00:00:00Don Reeder (#877) Transcript
VT: My name is Vicki Tobias. I'm conducting an oral history interview for the UW
Oral History Program. Today I am speaking with professor emeritus Don Reeder of
the UW Madison Physics Department. Don Reeder is the former chair of the Physics
Department, and a long time faculty member, professor, within the Physics
Department on campus. May I call you Don?
DR: Yes.
VT: Thank you very much. [laughs]
So tell me a little about your childhood and your early education. Where and
when were you born?
DR: Well, I was almost born on the bridge between Galena, Illinois and Dubuque,
Iowa, because my father didn't have toll change for the bridge. So there was no
hospital in Galena, where my father was a civil engineer on a project. So we
went across to Dubuque, where I was born. I spent five days in Dubuque and I
00:01:00haven't lived in Iowa since. But that's my natal state.
We then moved to the, my father worked for the state of Illinois as a civil
engineer. And we moved to Dixon, Illinois. And Dixon, Illinois, as everyone
knows these days, at least, is the city in which Ronald Reagan grew up. I was
unaware of Ronald Reagan except because of his movie. He used to come back once
every ten years and ride horses.
VT: Oh, yeah. Fantastic.
00:02:00
DR: With the local trail riders. But that was the only brush with fame that we
had at that time. But otherwise, it was a very, very typical childhood in a
rather small Midwestern town. Roughly speaking, ten thousand inhabitants. And I
did all the usual high school things. I was not an accomplished athlete. Still
am not accomplished athlete, that hasn't improved. But I did, I actually played
high school football or at least pretended. Same with basketball, golf,
00:03:00etcetera. So I was busy in those aspects. But in general, I was always
interested in science, as such.
VT: Were there any teachers or educators that were influential in that interest?
DR: No. Quite the opposite. Well, I take that back. Yes. There was a particular,
a chemistry teacher who was extraordinarily inspiring in the sense that he was
encouraging, he set high standards and he taught excellent fundamentals. And in
fact, I was able later on to essentially take the advance placement exams at the
00:04:00University of Illinois, and I did not take, did not have to take chemistry--
VT: Nice.
DR: --at the university. But the physics instructor, unfortunately, was the
athletic director. And he more or less just turned us up, and whatever we could
pick up, we picked up. And that was probably good and bad. But mostly not as
productive as it could have been, under the circumstances.
VT: Did you have any hobbies or interests outside of school as a child that sort
of fed your interest in science?
DR: Well, certainly, those days you could get chemistry sets.
VT: Yes.
DR: And having a chemistry set, which I augmented at opportunities. And
00:05:00branching out beyond that, simple things like measuring, making a lemon battery
with a strip of copper and a strip of zinc stuffed into it and so on was all
very interesting. And I spent a lot of time, I don't think terribly
productively, but it was certainly entertaining--
VT: (laughs) Sure.
DR: --to spend a lot of time in that respect. And it sort of whetted the
appetite I, you know, I took radios apart, but I never quite got to the point
where I could put them all back together.
VT: laughs) That's a problem.
DR: But I became familiar with parts and so on.
00:06:00
VT: Right.
DR: And the overall structure was much less understood. But then we went on,
finished high school, as is the case with many of my colleagues here and so on,
I was valedictorian of the high school. But it wasn't a very big high school, so--
VT: Still valedictorian.
DR: It's good but not impressive.
VT: How did you--go ahead.
DR: There were probably about 130 in my class.
VT: Oh, that's not too bad.
VT: How about your-- you mentioned your father was a civil engineer.
DR: Yes.
VT: Did he have any influence on your developing an interest in science or physics?
DR: In some sense, yes. Certainly the engineering aspect. He brought me into
00:07:00that early on. However, I was not privileged to know my father very long. When I
was six, I guess, in 1941, when Pearl Harbor occurred, my father, who had been
in the ROTC in his college days, and he graduated after the end of World War
One, so he was not in that war. But he immediately volunteered and went off and
served five, five and a half years, in the--
00:08:00
VT: Oh, my.
DR: In the army at that point. And was gone during that time. And my mother was
stuck with four children, a dog and various other things, trying to keep things
together. It's one of those interesting times which, as a child, you don't
realize what you're missing because you've never had it .
VT: Right. Right.
DR: So the fact that we were rationing, and that sugar was rationed, and tires
were rationed, and gasoline was rationed, and so on, was of enormous importance
to my parents. But I was more or less oblivious to all this.
00:09:00
VT: Sure. Sure.
DR: Anyway then I was, again, after, in 1945, probably one of the biggest things
I remember very clearly, being called by my mother into the kitchen to listen to
the radio because President Truman was making a very important speech. And he
had announced the bombing of Hiroshima, of what we now know as the nuclear bomb,
then the atomic bomb.
VT: Right.
DR: And it was, well, the biggest impact at that time was that it was likely to
lead to the surrender of, the end of the war and my father returning home.
00:10:00Because he was involved in the administration of VA hospitals and so on for a
while, he didn't get home till about '46 or sometime like that. So it was well
after the war ended that he finally was de-mobilized. And that was one aspect
that strengthened my interest in, and desire to learn about science in some sense.
And the other aspect was the information given to rockets, the potential
exploration of space, the breaking of the sound barrier, which sounds absurd
00:11:00nowadays. But the actual event was well covered. It's amazing, I suppose, that I
could still remember that as being influential time because nowadays, of course,
everybody doesn't even remember the beginning of the Space Age, let alone--
VT: My father had a similar memory, because he ended up joining the air force
and becoming a pilot, and he recalls similar events being key. And he's your
generation as well, being key for him to really want to explore more of those
issues, and curiosity about space flight and, you know.
DR: The fact that there was interest, there were opportunities available to
00:12:00learn about these things. Popular Science, Scientific American, magazines like
that, were available to try to provide some background which, perhaps, was not
there always.
Anyway, then, the one thing my father had a big effect on me was that, at the
time, military service was essentially universal. We were all involved. There
was no real expectation of avoiding public service in some sense. And he had
been in ROTC and was strongly encouraging me that if I had to serve, I should
serve as an officer. So when it came time, I went off, signed up for the Naval ROTC.
00:13:00
VT: In high school, or college?
DR: Well, this was going towards high school, or college, I'm sorry. This was a
national program for which you could, it was to augment the Naval Academy. So
you could graduate with a regular commission, as opposed to a reserve
commission, in the navy.
VT: How did you choose the navy over the other branch of service?
DR: You know, I haven't the foggiest idea. Probably because I didn't know
anything about it. My father said I probably wouldn't have to sleep in a tent
and live in a trench and so on.
VT: (laughs) And that was appealing. Yeah.
DR: And that sounded good to me. But I did wind up in the navy, and I wound up
00:14:00being selected, barely, into the regular program. And the advantage of that,
which was important for my parents, was that they paid a considerable amount of
money. They paid for books, they paid tuition, and they paid fifty dollars a
month running around money, which in those days was probably 40, 50 percent of
what I required.
VT: That's substantial.
DR: And so it was a good deal. And with three younger siblings that I had, my
parents were concerned about getting everybody thorough the university and so
00:15:00on, so they encouraged me to take advantage of this.
DR: Well, I then went to the University of Illinois.
VT: In Urbana?
DR: At Urbana-Champaign. And I entered engineering physics at that point. Which
turns out rather similar to the situation at the University of Wisconsin. There
was an engineering physics degree, and a normal liberal arts physics degree. And
in those days, the difference was that, not a heck of a lot. You took exactly
the same courses, except that if you were in engineering physics, you took
00:16:00engineering draftsmanship, and so on. And if you were in L&S, you had a language
requirement. But because almost all physicists went to graduate school, and
there was a language requirement in graduate school, we took languages anyway.
VT: What did you study?
DR: German. And so it was Hobson's choice. It made absolutely no difference at
all. And I graduated at, because the additional naval science courses required
in the ROTC program did not count towards the physics degree--
VT: How interesting.
DR: Or at least as many as I was required to take, it took four and a half years
00:17:00to graduate, instead of four years. and as a result, I was behind the eight ball
with respect to the equivalent Academy class, because not only was I behind them
to begin with--
VT: A semester. Right.
