In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Samuel Aronson, Director Emeritus of Brookhaven National Laboratory. He discusses his more recent work as director of the RIKEN Institute and his involvement with the National Offshore Wind R&D Consortium. Aronson recounts his childhood on Long Island, and he describes the impact of Sputnik on him personally and on the country generally. He describes his undergraduate education at Columbia and the relationship he developed with Mel Schwartz, and he discusses Schwartz’s collaborations with Leon Lederman and Jack Steinberger. Aronson describes his decision to pursue his graduate degree at Princeton, and his interest in working at the Princeton-Pennsylvania Accelerator Center. He discusses his involvement in the study of the decay of neutral K mesons into a pion and an electron and a neutrino. Aronson recounts his work with Valentine Telegdi at the Fermi Institute, and he describes Telegdi’s research at the ZDS in Argonne in kaons. He discusses his faculty appointment at the University of Wisconsin and his research on neutral kaons, and he describes the fundamental and concurrent work going on at Brookhaven and SLAC. Aronson explains the origins of his collaboration with Ephraim Fischbach on the Fifth Force, and he describes his attraction in moving to Brookhaven where the ISABELLE proton-proton collider was in development. He describes the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and PHENIX program, and he explains his promotions and increasing responsibilities culminating in his being named director of Brookhaven. Aronson discusses the rise of cosmology from within the field of particle physics, and he describes the role of DOE in supporting basic science at the lab. At the end of the interview, Aronson shares his views on the future of particle physics and some major outstanding questions that will continue to animate the field.
