In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Thomas C. Blum, Professor of Physics at the University of Connecticut. Blum recounts his childhood in Reno, Nevada and he describes his early interests in math and science. He describes his undergraduate work in aeronautical and astronomical engineering at the University of Washington. Blum discusses his job focusing on computational fluid dynamics at Boeing after college and he explains his decision to pursue a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Arizona. He describes his graduate work in lattice gauge theory studying under Doug Toussaint. Blum discusses his postdoctoral work at Brookhaven, where he continued to work on lattice gauge theory, and he describes his decision to join the faculty at UConn. He describes his ongoing interests in chiral symmetry, g-2 and QCD research, and he conveys his excitement over possible future breakthroughs in hadronic vacuum polarization. At the end of the interview, Blum conveys how much fundamental work remains to be done in physics, and as an example he raises what remains an open-ended question: what is the real structure of the proton?