DR: --to begin with, but I was a semester later that many others got through
ahead of me. So my naval career was somewhat blighted to begin with. But--
VT: How did you find--go ahead.
DR: Go ahead.
VT: How did you find the undergraduate program at Urbana, in Illinois, in
general? The physics program, the engineering program. Was it challenging? Was
it what you expected it to be?
DR: Oh, it was very challenging. I think I had a general experience, which has
00:18:00not changed dramatically over fifty years. Which is, as an entering student,
you're a big cheese.
VT: Yes.
DR: Okay. And all of a sudden, the level of competition, the level of
understanding, the differences in background, put you right back into the mix in
a very ego-suppressing way. And I did not, for usual reasons of undergraduates,
I probably did not focus as intensely as I would do in graduate school later on.
00:19:00But in general, I greatly enjoyed both the instructors and the subject.
VT: Do any of those still stand out in your mind as being very influential or
life changing?
DR: I don't know if they were life changing so much as sort of cementing my
basic inclinations that I became recommitted to this on the basis of the
experience because I both enjoyed and was reasonably successful.
00:20:00
The course I remember most clearly was an advanced laboratory, in which we did a
whole flock of things involving quantitative measurement of exposed film and
optics experiments and spectroscopy, looking at the absorption lines in the
sun's atmosphere. Recording, analyzing, doing all that. And that was just very,
again, inspiring [unclear] the kinds of things that I would just like to do.
VT: It was a good fit for you.
DR: And it was just a heck of a lot of fun.
00:21:00
VT: That's great.
DR: And so that aspect was very pleasantly, was more or less committed to come
back to graduate school after my naval service.
VT: Were there any activities, sort of extracurricular activities, student
organizations that you participated in outside of the academic?
DR: No, not formally. I was tied up both with the ROTC program and I was part of
a social fraternity. And those two sucked up that aspect of things. But what I
did have is a group of classmates in the physics program. And similarly to the
00:22:00situation at the University of Wisconsin, the undergraduates are significantly
smaller as a group than the graduate students. The undergraduate majors. So we
knew, I knew, well probably half the, that we studied together, we talked. So
that was also, I'm convinced, based on both my undergraduate and graduate
experience that there is a lot of learning that goes on by interaction with your
peers, by talking with fellow students. Learning how they approach things and so
00:23:00on. And it's the recent aspects of being better connected to a CRT or screen of
some sort. And what appears to be a heightened, competitive situation. We didn't
feel that as strongly when you were, it was much more cooperative.
VT: More collegial.
DR: More collegial direction in that sense. We all saw that we're not competing
for a particularly restricted set of activities. The potential activities were
broad enough that we could investigate all those. And there were, we were
convinced, probably incorrectly, but we were convinced that there would be a
place for us down the line.
00:24:00
VT: Do you still keep in touch with any of those colleagues from your first
educational experience?
DR: I have on and off. It's been much less than I probably would have liked.
But, yeah, I occasionally run in and talk to them.
VT: Have any of them ended up in positions with universities?
DR: Not that I'm, no. One of them was a patent attorney--
VT: Interesting.
DR: Went on to get a law degree and a patent attorney out of Washington. Several
went into industry and so on [unclear] Because I was literally at sea for three
years after undergraduate and then reappeared as a graduate student, I became disconnected--
00:25:00
VT: Sure.
DR: --in a serious way. Not the least of which was I got married at the end of
my undergraduate time, just before commissioning, just after commissioning,
before it was forbidden. So we weren't able, because of circumstances, to
perhaps continue the relationship, which I think might have been interesting. I
have been much more in touch with my class in graduate school.
00:26:00
VT: Sure. Sure.
DR: Who I spent a lot of time with again and been aware of.
VT: Sure. So you were required to fulfill a military obligation as a part of the
ROTC program.
DR: Right. Three years.
VT: And that was a three-year commission. Tell me a little bit about that.
DR: I was unwilling to accept five years at this point. I really wanted to get
back to graduate school.
VT: What year was this?
DR: '58. 1958. And the nuclear submarine program was looking for people. I could
00:27:00have easily gotten into there, but the commitment was five years. And I was not
prepared at that time for a five-year commitment. And I also was not terribly
serious about a military career.
VT: Sure.
DR: So I backed away from that. And they sent me to a school, a navy school, for
three months. And then I went to deploy at sea.
VT: Where was the school?
DR: In Philadelphia. And then, after three years, or three months in
00:28:00Philadelphia, I went to sea. Deployed in the Mediterranean with Sixth Fleet for
nine months. And so I spent nine months of my first year of marriage at sea.
VT: Oh, no. (laughs) What sort of a ship were you on?
DR: I was on a cruiser. I was an engineering division officer on a cruiser. USS
Newport News. Now long since gone to the bone yard.
VT: What sort of work was that, to be an engineer?
DR: It was essentially mostly administrative. I learned about steam plants and
things like that. But it was mostly plumbing and it was not a lot of real
00:29:00science there. And it was mostly looking after people. And that was eye opening, certainly.
VT: Was that your first opportunity where you really managed or supervised people?
DR: Yes. Certainly in this sense that I was considered responsible for these
people. And although I had been nominally a leader in some activities at the
University of Illinois, nonetheless it's not the same thing as being under the
military discipline, and so on. That was a, well, it was probably most
00:30:00interesting in the sense of what I observed, the mistakes that other people
would make which I could identify. And then I tried not to make those mistakes.
VT: Sure.
DR: I felt that in general, my position existed was to try to keep all the spit
and polish from the guys that were trying to do the work, so they could really
do it right.
VT: Right, right.
DR: And at the same time, try to filter up the correct information and so on up
the chain of command. And that was interesting and, I think, probably reinforced
00:31:00my internal tendency to believe that you could encourage people more by carrots
than by sticks.
VT: Sure. Sure.
DR: But that is not always the situation.
DR: Anyway, that was, I spent about eighteen months on that ship and then was
sent off to Boston to put another guided missile cruiser into commission, again
as an engineering officer. And it was the USS Providence. And I was there for,
again, about eighteen months, and took it over to Japan. And spent a horrendous
00:32:00week and a half trying to get back for Christmas--
VT: Oh, no.
DR: --to visit my daughter, who had been born in the meantime. And I had been
home when she was born, or at least when she was a few weeks old, and got
everybody settled. And then I went to Japan. And I was trying to get back for
Christmas. At that time, the only planes for the military transport service were
the old four-engine recycled, which had to stop three times crossing the
Pacific. [laughter]
00:33:00
VT: That's annoying.
DR: And finally got into Hawaii. No, finally got into San Francisco, Treasure
Island, on the 23rd, only to find that everything was closed. And I had to go to
the [BOQ?] and spend the time on the telephone until about the first of the year
I finally got free and came back. But in the meantime, typical military, this
may or may not be of interest to anyone, but I collected at least five different
sets of inoculations, which were required for the demobilization, for my getting
00:34:00out, discharge. So I got them on the ship, I got them in Tokyo before I got in
the plane, I got them again in Hawaii, I got them again in San Francisco. It
just was incredible. No one would believe anybody else's record.
VT: Yeah, yeah.
DR: So I was stuck with--
VT: Human pincushion.
DR: --a sore arm for a long time. [laughter] But all in all then, I was...
DR: From them on, maybe even earlier, in some sense, but from then on,
certainly, I can only characterize my career as being at the right place at the
right time. Due to no good planning or thought or precedence or anything of my
00:35:00own. It just sort of fell on me.
VT: Can you give an example of that?
DR: I will give a number of examples of how things developed.
VT: Just worked out for you.
DR: Number one was I was unable to possibly unable, possibly I didn't pursue it
enough, but I did not take the GRE. I was over in the Sea of Japan at the time,
and it was complicated to get somebody to get it and to--
VT: Administer it.
DR: --administer it and--
VT: Score it.
DR: --and get it and get it back, get it graded and all that stuff. And I didn't
bother. I didn't realize, actually, how important it might have been.
00:36:00
VT: Was it required at the time?
DR: No, but it was strongly encouraged.
VT: I see.
