Candid Science IV

The following sections are included:

• FOREWORD

• PREFACE

• CONTENTS

Eugene P. Wigner (1902, Budapest — 1995, Princeton) received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles." He attended one of the famous Budapest high schools before his studies at the Berlin University of Technology, where, eventually he earned his doctorate in chemical engineering. When the Nazis came to power in Germany he left for the United States. He was Thomas D. Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics at Princeton University between 1938 and 1971, when he retired. Wigner worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He was a member of the General Advisory Committee to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1952–1957 and 1959–1964. Among his decorations, he received the U.S. Medal of Merit (1946), the Enrico Fermi Prize of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1958), the Atoms for Peace Award (1960), the Medal of the Franklin Society, the Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society, the National Medal of Science (1969), and others. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A., the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and other learned societies. We met and had extensive conversations at the University of Texas at Austin in 1969. This narrative (by István Hargittai) is based on these conversations and on other interviews in this volume.

Steven Weinberg (b. 1933 in New York City) is Josey Regental Professor of Science in the Department of Physics of the University of Texas at Austin and Morris Loeb Visiting Professor of Physics at Harvard University. He received his undergraduate degree from Cornell in 1954, started his graduate studies in Copenhagen, and received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1957. He started his university career at Columbia University, spent longer periods of time at Berkeley, MIT, and Harvard before moving to Texas in 1982. Dr. Weinberg received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 together with Sheldon L. Glashow of Harvard University and Abdus Salam of Imperial College, London, "for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current." Steven Weinberg has authored over 200 research papers and seven books, including The First Three Minutes — A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (Basic Books, New York, 1977), which has appeared in 22 languages, and Dreams of a Final Theory (Pantheon, New York, 1993). He has been awarded many honorary degrees, is member of many learned societies, including the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A., and received many awards, including the National Medal of Science. Our conversation was recorded in Professor Weinberg's office at the University of Texas at Austin, on March 3, 1998, and the text was finalized in the spring of 2003.

Yuval Ne'eman (b. 1925 in Tel-Aviv, Israel) is Professor of Physics (Emeritus, since 1997) at Tel-Aviv University and Chairman of the Israeli Space Agency. He received his B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1945 and the Diploma of Engineering in 1946, both from the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion), Haifa. In 1962, he received his D.I.C (Physics) from Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, and a Ph.D. (Sciences) from London University. His academic positions included his appointment at the Department of Physics of Tel-Aviv University, which he had in fact founded in 1962. He served Tel-Aviv University in various capacities, including that of President in 1971–1975. He has been very active in committees and other appointments in Israeli academia, as well as on the international academic scene.

Professor Ne'eman is a Member of the Israel National Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A., a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Life Member of the New York Academy of Science, and a Member of the International Academy of Astronautics. In Israel, he received the Weizmann Prize, the Rothschild Prize, and the Israel Prize; on the international scene he was awarded with the Albert Einstein Medal, the College de France Medal, the Wigner Medal, and the Birla Award (India). He is a member of many learned societies and has received many other distinctions. In addition, Professor Ne'eman has had an exceptional military and political career in Israel.

We recorded our conversations during the Symmetry 2000 Symposium in Stockholm, September 13–16, 2000.¹ The text was then augmented with references in subsequent correspondence.

Jerome I. Friedman (b. 1930 in Chicago) is Institute Professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was one of the three recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1990, the other two being Henry W. Kendall, also of MIT, and Richard E. Taylor of Stanford University. The citation said, "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics". Jerome Friedman received all his degrees in physics at the University of Chicago: A.B., M.S., and Ph.D. in 1950, 1953, and 1956, respectively. He worked in the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago and at Stanford University before he joined MIT where he has been since 1960. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1980) and the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. (1992). He received the W.K.H. Panofsky Prize of the American Physical Society in 1989 and was President of the Society in 1999. He has been a member of numerous committees and panels. We recorded our conversation on February 5, 2002, in Dr. Friedman's office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Martinus Veltman (b. 1931 in Waalwijk, the Netherlands) is Professor Emeritus, John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Utrecht in 1963. He was a fellow at CERN and Professor of Physics at the University of Utrecht. He has been at the University of Michigan since 1981 till his retirement in 1997. Now he lives in Bilthoven, the Netherlands. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1999, together with Gerardus 't Hooft, "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics". He is a member of the Dutch Academy of Sciences (1981), the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. (2000) and Fellow of the American Physical Society (1984). He has served on policy committees of all major high-energy physics laboratories in the world. We recorded our conversation in Professor Veltman's home in Bilthoven on March 18, 2001.

