World War, 1939-1945

In these interviews, Joanna Behrman, Assistant Public Historian for AIP, interviews Steven Moszkowski, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He describes his family background and childhood in Germany. Moszkowski recounts how he and his family, particularly his grandparents, were friends of Albert Einstein. He recalls the rise of the Nazis and how he and his parents emigrated to the United States. He describes joining the Army after high school and being transferred to work at the Metallurgical Laboratory under Robert Sachs. He explains how he became interested in nuclear physics and earned his Ph.D. under Maria Goeppert-Mayer. Moszkowski describes working with Chien-Shiung Wu at Columbia on beta decay and coauthoring a book together. He recounts moving from Columbia to UCLA where he also consulted for the Rand Corporation and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He discusses the evolution of research on nuclear models including Goeppert-Mayer’s shell model and his own interest in the nuclear many-body problem. Moszkowski explains the origins of the division between nuclear theorists and particle theorists. He describes how he generalized Goeppert-Mayer’s delta interaction and named it the surface delta interaction which became a focus of research for many years. He then describes the social and personal upheavals he experienced during the 1960s He recounts the importance of travel and collaboration in his research, particularly his travel to Hungary, the European Center for Theoretical Studies in Nuclear Physics and Related Areas (ECT*) in Trento, and the University of Coimbra in Portugal. He recalls his interactions with many colleagues in physics including Judit Nemeth, Yoichiro Nambu, Murph Goldberger, and Murray Gell-Mann. Moszkowski describes his impressions on the status of women in physics and his biography of Goeppert-Mayer as part of a volume edited by Nina Byers and Gary Williams. Moszkowski concludes with his impressions of Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Werner Heisenberg, Nambu, and Hans Bethe.

Interview with Pierre Ramond, Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Florida. Ramond recounts childhood in Paris, he describes his family’s experiences during World War II, and he explains that opportunities that led to his education in electrical engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He discusses his graduate degree in physics at Syracuse University to focus on general relativity and his first exposure to the earliest iterations of string theory. Ramond describes his work at Fermilab on Veneziano modelling, his postdoctoral research at Yale, and his subsequent work at Los Alamos. He describes Gell-Mann’s interest in grand unified theories and the influence of Ken Wilson. Ramond explains the excitement regarding the muon anomaly experiment at Fermilab, and he narrates his decision to join the faculty at the University of Florida. He explains how the department’s stature has risen over the past forty years, and he reflects on his involvement with the superstring revolution in 1984. Ramond describes the difference between effective and fundamental theories in particle physics and he conveys the productive intellectual ferment at the annual Aspen conferences. He describes his service work on the faculty senate and he describes his leadership position at the APS during the discovery of the Higgs. Ramond explains why he thinks supersymmetry would have been detected at a completed SSC and he reflects on receiving the Dirac medal in 2020. At the end of the interview, he discusses Einstein’s misgivings on quantum mechanics, he imagines how string theory might be testable, and he explains why he remains interested in CP violation.

Interview with Bertram Batlogg, Professor Emeritus at ETH Zurich. Batlogg surveys his current interests in topological superconductivity and superconductivity in twisted layer graphene, and he connects this current research with his own work at Bell Labs earlier in his career. He considers the current state of play in high-Tc research and he recounts his family's Austrian heritage and his upbringing early interests in physics. Batlogg describes his undergraduate experience at ETH Zurich and his reasons for remaining to complete his PhD thesis work. He describes Bell Labs as the Mecca for his research as a postdoctoral fellow and then as a staff scientist. Batlogg discusses his work on Hall effect measurements, superconductivity, and heavy Fermions, and he describes his tenure as head of the solid state physics and materials research division.  He describes the culture of basic science and how it changed from the 1980s to the 1990s, and he discusses his formative collaborations with Bob Cava and 1-2-3 YBCO. He narrates the story of meeting Jan Hendrik Schön and the issues that would lead to the investigation led by Mac Beasley. Batlogg conveys the scientific and emotional turmoil of this episode and the impact this episode had on his sense of trust in people. He describes participating in the investigation after he had already left Bell Labs to return to ETH Zurich to build up a research group with a focus that included topics such as charge dynamics and heavy Fermions in very high magnetic fields. At the end of the interview, Batlogg emphasizes advances in data acquisition and spectroscopy that propelled the field forward over his career, and he considers how some his research can contribute in the future to discoveries in both the applied and basic realms of science.

Interview covers the development of several branches of theoretical physics from the 1930s through the 1960s; the most extensive discussions deal with topics in quantum electrodynamics, nuclear physics as it relates to fission technology, meson field theory, superfluidity and other properties of liquid helium, beta decay and the Universal Fermi Interaction, with particular emphasis on Feynman's work in the reformulation of quantum electrodynamic field equations. Early life in Brooklyn, New York; high school; undergraduate studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; learning the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics on his own. To Princeton University (John A. Wheeler), 1939; serious preoccupation with problem of self-energy of electron and other problems of quantum field theory; work on uranium isotope separation; Ph.D., 1942. Atomic bomb project, Los Alamos (Hans Bethe, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi); test explosion at Alamagordo. After World War II teaches mathematical physics at Cornell University; fundamental ideas in quantum electrodynamics crystalize; publishes "A Space-Time View," 1948; Shelter Island Conference (Lamb shift); Poconos Conferences; relations with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichiro Tomonaga; nature and quality of scientific education in Latin America; industry and science policies. To California Institute of Technology, 1951; problems associated with the nature of superfluid helium; work on the Lamb shift (Bethe, Michel Baranger); work on the law of beta decay and violation of parity (Murray Gell-Mann); biological studies; philosophy of scientific discovery; Geneva Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy; masers (Robert Hellwarth, Frank Lee Vernon, Jr.), 1957; Solvay Conference, 1961. Appraisal of current state of quantum electrodynamics; opinion of the National Academy of Science; Nobel Prize, 1965.

