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Interview with Richard Ellis
Full text linkInterview in eight sessions (January–February 2014) with Steele Professor of Astronomy Richard Ellis, whose life has taken him from a small coastal town in Wales to the edge of the universe. He recounts that trajectory in this oral history, starting with his upbringing and education in Wales and his youthful enthusiasm for astronomy, which he pursued through studies at University College London (B.Sc. 1971) and Oxford University (D.Phil. 1974). Having the good fortune to begin his career at the dawn of the “golden era” of British astronomy, he describes his years on the faculty of the University of Durham, where he worked with physics department head and future UK Astronomer Royal A. Wolfendale to develop the “Durham group” into an internationally recognized astronomy program. He talks about his work at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, his galactic and extragalactic studies carried out at British observatories and elsewhere, most notably the Anglo-Australian Telescope, and his involvement in mapping the future of British astronomy.
In 1993, he became the Plumian Professor at the University of Cambridge and director of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, and in 1999 he joined the faculty of Caltech, where he served as director of Palomar Observatory/Caltech Optical Observatories (2000–05), carried out pioneering observations at the W. M. Keck Observatories and Hubble Space Telescope, and was centrally involved in still-ongoing efforts to build the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT).
Ellis details his years of research in observational cosmology, probing galactic evolution and distribution at ever-higher redshifts, and his work on gravitational lensing and dark matter, the cosmic “dark ages” and cosmic dawn, and the pursuit of the most distant objects in the universe. He recalls his role in the 1987 discovery of the first cosmologically distant supernova and subsequent involvement in the supernova cosmology project, an investigation that won the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics for three of its principal scientists. He talks about his collaborations and interactions with numerous colleagues and students, including D. Axon, R. Blandford, A. Boksenberg, G. Efstathiou, D. Lynden-Bell, J. Peebles, M. Rees, W. Sargent, D. Saxon, B. Tinsley, and T. Tombrello, and shares his perspectives on the science and sociology of the astrophysical communities in Great Britain and the United States. Recaps of his election to the UK Royal Society and his designation as a Commander of the British Empire (CBE)—the latter formalized at a Buckingham Palace reception with HRH Prince Charles—also form part of this oral history.
Note: Occasional allusions in this manuscript to a Royal Society memoir or biography refer to an autobiography that Ellis was asked to prepare for the Royal Society at the time he was elected a Fellow in 1995. A copy of the bio is appended to this oral history
Interview with Hans G. Hornung
Full text linkAn interview in two sessions, June and July 2014, with Hans Georg Hornung, Clarence L. Johnson Professor of Aeronautics, emeritus, in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science.
Dr. Hornung describes the origins of the German Templer Colony in Palestine and his upbringing there before and during World War II. Family moves to Templer settlement, Melbourne, Australia, 1948. He attends technical college; University of Melbourne; master’s in engineering, 1962. Researcher, Aeronautical Research Laboratories, Melbourne; PhD, Imperial College, London, 1965.
He recalls his academic career at the Australian National University, Canberra (1967-1980); his interest in hypersonics; building free-piston shock tunnel with Raymond Stalker. Sabbatical in Darmstadt with Ernst Becker. Seven years as director of fluid-mechanics institute of the DLR [Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt], in Göttingen. Comes to Caltech in 1987 to succeed Hans W. Liepmann as director of GALCIT [Graduate Aerospace Laboratories, California Institute of Technology]. Recalls his various aero colleagues, his work with Rocketdyne on Caltech’s T5 (successor to Canberra’s T3 shock tunnel) and Ludwieg tube, collaboration with JPL on space program, and work with graduate students Simon Sanderson and Eric Cummings. Discusses his involvement in various scientific societies and his current activities and continuing research as an emeritus professor
Interview with Judith R. Goodstein
Full text linkAn interview in six sessions, September and October 2012, with Judith R. Goodstein, university archivist emeritus.
Early education in Brooklyn, N.Y., at Erasmus Hall High School and Brooklyn College, where she majored in history and met future husband, David L. Goodstein (Caltech professor of physics and applied physics, emeritus). Both do graduate work at University of Washington; her dissertation on chemist Humphry Davy. David recruited by James Mercereau at Caltech; they leave for Pasadena, 1966.
After six months at Caltech and a year at University of Rome, they return to Caltech; she becomes institute archivist at behest of historian Daniel J. Kevles. Recalls establishment of Caltech Archives under library director Harald Ostvold; early years in basement of Millikan Library; growth of Archives; origins of rare book collection, oral history project; difficulties with library director Glenn Brudvig.