Gerardus 't Hooft (b. 1946 in Den Helder, The Netherlands) is Professor of Physics at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of Utrecht University. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Utrecht in 1972 and has stayed there ever since. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1999, together with Martinus Veltman "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics". He has received numerous honors, among them the Wolf Prize of the State of Israel (1982), the Franklin Medal (1995), the Commander in the Order of the Dutch Lion (a national distinction) (1999) and the Officier de la Légion d'Honneur of France (2001). He is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (1982) and foreign associate of the Belgian Academy of Sciences (1981), the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. (1984), and the French Academy of Sciences (1995). An asteroid was named after him, "9491 Thooft", in 2000. We recorded our conversation in Professor 't Hooft's office at the University of Utrecht on March 18, 2001.

Leon M. Lederman (b. 1922 in New York City), is Professor Emeritus of Physics at Columbia University, Director Emeritus of Fermilab, and currently Pritzker Professor of Physics at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 jointly with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, "for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino." He graduated from City College of New York, majoring in chemistry in 1943. Three years of service followed in the United States Army. Between 1946 and 1951 he was in the Graduate School of Physics at Columbia University. He stayed on at Columbia University where he became full professor in 1958. Between 1979 and 1989 he was Director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Leon Lederman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. and was awarded the National Medal of Science (1965), the Wolf Prize in Physics (1982, with Martin Perl), and the Fermi Prize (1993), among many other distinctions. Our conversation was recorded in his office at the Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, on May 16, 1997.

Valentine L. Telegdi (b. 1922 in Budapest, Hungary) is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. He received his Ph.D. at the ETH in 1950. He was at the University of Chicago between 1951 and 1976, and at the ETH from 1976 till 1990. Since retiring, he shares his time between CERN in Geneva and Caltech in Pasadena. He has honorary doctorates from the University of Louvain, Belgium, the Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary, and the University of Chicago. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. (1968), the American Academy of Arts and Science, the Academia Europaea, and foreign member of the French, Hungarian, and Russian Academies of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and other learned societies. He received the Wolf Prize in Physics (1991) and the J. E. Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society (1995). We recorded our conversation in our home in Budapest, on November 14, 2002.

Val L. Fitch (b. 1923, 42.98 degrees north latitude, 101.71 degrees west longitude, Nebraska, U.S.A.) is Emeritus Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. at Columbia University and has been at Princeton University since 1954. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980, together with James Cronin, "for the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons". He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. (1966), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1966), and the American Philosophical Society. He received the E. O. Lawrence Award (1969), the Research Corporation Award (1967) and the John Price Witherill Medal of the Franklin Institute (1967, both together with J. Cronin) and the President's Medal for Science in 1993. We recorded our conversation in his office in the Department of Physics at Princeton University on October 30, 2002.

