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.
