In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Richard Casten, D. Allan Bromley Professor of Physics Emeritus at Yale, and consultant for the Facility for Rare Ion Beams facility at Michigan State. Casten recounts his childhood in Manhattan and his decision to attend Holy Cross for his undergraduate studies, where he pursued a degree in physics from the outset. He describes the long term benefits of a degree that required significant coursework in the humanities, and how he came to focus on nuclear physics as a research focus. Casten describes his graduate work at Yale and his work with Allan Bromley, who at the time was working on lower energy accelerators. Casten explains the major research questions in nuclear physics at that time, and he describe his research in the Coulomb excitation in the osmium isotopes. He recounts his time at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, his work using the triton beam at Los Alamos, and his subsequent research on the tandem accelerator at Brookhaven. Casten explains the rise of interest in the interacting boson model, and he describes his decision to join the faculty at Yale where he directed the Wright Nuclear Structure Lab. He describes his research over the course of his tenure at Yale, and the import of the collaborations he has maintained with his colleagues in Cologne. At the end of the interview, Casten provides an overview of his key contributions, and he shares what is most compelling to him for the future of nuclear physics.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Nicholas Samios, Director Emeritus of Brookhaven National Laboratory. He describes his family’s Greek heritage and he recounts his childhood in Manhattan and the value of the education he received at Stuyvesant High School. He describes his decision to attend Columbia as an undergraduate, where he studied under Jack Steinberger, Polycarp Kusch, and I.I. Rabi. Samios explains his decision to remain at Columbia for graduate school, and he explains some of the exciting things that were happening in particle physics then, including the use of cloud chambers to discover the “strange particles” called lambdas and thetas. He describes his dissertation research studying these particles using bubble chambers and searching for parity violation, and he explains his interest in the research at the Nevis Cyclotron in Westchester. Samios discusses his postdoctoral research at Columbia before accepting a position at Brookhaven, which was in the middle of building the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, and he describes the difference between this work on pions and what Panofsky was doing with electrons at Stanford. He describes his subsequent work designing neutrino beams and his contribution to the discovery of the baryon charm, and he describes his tenure as chair of Brookhaven’s physics department and his efforts to produce complementary and not redundant work with the other National Labs. Samios recounts his time as Director at Brookhaven, and he describes in detail the ISABELLE project and why it was cancelled by the Reagan administration. He connects the fall of ISABELLE with the origins and ultimate failure of the SSC and the inevitable loss of leadership the U.S. experienced in high energy physics. Samios discusses why the RHIC endeavor delayed his retirement and the significance of RHIC’s discovery of the quark-gluon plasma. At the end of the interview, Samios surveys the fundamental discoveries that occurred over his career on the Standard Model and parity conservation, the ongoing mystery of dark matter, and he outlines the many ways that particle physics has positively influenced technology and human well-being.
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 Samuel Aronson, Director Emeritus of Brookhaven National Laboratory. He discusses his more recent work as director of the RIKEN Institute and his involvement with the National Offshore Wind R&D Consortium. Aronson recounts his childhood on Long Island, and he describes the impact of Sputnik on him personally and on the country generally. He describes his undergraduate education at Columbia and the relationship he developed with Mel Schwartz, and he discusses Schwartz’s collaborations with Leon Lederman and Jack Steinberger. Aronson describes his decision to pursue his graduate degree at Princeton, and his interest in working at the Princeton-Pennsylvania Accelerator Center. He discusses his involvement in the study of the decay of neutral K mesons into a pion and an electron and a neutrino. Aronson recounts his work with Valentine Telegdi at the Fermi Institute, and he describes Telegdi’s research at the ZDS in Argonne in kaons. He discusses his faculty appointment at the University of Wisconsin and his research on neutral kaons, and he describes the fundamental and concurrent work going on at Brookhaven and SLAC. Aronson explains the origins of his collaboration with Ephraim Fischbach on the Fifth Force, and he describes his attraction in moving to Brookhaven where the ISABELLE proton-proton collider was in development. He describes the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and PHENIX program, and he explains his promotions and increasing responsibilities culminating in his being named director of Brookhaven. Aronson discusses the rise of cosmology from within the field of particle physics, and he describes the role of DOE in supporting basic science at the lab. At the end of the interview, Aronson shares his views on the future of particle physics and some major outstanding questions that will continue to animate the field.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Thomas C. Blum, Professor of Physics at the University of Connecticut. Blum recounts his childhood in Reno, Nevada and he describes his early interests in math and science. He describes his undergraduate work in aeronautical and astronomical engineering at the University of Washington. Blum discusses his job focusing on computational fluid dynamics at Boeing after college and he explains his decision to pursue a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Arizona. He describes his graduate work in lattice gauge theory studying under Doug Toussaint. Blum discusses his postdoctoral work at Brookhaven, where he continued to work on lattice gauge theory, and he describes his decision to join the faculty at UConn. He describes his ongoing interests in chiral symmetry, g-2 and QCD research, and he conveys his excitement over possible future breakthroughs in hadronic vacuum polarization. At the end of the interview, Blum conveys how much fundamental work remains to be done in physics, and as an example he raises what remains an open-ended question: what is the real structure of the proton?