DR: And I applied to several universities. Johns Hopkins and the University of
Illinois, the University of Wisconsin, and one other I've forgotten. And I was
accepted at the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin. And the
University of Wisconsin, I found out later, would occasionally deal with
students who didn't have a GRE. And it was, again, I had no inkle of this at the
00:37:00time. But it turned out that I sort of snuck in under the wire in that sense.
VT: How did you select UW at the time? Had you been here for a visit? Or did you
know the reputation?
DR: No. Well, yes and no. I did not, reputation, knowledge, it was in the
Midwest and probably it and Michigan were the two, and the University of
Illinois were the three only choices in the Midwest. And it had at least, in my
perception, a very good reputation as both a university and in physics. And so
when I was accepted, and the other aspect was since I had a wife and family,
00:38:00which nowadays is almost unique. In those days, it was absolutely everywhere.
VT: Graduate students?
DR: Graduate students essentially were all married. They didn't all have
families. But they had not all been out of school for three years like I had.
VT: Right. Right.
DR: So the attraction of Eagle Heights was a big attraction.
VT: Sure.
DR: And we did manage to get in Eagle Heights. And it was a very, very positive
experience. The first day we had driven in and done my paperwork and so on. I
00:39:00can tell you, and came into the department. Sterling Hall, at that time. Came
into the department and they showed up. And because everything was sequenced
because of this ROTC business, I was always coming in out of sequence.
VT: Right.
DR: So this was the beginning of the second semester, middle of winter, well, it
was January, 1961. And I was talking with a secretary who said they were
expecting me and so on. They said bang, what do you want to do? What do you want
to major in? I'd never thought of it. Never thought of that. I thought you know,
00:40:00physics is physics. I was going to do whatever--
VT: Right.
DR: -- I had the opportunity to do. He said, "Well, we've got this new fellow
here who is recruiting students. Maybe you'd be interested."
I said, "Well, yeah, I'd certainly like to talk to him." So I talked to him and
it sounded great. And I joined up.
VT: Who was it?
DR: His name was Myron Goode, or Bud Goode, who had recently arrived as having
finished a postdoctoral at Berkeley. And was already relatively prestigious. I
mean, he had established himself extraordinarily well.
VT: What was his specific area of physics?
00:41:00
DR: In particle physics. So there I was.
VT: In the right place at the right time.
DR: All of a sudden I had, I was prepared on the basis of savings and so on, I
was prepared, at least for the first year, to pay my own way. All of a sudden I
had a assistantship that was going to pay me a stipend.
VT: Excellent.
DR: And I was into Eagle Heights. I was in the catbird's seat. And I just walked
right into it.
VT: Sure. Sure.
DR: I mean, I had no idea! I didn't apply. I didn't do anything. It just
happened. And later on, similar things happened. When I graduated, got my
00:42:00degree, and had several postdoctoral opportunities, one at Berkeley and one, two
out east, and so on, the University of Wisconsin offered me an assistant
professorship. I took it.
VT: There you go. There you go.
DR: And there I was. Stuck. Here.
VT: (laughs) It's not that [bad?]
DR: And my wife said, "When are we going to move? When are we going to move on
with all these things?" And we've been here ever since.
VT: That's fantastic.
VT: Tell me a little about your experience living in Eagle Heights. I know we
talked about that a little bit last time, and the camaraderie and the collegial environment.
DR: Well the enormous feature of Eagle Heights is that there was, we were all
00:43:00intermixed. And so we were intermixed amongst the different, English majors and
philosophy majors--
VT: Different disciplines. Right.
DR: --physics majors and sociology and the whole nine yards. In addition, there
were scattered over, there were divided into various 100s, 200s, 300s, for eight
or ten buildings, nine buildings in each section. So there were all my fellow
graduate, many of my fellow graduate students. Almost nobody lived off campus
[unclear]. And we had my fellow graduate students in physics were scattered
00:44:00around as well. But the close neighbors were, there were many that had children
as well. So the kids all played together, and we talked and watched and babysat.
VT: Sure. How long did you live there?
DR: Five years. Till I graduated in '66. And that was a very, very broadening experience.
VT: Sure.
DR: And again it was delightful not to be so inbred that you had the option of
talking physics with your physics friends, and talking politics and whatever.
00:45:00
VT: Poetry. Yeah. Yeah.
DR: Automobiles. Sports. Everything else with the others. And that was a real delight.
VT: Yeah.
DR: And again, one of the features.
DR: During graduate school I was a, well, I was a student involved in doing
particle physics research. But in particular, the aspect which, again, was
accidental in some sense at the time was that I came along at the time of the,
just the front of the wave of the real expansion in particle physics using
00:46:00visual techniques. The so-called bubble chamber, which is superheated liquid
that particle tracks are photographed as bubbles. The analysis of that activity
was we identified those photos that had interesting happenings in them. We
measured them quantitatively, we analyzed them, we did all that. And it was
very, very interesting time because there were particles discovered on and off
almost weekly.
VT: Really?
DR: And then there was the question, somebody reported this, can you see that,
and what should we do for the next step and so on.
00:47:00
VT: That's very exciting.
DR: It was a very, very, innervating time, which, and things were happening on
such a short time scale that we had a very close activity. One of the, again,
one of the things that we've evolved away from in the department, which is
really too bad, is that at the time, they had a coffee time. Sort of formally,
or tea time, or whatever, three o'clock in the afternoon. And everybody got
together. The department was small enough that they got together. And there was
a ten or fifteen minute discussion leader that somebody told about attending a
00:48:00conference. And there was a particularly interesting result that had been
presented. And this was it. And then they discussed why it might be interesting,
and whether we should pursue this or not pursue it, and so on.
VT: And that tradition hasn't carried on?
DR: It was carried on for a number of years, but it sort of fell beside, partly
again because of the disruptive aspect of the computation, computers and desktop
stations and so on. In the same way that email and that the web connects you
farther away. That's good. But it's also bad, because the close connections are lost.
00:49:00
VT: Right. We talked a little bit about that.
DR: And that's an unfortunate development.
DR: Anyway, as part of this, one of the other aspects was, again, that we had a
central computational facility. Shortly after I came, the department, well at
that time it was the Atomic Energy Commission, the AEC, that sponsored research
in particle physics.
VT: They sponsored research here.
DR: Yes. And as part of that, they gave us a grant to get additional
computational facilities. These were essentially shared by the general
00:50:00university. And in fact, the beginnings of DoIt and so on grew out of this general--
VT: Oh, really?
DR: --funding of the, from physics research.
VT: About what year was this? Late '60s?
DR: Well, yes. I suspect it must have been '64, '65, when we got the first of
the local machines. Prior to that, we had an old vacuum tube machine, which was
a legacy from an attempt that had been made to, in the late '50s and the early
00:51:00part of the '60s, there was a group of Midwestern universities which had joined
together to propose an accelerator in this same way that the Brookhaven National
Laboratory of the East Coast had their accelerator. And, of course, Berkeley had
the outgrowth of Ernest Lawrence activities out there with the cyclotrons, and
then the bevatron, which was the first high energy cyclotron. And the attempt
was going to be made to build one in the Midwest for the local Midwestern
people. And they joined together, and there was a group in which Don Kerst, a
00:52:00former student of Ray Herb here. And a number of people from the university,
others from the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan came
together in this organization called the Midwestern Universities Research
Association, or MURA. M-U-R-A. They worked and made a proposal. And in fact,
they invented the whole concept of colliding beams, had been invented here.
Keith Simon, a long time member of the department here, was very instrumental in
this activity. And eventually it was probably the first big effort after the war
00:53:00that had been turned down. It failed to receive funding. It had gone on, it was--
VT: Why do you think that is?
DR: Well, it was partly politics, and it was partly the wrong emphasis. The
emphasis was on intensity rather than energy. And it turned out that energy was
the more important parameter. And it probably was a reasonable decision at the
end. But in the meantime, everybody was tied up in it.
VT: Right.
DR: In particular, Bud Goode, was sort of felt unhappy that he was not able to
go ahead with it.
VT: Sure.
00:54:00
DR: He felt that it was an opportunity that was gone. So we, the result of this
was that in the process of the closing of this activity, there was this old
vacuum tube computer which had been located down what is now Old University
Avenue at the top of a ex-car dealership that had a ramp--
VT: Yeah.
