Interview with Jonathan Dorfan, emeritus director of SLAC, and emeritus president of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Graduate University. Dorfan recounts his childhood in South Africa and his experiences with apartheid, and he explains how he developed his early interests in science. He discusses his time at the University of Cape Town and a formative visit he made to SLAC where his older brother was working. Dorfan describes his subsequent studies at UC-Irvine and he explains his interest in pursuing a graduate degree in particle physics and high-energy physics during the excitement surrounding the Standard Model. He discusses his move to SLAC to conduct research with rapid cycling bubble chambers which turned into his thesis. Dorfan describes his postdoctoral research at SLAC with Martin Perl and his involvement with the Mark I and Mark II experiments, and he describes the opportunities leading to his faculty position at SLAC. He discusses the centrality of the B-factory project, and he describes his considerations when he was offered the directorship at Fermilab. Dorfan describes the impact of the rise and fall of the SSC on SLAC, and he explains the leadership positions which at a certain point put him on track to assume the directorship of SLAC. He describes SLAC’s entrée to astrophysics and the strategic partnership it developed with NASA, and he reflects on whether this transition would have been conceivable to Panofsky’s founding vision for the lab. Dorfan describes the changing culture of SLAC and its increasingly bureaucratized nature toward the end of his directorship, his work in support of advancing cancer research at Stanford, and he discusses the circumstances leading to his directorship of the Okinawa Institute. At the end of the interview, Dorfan emphasizes continuity over change as the dominant theme of his career in science with an arc that has increasingly bent toward concerns of broad societal relevance.
Interview with Nan Phinney, retired Distinguished Staff Scientist at SLAC. Phinney recounts her childhood in Chicago and her education in Catholic private schools. She describes her undergraduate education at Michigan State where she majored in physics – despite being discouraged by many men that this was not an appropriate field of study for women. Phinney describes the excitement and benefits of focusing on particle physics during such a fundamental era of discovery and she explains her decision to pursue a Ph.D. in physics with Jack Smith at Stony Brook. She discusses her involvement in efforts to discover the Z boson, and she describes her work at CERN. Phinney describes her interest in linear colliders and the circumstances leading to her employment at SLAC. She discusses her initial work on the control system for the SLC and explains how networking issues presented the biggest technical challenge for the project. Phinney describes the international culture of collaboration with projects at CERN and DESY, and she explains the impact of the B factory at SLAC. She discusses her role in the creation of the NLC and the mechanical breakdown leading to the end of the SLC. Phinney describes the origins of the ILC and some of the significant developments in superconductivity in the early 2000s. At the end of the interview, Phinney describes current research on electron-positron colliders, she discusses her work with the APS, and she explains how SLAC has changed both culturally and scientifically over the decades.
Interview with Paul Emma, retired and formerly Senior Staff Scientist at SLAC. Emma recounts his childhood in Illinois, and he describes his undergraduate work at Western Washington University in Bellingham. He explains why he left WWU early to accept an opportunity for graduate work at Caltech briefly before accepting a job at Fermilab where he worked in operations on the Main Ring and the Tevatron project. He describes the series of events leading to his work at SLAC, where he worked in operations and design on the LCLS, the SLC, and the NLC. Emma describes his work for the superconducting undulator for Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, and at the end of the interview he discusses his ongoing work on LCLS-II.
Interview with Ronald E. Mickens, Distinguished Fuller E. Callaway Professor Emeritus, Department of Physics, at Clark Atlanta University. Mickens recounts his childhood in segregated Virginia and how his entrepreneurial instincts and exposure to farm life fed into his budding interest in science. He explains the opportunities that led to his undergraduate education at Fisk University, where he majored in physics on the basis of his ability to combine his talents in math and chemistry. Mickens describes his formative summer research at Vanderbilt University on thermodynamics, and he explains the influence that his graduate advisor Wendell Holladay played in his life and his decision to continue at Vanderbilt for his graduate work. He discusses his involvement with the Civil Rights movement during his time in Nashville and how he dealt with the possibility of getting drafted for military service in Vietnam. Mickens describes his postdoctoral research in the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT, and he explains how events that can appear to be supernatural must be explicable within the single physical world. He describes his research at MIT as a time to expand on his thesis work on Regge poles, and he explains how his work with James Young connected him with his research at Los Alamos. Mickens describes his teaching and research record while he was a professor at Fisk, and he discusses his summer research at SLAC and his focus on the Pomeron and elastic scattering. He describes his many research visits to Europe and his work at CERN where he probed the theoretical underpinnings of high energy scattering. Mickens explains his fascination with Newtonian formulation equations and the utility of his visits to the summer Aspen Institute program. He describes some of the frictions he experienced with the administration at Fisk, his work at JILA, and the professional and personal considerations that compelled him to accept a professorship at Clark Atlanta and its transformation from Atlanta University. Mickens conveys the fundamental importance that geometry and numerical modeling has played in his career, and he contextualizes his academic achievements by emphasizing that everyone in his family has achieved a terminal degree. At the end of the interview, Mickens offers a history of the origins of the National Society of Black Physicists, and explains the significance of, and the lessons that should be learned, from Edward Bouchet’s life.