Maurice Goldhaber (b. 1911 in Lemberg, then Austria-Hungary, now the Ukraine) is Director Emeritus of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. He studied physics at the University of Berlin. Because of the growing anti-Semitism, he left Germany in 1933 and became a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory headed by Ernest Rutherford in Cambridge, England. He did his doctoral work under James Chadwick and continued working at Cavendish after he had completed his Ph.D. thesis in 1936. In 1938, Dr. Goldhaber accepted an Assistant Professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana and moved to the United States. In 1939, Maurice Goldhaber married Gertrude Scharff, a fellow physicist and fellow refugee. She had a distinguished carrier in physics and died in 1998. They have two sons, Alfred and Michael. In 1950, Maurice Goldhaber moved to the Brookhaven National Laboratory. At one time he was Chairman of the Physics Department and between 1961 and 1973 he was the Director of the Laboratory. Following his directorship he was appointed Distinguished Physicist, while continuing his research. He is best known for his contributions to nuclear physics and to the physics of fundamental particles. Dr. Goldhaber has received many awards and distinctions of which only a few will be mentioned here. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A., a member of the American Philosophical Society, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the National Medal of Science (1983), the Wolf Prize in Physics (1991, Israel), and the Enrico Fermi Award (1998).

We visited Dr. Goldhaber on November 8, 2001, and recorded a conversation with him in his office at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and returned for a brief visit to finalize some points in March 2002.

John N. Bahcall (b. 1934 in Shreveport, Louisiana) is Richard Black Professor of Natural Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He received an A.B. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley (1956), an M.S. in physics from the University of Chicago (1957), and his Ph.D. from Harvard University (1961). He was on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology till 1970 and he has been at the Institute for Advanced Study since 1971. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. (1976), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1976), the Academia Europaea (1993), and the American Philosophical Society (2001). He has received numerous awards, among them the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal (1992), the Heineman Prize (1994), the Hans Bethe Prize (1996), the National Medal of Science of the U.S.A. (1998), the Russell Prize (1999), the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (2003), the Dan David Prize in Cosmology and Astronomy (2003), the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics (2003), and the Presidential Enrico Fermi Award (2003). He was a member of the Hubble Space Telescope Working Group for more than 20 years. He was president of the American Astronomical Society (1990–1992). His home page contains relevant material, including popular articles: http://www.sns.ias.edu/~jnb. We recorded our conversation in his office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton on October 23, 2002.

Rudolf Mößbauer (b. 1929) is Professor of Physics at the Technical University Munich. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1961 "for his researches concerning the resonance absorption of gamma radiation and his discovery in this connection of the effect which bears his name". (The other recipient of the 1961 Physics Nobel Prize was R. Hofstadter, Stanford University, "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his thereby achieved discoveries concerning the structure of the nucleons".) Our conversation with Rudolf Mößbauer was recorded on October 26, 1995, in Budapest.

Arno A. Penzias (b. 1933 in Munich, Germany) is a Venture Partner at New Enterprise Associates in Menlo Park, California. He shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 with Robert W. Wilson "for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation". The other half of that year's physics prize went to Pyotr L. Kapitsa "for his basic inventions and discoveries in the area of low-temperature physics". Arno Penzias received his B.Sc. degree from the City College of New York and his Master's and Ph.D. (1962) degrees from Columbia University. His positions included Vice President and Chief Scientist of AT&T Bell Laboratories and later of Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs Innovations. He has been with New Enterprise Associates since 1998. Dr. Penzias has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. and other learned societies. He has received numerous honorary degrees, and has been on the board of many companies. Between 1967 and 1985 he was associated with Princeton University on a part-time basis. His books include Ideas and Information: Managing in a High-Tech World (W.W. Norton, 1989, and numerous foreign editions) and Digital Harmony: Business, Technology, and Life after Paperwork (Harper Collins, 1996, and foreign editions). We recorded this conversation during the Nobel Prize Centennial in Stockholm, on December 11, 2001.

