Interview with Gerard 't Hooft, University Professor of Physics (Emeritus) at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. 't Hooft considers the possibility that the g-2 muon anomaly experiment at Fermilab is suggestive of new physics, and he reflects broadly on the current shortcomings in our understanding of quantum mechanics and general relativity. 't Hooft recounts his childhood in postwar Holland and the influence of his great uncle, the Nobel Prize winner Frits Zernike and his uncle, the theoretical physicist Nico van Kampen. He describes his undergraduate education at Utrecht University where he got to know Martinus Veltman, with whom he would pursue a graduate degree and ultimately share the Nobel Prize. 't Hooft explains the origins of what would become the Standard Model and the significance of Yang-Mills fields and Ken Wilson’s theory of renormalization. He describes Veltman’s pioneering use of computers to calculate algebraic manipulations and why questions of scaling were able to be raised for the first time. 't Hooft discusses his postdoctoral appointment at CERN, his ideas about grouping Feynman diagrams together, and how he became involved in quantum gravity research and Bose condensation. He explains the value in studying instantons for broader questions in QCD, the significance of Hawking’s work on the black hole information paradox, the holographic principle, and why he has diverged with string theorists. 't Hooft describes being present at the start of supersymmetry, and the growing “buzz” that culminated in winning the Nobel Prize. He describes his overall interest in the past twenty years in thinking more deeply about quantum mechanics and he places the foundational disagreement between Einstein and Bohr in historical context. At the end of the interview, 't Hooft surveys the limitations that prevent us from understanding how to merge quantum mechanics and general relativity and why this will require an understanding of how to relate the set of all integer numbers to phenomena of the universe.
Early education at Università di Pavia and Collegio Ghislieri; political involvement in the post-liberation years; experience in Holland (Utrecht and Leiden); postgraduate work with Fausto Fumi and Piero Caldirola's encouragement; evangelizing at Università di Genova and Università di Pisa and first experimental group in Milano; in 1965 Chair at Università di Parma and subsequent establishment there of a Consiglio nazionale delle richerche laboratory for the study of "materials for electronics;" attitude of Italian Communist Party leaders toward science and technology issues over the last decades, from the days of Stalinism to the autonomous stand of today; situation of a Communist physicist during the 1950s and post-1950s.
University of Bristol (1957-1961); work on electron beams and flux in a magnetic field with Yack Aharonov; work on plasmas and the separation of the individual and collective behavior with Gidon Carmi; conference on solid state electronic plasma theory in Utrecht (1959); read Georgii Gurdjieff, Peter Ouspensky, Buddhism, Indian and Christian philosophy; first meeting with Krishnamurti (June 1961); Birkbeck College, University of London (1961-1987); integrating mathematics, physics and philosophy in his teachings; lecturing about Causality and Chance in Modern Physics; differences between Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg’s ideas on quantum mechanics.
A short interview centering on training at Leiden; recollections of teachers -- Oort, van de Hulst, Osterhoff; growth of Dutch radio astronomy; present state of astronomy in Holland.