Teaching at Cal State Dominguez Hills and UCLA; dashed hopes for faculty position at Caltech; becomes faculty associate, 1982; co-teaches with Diana Kormos-Buchwald. Her 1989 appointment as Caltech registrar; divides time between Registrar’s Office and Archives, which moves the following year from Millikan to new Beckman Institute. Writes Millikan’s School, published by W. W. Norton.
Her work as registrar; on Freshman Admissions and Convocations committees; resignation as registrar in 2003. Returns full time to Archives; first digitization project in Archives; dealings with Caltech administration. Becomes archivist emeritus, 2009. Comments on current state of Archives, now back under library control. Acquisition of Max Delbrück and R. P. Feynman papers. Friendship with Feynman; her discovery of Feynman lecture on Newton’s laws of planetary motion; David Goodstein’s reconstruction of proof, published as Feynman’s Lost Lecture. Her research on Italian mathematics; writing of The Volterra Chronicles
Interview with William Tivol
Full text linkOn Seminar Day—Caltech’s annual reunion event—May 19, 2012, for the first time the Caltech Archives and Library offered alumni/ae the opportunity to record mini-interviews with Archives’ staff. Nine people participated, including one alumni spouse and one daughter. These alums held bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees across several divisions, with engineering marginally in the lead. One former student who transferred out of Caltech came back to relate how well his Caltech years had served him in his later studies and career in psychology. Ranging from 10 to 15 minutes in length, the interviews typically relate stories or episodes from student years. Favorite topics include pranks and traditions, some of which have died out. Alumni also reflect on professors and classes which were memorable and on the unique intellectual stimulus that a Caltech education provides. Readers will find that the transcripts of the short interviews reflect the personal and colloquial tone at which the event aimed
Interview with Martin Tangora
Full text linkOn Seminar Day—Caltech’s annual reunion event—May 19, 2012, for the first time the Caltech Archives and Library offered alumni/ae the opportunity to record mini-interviews with Archives’ staff. Nine people participated, including one alumni spouse and one daughter. These alums held bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees across several divisions, with engineering marginally in the lead. One former student who transferred out of Caltech came back to relate how well his Caltech years had served him in his later studies and career in psychology. Ranging from 10 to 15 minutes in length, the interviews typically relate stories or episodes from student years. Favorite topics include pranks and traditions, some of which have died out. Alumni also reflect on professors and classes which were memorable and on the unique intellectual stimulus that a Caltech education provides. Readers will find that the transcripts of the short interviews reflect the personal and colloquial tone at which the event aimed
Interview with Richard J. Harris
Full text linkOn Seminar Day—Caltech’s annual reunion event—May 19, 2012, for the first time the Caltech Archives and Library offered alumni/ae the opportunity to record mini-interviews with Archives’ staff. Nine people participated, including one alumni spouse and one daughter. These alums held bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees across several divisions, with engineering marginally in the lead. One former student who transferred out of Caltech came back to relate how well his Caltech years had served him in his later studies and career in psychology. Ranging from 10 to 15 minutes in length, the interviews typically relate stories or episodes from student years. Favorite topics include pranks and traditions, some of which have died out. Alumni also reflect on professors and classes which were memorable and on the unique intellectual stimulus that a Caltech education provides. Readers will find that the transcripts of the short interviews reflect the personal and colloquial tone at which the event aimed
Interview with Thomas J. Litle
Full text linkOn Seminar Day—Caltech’s annual reunion event—May 19, 2012, for the first time the Caltech Archives and Library offered alumni/ae the opportunity to record mini-interviews with Archives’ staff. Nine people participated, including one alumni spouse and one daughter. These alums held bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees across several divisions, with engineering marginally in the lead. One former student who transferred out of Caltech came back to relate how well his Caltech years had served him in his later studies and career in psychology. Ranging from 10 to 15 minutes in length, the interviews typically relate stories or episodes from student years. Favorite topics include pranks and traditions, some of which have died out. Alumni also reflect on professors and classes which were memorable and on the unique intellectual stimulus that a Caltech education provides. Readers will find that the transcripts of the short interviews reflect the personal and colloquial tone at which the event aimed
Interview with Murray Gell-Mann
Full text linkAn interview in two sessions, July 1997, with Murray Gell-Mann, Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics, emeritus. Dr. Gell-Mann was on the faculty of Caltech’s Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy from 1955 until 1993.