Robert W. Wilson (b. 1936 in Houston, Texas) retired from his original workplace, Bell Laboratories in 1994 and has since been a part-time associate of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1978 with Arno A. Penzias "for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation". The other half of that year's physics prize went to Pyotr L. Kapitsa "for his basic inventions and discoveries in the area of low-temperature physics". Robert Wilson graduated from Rice University with a B.A. degree with "honors in Physics" in 1957 and received his Ph.D. degree from Caltech in 1962. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received the Henry Draper Award (1977) and the Herschel Medal (1977). We recorded our conversation in Dr. Wilson's home in Holmdel, New Jersey, on March 1, 2002 and below are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Owen Chamberlain (b. 1920 in San Francisco) is Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959 with Emilio Segrè "for their discovery of the antiproton". Owen Chamberlain got his B.S. in 1941 from Dartmouth College and his Ph.D. in 1949 from the University of Chicago. He worked for the Manhattan Project in Berkeley and Los Alamos between 1942–1946. He has been at the University of California at Berkeley since 1948. He is member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. and has received many other distinctions and honors. We visited Dr. Chamberlain in his home on May 11, 1999, and asked him about the origin of his interest in science, his experience with the Manhattan Project, and the discovery of the antiproton. In spite of his failing health he was kind and patient and his wife, Senta Pugh, was very helpful in making this visit possible. Here are some edited excerpts of what Dr. Chamberlain told us.

On July 22, 1999, we visited Sir Mark Oliphant (1901 in Kent Town, near Adelaide, South Australia — 2000 in Canberra), as he was known in his home in Canberra, Australia, where he lived together with his daughter, Vivian Wilson. Oliphant was co-discoverer of tritium and helium-3 with Ernest Rutherford. Later, Oliphant was a principal co-worker in establishing efficient radar for the defense of the Allies in World War II; he was also a leading British participant of the Manhattan Project, founder of the Australian Academy of Science, and co-founder of the Australian National University. At 98 he was still a commanding presence and we came away from this visit deeply impressed by his wit and care and interest.

There is a book about Mark Oliphant's life and times,¹ which we consulted for this account and which we used as the source for three quotations. Otherwise, this writing is based on our visit with him and uses direct quotations from our conversation.

Norman F. Ramsey (b. 1915 in Washington, D.C.) is Higgins Professor Emeritus of Physics at Harvard University. He was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics with Hans G. Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul in 1989. Ramsey received half of the prize "for the invention of the separated oscillatory fields method and its use in the hydrogen maser and other atomic clocks" and the other half was shared by Dehmelt and Paul "for the development of the ion trap technique."

Norman Ramsey received his A.B. and M.A. degrees from Columbia University and Cambridge University, England. He did his Ph.D. work under the direction of I. I. Rabi at Columbia University in the new field of magnetic resonance and participated in the discovery of the deuteron quadrupole moment. He worked for short periods of time at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., and at the University of Illinois. During World War II he worked at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where he headed the group that developed radar at 3 cm wavelength. Later he was a radar consultant to the Secretary of War in Washington and participated in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. After the war he was active in establishing Brookhaven National Laboratory and was executive secretary of the Laboratory and chairman of its first Physics Department. He has been at Harvard University since 1947.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A., the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and many other learned societies. He is a foreign associate of the French Academy of Sciences. His many distinctions include the Presidential Certificate of Merit (1947), the E. O. Lawrence Award (1960), the Davisson-Germer Prize (1974), the Compton Medal (1986), the Oersted Medal (1988), and the National Medal of Science (1988). He has received honorary degrees from many universities. We recorded our conversation in Dr. Ramsey's office at Harvard University in February 5, 2002.

David E. Pritchard (b. 1941 in New York City) is Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and a principal investigator in the Center for Ultracold Atoms and the Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) Physics Group in the Research Laboratory of Electronics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned his B.S. degree at the California Institute of Technology in 1962 and his Ph.D. degree at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1968. His thesis title was "Differential Spin Exchange Scattering: Sodium on Cesium". He has been at MIT since 1968. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A., Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a fellow of several learned societies. We recorded our conversation in Dr. Pritchard's office at the MIT on March 11, 2002.

Wolfgang Ketterle (b. 1957 in Heidelberg, Germany) is John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his Diploma in Physics (equivalent to a Master's degree) from the Technical University of Munich in 1982 and received his Ph.D. degree from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich in 1986. He did postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Munich-Garching, at the University of Heidelberg, and at MIT and joined the physics faculty of MIT in 1993. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2001 with Eric A. Cornell (b. 1961) of the Joint Institute for Laboratory of Astrophysics (JILA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, and Carl E. Wieman (b. 1951) of JILA and the University of Colorado at Boulder "for the achievement of Bose-Einstein Condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates."

