This is an interview with Edward Weiler, who served as chief scientist of the Hubble Space Telescope from 1979 to 1998, as NASA Associate Administrator for science activities from 1998 to 2004 and again from 2008 to 2011, and as director of the Goddard Space Flight Center from 2004 to 2008. The interview focuses primarily on his work relating to Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope. Subjects addressed include his work developing international collaboration, and he explains the value of his strong working relationship with David Southwood of the European Space Agency. Weiler details his involvement with the correction of the spherical aberration afflicting Hubble’s primary mirror. He highlights NASA Administrator Dan Goldin’s role in establishing the scope of the Webb telescope, and he offers his views on the project’s troubles and the 2010 review chaired by John Casani that diagnosed sources of its cost growth and schedule slippage. Weiler also recounts his motivations for retiring from NASA in 2011, his activities since then, and he expresses his perspective on matters such as human space flight, lunar exploration, and the value of international partnerships in space science.
This interview was conducted first solely with Terry Hughes, then a brief segment with both Hughes and George Denton, and finally a segment with only Denton. It is part of a series of interviews done documenting the history of scientific work on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), and it concentrates primarily on Hughes’s career. It briefly covers his upbringing in South Dakota and undergraduate education in metallurgy at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and discusses his introduction into glaciology through Johannes Weertman, while doing graduate work in metallurgy at Northwestern University. The interview moves on to field work in Antarctica as a research associate under Colin Bull, subsequent employment at the Institute of Polar Studies at The Ohio State University, and production of his ISCAP Bulletins outlining the possibility that WAIS might disintegrate. Hughes’s move to the University of Maine as part of the CLIMAP project and his association with Denton and Hal Borns, are discussed. There is a focus on Hughes and Denton’s identification in The Last Great Ice Sheets of marine portions of ice sheets as playing a crucial role in the destruction of past ice sheets, as well as their identification of Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers as a potential outlet for rapid ice loss from WAIS. There is also discussion of early attention to the WAIS disintegration problem circa 1980 and Hughes’s distance from subsequent research on ice streams. Denton describes field work in reconstructing past climate conditions, including the contributions of John Mercer.
In this interview, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Director of The Chatterjee Group - Centers of Research in Education, Science, and Technology, discusses his time working in the United States and India. He discusses his time at Northwestern University as an advisee of John Ketterson and his work with liquid crystals. He also speaks about the interplay between experiment and theory. Bhattacharya details his time as a James Franck Fellow at the University of Chicago and his collaboration with Sid Nagel on the glass transition of glycerol. He speaks about his experience working on charge density waves at Exxon, as well as his discovery of the pseudo-gap phase while there. He discusses working at NEC with vortex phases in type-II superconductors. Bhattacharya reflects on the joy he found teaching physics to undergraduate students. He details his time working at Ashoka University where he was allowed the opportunity to create an undergraduate education framework and build a physics department. Lastly, Bhattacharya discusses the importance of incorporating science into culture.
Interview with Norman Jouppi, Distinguished Hardware Engineer at Google. Jouppi provides an overview of the organizational hierarchy at Google and where he fits in, and he surveys the distinctions between applied physics, electrical engineering, and computer science. He recounts his childhood in suburban Chicago and his early interests in computers. He describes his undergraduate education at Northwestern where he pursued his interests in computer architecture. Jouppi discusses his graduate research at Stanford, and he reflects on the early days of startup culture in Silicon Valley. He explains the origins of MIPS and the influence of Jim Clark and John Hennessy and he describes his work for Silicon Graphics and his thesis research in CAD. Jouppi explains his decision to take his first postgraduate position at Digital Equipment Corporation and he describes the importance of VAX computing. He explains the corporate transition from DEC to Compaq to HP, and he explains the origins internet browsing and the creation of Alta Vista. Jouppi explains the concept of telepresence and he discusses his responsibilities as director of the Advanced Architecture Lab. He explains the interest in exascale computing and his early work in artificial intelligence. Jouppi discusses his involvement in VLSI design and he explains the process that brought him to Google to work on platforms and TPU infrastructure. He reflects on how ML has changed over the years and he describes both the research and collaborative culture that Google promotes, and he explains why quantum computing is a completely different domain of computation. At the end of the interview, Jouppi considers how and when Moore’s Law will end, and he conveys his commitment to advancing technology that has a tangibly net-positive impact on society.
