Interview with Michael Green, Lucasian Professor Emeritus at Cambridge University and visiting professor at Queen Mary University. He recounts his childhood in London as the child of secular Jewish parents who immigrated to London just before World War II. Green discusses his early interests in physics and the opportunities that led to his enrollment at Cambridge, and he conveys Geoff Chew’s influence with his ideas on S-matrix and bootstrap theory, which informed his thesis research on hadronic interactions. He narrates the founding ideas that led to string theory and how the work on dual models became transformed into string theory. Green describes his postdoctoral work at the Institute for Advanced Study and his interactions with Veneziano. He explains his decision to return to Cambridge and the importance of the CERN theory group for his research, and he narrates the origins of his collaborations with John Schwarz. Green connects string theory to the ideas that led to supergravity, and he explains why he does not like the term “revolution” in relation to advances in string theory to explain what was happening between 1981-1984. He explains the meaning of the pronoun “super” in relation to string theory, and he conveys his disappointment that supersymmetry has yet to be observed. Green describes the importance of AdS/CFT and his contributions to the origins of D-branes with Joe Polchinski. He discusses his increasing reliance on computers for understanding aspects of AdS/CFT correspondence. Green reflects on winning the Breakthrough Prize, and the supposed aspirational recognition on working to unify the forces which are not yet unified, and he discusses the generational de-coupling of string theory education from particle physics. He provides sociological perspective in response to the impatience that certain physicists have expressed regarding string theory. At the end of the interview, Green ponders the future relationship between string theory and quantum computing, and he describes the field as an intellectual adventure which makes it difficult to predict the significance of these changes.
Interview with Edward Witten, Charles Simonyi Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study. Witten discusses his current interests in quantum information theory in gravity, and he recounts his childhood in Baltimore and the influence of his father Louis Witten, who is a physicist. He describes his undergraduate education at Brandeis, where he majored in history, a brief stint working for the McGovern campaign, and a false start in graduate school to study economics before landing at Princeton to study first applied mathematics and then theoretical particle physics with David Gross. He describes the significance of deep inelastic scattering in the emergence of QCD and his earliest exposure to the ideas that would develop into string theory. Witten describes his postdoctoral appointment at Harvard to work with Steve Weinberg, Sidney Coleman, Shelly Glashow, and Howard Georgi. He discusses t’ Hooft’s success at solving the U(1) problem and his early work in supersymmetry by the time he joined the faculty at Princeton. Witten narrates the string revolution of 1984 and the early optimism that string theory would be able to describe the real world. He describes his involvement in topological quantum field theories and he explains his decision to move to the Institute from Princeton. Witten discusses his work with Nati Seiberg on N=2 super Yang Mills in four dimensions, the origins of M-theory in the 1994 string revolution, and the impact of Juan Maldacena’s work on AdS/CFT. He describes his collaboration with Seiberg on noncommutative geometry, his interest in the Langlands program, and the role of axions in string theory. Witten conveys the sense of optimism when the LHC turned on and the significance of Khovanov homology and Morse theory. He explains the need to revisit perturbative superstring theory and the possibility that the g-2 muon anomaly experiment at Fermilab will lead to new physics. At the end of the interview, Witten reflects on how little has been seen at the LHC after the Higgs discovery, and he expresses hope that string/M-theory and quantum gravity make meaningful contact during his lifetime.
Interview with Bruno Coppi, Professor of Physics Emeritus at MIT. Coppi recounts his childhood in Lombardi, Italy. He discusses his early interests in nuclear engineering and his graduate work in Milan on neutron transport theory. He explains the opportunities that led to his postgraduate appointment at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and his subsequent work at Stanford for his postdoctoral research in collision-less plasma. Coppi discusses his work at the Institute for Advanced Study where he interacted closely with Freeman Dyson, and he explains his decision to join the faculty at MIT where he could work with Bruno Rossi. He describes his collaborations in the Soviet Union with nuclear physicists, and he explains the sequencing of the Alcator program to the Ignitor program. Coppi describes the changes inherent in the AEC’s transformation into the DOE, and he explains the import of the Voyager 2 space mission. He describes his current interest in spontaneously rotating plasma and he reflects on why science is a humbling profession, even for geniuses. At the end of the interview, Coppi explains why the role of angular momentum remains profoundly mysterious, and why he is optimistic that he will continue to make contributions to the understanding of burning plasmas.
