In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Robert Cahn, Senior Scientist Emeritus at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Cahn recounts his childhood in the San Francisco area, and he describes his early interests in math and science, and he describes his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he was influenced by Dan Kleppner and Ed Purcell. Cahn describes his summer internship at SLAC, and his travel experiences in Europe after graduating. He describes his decision to pursue graduate work at Berkeley and he explains the political tumult that had convulsed the campus in the late 1960s. Cahn discusses his work with Dave Jackson on Regge theory and his postdoctoral work at SLAC, which was focused on quark research. Cahn describes his work at the University of Washington, where he collaborated with Lowell Brown, and he explains his decision to join the physics faculty at University of Michigan, where he collaborated on several projects with Gordy Kane and where he became interested in parity violation in atoms. Cahn explains his decision to move to UC Davis, and he describes the opportunity at LBL that presented itself shortly thereafter. Cahn describes the way LBL has been integrated with the physics department at Berkeley, and he discusses his tenure as Director of the Physics division. At the end of the interview, Cahn describes LBL’s increasing involvement in cosmology, the fundamental discoveries that have been made over the course of his career, and he considers some of the philosophical or metaphysical issues that arise in investigating how the universe works.
This is an interview with Martha Krebs, former director of the Consortium for Building Energy Innovation for Penn State in Philadelphia and advisor to the Defense Science Study Group at the Institute for Defense Analysis. She recounts her childhood in postwar Japan and then central Pennsylvania, and she describes her interest in science and the formative influence of Sputnik on her ambitions during her time in a Catholic high school. Krebs explains her decision to attend Catholic University where she knew she wanted to pursue a degree in physics from the beginning. She discusses the importance of securing a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship and the family considerations that influenced her decision to stay at Catholic for graduate school, where she studied under Tomoyasu Tanaka, who was working on hydrogen bonds in ferroelectrics. Krebs describes the opportunities leading to her first postgraduate job in the Science Policy Research Division of the Congressional Research Service which led to her work on the Energy Subcommittee of the Science and Technology Committee, and she provides context on the major issues relating to federal energy policy in the mid-1970s and the rebalancing of power between the White House and Congress in the post-Watergate era. She narrates the origins of the Department of Energy during the Carter administration and she describes the circumstances that led to her tenure as staff director of the Energy Subcommittee which was becoming increasingly important to national developments in renewable and efficient energy sources. Krebs describes the major partisan and industry dynamics that shaped her work on the committee, particularly with the ascendancy of the conservative movement in the 1980s. She explains her decision to move to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which was looking to reinvent itself beyond high-energy physics with new projects in relativistic heavy ion collider projects. She describes the central influence of the Cooperative Research and Development Agreements in the relationship between the Lab and the DOE, and she describes the events leading to her work as director of the Office of Science in the DOE for the Clinton administration. Krebs discusses the collapse of the SSC project at the beginning of her tenure and her contributions to the Office of Energy Research and the applied R & D programs and how she understood the relationship between DOE and OMB on science policy generally during the Clinton years. She describes the state of high energy physics during this time and the DOE’s involvement in nanotechnology research, her decision to join the California NanoSystems Institute, and then her decision to become director of energy efficiency at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. At the end of the interview, Krebs reflects on her career and offers insight into how U.S. national policy can be best directed toward further gains in energy efficiency into the future.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Chris Quigg, Distinguished Scientist Emeritus at Fermi National Accelerator Lab. He discusses his current book project Grace in All Simplicity with his colleague Bob Cahn, and he recounts his upbringing in Pennsylvania and his early interests in science. He describes his undergraduate experience at Yale where he worked with Itzhak Kelson, and his fascination with accelerator physics. Quigg discusses his decision to attend Berkeley for his graduate work and his formative summer work at Livermore. He describes the influence of J.D. Jackson’s course on the dynamics of strong interactions and how he developed his research on rho meson resonances under Jackson’s direction. Quigg discusses his postdoctoral and then faculty position at Stony Brook, and the dual attractions of Brookhaven Lab and the Institute for Theoretical Physics under the leadership of C.N. Yang. He describes his work on two-Reggeon exchange reactions and his interest in the deep inelastic scattering results coming out of SLAC at this time. Quigg discusses the circumstances leading to him joining Fermilab, and he discusses the import of research on weak neutral current, the W and Z bosons, and the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam theory. He describes the fundamental importance of Lederman’s discovery of the Upsilon, and he discusses his contributions to the research going on at CERN in the 1970s. Quigg recounts his involvement in planning the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) and he describes his work thereafter at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL). Toward the end of the interview, Quigg shares his ideas on the current state of high energy physics and the ongoing prospects for fundamental discoveries.