Wolfgang Ketterle received the I. I. Rabi Prize of the American Physical Society (1997), the Fritz London Prize in Low Temperature Physics (1999), and the Franklin medal in Physics (2000), among other awards. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the European Academy of Arts and Sciences, and other learned societies. We recorded our conversation on March 11, 2002, in Dr. Ketterle's office at MIT.

Laszlo Tisza (b. 1907 in Budapest) is Professor Emeritus of Physics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He grew up in Budapest where his father owned a book store. Already before university, he distinguished himself in competitions in mathematics and physics and met Edward Teller (see next interview) when they shared the first prize in a physics competition in 1925. He started his university studies in Budapest first majoring in mathematics. After two years he continued his studies in Germany, first in Göttingen, then, at Teller's urging, in Leipzig. Tisza did his first research work in studying molecular properties employing quantum mechanics. His doctoral project was the application of group theory and he gradually became a physicist. Upon return to Hungary he completed his Ph.D., but got involved in the communist movement and was sentenced to a year in prison. After he had served his time he joined Lev Landau in Kharkov in the Soviet Union in 1934. He acquired yet another degree there, approximately equivalent to a Ph.D. He returned to Hungary from the Soviet Union in 1937, but stayed for a short while only. Teller once again helped his friend when Tisza arrived in the United States in 1941 but had no job. Tisza worked as Teller's assistant for a short while before he found his employment at MIT where he has stayed ever since. We recorded our conversation on October 11, 1997, in Budapest, during Professor Tisza's brief visit in Budapest.

Edward Teller (1908, Budapest — 2003 Stanford, California) was a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and University Emeritus of the University of California at the time of our conversation. He made major contributions to nuclear chemistry and atomic, nuclear, and solid state physics. He was also involved with the Manhattan Project, the hydrogen bomb, and what is popularly known as Star Wars. He started his education in chemical engineering but eventually became a world famous physicist. He was recipient of, among others, the Enrico Fermi Medal and the Albert Einstein Award.

We spent a memorable afternoon with Edward and Micike Teller in their home in Stanford, California, on February 24, 1996. Dr. Teller was just convalescing after an illness, but especially when he spoke about science, and in particular about his views on the uncertainty principle, he was most vigorous and captivating and kept our mini-audience of two in awe. Although the social chat was in Hungarian, the entire conversation recorded here was in English.

John Archibald Wheeler (b. 1911 in Jacksonville, Florida) is Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton University. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University and did postdoctoral work with Gregory Breit at New York University and with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. He has been at Princeton University since 1938, except for a ten-year break, starting in 1976 at the University of Texas at Austin. He has honorary degrees from 18 universities. He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. (1952), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1954), the American Philosophical Society (1962), foreign member of the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences (1971) and the Royal Society of London, England (1995) and many other societies. He has received numerous awards, among them the Enrico Fermi Award of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1968), the National Medal of Science (1971), the Niels Bohr International Gold Medal (1982), the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize (1984), the Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society (1989), and the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1997.

Together with Bohr, he worked out the theory of nuclear fission, participated in the Manhattan Project and the hydrogen bomb project and was the mentor of Richard Feynman and collaborated on investigations of the concept of action at a distance. He suggested, first, the existence of black holes. He has had seminal contributions in other areas of physics, such as quantum gravity and the theory of nuclear scattering. I recorded several conversations in May 2000 and in May 2001, and the material was finalized in the Spring of 2002.