Interview with Stephen Wolfram, Founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. He describes his recent efforts to launch an “assault” on the final theory of physics and he muses on the possibility that the human mind is a quantum mechanical system. Wolfram recounts his family’s German-Jewish heritage and his upbringing in Oxford, where his mother was an academic. He describes his schooling which put him on a trajectory to skip grades and begin college at age fifteen and to complete his PhD at age twenty. Wolfram discusses his early interests in particle theory and computer systems and he describes his summer research visit to Argonne Lab and his visit with David Gross at Princeton. He explains the circumstances that led to his admission at Caltech to work on QCD and his decision to accept a faculty appointment at Caltech thereafter. Wolfram narrates the origins of the SMP program and the intellectual property issues he experienced as a Caltech professor. He explains his intellectual migration away from physics toward the work that would become Mathematica and Wolfram Language, and he describes his time at the Institute for Advanced Study. Wolfram discusses the business model he adopted for Mathematica and his educational motivations that were incorporated into the program from its inception. He discusses his interests in complex system research and his fascination with cellular automata, and he narrates the intellectual process that led to his book A New Kind of Science. Wolfram surveys the reviews, positive and negative, that he has received for this work, and he offers a retrospective look at how NKS has held up as it approaches its twentieth anniversary. He describes the launch of Wolfram Alpha and the promises and limits of quantum computing and why he has returned to physics in recent years. At the end of the interview, Wolfram asserts that he has never taken risk in any of his decisions, and he considers how his approach and the intellectual and business ventures he has pursued will continue to yield solutions for many of the ongoing and seemingly intractable problems in physics.
Interview with Albert Schwarz, Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at UC Davis. Schwarz discusses his current interests in pursuing a geometric approach to quantum theory, and he recounts his family origins in Russia and Eastern Europe and their travails under Stalin’s oppression. He describes his early interests in math and his education at the Ivanovo Pedagogical Institute under the guidance of Professor Efremovich, who guided him in the new field of geometric group theory. Schwarz discusses his graduate research at Moscow University, where he focused on the homology of the space of closed curves and on the topology of the space of Fredholm maps during his postgraduate work. He explains the impact of Polyakov’s and t’Hooft’s work on magnetic monopoles and gauge fields in the 1970s, and he describes his contributions to instanton research. Schwarz recounts his earliest exposure to string theory and his subsequent work on supergravity, and he explains the opportunities and considerations that allowed him to emigrate to the United States. He discusses his initial contacts with Ed Witten and his appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study and his job offer at Davis. Schwarz explains his interest in Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism and his appreciation of the value in relating non-commutative geometry to string theory and M-theory. He describes why a geometric approach to quantum theory de-emphasizes the differences between classical and quantum mechanics. At the end of the interview, Schwarz reflects on some of the life lessons he learned from the difficulties of his youth, how his background gives him a uniquely Russian approach to math and physics, and he explains a duality in string theory where it does not currently explain reality but that ultimately, the “right” physics will arise from it.
Interview with Roger Blandford, the Luke Blossom Professor at the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University and Professor of Physics at SLAC. He discusses his current work developing alternate understandings of the Event Horizon Telescope image, on fast radio bursts, and on the notion that handedness has astrophysical origins. Blandford describes the history of cosmology as a respectable discipline within physics, and he credits the rise of VLBI in the 1960s and 1970s for demonstrating the evidence of black holes. He recounts his childhood in England, his early interests in science, and his education at Cambridge, where his thesis research on accretion discs and radio sources was supervised by Martin Rees. Blandford discusses his postdoctoral work on astrophysical particle acceleration and plasma and QED processes in pulsars and a formative visit to the Institute for Advanced Study and to Berkeley. He describes his initial impressions of Caltech where he joined the faculty and where he worked closely with Roman Znajek, and he explains the distinctions between radio jets and relativistic jets. Blandford explains his reasons for moving to Stanford to set up the Kavli Institute and he describes his involvement with the Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey. At the end of the interview, Blandford contends that the most exciting developments in the field have been on exoplanet research, why the possibilities in astrobiology give him cause for optimism, and why the concept that astronomical discovery arrives as “logically unscripted” resonates with him.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Raymond Sawyer, professor of physics emeritus at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Sawyer recounts his childhood growing up in many towns in the Midwest as a function of his father’s frequent job transfers. He discusses his undergraduate studies at Swarthmore College, where he developed his interest in physics, and he explains the atmosphere of wide career opportunity in the age of Sputnik. Sawyer describes his graduate research at Harvard, where he worked in Norman Ramsey’s molecular beam lab. He explains how Julian Schwinger came to be his advisor and he describes his dissertation study on symmetries and the weak interactions of elementary particles. Sawyer discusses his postdoctoral research at CERN where he joined the theory group and where he studied the decay of a charged pion. He describes his second postdoctoral appointment at the University of Wisconsin and his work in quantum field theory at the Institute for Advanced Study which he did at the invitation of Robert Oppenheimer. Sawyer explains the series of events leading to his decision to join the faculty at UC Santa Barbara, and he discusses his role in the formation of the Institute for Theoretical Physics. He explains his invention of charged pion condensation and he describes his work in university administration. At the end of the interview, Sawyer reflects on his contributions throughout his career, and he explains how he has kept active in the field during retirement.