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Arthur Poskanzer, distinguished senior scientist emeritus at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Poskanzer recounts his childhood in Manhattan and his experience at Stuyvesant High School where he focused on chemistry. He discusses his undergraduate studies at Harvard and his decision to study at MIT under Charles Coryell in radio chemistry. Poskanzer describes his postgraduate research at Brookhaven where he studied high-energy protons on uranium, and he explains his decision to transfer to Berkeley Lab to work with Earl Hyde on the Bevatron. He explains how he discovered the collective flow of nuclear matter and he describes the origins of the Plastic Ball experimental group. Poskanzer discusses the contributions of the STAR collaboration and the discovery of elliptic flow and the existence of quark gluon plasma. He compares the experiences that led to his discovery of 28 isotopes and why he enjoyed discovering Helium-8 the most. Poskanzer explains the connection between his study of isotope decay and the value this had for solar neutrino experiments, and he explains why 28 was the “magic number” for neutron excess sodium isotopes. At the end of the interview, he describes how Berkeley Lab has changed over the years, and in reflecting on all the discovery he was a part of, Poskanzer emphasizes that successful scientists have an intuition that allows them to pick projects primed for success.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Persis Drell, James and Anna Marie Spilker Professor in the School of Engineering, Provost of Stanford, and former Director of SLAC. Drell recounts her childhood as the daughter of the eminent physicist Sid Drell and what it was like to grow up in this milieu, and she emphasizes her lack of interest in physics as a child. She explains her decision to attend Wellesley for her undergraduate education, and she describes the benefits she felt she gained in attending a woman's college where Professor Phyllis Fleming turned her on to physics. Drell discusses her graduate work at Berkeley, where her key mentors were Gene Commins, Dave Jackson, and George Trilling and where she developed her thesis research on systematic errors that could cause false asymmetries. She describes her postgraduate work at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where she switched to high-energy experimental physics and began her work at SLAC. Drell describes the changing culture at SLAC in the 1980s and 1990s, and the structural changes that compelled the Lab to branch out to new scientific pursuits. She discusses her decision to join the faculty at Cornell where she focused on data analysis for the CLEO particle detector and Cornell Electron-positron Storage Ring (CESR) projects, and conveys the supportive culture of Cornell. Drell describes the circumstances that compelled her to return to SLAC as director of research. She discusses the increasing importance of astrophysics and the B factory to SLAC's research agenda and the strategic challenges facing the Gamma-ray Space Telescope project. Drell explains the considerations leading to her being named lab director and some of the structural challenges in managing the relationship between SLAC and the Department of Energy (DOE). She describes the technical triumph of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) and the opportunities for better integration of SLAC with Stanford proper during her tenure, and she explains her decision to become dean of engineering at Stanford and then provost. Drell describes her most important responsibilities as provost, and at the end of the interview, she reviews some of the fundamental challenges that Stanford is facing as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, and explains why, despite these challenges, students should feel optimistic about the future.
AIP Oral Historian David Zierler interviews Dr. Mary Gaillard, Professor of the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley and Affiliate Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Dr. Gaillard discusses her experiences as an undergraduate at Hollins College in Virginia, and as a graduate student first at Columbia University, then at the University of Paris at Orsay. She describes her subsequent research on kaons and baryon decay while working for the French National Center for Scientific Research at CERN, her year-long collaboration with Ben Lee at Fermilab, and her eventual return to the United States as the first woman to be a tenured professor in the Department of Physics at UC Berkeley, focusing in particular on the working environment at each institution. The remainder of the interview deals with the state of theoretical physics over the course of her career and through to the present.
In this interview Robert Cahn discusses his tenure and support of the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP) as director (1991-1996) of the physics division at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL). Reviews of the SCP. Saul Perlmutter as building a new field of research in distant supernovae. Astrophysics in Berkeley. Style of research in the physics division at LBL. On discoveries as gradual and the importance of statistics and systematics. Pentaquark discovery as an example of error. Physical Review's policy of what constitute 'evidence' (three Sigma) and what constitutes a 'discovery' (five Sigma). Historical example of the discovery of the neutron. Historical example of the discovery of the Psi particle. Two milestones in the discovery of positive Lambda: the first distant supernova and then, finding batches of supernovae. Use of the Hubble Space Telescope by High-z team and SCP. Controversy heated because of the possibility of winning the Nobel prize.