DR: --that took the cars up to be worked on up in the second, third floor. And
that's where they installed this machine. It was no longer a dealership.
00:55:00
VT: Right, right.
DR: The building was still there. And they could deliver this--
VT: Right.
DR: --old IBM machine. And it was the first major computer that the campus had
access to. They'd had a small IBM machine before, but it just ran on the punch
cards, as all them did.
VT: Who was doing computing on campus at that time? Besides the Physics Department?
DR: Essentially just Physics Department.
VT: Really.
DR: Mostly the original computational thrust came from the MURA organization.
And then when they sort of went defunct, that became available to the particle
physics activity. And we used that for a number of years.
VT: And then the central computational facility--
DR: And then we got a CDC1604, which was an early machine. And it seemed to us
00:56:00to be fantastic.
VT: Sure.
DR: Again, all these machines ran programs which were using Fortran language,
and which we had big decks of cards, three feet of IBM cards all punched or
duplicated and verified [unclear] various things in both data and programs.
VT: Sure.
DR: So all these were kept in file cabinets. We all had our own bazillion card
00:57:00file cabinets that we heard for records and so on.
VT: How did that change the nature of your research or your work?
DR: Well one of the interesting features of it was since this was a gathering
point, it became a focus point in which people came in, and they stood around
while their cards were being read in.
VT: [unclear]
DR: And so we could talk to one another and find out what was happening and so
on. And then because we shared a lot of stuff, we could just talk back and forth
with each other.
VT: So another, like the coffee talk, another opportunity.
DR: It was, that's right. It was another opportunity which disappeared again
with the VAXes that finally came up. And everyone had five times as much
00:58:00computing in their office as we had in this.
Well then we got the next upgrade machine, which was over on the third floor of
[Stroning?] Hall. The CDC3600. Which was again another step up. And we carried
on with that for a number of years, until it had gone away. And then the
equivalent, it wasn't called DoIt then, but it was the previous. MACC, it was
called. And they bought a new machine and were installing it over on the other
00:59:00side of campus in that new building there. [unclear] and they were putting it
in, and did put it in. It was state of the art machine. And it was at that time,
they had dismantled the 3600. It was [unclear] But this was 1970.
And it was that machine in the wing of Sterling occupied by the Army Math
Research Center that was the target of the Vietnam War protestors who set off
the bomb to try to, among other things, destroy this computer. The irony, of
01:00:00course, was it wasn't even connected at the time. It was sitting there waiting
for trash, it had all moved into other places.
DR: But that's a bit ahead of this story, in a sense--
VT: Right.
DR: --that in '66 I graduated, and as I said, had the opportunity, I was pretty
well earmarked to go to Berkeley--
VT: Really?
DR: --to be part of [Gilson Goldopper's?] group there. And at that time, one of
my classmates here had been offered an assistant professorship here. And he
01:01:00apparently was going to take it. My professor, Bud Goode, felt that that was an
unnecessary distinction. He thought his students should be given equal. I'm told
this. I don't really know what happened, obviously. But all of a sudden I got
this offer to stay on as assistant professor. And that was great, and I was
certainly considering it strongly. But what tipped it, in some sense, was the
fact that at the same time, in '66, this was a time of enormous burgeoning
expansion of higher education in the United States. People were just being hired
01:02:00everywhere. And expansions were going on enormously. They got their second wind
after the Second World War, and they generated a number of people, and they were
just expanding. I think the department here expanded by almost a factor of three
in that period.
VT: Oh, my.
DR: And one of the things that happened was that New York State instituted a
public university for the first time.
VT: Sure.
DR: Previously, of course, they'd had City College, and New York University, and
a lot of private. Cornell, which was quasi-private--
01:03:00
VT: Right.
DR: --and so on. But they had not had a state university system. And then they
set one up at that time. And the campuses were to be defined in terms of
particular activities. There was to be a physical sciences and a live sciences
campus, and social sciences campus, in terms of whatever. And for the physical
sciences, Stony Brook was the choice. And on the theoretical side, they hired
Frank Yang, who had been half the Nobel Prize winning pair of very young
01:04:00theorists, T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang, who had discovered the violation of parity
and the symmetries and the weak interactions. For which they received the Nobel
Prize relatively early. And he had the Nobel Prize, and Frank went to Stony
Brook as not an administrative head, but sort of a general leader of things.
And he needed to set up an experimental site. So they hired, they made a big
offer to Bud Goode, who then decided to accept it and was leaving. And he left
01:05:00within, as things ended, so when he left within, we knew he was going to leave
at the time the position was offered to me. So I essentially walked into an
ongoing activity that had already had a history of funding and--
VT: His work. His courses.
DR: We had programs going. And we had research activities lined up, and so on
and so forth. And we were, so it was really a unique situation.
VT: Sure.
DR: If you could not have to start up things from scratch that you could, only
had to keep things going in some sense. So that was a major feature. So both
01:06:00David Klein and myself were two members of the class who went on to become
faculty members here at the university.
VT: Would you characterize Bud Goode as, was he your mentor or your advisor
throughout your education?
DR: Oh, very much so. Well, throughout that part of my education. He was role
model, he was very intelligent, bright, and actually largely ill starred. He
had, again, this is a partially, a personal view of this, and not necessarily
shared by everybody. But I think he had been affected by being in Luis Alvarez
01:07:00group at Berkeley. And Alvarez won the Nobel Prize for the invention of the
bubble chamber. And he was a real wheeler dealer type individual. And was a
superb organizer, administrator, and leader in that way. And I think he set a
standard that Bud very much would like to have emulated. But that was not his forte.
VT: Sure.
DR: Bud, in fact, was an excellent physicist, and had an incredibly intuitive
and imaginative grasp of physics and things that were going on. But he was not a
01:08:00great administrator.
VT: Sure.
DR: And the difficulty, then, was that that's what he really wanted to be. And
the fact that he failed at this meant that he was somehow inadequate.
VT: Sure.
DR: And in fact he had been extraordinarily successful as a physicist. But in
his own light, he was unable to reconcile that by measuring up to Alvarez.
VT: That's unfortunate.
DR: So, nonetheless, he tried to recruit me to Stony Brook. But I, one of the
advantages, one of the disadvantages of staying on at Wisconsin, under normal
circumstances, would be that you would always be the acolyte as the major
01:09:00professor. You would be perceived as that by--
VT: Your colleagues.
DR: Whatever. Outsiders, general collaborators or whatever else. And so that was
something that you had to worry about.
VT: Right.
DR: And there was, the normal situation was that you would go away. And maybe
you would come back, but you would come back as your own person in that sense.
VT: Right.
DR: Well, what happened in my case was just the opposite. I stayed, but my major professor--
VT: Left.
DR: --moved away.
VT: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
DR: So I had the benefit of getting the ongoing research program, and yet I did
not have to share the spotlight in some sense with my senior mentor.
VT: Right.
DR: Nonetheless, we worked together at Brookhaven, where he spent most of his
01:10:00remaining time. He actually came to FERMI lab someway later.
VT: So your relationship continued as far as research.
DR: It continued. We were collaborators in research for five or six years after,
after that time. Very successful collaborations.
VT: Were there other faculty or graduate students during your masters or PhD
work who were also influential in that way? Any particular projects that you
might have worked on that stand out? Particularly faculty that steered you in a
certain direction besides Bud Goode?
DR: No. I wouldn't say they necessarily steered me. There was, as I say, this
01:11:00extraordinarily productive ferment and opportunities kept popping up left and
right in terms of opportunities. The, in my particular activity, there was
collegial efforts between David Klein and myself, both of who were in the same
field and were hired at the same time out of his class.
VT: Particle physics.
DR: Actually, there were three of us hired at the same time. Dale Mead, who I
knew very well as a student, was also essentially in this class with us. There
were three of us that had been hired on here. David Klein left in mid '70s to go
01:12:00to UCLA. And has been there ever since. And Dale Mead left, was a protégée of
Don Kerst, who, Kerst had just moved up in 1966 to University of Wisconsin,
where he had done his graduate work. He'd been at the University of Illinois,
where he invented the bevatron. Which I think might even be still in operation
at the University of Illinois. Invented the bevatron. And had been moving toward
the application things and the concept of fusion physics, or plasma physics,
01:13:00physics of plasmas. And this was an area which the university department had
never been involved in. So they very much wanted to take advantage of both
providing an opportunity for returning alumnus and particularly a very
prestigious involved, and set up this very active, which remains as his legacy,
remains one of the top three or four universities in the country in this aspect.
