Magnetic fields

Interview with Laura Greene, Chief Scientist of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (MagLab) and the Marie Krafft Professor of Physics at Florida State University. The interview begins with Greene describing the relationship between MagLab and FSU, how MagLab fits into the National Laboratory network, and how the COVID-19 pandemic affected their work. Greene then recounts her childhood in Cleveland where she attended public schools and felt called toward science at a young age. She discusses her undergraduate studies in physics at Ohio State and her time working at Hughes Aircraft before pursuing graduate studies at Cornell, where she was one of four women in her program. Greene recalls her time at Bell Labs and later Bellcore, describing her work in areas such as planar tunneling in superconductors and high temperature superconductivity. She then discusses her move to University of Illinois and the transition from industry back into academia. Toward the end of the interview, Greene reflects on her time spent in Korea as a visiting professor, her leadership within the American Physical Society, and her appointment to PCAST. Other topics include challenges of being a women in physics, the importance of diversity in science, her work in science diplomacy and her human rights work with scientists who are prisoners of conscience, and science policy.

Interview with Peter L. Bender, Senior Research Associate at the University of Colorado and the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) in Boulder. Bender recounts his childhood in New Jersey, he describes his undergraduate focus in math and physics at Rutgers, and he explains his decision to pursue a graduate degree in physics at Princeton to work with Bob Dicke. He discusses his dissertation research on optical pumping of sodium vapor, which was suggested by Dicke as a means of doing precision measurements of atoms. Bender discusses his postdoctoral research at the National Bureau of Standards, where he focused on magnetic fields and he narrates the administrative and national security decisions leading to the creation of JILA in Boulder, where the laboratory would be less vulnerable to nuclear attack. He describes his work on laser distance measurements to the moon and his collaborations with NASA, and he discusses his long-term advisory work for the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council. Bender describes the origins of the NASA Astrotech 21 Program and the LISA proposal, he explains his more recent interests in massive black holes, geophysics and earth science, and he explains some of the challenges associated with putting optical clocks in space. At the end of the interview, Bender reflects on the central role of lasers in his research, and he explains the intellectual overlap of his work in astrophysics and earth physics, which literally binds research that is based both in this world and beyond it.

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.