Nuclear reactions

In this interview, Steven Koonin, University Professor at New York University, recounts his childhood in Brooklyn and his education at Stuyvesant High School, which he credits for providing an excellent education in math and science. He explains his decision to pursue a degree in physics at Caltech, where Willie Fowler supervised him, and where he focused on nuclear physics. Koonin discusses his graduate work at MIT, where he studied under Art Kerman and focused on Hamiltonian variational principles for quantum many-body systems and on the study of nuclear motion. He explains the opportunity that led him back to Caltech for his first faculty position without going through a postdoctoral experience first. He describes his interest in then doing a postdoc in Copenhagen, where he had more opportunities to collaborate on theoretical nuclear physics than at Caltech. Koonin describes the pleasures of teaching quantum mechanics to undergraduates, he describes the impact of personal computing technology on his research in the mid-1980s, and he discusses his contributions in extrapolating nuclear reactions to get astrophysical rates. Koonin discusses his involvement in national security issues including the Strategic Defense Initiative as part of the JASON group, and his advisory work for the Department of Energy and DARPA. He describes his administrative accomplishments as vice president at provost at Caltech and the institutional advancements that he fostered in biology and high-performance computing. Koonin explains his position to take a position at BP as chief scientist where he had a mandate to push the company to pursue alternative energy resources, and he describes his decision to accept Steve Chu’s offer to run the Office of Science at DOE during the first Obama administration. Koonin describes his focus there on exascale computing and high-energy density science, and he discusses his long-range interest in climate science and some of the inherent challenges this field presents in both the scientific and political realms. He describes his decision to accept his current position at NYU, and at the end of the interview, Koonin describes his goals in founding the Center for Urban Science and Progress. 

In this interview Richard Garwin discusses topics such as: hydrogen bombs,  Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Enrico Fermi, nuclear weapons, uranium enrichment, nuclear reactions, Edward Teller, thermonuclear burning, Greenhouse George, Stanislaw Ulam, Soviet Union, Richard Rhodes, Marshall Rosenbluth, International Business Machines (IBM), IBM Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory, Project Lamplight.This interview is part of a collection of interviews on the life and work of Richard Garwin. To see all associated interviews, click here.

Arrival in the U.S. in 1930; comparison of social, scientific, general intellectual climates in U.S and Europe; early interest in nuclear physics, relationship with graduate students; beta decay, compound nucleus model, Breit-Wigner formula, early shell model; review articles by Bethe; relation of early meson theory to nuclear physics; nuclear forces; charge independence; journal literature of physics ca. 1937; effectiveness of group-theoretic models in nuclear physics; effectiveness of quantum mechanics for nuclear physics; significant early experimental discoveries in nuclear physics: neutron, deutron, artificial radioactivity; fission, shell model of Mayer and Jensen; rotational levels in nuclei; the specialization of physics; effect of World War II on nuclear physics research; work at Chicago; conferences after the war; branching off of high-energy physics from nuclear physics; work personally regarded as interesting.