In this anecdotal interview tracing his career to 1960, he begins by recalling his Manhattan childhood during the Depression, family background, early education at Columbia Grammar School. Discusses his undergraduate years at Yale, graduate work at MIT with Victor Weisskopf, courses at Harvard with Norman Ramsey and Julian Schwinger—followed in 1951 by two terms at Institute for Advanced Study, working with Francis Low on a problem in quantum field theory. Summer 1951, University of Illinois, works on complex systems with Keith Brueckner; interaction with John von Neumann.
Joins University of Chicago’s Institute for Nuclear Studies, headed by Enrico Fermi; recalls such colleagues as M. L. Goldberger, Leo Szilard, Harold Urey, Gerald Wasserburg; works on dispersion relations and pseudoscalar meson theory with Goldberger. At University of Illinois, summer 1953, works with Low on elementary-particle field theory, invents the renormalization group; comments on later contributions of Petermann & Stueckelberg, his student Kenneth Wilson.
His early work at Caltech on what was later called S-matrix theory; comments on contribution to superstring theory. Meets future wife, Margaret Dow; travels in Scotland with her, 1954; their marriage. Recruited to Caltech by R. P. Feynman; life in Pasadena; visits Bohr Institute, Copenhagen, summer 1955; Spain, France, and the U.K. Back at Caltech fall 1956, teaches quantum mechanics course. Recollections of Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer, Stewart Harrison. Comments on undergraduate education at Caltech and vain efforts to promote behavioral and social sciences there.
Work at RAND, 1956; paper with Brueckner; objections by Brueckner and Tatsuro Sawada; contributions of Bill Karzas, Don DuBois, Jeffrey Goldstone. Annual Review of Nuclear Science article on “last stand of the universal Fermi Interaction” with Arthur Rosenfeld; related work by Marshak & Sudarshan; Feynman’s approach; their collaboration; later work by Yang & Lee. Comments on origins of the Eightfold Way. Preoccupation with symmetry, supermultiplets, weak and strong interactions, Yang-Mills theory. Collaboration with Maurice Lévy et al., in France, 1959, on the axial vector current in beta decay
Interview with Susan Davis
Full text linkInterview in three sessions with Susan Davis, division administrator for Caltech Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) from 1981 to 2012. Ms. Davis briefly recaps her youth and education in New England, her work with economists at the University of Rochester, and her marriage to Caltech economist Lance Davis before moving into a discussion of her thirty-five years with Caltech’s Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), including more than three decades as division administrator. She talks about the growth of the division’s undergraduate and graduate programs in the social sciences, the reactions this inspired within the division and across the Caltech campus, and discusses the relationship between social scientists and humanists within the division and with Caltech’s physical scientists. She recounts her years working with division chairs R. Huttenback, R. Noll, D. Grether, J. Ledyard, J. Ensminger, and J. Katz and with numerous HSS personalities, and discusses the evolution and growth of HSS’s academic programs over nearly four decades. She also talks about her service on Caltech staff committees and offers her personal perspective on changes in the campus environment and working conditions for staff, particularly staff women, over her years at Caltech
Interview with Norman R. Davidson
Full text linkAn interview in three sessions, August and September 1987, with Norman R. Davidson, Chandler Professor of Chemical Biology, emeritus, in the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. He received his BS (1937) and PhD (1941) from the University of Chicago and a BSc from the University of Oxford (1938). He came to Caltech as an instructor in 1946, becoming a full professor in 1957 and Chandler Professor in 1982.
He recalls growing up in Hyde Park, Chicago; his years at the university; his Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. Discusses his wartime work: with Anton Burg at USC; recruitment by Harold Urey for uranium isotope separation at Columbia; stint at University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory on the plutonium project under Glenn Seaborg. Postwar move to RCA Labs, Princeton, working on electron microscopy with James Hillier.
Recalls the chemistry division, Linus Pauling, and Robert A. Millikan, among others, during his early years at Caltech. His interest in organometallic chemistry, gas-phase reaction mechanisms, formation of complex ions in solution. Recalls serving on the Freshman Admissions Committee; designing flash-lamp photodissociation apparatus; work on dissociation by shock tubes with grad student Tucker Carrington. Growing interest in molecular biology; attending 1958 NIH biophysics conference, Boulder, CO; the evolution of chemical biology.
Discusses work of 1968 presidential search committee and Harold Brown’s selection; advocacy of an enriched humanities curriculum; his support for proposed affiliation with Immaculate Heart College. Recalls three of his outstanding postdocs/graduate students: James C. Wang, Phillip A. Sharp, Ronald W. Davis. Offers his views on Linus Pauling in an appendix