So it's very important that--
VT: That's interesting.
DR: --and good aspect. Well, Dale had joined the department. And for a number of
01:14:00years was on the professional staff. But he very much wanted to get deeper into
the subject. And he didn't enjoy teaching quite as much as the rest of us, or at
least willing to put up with it. So he went off to the Princeton laboratory, or
plasma physics laboratory at Princeton, and eventually became associate
director, and had a very prestigious and exceptional career.
And certainly, working with these individuals very closely was influential in
01:15:00both providing a goal of what can be done, what should be done, and so on.
And to provide a path on how to get there, both role models and just general
connections in that respect. So we had a, it was very productive class. And were
fine, fine people. They turned out to be both involved and influential over the
wider scheme of things.
VT: What was your particular thesis, or focus of study, dissertation, in your
masters or PhD program?
DR: Well, it was a particular topic on particle physics. Totally useless.
01:16:00
VT: [laughs] Why do you say that?
DR: Well, it was not at the forefront of things. It was really in the concept of
the thesis being an example of whether an individual had mastered the techniques of--
VT: Skills and knowledge, right.
DR: --research. And were able to communicate technical results comprehensibly,
and whether it, it turned out that as is the case with many experiments I've
often characterized research as being those activities which have at least a 50
01:17:00percent chance of failure.
VT: Right.
DR: If it doesn't have the chance of failure, you're developing something that's
already been established. If the research is really pushing where you don't know
what the result is, and therefore it's going to, you could fail. Well, one of
the ideas that had been floating around in the middle '60s is the question of
what kind of symmetries the particles could be classified into. And eventually
it turned out this so-called SU3, or Symmetric Unitary Group 3 was going to be a
useful categorization. But there were alternatives involved, which made
01:18:00different predictions. And the one of these alternatives was such that it
predicted a certain particle characteristic, or resonance, whatever you wish to
call it, that should have been produced with a certain, if this were, would only
have been identified if this was the correct path. So I looked for that, and
failed to find it. I found some other things.
VT: Okay.
DR: Were able to talk about some positive measurements as well. But it wasn't that.
VT: Right.
DR: So okay, fine. I wrote it up. My poor wife had to type this thing. I
01:19:00invented this great procedure, however, which was copied a great deal later on.
At the time, everything was transcribed, essentially by hand, and technical
typists would type this stuff out. But these were all full of handwritten
equations and so on--
VT: Sure, sure.
DR: -that you had to put in and so on. Well, there would inevitably be a
residual of typographical errors.
VT: Sure.
DR: And that later on it became apparent, it was not totally apparent to me at
01:20:00the time, but later on it became apparent that no matter how many times you had
it done, you could correct the old ones and the new ones would come in. And you
would have this absolutely irreducible minimum of typos--
VT: Right.
DR: --that were unable to be excised from the--Well, what had just been, become
widely available, were the early Xerox machines. So the graduate school required
the, still requires the thesis to be done on rag bond, it has to be watermarked,
and this, that and the other thing. At that time, since everything was done
01:21:00manually on, if you were lucky, an electric typewriter, the margins were the
crucial thing. So in fact there was a woman over there we called the margin lady
who would continually reject manuscripts because the margins didn't satisfy the
appropriate width or whatever. Or one page didn't satisfy--
VT: Oh! That's harsh.
DR: [makes dismissive sound] Gone. Uh, and so to avoid this, and to try to keep
going, I discovered that you could pretty accurately correct things using, by
typing on corrasable bond, where you could erase it and so on. Once you had a
01:22:00clean copy with corrections made, you could Xerox it onto bond.
VT: Clever! [laughter]
DR: And that had not been done before. So that was a real time saver--
VT: Oh, sure.
DR: --in the sense that people were spending hours to have these things retyped,
and then proofread yet again.
VT: Oh, it sounds painful.
DR: And it was just awful. And we managed to cut that back considerably by that
technique. I was sort of the first one around here that accomplished it in that way.
VT: Groundbreaking.
DR: Things were - again, things were changing so fast that the exact topic of my
01:23:00thesis almost immediately disappeared into the next application. And actually,
the activities of Vernon Barker, who came to the department as the, as a very
young, much younger than I. Didn't have to go to the navy. And he was smart and
early to finish, and kept going. He was a theorist, so he didn't have to go as
long in graduate school. And so on. He was several years younger than me. Still
is. Right up there.
VT: Oh, yeah.
DR: And he had been hired in the department, and had invented this so-called
01:24:00phenomenological approach, in which he was trying to bridge the gap between
connecting experimental data to the evermore remote and difficult to calculate
theoretical ideas. And he got another former post-doc who came as a postdoctoral
from Maryland, and then stayed on as an assistant professor. He was recruited as
an experimental postdoc. But when he was here, he went over to the dark side and
became a theorist. And he just retired last year, two years ago, with me. His
01:25:00name was Martin Olson. And so Vernon [Barger?], as the leader, joined with
Martin Olson, David Klein, and myself, who set up this University of Wisconsin
Phenomenological Institute. It was basically theoretical. We provided some,
well, early on we were more tightly connected than later on. But we did a number
of phenomenological analyses and so on. And Vernon has just continued on at
breakneck speed ever since. The rest of us have slowed up considerably. And it
01:26:00did not develop into our major focus. When possible, we connected with it. But
we moved on, basically, to other things.
And more or less, the other things occurred when in 1972, yeah, it must have
been '72, that a decision was made to build a national synchrotron at high
energy. There had been a synchrotron of 200 gigavolts, 200 GeV, proposed by
Berkeley to follow on from their sequence of their cyclotrons and the bevatron
01:27:00and so on. And they were going to move to a very high energy machine. Well this
was going to cost so much, this was a step above the East Coast machine. Which
at that point was the AGS, the alternating gradient synchrotron that had been
built there. And it had been in the process of being duplicated at CERN as the
European counterpart of the US program. Prior to that, the US was essentially
all alone--
VT: Really.
DR: --in this activity for, until the development of CERN. And we had visitors
from, but the facilities were all in the United States.
01:28:00
VT: Right.
DR: And when the 200 GeV machine was proposed, then there was a discussion of
how it should be located, funded, and so on. They had this nationwide search for
where it should be built. One of the sites, actually one of the final sites that
existed was at Stoughton.
VT: Oh, really?
DR: The former location of the MURA activity. The MURA proposal, for which they
had at least some land purchased.
VT: In Stoughton.
DR: Which has now become the Wisconsin Physical Sciences Laboratory, as the
synchrotron light source, which is the grandchild of one of the early Mura
01:29:00experimental machines. But in the process of trying to come to grips with this
national thing, they finally settled on this site of [Potavi?], Illinois. And
one of the first, they chose a director, a very charismatic individual from
Cornell. And first thing he did was to say he was going to double the energy for
the same price. He would build a machine that had twice the energy.
VT: Wow.
DR: And everybody said no, it's not possible. Bob Wilson, though, was a classic
01:30:00builder in the same sense, I think both he and Lawrence came from Wyoming. But
certainly Bob Wilson, I'm not sure where Lawrence came from, but Bob Wilson came
from Wyoming. One of the relatively few physicists to come from Wyoming. And had
gone to Berkeley and had studied under Lawrence and so on. Then went to Cornell
where he had run an exemplary program where he had run a whole lot of innovative
and cheap electron machines. And he was chosen to be the leader at the National
Solar Laboratory, which was a [Greenfield?] start at [Potavia?]. And so he
01:31:00started designing. And he came down into, I remember some meeting when he came
down the aisle being introduced to people. and he announced that he was doubling
the energy. Oh, my god! What's going on? What's going on? And, by god, he did,
although there were some stumbles along the way.
VT: Sure. Sure.
