news came on and they said they were announcing the Nobel prize winners in physics. I was a physics major and also got my masters in physics so I always perk up at that because, you know, it might be somebody I know. Well, it was. They announced that Russell and Joe Taylor had won the Nobel prize in physics. I screamed, ran upstairs and Russell was laying there in bed. You know how it is when you're sleeping and sometimes you hear something on the news or some noise in the background and it kinda of works into your dreams and you're not quite sure whether you really heard or not that? That was Russell. I said, “you won the Nobel prize, you won the Nobel prize” and then our phone started ringing but it wasn't the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences it was ABC, CBS, NBC and various news outlets that were calling. Apparently, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had called somebody else who's was listed in some phone directory in New Jersey as R. Hulse and they didn't get us. So, unfortunately, I had to leave because I did have these people who were driving on their way down from Connecticut to be in Pennsylvania and I had to be there for them but Russell told me later, that shortly after I left, the doorbell rang and so he ran down in his bathrobe and was interviewed on the front doorstep by an API stringer who had gotten a phone call from her editor saying you've got a Nobel Laureate in Plainsboro. He sent her because that's where she lived. He sent her over to interview him.

So that’s how we found out that Russell won the Nobel prize.

Another story…

When you win the Nobel prize, they give you booklet that has your entire life planned out for when you're in Stockholm and it's pretty extensive and I remember Russell looking at it and saying “Where's the time for the naps ?” because you were booked solidly from after breakfast all the way through the evening.

Before going to Stockholm

We were invited, along with all the 1993 US Laureates and also Richard Roberts who was actually British but he was doing his research in the US, to the White House for tea with Bill and Hillary Clinton and then to the Swedish Embassy in Washington DC for a lovely dinner. We really enjoyed meeting the Clintons. President Clinton is absolutely remarkable. He has the ability to make you feel like you are the only person in the room and he is focused on you. It's really quite an experience. And Hillary Clinton can do the same thing but not quite as well as Bill. Then, we went to the dinner at the Swedish Embassy and I was seated at the table with Harold Varmus, the former head of NIH, and Harold Varmus taught me how to skole which was really kind of fun.

In Stockholm

In December, we were flown to Stockholm with our guests and it was quite an experience being Stockholm because the Nobel prize ceremony is not just a single ceremony like the Emmys or the Oscars are—it’s an entire week of celebration of the sciences and literature and economics and the Nobel foundation does a fabulous job of involving school children of all ages from elementary through graduate school so a lot of the events were affiliated with various educational institutions.

Graduate students in Physics at KTH [Royal Institute of Technology] were particularly thrilled with Russell winning the prize because it was for work that he did for his PhD thesis. Tickets to the ceremony are highly valued and rare. The physics professor who was our host at KTH had 2 tickets and she gave them to 2 of her graduate students because Russell’s winning the prize meant so much to them.

One of the things that they do have are social events and we were at one and I happen just to be standing near one of the members of the Royal Swedish Academy Sciences and he was talking to Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Jocelyn was the graduate student of Anthony Hewish who won the Nobel prize for the discovery of the first pulsar but she was not included in the prize and there's always been a lot of controversy about that. In fact, the astronomy graduate students at the University of Massachusetts used to joke about the “Jocelyn “no-prize” Bell award because she was excluded. Jocelyn was there as a guest of Joe Taylor. This member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences came over to her. Now, those members who have voted on the Nobel prize for that year get a lovely little gold lapel pen in the shape of the Nobel medal. He was wearing his. He took it off and he presented it to her, saying “you probably should've won the prize” which was just wonderful.

We were at another event that was held the day after the Nobel prize ceremony and it was a panel discussion involving Joe and Russell and some other people talking about gravitational theory. Jocelyn was in the audience and somebody asked her about how she felt about not having gotten the Nobel prize and she said something to the effect of well you know it's been OK I've been dining out a lot because of that story. She was a very gracious woman.

Nobel Prize memory, part 2

Written by Kuhlman on Jun 13, 2024:

So, when we went to Stockholm, we were traveling with more luggage than I've ever traveled with in my entire life. I mean, I had three evening gowns, Russell had several suits. We had a lot of luggage and while we were in Stockholm we kept accumulating things. When we came back to our hotel room each evening, there would be gifts—like the four videotape box set of the history of the Nobel prize, a box of mints and various odds and ends. So, when we were getting ready to go back to the States, we were wondering how we were going to manage all this stuff. Now, when you are a Nobel Laureate, you also have some perks and one of them is you get an attaché from the Swedish foreign office (Eric and a limo and driver Lars-Joran). Eric's purpose in life was twofold: firstly, to make sure that we were always on time because, courtesy of Alfred Nobel's will, everything is done in order of the prizes in the will and physics comes first, as Hulse comes before Taylor in the alphabet, Russell always had to be first (if we were late everybody else is going to be late) and secondly, he was our fixer. He was there to take care of things and make sure that we and our guests had no problems. We were in the limo one day and Russell was asking him about getting all this stuff back to the US and so Eric had his cell phone and he calls SAS. He hangs up and says “well, they said two bags each. That's not the right answer.” Eric gets back on the phone and he talks to somebody again and he turns around and says to us with a big grin on his face, “Take as much as you like.” When we were checking in at the airport to get back to the States, we trundled up to the desk with all our luggage on this cart and the woman at the desk kept looking around us. She said, “Is that all?” I guess she was expecting much more but it was plenty enough for us. Eric was wonderful. if we could've brought one thing back from Stockholm, it would've been Eric cause he certainly made our lives easier.

But he was really kind of funny too. We were supposed to be in Stockholm on the 13th which is Santa Lucia's day and then fly down to Lund the next day to be at the University of Lund but there was an airline strike so we missed the Santa Lucia day celebrations because we had to take the train to Lund that night. We were pretty tired and we're about to board the train and there's a reporter on the platform and he was trying to get a news story on people whose travel plans had been disrupted by the strike. We thought we had made it clear on the train when Eric went over and then mentioned the magic words to the reporter “Nobelpristagare” which means Nobel prize winner in Swedish, and the reporter immediately came over and started interviewing Russell.