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews John Galayda, Project Director for the NSTXU project at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Galayda recounts his childhood in New Jersey and his undergraduate experience at Lehigh University. He discusses his research work as a graduate student at Rutgers, where he was interested in applying accelerator physics to energy supply solutions, and where he focused on quantum field theory. Galayda discusses his research at Brookhaven he worked on the NSLS and the Transverse Optical Klystron. He explains his decision to move to Argonne where he conducted research on X-ray beams, and he describes the factors that convinced him to join SLAC in 2001. Galayda describes SLAC’s interest in building a next-generation Linear Collider. He explains some of the major research questions that propelled the LCLS and he describes the recruitment process that led to his current work at PPPL. In the last portion of the interview, Galayda surmises on the future of plasma physics and he emphasizes the importance of working with good people.
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 Francis Halzen, professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin and principal investigator for the IceCube Project. Halzen describes his involvement in the origins of the project in 1990, and he recounts his childhood in Belgium and the ordeals his family experienced during World War II. He discusses his undergraduate and graduate education at Louvain University, and he describes his developing interests in group theory and quark theory. Halzen discusses his research on non-relativistic quarks bound in mesons under the direction of Frans Cerulus, and he describes his postdoctoral research at CERN on duality between resonances and particle exchanges. He discusses his subsequent work at Brookhaven and the initial goal of finding the W boson with the ISABELLE program, and he describes the events leading to his joining the faculty in Madison. Halzen describes the leading position Wisconsin enjoyed in high-energy physics, the transitional period he found himself in with the advent of QCD, and the importance of the research being conducted at Argonne, SLAC and Fermilab over the years. He describes the origins of the AMANDA project and he explains the relevance of building a kilometer cube detector for neutrino astronomy. Halzen discusses the complementary relationship between cosmic ray and particle physics, and he explains why the IceCube project needed to be as large as it is to detect the sources of cosmic rays. He explains why Antarctica is an ideal site to detect neutrinos and what it would take to create a standard neutrino model. Halzen describes the magnitude of the event if IceCube was able to detect a neutron start merger in neutrinos, gamma rays and gravitational waves, and at the end of the interview, he describes the future goals of IceCube and how it will continue to expand our understanding of the universe.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Paul Feldman, professor emeritus of physics at Johns Hopkins. Feldman recounts his childhood in New York, his education at Brooklyn Tech, and his undergraduate work at Columbia, where he studied with Polykarp Kusch and worked at Brookhaven Lab during the summers. Feldman describes his decision to stay on at Columbia for graduate school to work in high energy physics, his work at the Naval Research Laboratory, and he provides a broad overview of atomic physics going back to the 1940s. Feldman details his longtime collaboration on projects with NASA during his career at Johns Hopkins, and he describes the significance of the Hubble telescope. In the last portion of the interview, Feldman shares his views on what he considers to be the most important current and future topics of research in astrophysics.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Alexander Chao, Professor of Physics and a specialist in accelerator physics at SLAC. Chao recounts his childhood in Taiwan, right after the civil war of 1949, and he describes his early difficulties in school before discovering his abilities in math and physics. He describes his undergraduate work at Tsinghua University in Taipei where he developed his early skills in theoretical accelerator physics. Chao describes his yearlong obligatory military service after graduating, and he explains his decision to pursue a graduate degree at Stony Brook, where he was attracted by the work of Chen-Ning Yang and with whom he worked on elementary particle physics. Chao discusses his work at Brookhaven Lab, and he conveys Yang’s advice to pursue a career in accelerator physics. He describes the opportunity that launched his career at SLAC, where Burt Richter hired him right before the “November Revolution” of 1974. Chao discusses his work over the decades at SLAC, including his role as a theorist in the high energy experimental group, his work as group leader of the beam dynamics group, and his deep involvement in the design of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). He offers his perspective on the many reasons why the SSC was cancelled, and he expresses his relief that he had a job waiting for him back at SLAC. Chao reflects on how the research culture at SLAC has changed over the years, and at the end of the interview, he discusses his current interest in Steady State Micro Bunching, which has the potential to radiate very high power for diverse applications.