DR: But he had founded the laboratory and was a, brought a whole new, I mean, he
is the classic individual. Thinking outside the box. He was never boxed in. He
would have, he again had a technique when they were designing the machines that
01:32:00I think has been talked about elsewhere, where he would come out and ring a bell
at three o'clock in the afternoon, and gather everybody around. And they would
have to give up new ideas.
VT: Oh, how interesting.
DR: Of what they were working on and why this was a good idea and whether it
could be, so just to--
VT: Engage.
DR: Engage communication and so on.
VT: That's innovative.
DR: A clever idea in that respect, and quite remarkable. And I went down for a
number of years as a consultant. I knew the head of the, the experimental
01:33:00program. Well, I knew a bunch of people at the laboratory.
VT: Sure.
DR: I had, a former collaborator was an older physicist named Ned [Goldvasser?]
from the University of Illinois, who became the associate director under Wilson.
And I knew him. We had been collaborators on experiments before, so I knew him
rather well. In addition, I had been doing experiments with Bud Goode out at
Brookhaven Laboratory. And I knew the head of the experimental activities out
there who had been hired to come to FERMI lab to set things up there. His name
was Jim Sanford, and he also was an extraordinarily accomplished individual. The
01:34:00laboratory in its initial days was blessed by having an enormous cadre of
competent, imaginative and excellent, intelligent physicists involved. And they
just did a superb job setting up the laboratory.
VT: Was UW Madison ever considered as a site for that lab?
DR: Yeah, that was the Stoughton lab.
VT: Or the Stoughton space. Why did they not choose that after all?
DR: Oh, politics, I'm convinced. There were two sites in Illinois, interestingly
enough. One was near Barrington. It's a, probably gated community now. But it
was one of the suburb communities that had a covenant that said you had to have
01:35:00a minimum of seven acres of estate. And they had horses and general horseback competition.
VT: Right.
DR: And all this stuff. Well, they actively campaigned to, at one point,
somebody brought in the Barrington paper which said that at a town meeting it
was declared that physicists would lower the tone of the community if this
laboratory were built.
VT: [laughs] Oh, dear.
DR: Well they managed to forestall building Barrington. But down the road apiece
was this failed development, suburban develop.
VT: In Batavia?
DR: Well, near Batavia. I've forgotten what it was called. There's been a whole
01:36:00book written about this. I reread it occasionally, just to remember all these
activities. But it's called Policide. Political suicide combination there. And
it was the killing of this village, which had essentially been built, the claim
was, with mob money and so on. And then had failed for various reasons. And they
wanted to erase it. So they erased it by buying, the state, by buying it up and
giving it to the national government to put this laboratory on. And one of the
things that Wilson did was to take these tract homes that had been built there
and to use them as, instead of buildings, he moved them around and refurbished
01:37:00them and so on, and used them, they're still in use.
VT: Oh, really? As a lab?
DR: As both lab buildings and as quasi dorms and things like that.
VT: That's very clever.
DR: So it was, again, part of his shtick was to do things relatively
innovatively, but at less cost.
VT: Yeah. It's a good selling point.
DR: But they located the lab down there. And I was going down, I was involved in
part from early on in graduate school. We were--
VT: Mm hmm. In the '60s.
DR: --helping to build, because Bud Goode had been one of the inventors of a new
01:38:00technique at Berkeley to separate beams of particles into different kinds, so
that you wouldn't have a mixture of particles in the bubble chamber. You could
have, for example, all [chemazons or all pimazons?] or protons or whatever. And
this involved some esoteric techniques of holding very high potential gradients
across good vacuum on very flat surfaces. And so these so-called particle
separators were first developed by Bud and his collaborators in Berkeley. But
then later on, at the ARGON National Laboratory, which prior, in the '60s, they
01:39:00were building a machine at the same time that a theorist on the East Coast,
[Korant?], had discovered the principle of strong focusing, which was a way of
getting intense beams and confining them at much less cost. And for larger
energies and larger rings. So the first real attempt at that was done at
Brookhaven. And to back that up, a more conventional machine was built at [Harta?].
And so these were going to be completed at about the same time. So early on, one
01:40:00of the reasons I picked this thesis experiment I told you about was that early
on we were working on a search for a particle which had been at least it
postulated very strange particle in the sense that it was a combination of what
we now are three strange quarks. But by this classification scheme of SU3, there
was a group of particles that had an obvious missing particle in the symmetry.
And they were searching for this particle. And there were two machines that were
01:41:00capable of finding it, the so-called argon machine, the zero gradient
synchrotron, and the machine at Brookhaven. And both of them were using
essentially the same techniques, and so on, and they had bubble chambers to try
to identify this particle. So we were sort of in a race, in some sense, to do
this. And we were working rather hard at all this. And it was in the process of
trying to finish this up that I just became fed up with being a student.
VT: Sure.
DR: So I picked a project, and I wrote up my thesis--
VT: Wrap it up and get it done.
01:42:00
DR: --and sent it off.
VT: I can respect that. [laughs]
DR: But in the meantime, we had been working for several years in terms of
trying to get things built and constructed and so on, done. But for various
reasons, the machine at Argon was significantly later, and things did not work
as well. But more than anything else, the luck failed, finally. And it was
probably okay.
VT: Yeah.
DR: And the Brookhaven group discovered the particle. We verified it perhaps
four months later. But they had the most incredible, it was hitting the hundred
01:43:00million dollar lottery right out of the box.
VT: Yeah. They found it.
DR: The first observation was so improbable that it never should have occurred.
And yet, it did.
VT: It did.
DR: And it was the first observation.
VT: That is the million dollar lottery, isn't it?
DR: It was absolutely incredible that almost everything that could have happened successfully--
VT: Did.
DR: --did happen with that single event. And you establish the entire existence
of the particle based on one, one example, which was unheard of, really, in
those days. And we came along later with more run of the mill--
VT: Right.
DR: --but equally expected events. Not nearly as dramatic as the Brookhaven.
01:44:00
VT: Sure. One thing that strikes me as we've been talking, you know, you've
mentioned several times that the field itself is changing so quickly in the
'60s. And I'm wondering, what was that like for you as a graduate student and a
young professor to literally have your field evolving as you were evolving in
your career? What was that experience like?
DR: Oh, it was extraordinarily exciting. You couldn't wait to show up every day
because there would be new opportunities, new things, new potential discoveries.
And so on. It was, and there was a lot of clear problems, misunderstandings. We
didn't have, we were at the very beginnings of the so-called standard model.
01:45:00
We had a zip set of standard models, or hypothesis suggestions that were all
brought forward. And these were all capable of examination and rejection or
acceptance and so on. And just being a part of that was very exhilarating. And
it, not nearly as frustrating as it clearly is for some of the students nowadays
who are looking at one more decimal point on a standard model, trying to find
something that's broken but haven't been able to. Nothing was not broken.
VT: Everything was new. Everything was wide open.
DR: Everything was strange. So it was a very, very interesting and exhilarating time.
01:46:00
VT: And how did that impact the development of the department?
DR: Well, the department, interestingly enough, was relatively small and ingrown
prior to World War Two. The biggest and most successful breakout had occurred
with Ray Herb, another homegrown individual who'd been very active at setting up
local accelerators and providing this opportunity to explore nuclear physics in
01:47:00a way which, and accuracy and precision that otherwise had not been achievable.
But even Ray did not recognize this as immediately applicable. He, I think, went
to, when physicists were mobilized in World War Two, he went to the MIT
radiation laboratory to develop radar and electronic techniques and so on,
instead of going to Los Alamos to work on the nuclear weapon. But his students,
his machines, all went to Los Alamos.
VT: Oh, really? Interesting.
DR: So he went to where he thought he could be most useful. And in fact, he may
01:48:00not have, could have contributed, perhaps.
VT: Sure.
DR: On the other hand, things went along very well there, so who knows?
DR: But that was the first sort of breakout here. And then, just after the war,
I'm having trouble with the names. A theorist who came, let me check the name.
Robert G. Sachs. I know him very well, did know him very well. He was a nuclear
01:49:00theorist who then made the transition over to particle theory. But at the time,
he was a nuclear theorist. And he had paired up with Ray Herb and were leading
the department at that time. And this was a time at which we had all sorts of
individuals pass through on occasions. Gregory Bright, a Nobelist, was here for
a while.