Freeman J. Dyson (b. 1923 in Crowthorne, Berkshire, England) is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He received a B.A. in mathematics at the University of Cambridge (U.K.) in 1945, spent some time as Professor of Physics at Cornell University, and became Professor of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1953. He participated in the ORION space-ship program and the TRIGA reactor program and served as a consultant in several governmental agencies, such as the Space Agency, the Disarmament Agency, and the Defense Department. He has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society (England) in 1952 and to the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. in 1964. He was the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Danny Heineman Prize by the American Institute of Physics in 1965, the Lorentz Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy in 1966, the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society (London) in 1968, the Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society in 1969, the Wolf Prize in Physics (Israel) in 1981, the Enrico Fermi Award in 1995, and the Templeton Prize (see on p. 479) in 2000. He holds honorary degrees from over 20 universities. He has written several books, Disturbing the Universe (Harper & Row, 1979), Origins of Life (Cambridge University Press, 1986, Second ed. 1999), Infinite in All Directions (Harper & Row, 1988), From Eros to Gaia (Pantheon Books, 1992), Imagined Worlds (Harvard University Press, 1997) and The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (Oxford University Press, 1999). Our conversation took place in Professor Dyson's office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton on April 24, 2000.

John C. Polkinghorne (b. 1930 in Weston-super-Mare, England) is a Fellow (and former President) of Queens' College, Cambridge University, and a Canon Theologian of Liverpool Cathedral. He studied physics at Trinity College in Cambridge and received his Ph.D. in 1955. He was Fellow of Trinity College 1954–1986. He was Lecturer, Reader and finally Professor of Mathematical Physics in Cambridge and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (London) in 1974. In 1979, he resigned his professorship and trained for the Anglican Priesthood for which he was ordained in 1982. Having served the Anglican Church in Cambridge, Bristol, and Blean (near Canterbury), in 1986, he was appointed Dean and Chaplain of Trinity Hall in Cambridge and in 1989, President of Queens' College, from which he retired in 1996. He has been a member of the General Synod of the Church of England and of the Medical Ethics Committee of the British Medical Association. He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1997. In 2002, he won the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities. It is the world's best known religion prize in the amount of about one million dollars. The Templeton Prize has been awarded annually since 1973. John Polkinghorne is a prolific writer. We recorded our conversation in his home in Cambridge, on March 16, 2000.

Benoit B. Mandelbrot (b. 1924 in Warsaw, Poland) is Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Yale University, and IBM Fellow Emeritus at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York. He is most famous for his pioneering work on fractals.

Mandelbrot's family emigrated to Paris in 1936 and survived the Second World War in Vichy France. He graduated as an engineer from the École Polytechnique in Paris in 1947, received his Master of Science degree from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1948 and his doctorate in mathematics from the Faculté des Sciences de Paris in 1952. Until 1958, he worked for the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) or academia. Then he worked at IBM in the United States until he retired in 1993. At Yale University he started as Abraham Robinson Professor in 1987 and became Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences in 1999. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A., a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He also belongs to other learned societies and has received numerous awards and distinctions. For the Barnard Medal for Meritorious Service to Science (1985) his citation read, "In the great tradition of natural philosophers past you looked at the world around you on a broader canvas." For the Franklin Medal for Signal and Eminent Service in Science (1986) his citation read, "For outstanding contributions to mathematics and the creation of the field of fractal geometry, and important and illuminating applications of this new concept to many fields of science." For the Wolf Prize for Physics (Israel, 1993) his citation ended by stating, "He has changed our view of nature." In 2003, Mandelbrot received the Japan Prize. Benoit Mandelbrot's web page is: http://www.math.yale.edu/mandelbrot. We recorded our conversation in Stockholm, during the "Symmetry 2000" Wenner-Gren symposium,¹ September 13–16, 2000 and what follows are edited excerpts from our conversations, together with last minute additions by Dr. Mandelbrot.

Kenneth G. Wilson (b. 1936 in Waltham, Massachusetts) is Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees Distinguished Professor at the Department of Physics, The Ohio State University in Columbus. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1982 "for his theory for critical phenomena in connection with phase transitions".

His father was the distinguished Harvard chemist E. Bright Wilson, Jr. (1908–1992), best known for his molecular structure studies, especially by microwave spectroscopy. Kenneth Wilson obtained his Ph.D. in 1961 at the California Institute of Technology where he was a student of Murray Gell-Mann.

