In this interview, Gary Feldman, the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Research Professor of Science at Harvard University, recounts his childhood in South Bend and his undergraduate experience at the University of Chicago. Feldman describes the opportunities that led to his graduate work at Harvard to work with Frank Pipkin on electro production pion experiments. Feldman discusses his postgraduate research at SLAC where he worked closely with Roy Schwitters in Burt Richter’s group measuring the form factors of baryons and pions. He describes the similarity of experiments connection Richter’s discovery of the Psi and Martin Perl’s discovery of the Tau twenty years later, and he describes the SLAC LDL detector project and the impact of LEP collaboration on SLAC. Feldman explains his decision to join the faculty at Harvard and the status of the CDF experiment at Fermilab at that point. He discusses his contributions to the NOMAD research at CERN looking for the tau neutrino in an electronic bubble chamber, his work on the MINOS experiment at the Soudan mine, and he explains the problem of CP violation in terms of what one can see with neutrinos and anti-neutrinos. Feldman prognosticates on future work to determine evidence for a sterile neutrino, and he offers his perspective on the downfall of the SSC and why Burt Richter’s directorship may have made the difference. At the end of the interview, Feldman points to Japan and China where some of the most interesting high energy physics is happening, and he notes the value that particle physics is contributing to deep learning and artificial neural nets.