Myriam Sarachik, Distinguished Professor Emerita Physics at City College of New York, is interviewed by David Zierler. Sarachik recounts her turbulent childhood first in Belgium, from which her orthodox Jewish family evacuated during World War II, then in Cuba, and then in New York. She describes some of the challenges of being a girl interested in science and she recounts her undergraduate at Barnard, where her talents in physics first became apparent. Sarachik discusses the formative influence of Polykarp Kusch and her experiences with Dick Garwin, who was her graduate advisor at Columbia. She explains her dissertation research measuring the attenuation of a magnetic field through a superconducting film right at the time that BCS (Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer) theory was developing. Sarachik describes her postgraduate work at Bell Labs, where she worked in Ted Geballe’s group, and where she conducted research in measuring the resistivity of alloys for which her findings came to be known as the Kondo effect. Sarachik discusses her decision to leave Bell to join the faculty at City College, where she immediately got to work building a lab and taking on students. She describes her coping mechanisms in her attempt to continue her career following the tragic loss of her child. Sarachik discusses her work on doped semiconductors and then in searching for the macroscopic quantum tunneling of magnetization. She reflects on her feelings of validation within the field as it related to her advisory work on numerous scientific boards and committees, and in particular her tenure as president of the APS. Sarachik describes her subsequent research on metal insulator transitions in two dimensions, and she conveys the impact of her major profile in the New York Times in 2020. At the end of the interview, Sarachik returns to her religious family roots and affirms both the cultural influence of this upbringing and her subsequent embrace of atheism. Sarachik concludes expressing wonderment at what the true meaning of quantum mechanical effects might tell us about nature. 

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Samuel C.C. Ting, Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Physics at MIT and Guest Professor of the Director General of CERN. Ting describes his long-term, unpaid affiliations with CERN and DESY, he recounts his childhood in Michigan, and he describes the opportunities that led to his parents to pursue graduate degrees at the University of Michigan. He explains why he returned with his parents to China before the Second World War, and he describes his family’s experiences during the war. Ting describes his own decision to return to the United States for his undergraduate studies after his family fled from the mainland to Taiwan in 1948, where he lived for eight years, before enrolling in the engineering program at the University of Michigan. He conveys his love for Michigan football, his near brush with the draft, and he explains his decision to remain at Michigan for graduate school. Ting explains his decision to focus on experimentation after initially considering theory, and he discusses his work on the Bevatron at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley. He describes his dissertation research on pion proton elastic scattering, and his contribution to the finding that that diffraction peak of this scattering does not shrink with increased energy. Ting explains the opportunities that led to his work at CERN to work on proton-proton scattering with Giuseppe Cocconi, and his positive experiences as a junior faculty member at Columbia University. He explains his collaboration with Stanley Brodsky and this connection with his work at DESY, and he relates Feynman’s humorous congratulatory telegram shortly after he won the Nobel Prize on the J particle. Ting explains the significance of this work, and that of Burt Richter at SLAC whose work was entirely independent from Ting’s. He explains his decision to deliver his Nobel acceptance speech in Mandarin, he describes the challenges of distraction owing to the recognition, and he explains how he became interested in space-based experiments. He discusses his increasing involvement with NASA and the Department of Energy (DOE) in pursuing his goal of large-scale experiments, where he has concentrated on measuring the spectrum of electrons. He explains the origins and outlook for the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), and he projects that attaining higher energies will continue to advance fundamental discovery which will serve as complements to land-based accelerator experiments. Ting discusses the discovery of the gluon by the Positron-Electron Tandem Ring Accelerator (PETRA) collaboration, and the influence of his research on the standard electroweak model, and he reflects on what it will take to understand dark matter. At the end of the interview, Ting expresses gratitude for the support he has received from MIT over the course of his career, and he makes the case for why governments should continue to support basic science research, even in fields for which no immediate benefit to humanity is readily apparent. 

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Gino Segrè, emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. Segrè recounts his childhood in Italy and his family’s abrupt exit for the United State before the outbreak of World War II. He discusses his life in New York, and his family’s decision move back and forth from Italy. Segrè discusses his undergraduate experience at Harvard and his graduate research at MIT. He discusses his work on field theory at Berkeley, and his decision to join the faculty at Penn where he set about helping to build up the elementary particle physics program. Toward the end of the interview, Segrè discusses his developing interests as a science writer, the present course of theoretical particle physics and the importance for physicists to reinvent themselves over the course of their careers.

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. 

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Josef Eisinger, professor emeritus at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Eisinger recounts his childhood in Vienna and his experiences in England as a refugee from the Nazis during World War II. He talks about his transfer to Canada as an “enemy alien,” his experience transitioning to civilian life, and his matriculation at the University of Toronto, where he completed his undergraduate and Masters work in physics before transferring to MIT for his Ph.D. Eisinger discusses his work with Jerrold Zacharias and Viki Weisskopf. Eisinger discusses his tenure at Bell Labs, where he pursued a variety of interests in spectroscopy and electron-nuclear double resonance. He explains his developing interest in molecular biology and the Guggenheim Fellowships that allowed him to advance in this new field. He discusses his work on lead poisoning and his transition to Mount Sinai. Toward the end of the interview, Eisinger discusses his involvement with translating the letters of Brahms.

Notes on Shklovskii's origins, education in Moscow, World War II experience, approach to astronomy and teaching, and changes in his lifetime.