Dr. Wilson was at the Department of Physics of Cornell University between 1963–1988 when he moved to The Ohio State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A., the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In 1980, he shared the Wolf Prize (Israel) in Physics with Michael Fisher and Leo Kadanoff. Recently Dr. Wilson has been engaged in educational reform. He lives in Maine but continues to work in Columbus, Ohio.

We recorded our conversation at the Physics Department of The Ohio State University in Columbus on May 5, 2000 and the text was finalized by correspondence in July 2002.

Mildred Dresselhaus (b. as Mildred Spiewak in 1930 in Brooklyn) is Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She graduated from the Hunter High School and then from Hunter College. A year at Cambridge University (U.K.) and another year at Harvard University followed, where she received a Master's degree in physics. She did research for her Ph.D. degree in physics at the University of Chicago. Her main results were written up in two sole-authored papers on the surface impedance of a superconductor in a magnetic field. She then joined her husband at Cornell University on an NSF postdoctoral fellowship. During the period 1960–1967, she worked at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory studying magneto-optical effects in semiconductors and semimetals. Then, following one year as Visiting Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT, she was appointed full professor and in 1985, Institute Professor at MIT. She has had a joint appointment between the Physics Department and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Mildred Dresselhaus is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. (1985), the National Academy of Engineering (1974), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1974), and the American Philosophical Society. She served as President of the American Physical Society, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as Treasurer of the National Academy of Sciences, and received the National Medal of Science in 1990. She has held many other positions and received numerous awards and distinctions. She has been especially active in women's issues, first at MIT and later nationwide and internationally. We recorded our conversation in Dr. Dresselhaus' office at MIT on February 5, 2002.

Catherine Bréchignac (b. 1946 in Paris) received her Ph.D. at the University of Paris-Sud in 1977. She has worked at the Laboratoire Aime Cotton in Orsay since 1971, between 1989–1995 as its director. She has served as Director General of the CNRS from 1997 till 2000. She is a corresponding member of the French Academy of Sciences (1997), Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1999) and Member of the Academie des Technologies of France (2000). She is Chevalier, Legion of Honor (1996) and Officer of the Ordre National du Merite (2000). Presently she is Director of Research of the CNRS. We recorded our conversation in her office in Orsay on October 21, 2000, which was augmented in 2002.

Philip W. Anderson (b. 1923 in Indianapolis) is Joseph Henry Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nevill F. Mott (1905–1996) of Cambridge University and John H. Van Vleck (1899–1980) of Harvard University "for their fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems". Philip Anderson got both his B.S. (1943) and Ph.D. (1949) degrees from Harvard University. His career has been spent at the Naval Research Laboratory (1943–1945), Bell Laboratories (1949–1984), and Princeton University since 1975. He also held a part-time professorship at Cambridge University between 1967 and 1975. Since 1985 he has been actively involved with the Santa Fe Institute. Dr. Anderson's research interests have included condensed matter physics and more general questions of theory, such as broken symmetry, measurement theory, and the origin of life. His recent interests extend to biophysics, neural nets, computers and complexity, and mixed valence. He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A., a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society (London), among many others and has received many decorations, including the National Medal of Science (1983). We recorded our conversation in his office at Princeton on March 12, 1999.

Zhores I. Alferov (b. 1930 in Vitebsk, Byelorussia [Belarus], then the Soviet Union) is Director of the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg and Vice-President of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2000, sharing half of the prize with Herbert Kroemer of the University of California at Santa Barbara "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics". The other half of that Nobel Prize went to Jack S. Kilby of Texas Instruments "for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit".

Zhores Alferov graduated from the V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin) Electrotechnical Institute in Leningrad in 1952 after which he joined the Physico-Technical Institute (today Ioffe Institute) in Leningrad, where he earned his scientific degrees. He has been director of this institute since 1987. He is a Member of the Soviet (later, Russian) Academy of Sciences (1972), Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. (1990), and has received many other honors and awards. We recorded our conversation in Stockholm during the Nobel Prize Centennial in December 2001.

