Interview with William "Bill" Unruh, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia, and Hagler Fellow at the Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering at Texas A&M. He credits his mentor John Wheeler for the steady progress of interest and work in general relativity over the decades, and he reflects broadly on the original debates among the relativists and the founders of quantum mechanics. Unruh explains the inability to merge these foundations of physics as the source of his attempts to understand the black hole evaporation as found by Hawking. He recounts his upbringing in Manitoba as part of a Mennonite community and his early interests in Euclidean geometry, and he describes his undergraduate education at the University of Manitoba. Unruh explains his decision to pursue a PhD with Wheeler at Princeton on topology and general relativity, and scattering cross sections of black holes to scalar fields. He describes his postgraduate appointment at Birkbeck College where he worked with Roger Penrose and he narrates the origins of his collaboration with Stephen Fulling and Paul Davies. Unruh discusses his time at Berkeley and then at McMaster and he historicizes the point at which observations made black holes more "real," and he explains his first involvement with decoherence. He explains his involvement with LIGO from its origins and its quantum mechanical nature, and he narrates his reaction of amazement when gravitational waves were detected. Unruh describes the impact of his work in quantum mechanics on computation, and he explains some of the advances that have made observation more relevant to his recent research. At the end of the interview, Unruh describes his efforts to launch a Gravity Archive at UBC, he expresses his frustration with people who insist we do not know quantum mechanics, and he quotes Wheeler, quoting his favorite Grook to convey that he is having fun and wants to learn as much as he can, while he can.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Ray Larsen, head of the electronics department at SLAC, where he specialized in controls instrumentation and microwave front end interfaces to electronics. Larsen recounts his childhood in Alberta and his Norwegian heritage. He discusses his undergraduate and masters degree experience at the University of British Columbia where he developed his interests in engineering and electronics. He discusses his work at the Canadian Armament Research and Development Establishment in Quebec City, and the circumstances leading to his tenure at SLAC, which he recognized immediately as his ideal career setting. Larsen describes his long tenure at SLAC, which spans nearly the life of SLAC itself. Larsen explains many of the fundamental experiments that have taken place at SLAC, and he discusses the exciting, free-wheeling spirit of the early days at the lab, and how it has changed over the years.