Julian Schwinger, again, a Nobelist, was here as a postdoctoral under Sachs for
01:50:00a while. There were several others that had, Eugene Vigner had come through and
was on the faculty for a short time before he went back to the East Coast. So I
mean there were nuclear physics, this was probably one of the strongest
locations in the country with respect to nuclear physics.
VT: And that was in the '50s, like post-war.
DR: Well even earlier, in the late '30s. And then after the war, that was when
the Ray Herb breakout sort of occurred.
01:51:00
VT: Right.
DR: And then after the war, they picked up on that and began to expand largely
under the tutelage of Bob Sachs. And as they expanded, they had, first thing
they did was hire two so-called space physicists or cosmic ray physicists. The
space program was just being developed. And so former cosmic ray physicists were
moving over into so-called space astronomy, or space physics. And Frank [Sherp?]
and Bill [Kraushover?] came to the department [unclear] around the same time I
did. It must have been around 1960, 1961, thereabouts. And they started this
01:52:00development of space/astrophysics, which has now grown into the whole ice cube
business. But for a long time, it was involved in [sounding racket flights?] and
things like that, which Dan [McCammon?] still carries on as [Kraushauer's?]
student here. So that was another direction that they expanded into. A third, as
I indicated, was the recruitment of Don Kerst, who opened up the whole field of
01:53:00plasma physics.
DR: The older aspects, the older fields of atomic spectroscopy and so on, which
had been very active research fields earlier on, were now less so. And the,
there still is and has been a long chain of people involved in what is now
called atomic physics. But the actual area of research and so on has developed
enormously with the invention of the laser and controlled photonics and optics,
01:54:00which had not been in any way foreseen. So we still have an active evolutionary
vestige, in some sense, of that activity early on. So then Sachs became aware of
the potential of the visual techniques which were then, again, slightly being
developed as a result of the burst of technology after World War Two.
And picked up Jack Fry from Chicago, where he was postdoc and had been active in
01:55:00emulsions, the, by putting nuclear particles in emulsions and developing,
because heat attracts the particles and so on. And that was the first sort of
track detector that had been constructed. And this was largely a British
invention. And then the Americans took over. The British also invented, or at
least utilized strongly, the so-called cloud chamber, which was a low density
device to measure particle tracks by taking superheated vapors and causing, or
01:56:00super cool, and causing them to condense. Then Donald [Glaser?] at the
University of Michigan, ostensibly while enjoying a late afternoon beer, got the
idea of using superheated liquids in the same way. And invented the bubble
chamber. Immediately was seen by Berkeley as an enormous research tool, largely
by Louis Alvarez. So they immediately hired Donald to go out to Berkeley. And in
01:57:00one of the really important engineering, Alvarez could think out of the box.
Alvarez jumped up and scaled from the earliest working model that they had,
which was about eight or nine inches in diameter. He immediately started work on
a million dollar effort, which was six feet long.
VT: Wow.
DR: And he had to invent all sorts of new techniques along the way to achieve
that. But by god, it worked, right out of the box. And for years, it was the
trend setter, the so-called 72-inch bubble chamber, was the trend setter. And it
01:58:00was an enormous leap forward. I don't think there's been a step, well certainly
it was in the scale of, in terms of a step forward, it was the scale of the
atomic bomb, but there was not anywhere, you know, I mean, it was totally
different in aspect and everything else. But it was directly related to particle
physics and research. But it was an enormous engineering step, and could have
failed at every opportunity.
VT: [unclear]
DR: Very successfully done. Interestingly enough, Don [Glaser?] didn't do it. He
went off into biophysics or something.
01:59:00
VT: Oh, interesting.
DR: He didn't stay with the activity that he was hired for out of Berkeley. And
that's not unusual. But Alvarez really jumped up and did the deed there. And it
was probably because [Glaser?] couldn't compete against Alvarez as well.
VT: Sure. Personality.
DR: Who was a titanic force.
VT: Yes. Sounds like it. What do you think for you--I'm sorry. We should
probably watch the time. I don't know what we're at.
DR: That's fine by me.
VT: Okay. Why don't we do a couple more questions today, and then we'll take a break.
DR: Okay.
VT: So you've talked a lot about a lot of extremely innovative, very exciting
research and developments and discoveries. For you in your early career, you
know, here at the UW, what do you think was the most sort of monumental research
or discovery, for you personally? Or if there wasn't just one?
02:00:00
DR: Well it didn't happen that early, but what turned out to be the major
highlight of both the opportunity and the career was the completion of the
accelerator, laboratory and the proposal which I joined as sort of the fourth
individual with Carlo [Rubia?], David Klein and Alfred Mann. Al Mann is from
Pennsylvania. Carl [Rubia?], at the time, joined Harvard to be, was a Harvard
professor. David and I were from Wisconsin. We made a proposal to study
02:01:00neutrinos at the, probably the first really, not the first experiment, by any
stretch. There had been a couple experiments at Brookhaven. But it was the, by
any stretch, the first experiment that had a real opportunity for getting an
intense enough beam to be able to collect high statistics and be able to explore things.
VT: When did this start?
DR: Well it began in, oh, god, it began in '72 or three. And we, David was, it
02:02:00was very important to him to have a jump on things. So he finished the proposal
and drove down and stood in line so that we had experiment number one.
VT: Fantastic!
DR: At the National Laboratory. So that experiment was finally accepted and was
built. And we participated in the discovery of neutral weak currents. There was
a flaw in the, and the theoretical understanding at that time, which indicated
that there were, there had to be a breakdown at a certain energy. It would
02:03:00violate causality, or there would be a catastrophe if something didn't happen.
So it was clear something was going to happen.
DR: And there were two or three possibilities which had been proposed for what
might happen. One of them, Weinberg, then on the East Coast, had proposed, among
others, the existence of a neutral current as opposed to the charge currents
that were responsible for decay of radioactive particles. And but because it did
not have any characteristic charge particle to identify it, it was more
02:04:00difficult to interpret. So you needed a lot of events and so on. Well we jumped
into it and we found it. But the Europeans had been looking with the heavy
liquid bubble chamber for a number of years, and had been toying with the
possibility that they might have been seeing it. But they were unable to make
[unclear] partly because of statistics and partly because they were, had an
active area surrounded by a lot of material, which there was a question of
whether or not neutrons could come in and--
02:05:00
VT: Right.
DR: --mimic things that would look like these neutral current. Events initiated
by neutrinos. And whereas we sort of had the reverse situation, we were
surrounded by errors and so on, so that there was no chance of things scattering
for our purposes. And we managed to establish that yes, there was quite a
significant result. And then this was published, or essentially published, and
almost simultaneously with the fact that the information was apparently carried
back to CERN. And so they decided they were going to publish, too. So there was
02:06:00a sort of quasi-simultaneous production.
But then the thing that took the luster off in a sense was that my colleagues,
or at least a couple of them, decided they would move toward what they thought
was a more definitive experimental configuration. And they moved a little too
fast, and they cast doubt in what they were, some question about whether or not
in their mind the thing existed. And then it was discovered that the
configuration they moved to actually made it impossible to detect what we were
looking for. We had a much better situation to begin with.
VT: Oh, dear.
DR: And so as a result, the Europeans who were unhappy with the United States
02:07:00successes managed to, managed to push down the US contribution to the discovery.
And unfortunately, as a result, the discovery has not been recognized as
important as it has been. The prizes were given to the theorists, rather than
the experimentalists involved. But nonetheless, it was the most influential
activity with which I was involved. And certainly the most, the biggest
contribution to physics that we made. There were other aspects which were also
important in this whole neutrino program, which was a very useful one. But
02:08:00certainly nothing was as dramatic or as potentially important as the discovery
of neutral currents. And that, I mean, the other activities were interesting.
Preceding that were more or less workmanlike, there was nothing that, we just
didn't have the energy to really break through on some of these things. But
later on, we, the neutrino program was probably the most productive, the one
that we were most successful with.
02:09:00
VT: We can do one more question.
DR: Sure.