Daniel Chee Tsui (b. 1939 in Henan, China) left his village and family in 1951 and went to Hong Kong where he graduated from high school in 1957. He continued his studies in 1958 in Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, and received his B.A. degree there in 1961. Then he was a Ph.D. student in the Physics Department of the University of Chicago and graduated in 1967. For 13 years he worked for Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill before joining Princeton University in 1982. Today he is Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. Dr. Tsui was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1998 together with Robert B. Laughlin (b. 1950) of Stanford University and Horst L. Störmer (b. 1949) of Columbia University, "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations". Also in 1998 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics. He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. and the Academia Sinica. We recorded our conversation on March 8, 1999, in Professor Tsui's office at Princeton University.

Antony Hewish (b. 1924 in England) is Professor of Radioastronomy, Emeritus, at the University of Cambridge. He studied at the University of Cambridge and held various positions before becoming a Professor there. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (London) in 1968. Professor Hewish received the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1974 jointly with the late Sir Martin Ryle (1918–1984) "for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars". Antony Hewish is married to Marjorie Richards and they have a computer physicist son and a language teacher daughter who both have their own families. We recorded our conversation in Professor Hewish's office at the Cavendish Laboratory on February 1, 2000. My first question was about his beginnings in science and about the Nobel Prize-winning discovery.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell (b. 1943 in Belfast, Northern Ireland) is a Professor and Dean of Science at the University of Bath. She received her B.Sc. degree at the University of Glasgow and her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge (1968). During her Ph.D. studies she discovered the first pulsars, for which Antony Hewish, her supervisor, received half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974 but she was not included in the Prize (the other half went to Sir Martin Ryle for the aperture synthesis technique). She has held different part-time positions in astronomy and physics till 1991, when she became professor at The Open University and Chair of the Physics Department. She has received numerous awards: the Michelson Medal (1973), the Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize (1978), The Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize (1987), the Hershel Medal (1989), the Edinburgh Medal (1999) and the Giuseppi Piazzi Prize (1999). She is honorary doctor of numerous universities. We recorded our conversation in April 25, 2000 in her office at the Physics Department of Princeton University where she was a Distinguished Visiting Professor for a year. That conversation was augmented in 2002.

Joseph H. Taylor (b. 1941 in Philadelphia) is James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He received his B.Sc. degree in physics at Haverford College in 1963 and his Ph.D. in astronomy at Harvard University in 1968. He was professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts till 1981. Since then he has been at Princeton University, where, between 1997 and 2003 he was the Dean of Faculty. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics, together with Russell Hulse, in 1993 "for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation". He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. (1981), Fellow of the American Academy of Science and Letters (1982), and Member of the American Philosophical Society (1992). His many honors include the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (1985), the John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science (1991) and the Wolf Prize (1992). We recorded our conversation in his office at Nassau Hall at Princeton University on October 9, 2000.

Russell A. Hulse (b. 1950 in New York City) is a Principal Research Physicist at the Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton University (PPPL). He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1993, together with Joseph H. Taylor of Princeton University "for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation". He studied at Cooper Union in New York and did his Ph.D. work at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where Joseph Taylor was his thesis advisor. It was during his doctoral studies that they discovered the first binary pulsar, the discovery of which eventually led to the Nobel Prize. A few years after receiving his Ph.D. in physics, he left astronomy and went to work at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, where he is still today. We recorded our conversation in Dr. Hulse's office at PPPL in April, 2000.

David Shoenberg (b. 1911 in St. Petersburg, Russia) is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University in England. I visited Professor Shoenberg and his wife in their home in Cambridge on February 16, 2000. Professor Shoenberg was in great spirits although he was just recuperating from hip surgery following an unfortunate fall. The following is a summary of our conversation with direct quotes about his encounters with Peter Kapitza (1894–1984) and Lev Landau (1908–1968).

The following sections are included:

• NAME INDEX

• CUMULATIVE INDEX OF INTERVIEWEES