Interview with Peter Lepage, Tisch Family Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Cornell. He recounts his childhood in Montreal and his decision to pursue an undergraduate degree in physics at McGill. Lepage discusses his Master’s work at Cambridge University and his decision to do his thesis research in particle physics at Stanford. He describes the fundamental advances happening at SLAC during his graduate years and his work on bound states of electrons and muons under the direction of Stanley Brodsky. Lepage discusses his postdoctoral appointment at Cornell and his work in high-precision QED calculations in atoms, and he describes the foundational impact of Ken Wilson’s work on lattice QCD and the intellectual revolution of renormalization. He describes this period as his entrée into QCD research, and he emphasizes the beauty of Ithaca and the supportive culture of the Physics Department as his main reasons to accept a faculty position at Cornell. Lepage explains how and when computers became central to Lattice QCD research and why effective field theory was an area of specialization that was broadly useful in other subfields. He describes the ongoing stubbornness of the Standard Model, and he discusses his tenure as chair of the department, then as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and his work on PCAST in the Obama administration. Lepage explains his longstanding interest in physics pedagogy, and he discusses his current work on the numerical integration program called VEGAS. In the last part of the interview, Lepage emphasizes that the most fundamental advances in physics are in astrophysics and cosmology and that lattice QCD should be “kept alive” because it’s unclear where it is going until physics goes beyond the Standard Model.
Interview with William Herrmannsfeldt, Staff Physicist at SLAC. Herrmannsfeldt recounts his German heritage, his upbringing in Ohio, and his early interests in physics which he pursued as an undergraduate at Miami University. He discusses his graduate work on beta decay and nuclear physics at the University of Illinois, under the direction of James Allen, and he describes his postdoctoral appointment at Los Alamos where he made detectors for bomb tests. Herrmannsfeldt explains the connection between his work at Los Alamos on electron optics and his initial research at SLAC, and he describes his work on linear accelerators. He describes his tenure as Secretary of the Advanced Development Group and his role at the AEC to concentrate on accelerator physics for Fermilab. Herrmannsfeldt explains the decision to move ahead with the PEP project and his LINAC work at Berkeley. Herrmannsfeldt explains the relevance of this research to nuclear fusion, and he describes some of the technical challenges in building the superconducting RF system. At the end of the interview, Herrmannsfeldt conveys the sense of fun he felt in learning new technological systems, the inherent challenges of beam dynamics, and he reflects on how SLAC has changed since its inception.
Interview with Piero Pianetta, Research Professor in the Photon Science Department, joint with Electrical Engineering, at Stanford. He recounts his family’s Italian heritage, and his upbringing in Italy and then in California. He explains his interest in pursuing physics as an undergraduate at Santa Clara University, and his graduate work at Stanford where he worked on monochromator experiments and contributed to the SPEAR collaboration at SLAC. Pianetta discusses his scientific interests converging on surface science and the influence of Seb Doniach on his research. He describes his postgraduate work at HP where he focused on laser annealing and subsequently SSRL to conduct research on device technology and photoemission techniques. Pianetta explains how SSRL became integrated in SLAC and how he became administratively housed in the Photon Science department, and how this development is illustrative of the way SLAC has diversified its research and redefined its relationship with the Department of Energy. He describes his most recent responsibilities as chair of the photon science group at SLAC and his current work chairing the laboratory promotions committee. At the end of the interview, Pianetta reflects on the long-term impact of remote work for SLAC generally and he conveys optimism on improving SSRL’s long-term capabilities.