VT: Then we'll take a break. Before we sort of start moving into your career as
a member of the faculty and department chairs and some of the things you did
later in the '70s and '80s and '90s, you know, I'm wondering, you talked a
little bit about what it was like to be a graduate student on campus, living in
Eagle Heights in the early '60s. You know, there was a lot of activity on campus
in general in the '60s with the war and the student activism. You know, you
alluded to the Sterling Hall bombing in the early '70s. But I'm wondering what
was it like on campus in the '60s in general for graduate students, for students
in the sciences, for students. It was a very tumultuous time, and a lot of
social changes were taking place.
DR: I joined the faculty in 1966. And I think it was '68 or '69 was the Dow,
02:10:00'68, that fall, I think, was the so-called Dow riots or whatever.
VT: Right. Right.
DR: When the recruiters came on campus. Well that was, there obviously had been
a buildup. It's well known that people have characterized that as the first time
war came into the living rooms, through television.
VT: Right.
DR: With the coverage. And so on. And that there was a slow buildup in terms of
02:11:00tension and reaction, and that free speech movement at Berkeley, and [we can't
come back?] and this general feeling of empowerment of the students and the
youth was involved. And there were other features, I'm not sure when it took
place, but it was all mixed up. I think it was probably after, I think it was in
the '70s that we had the TA activities.
VT: The strike. Right.
DR: And there were strikes and demonstrations and sit-ins and so on. Many of the
same tactics had continued on in other venues. And we were at least partially,
02:12:00partially insulated from those things. We had this activity which was not
directly connected to the war by any stretch.
VT: Right.
DR: We were perfectly happy. We were excited by what was happening and what was
going on. And we were not particularly connected to the activity. Now of course,
you couldn't avoid it.
VT: Right.
DR: After the riots, and there began this steady drum beat of weekly marches
down State Street, and window breaking, vandalism and so on, and to partially
02:13:00protest the war, you certainly couldn't avoid things. But we did not have, at
that time I think I moved up to university houses. And we had not, you know,
that was fairly, there were no activities and nothing there. It was pretty
much--[phone interruption]
VT: There we go.
DR: So we were worrying about the development of the, actually the whole aspect
02:14:00was one of these insidious things that you never recognize what's happened until
you can look back at how far you've traveled. Because each little step, each
little day it develops and it doesn't seem like the incremental changes are
different and so on. But then all of a sudden, things happen. Well, you know,
there were marches. There were things that we would participate on and off with.
We never really went around, I mean, we had kids and so forth--
VT: Right. Right.
DR: And we certainly weren't going to be active rioters in any respect. But we
were sort of sympathetic with the goals, but not of the tactics, I think, in general.
02:15:00
VT: Yeah. Yeah.
DR: And there were all these statements that this is the only way you can make
progress is to tear down the establishment and so on, which I wasn't, I was
pretty committed to the establishment at that point.
So things were, there were little things that if you look back on them, you can
see that things were at a relatively bizarre state. The hospital was right
across Charter Street from the building at the time. And our pediatrician, part
of the university health service, had their offices in there. And at one point,
02:16:00my wife had driven our two children in for an exam. And they were coming out.
And as they were coming out, walking over here to pick me up after their exam, a
company or probably less than that, thirty or forty National Guard troops in
full riot gear with bayonets and guns and the whole business came marching down
the steps, just the other side of Sterling, wherever it is. Of course, kids were
02:17:00just amazed by all this. "What's happening? What's happening?" And the first
thing my wife wanted to do was get them off the street!
VT: Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] Get them out of the line of fire.
DR: But the whole thing, nothing was happening anywhere. They were just walking
across, and it was just a strange, strange setup.
VT: Different climate.
DR: Another incident I remember clearly was I had an office in Sterling Hall,
opened on the north side of the, I mean, had a window off on the north side of
the building. And in those days, you could open the windows. And it was in the
summertime. We had the windows open because it was hot and there was no air
conditioning. Still is no air conditioning in that building. And I was grading
02:18:00exams. And all of a sudden it occurred to me that I really shouldn't be crying
over this exam. [laughs] Tears were running down my face.
VT: Oh, no!
DR: And it turned out that tear gas had drifted over from State Street--
VT: Waft.
DR: There was enough of it wafting around that it had gotten into my eyes. And
it was not a terribly painful thing, as it would have been if I'd been on State
Street. But it was enough just that I was crying. These tests were becoming wet.
VT: That poor student had a really bad grade.
DR: And that was, again, a very bizarre feature of the times. And we sort of
decided that so what, I mean, that's the way things are. It's no big deal. We
02:19:00didn't realize until much later how absolutely strange this situation was.
And of course, when the bomb went off, that was even worse.
VT: Was any of your faculty offices or research damaged or destroyed as a result?
DR: Not myself, no. As I say, the biggest thing that would have happened would
have been the loss of the computer. But that had already been shifted. And of
course then protected very much. Security went up several orders of magnitude
after that. But it was, as you might imagine, extraordinarily corrosive to the department.
VT: Yeah.
DR: There was, as there is in any relatively large group, there is a broad
02:20:00spectrum of political perspectives that exist from those that were considered by
some to be farther, farther left than Russians. And the others, that were
farther right by the Nazis.
VT: Right. And everything in between. Sure.
DR: The whole business. Well, there was a lot of suspicion. And there was a
statement that had been painted and put up on the side of the building to the
extent that violence was an improper response to all this, which is obviously
true. And so that was difficult to get through, and big arguments over the
02:21:00wording and everything else. And of course the effect on individuals was vastly
asymmetric as well. I mean, Joe Dillinger, whose student and finally graduate
student postdoc was Bob Fassnacht, who was killed--
VT: Right.
DR: He really never did psychologically recover. He died within three or four
years. And he was distraught that whole time.
VT: That's a shame.
DR: Unable to focus or essentially accomplish anything after that. There of
course were the whole of the nuclear program. Their records were burned and
02:22:00damaged by water when they put out the fires and everything else. And that was
so that, you know, some groups slip by with relatively almost no change to their
activities, and others were set back a number of years. Henry [Barshall, Heinz
Barshall?] was so unhappy that he left and went to Livermore Laboratory for a
number of years and came back toward the end of his career, because his wife and
so forth missed Madison. But he was unhappy with the university response. I'm
02:23:00not sure the university could have done a lot differently.
VT: Right. Right.
DR: But there's always a certain impersonality with respect to an institutional
response to what basically is a personal injury. And I think that has been a
great deal of the difficulty.
DR: There were other ancillary problems that developed, probably not obviously,
along the way. One of the faculty members came over and was trying to help move,
02:24:00uncover things and find records and equipment and so on, and strained his back
and never did, he always had back pain after that, and he retired somewhat early
as a result. So there were little things like that that tended to keep the whole
business alive. And there were misattributed, I mean, it was not opposition to
the war that caused this, but it was certainly a contributor in the sense--
VT: Right. Right.
DR: So you can't throw out what was, in my view, somewhat moral positions and
02:25:00that this war was not going to be successfully concluded and we should not be a
part of it anymore.
VT: Right. Right.
DR: It should be truncated, one way or another. By far the results are worse
than the possible benefits.
VT: Right.
DR: And I say that not because we apparently have not learned anything--
VT: Yeah.
DR: --in four years. [laughs] And we're back to the same kind of situation.
VT: It's déjà vu.
DR: I feel the same situation exists at the moment, that we will not be able to
identify when we do win this war.
02:26:00
VT: Whatever it is, yeah.
DR: And in particular, I'm not sure that the result is going to be worth the cost.
VT: Yeah. Yeah.
DR: And that is essentially how I felt about certainly the latter stages of the
Vietnam War.
VT: Yeah. Yeah.
DR: Overall in the country, there was an incredible polarization. I remember
clearly I was flying back from Brookhaven at the time of the Kent State
massacre. And there were people who were going around saying that they deserved
it. I mean, it was totally irrational knee-jerk--
02:27:00
VT: Response.
DR: --responses of people who did not understand what was at stake or what was
going on.
VT: Yeah.
DR: Or even what happened. And that was very eye opening at the time was that
how people could be in such a rush to judgment that they wouldn't even bother to
find out the facts which were very poorly defined at that point as to who gave
what orders and--
VT: What actually happened.
DR: --what happened and so on. Anyway, I think we probably should call it a day.
VT: I think that sounds--