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Anthony (Tony) Zee, professor of physics and a member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara. He recounts his family’s escape from revolutionary mainland China to Hong Kong, and then to Brazil where his father pursued economic opportunity in Sao Paulo. Zee explains the opportunities leading to his undergraduate study at Princeton, where John Wheeler was a formative influence, and he describes the connection from Wheeler to Steve Weinberg that allowed him to pursue his graduate studies at Harvard where ultimately he studied under Sidney Coleman. He discusses his postgraduate work at the Institute for Advanced Study where he worked with Michael Green and Bob Carlitz on hadron-hadron scattering. Zee explains his reasons for accepting his first faculty appointment at Rockefeller University and all of the contemporary excitement surrounding asymptotic freedom and renormalization. He describes his return to Princeton, where he stayed until he was denied tenure and he moved to Penn. Zee explains the origins of the ITP (before Kavli’s endowment made it the KITP) and his interest in coming to Santa Barbara after a brief appointment at the University of Washington. At the end of the interview, Zee describes the pleasures of writing popular physics books, he emphasizes the importance of reinventing oneself within and beyond the broad world of physics, and he shares that his big non-scientific ambition is to have a cartoon submission accepted in the New Yorker.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews David Spergel, Director of the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute, and Charles Young Professor of Astronomy on the Class of 1897 Foundation, Emeritus, at Princeton. Spergel describes his transition to the Flatiron Institute and he shares that he will become the president of the Simons Foundation in summer of 2021. He explains his initial connection to Jim Simons and how the Institute differs from a traditional academic environment. Spergel describes New York City as a burgeoning center for machine learning both in academic and industrial research and he conveys his long term interest in determining the future value of machine learning to multiscale physics. He recounts his childhood on Long Island and what it was like to have a physicist for a father, and he explains his undergraduate experience in the physics program at Princeton, where Jim Peebles was a formative influence. Spergel describes his graduate work at Harvard where he worked with Bill Press on the solar neutrino problem and James Binney on orbital dynamics, and where he learned about superconducting cosmic strings. He discusses his postdoctoral appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he became interested in galactic orbits and where he realized the value of the data coming out of COBE. Spergel describes his subsequent appointment to the faculty at Princeton and the promise of string theory at this time. He describes the notion of a multiverse as a non-scientific tautology and he explains why his favorite paper is Wigner’s take on the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.” Spergel describes the origins of WMAP, the turning point this collaboration offered his career trajectory, and how the project allowed for pathbreaking avenues to measure the properties of the universe. He surveys the various ways that inflation, expansion, and acceleration of the universe fit with WMAP, and he explains how this collaboration is driving the next generation of experiments, and in particular, the impact in advances in detector technology. Spergel describes his involvement in the Roman Space Telescope Project and the budgeting challenges it has experienced during the Trump administration. He discusses his advocacy work in Congress on behalf of NASA. Spergel surveys his career as a teacher and a graduate mentor, and he describes how the culture of inclusivity at Princeton has improved over the years. At the end of the interview, Spergel shares his plans for the future of the Simons Foundation, he explains how he will attempt to remain close to the science, how he will use his new position to continue to promote diversity in STEM and to support cutting-edge research across a broad array of scientific endeavors.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Robert Finkelstein, (deceased in August 2020) formerly professor emeritus, department of physics, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Finkelstein describes his early interests in physics and his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College, and he describes his formative summer at Columbia University, where he studied under I.I. Rabi. He discusses he graduate work at Harvard University under the direction of John van Vleck, and he discusses van Vleck’s fundamental contributions to quantum mechanics. Finkelstein describes his postdoctoral work expanding on Niels Bohr’s capacity to deal with magnetism, and he discusses his work with Francis Bitter at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He describes his conscription to the Navy during World War II, where he worked on mine warfare, and he explains his close relationship with George Gamow and his work on tunneling in quantum mechanics and general relativity. Finkelstein discusses his postwar work at Fermilab, where he became interested in meson physics, and he describes his position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton as a postdoctoral researcher under Robert Oppenheimer, where he continued to work on mesons. He describes getting to know at the Institute, he discusses his first contact with the Feynman diagrams, and he recounts how Jack Steinberger used his calculations which were in agreement with the diagrams. Finkelstein discusses his decision to join the faculty at UCLA, and he explains his opinion that Julian Schwinger was a “deeper” thinker than Feynman. He explains the originals of his unitary field theory, and he describes his contributions to the concept of supergravity. At the end of the interview, Finkelstein explains his ongoing interest with improving upon the Standard Model, and he reflects on the incredible level of understanding about the cosmos that has been developed over the course of his career.