Interview with Henry Tye, professor emeritus of physics at Cornell, and subsequently professor emeritus of physics at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), and currently, Researcher at the Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study at HKUST. Tye provides a brief history of HKUST, and he offers his views on China’s long-term goals in high energy physics. He recounts his childhood in Hong Kong where his family fled from mainland China during the Communist revolution, and he explains the opportunities that led to his undergraduate admission to Caltech. Tye describes how discussions of the Vietnam War permeated his college experience, and he describes the influence of Gerry Neugebauer on his interest in physics but that cosmology was far from his considerations at that point. He discusses his decision to study at MIT, where Francis Low became his advisor, and how he worked closely with Gabriele Veneziano on the relationship between the Thirring model and bosonic string theory. Tye explains the excitement surrounding the “November Revolution” which was unfolding just as he arrived at the SLAC Theory Group in 1974. He describes the origins of his interests in cosmology, and the source of his collaboration with Alan Guth during his postdoctoral work at Cornell, where he pursued matter-antimatter asymmetry. Tye explains how this collaboration ultimately created the field of inflation and why this addresses fundamental cosmological problems associated with flatness and the horizon. He explains how and why the original theory of inflation was revised by Andrei Linde and Paul Steinhardt, among others, and why he developed a subsequent interest in cosmic superstrings and branes which he recognized would give a perfect model for inflation. Tye describes why he is optimistic that technological advances will make cosmic superstrings a testable proposition, and that collaborations including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and LIGO/Virgo are positive steps in that direction. He bemoans the dearth of string theorists focused on phenomenological work and why he thinks string theory will solve the quantum gravity problem. Tye describes his decision to join the Cornell faculty, why his notions of a “string landscape” suggest philosophical implications, why the cosmic landscape is central for understanding the wavefunction of the universe, and why both the universe and all multiverses can begin from truly nothing. At the end of the interview, Tye discusses his recent interests on the cosmological constant problem, the KLT relation, and the observations and experiments that are most likely to push cosmology into new and exciting areas of discovery.
Interview with Joshua Frieman, head of the Particle Physics Division at Fermilab, and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. He recounts his childhood in Princeton as the son of a physicist and his decision to attend Stanford as an undergraduate, where his interests in cosmology developed. Frieman explains that his options for graduate research in cosmology were narrow and his reasons for going to the University of Washington to work with Jim Bardeen before moving to Chicago to be Michael Turner’s first graduate student. He discusses his interest in approaching cosmology from the perspective of particle theory and his thesis focus on curved space time within a cosmological context. Frieman describes his postdoctoral work at SLAC and his first position at Fermilab in the theory group that Dave Schramm had started. He discusses his work on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and then the Dark Energy Survey. Frieman explains what might be needed to understand dark energy, he describes his appointment at Chicago, and he explains the origins of the Magellan Telescopes project. He discusses the value of the Aspen summer sessions and his involvement with P5, and explains the value of the 2010 Decadal Survey. At the end of the interview, Frieman surveys the current slate of project at Fermilab and emphasizes the value of incorporating cosmological perspectives to high-energy and particle physics.
Interview with Charles Prescott, Professor Emeritus at SLAC. Prescott discusses his activities in physics since retiring in 2006, and he conveys his interest in the muon anomaly results from the g-2 experiment at Fermilab in light of his longstanding work in spin physics. He offers a wide perspective on the creation of the Standard Model and when the field began to search for new physics beyond it, and he recounts his childhood in Oklahoma. Prescott discusses his undergraduate education at Rice and his interests in physics, and he describes the opportunities that led to his graduate admission to Caltech, where Bob Walker advised his thesis research on the eta meson. Prescott conveys the importance of Steve Weinberg’s work on particle theory in the late 1960s, and he describes the circumstances that led him to SLAC after a brief appointment at UC Santa Cruz. He describes joining Group A, which was led by Dick Taylor, and how he organized the first parity violation experiment. He discusses the E95 and E122 experiments, and he describes early advances in understanding the nucleon sub-structure. Prescott explains his proposal to add polarized beams to the SLC and a new drift chamber for the SLD, and he discusses the origins of the DELCO collaboration. He describes his tenure as leader of Group A and then as Associate Director of the Research Division, and as chair of the International Spin Physics symposium. Prescott discusses his work on SLAC’s Enriched Xenon Observatory, and he prognosticates the poor political and budgetary prospects of future linear accelerators. At the end of the interview, Prescott reflects on receiving the Panofsky Prize, and he segments SLAC into its constituent historical eras as defined by the dominant experiments over the decades.
