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i was born in the university of michigan hospital where both my parents were graduate students my father studied civil engineering my mother studied psychology right after i was born the war between china and japan broke up the war has been going on for a long time at that time my parents they were patriotic type they think they're chinese they want to go back to china so i was a few months old i had nothing to say so i went back to china with them so from some 19 third middle of 1936 tier 19 45 i was basically a refugee traveling around china and spent some time in chongqing which was the wartime capital of chinese nationalists and then in 1945 we went to nanjing within was the the final capital of the nationalist government after that in 1949 we went to taiwan from 49 to 56 i actually began my formal education in taiwan i am 56 on september 6 exactly today i went back to the university of michigan at the beginning i really didn't speak any english but since i was born in the university of michigan hospital i'm considered a citizen by birth and michigan residents so i got into the university and i don't i don't know how i got in because i speak hardly in english at the first year i studied mechanical engineering after the first year i had a conversation with my advisor robert white very good engineer at that time he took a look migrate he said you are no engineer and the problem was at that time there was no computer then you you have to for every engineer you have to do drawings so for object you have to look from the top look from the side look from the end that was no good i couldn't even draw a line with equal thickness and professor white said maybe you should study math and physics why do you take math and physics at the same time why don't you begin to take some courses in graduate school so in 56 when i first came in i was 20 years old i was the oldest in the class and second semester well i took begin to take some graduate courses and so i became the youngest the university was really very nice to me and they examined me from taking in english language history economics let me allow me to concentrate on math concentrate on physics so in 59 i got a bachelor's degree in mathematics and biophysics i am 62 end of 62 get my phd degree so from entering to university to leaving was a little bit around six years so that is that time considered fast particularly when i started i didn't hardly speak in english after that i realized see i've been spent six years only in michigan maybe i should go to europe so i applied for a fellowship from the ford foundation so from that from that foundation allowed me to go to the european organization for nuclear research in geneva switzerland i think i arrived march 31st 63 and so i was a cern before i left sir before i left for cern my one of my advisor marty pearl who was a graduate of columbia university at that time colombia's physics department was really the very best he said maybe i should recommend you to columbia university to be a instructor so i went to cern for a year and then i went back to colombia colombia at that time has many many truly outstanding physicists particularly i remember professor robbie and from these people i gradually learn how to do physics at university of michigan i finally graduated school somehow was somewhat easy for me and i developed besides school an interest in university of michigan football so i was there six years missed quite a few classes never missed a single football so i'm very proud of this fact that never missed a single football game university michigan as you know it's a football if you're a student if you're not if you if you don't watch football you are not with it and so oh i was very grateful i still still is very grateful to the university because they really educated and supported when i came to to who are entering to the university i had a discussion with my father and my muslim the discussion goes like this i told my parents i i heard people in united states go to school support by themselves so i don't need money from you just give me hundred dollars so that's what they did so fine take a hundred dollars and so i remembered on september 6 i landed in at that time called willow run airport not the current metropolitan airport and then i had a hamburger cost one dollar this was only then i began to realize what a serious mistake i made so but the university supported me with scholarship and so well that's how i started my little career so before that all-important meeting with your advisor when you decided not to become a mechanical engineer did you have a sense before that time that you had an aptitude for for math and physics or was that was that was it college that you really began to understand that and before i was 11 i was a refugee so i would go to one school for a few months go to another school for a few months and that time during war with world war ii there were japanese airplanes come to visit us and so so school is not stable so school was not my highest priority and i also gradually developed the interest to watch the birds to watch watch the animals but and not much opportunity to go to school i went to school for the first time in a serious way while i went to taiwan to attend the fifth grade and then i realized gee probably it's important to to take this matter seriously in high school i definitely was not the best student i was interested in chinese history in physics math and chemistry the reason i'm interested in chinese history is at that time i have a good memory i will read since once i remember so it was easy for me to get a hundred in school you're interested because you don't have to do too much work and you get a good grade if you if you spend a lot of time you still get zeroed you cannot be interested and i did not know what i want to do and because my father was an engineer my parents friend who was the dean of engineering at the university of michigan gg brown said to me that i can who i want to to an opposite i can live in their house with them and that's how i decide to study engineering so your discovery of math and then physics came actually relatively late yeah yeah so would you say that it was something that that you developed a love for very quickly or or was it tell me tell me about that sort of process of discovering that you your physics and math i found it's quite easy without much hard work you can get a good good grades and they enable you to go to to watch football on the side and so that was the only thing that was very easy for me so i i also wanted to ask you more about your parents um i mean clearly it was a tumultuous time and place to to grow up uh once you return to china tell me about your parents and their influence on you and my father come from a very wealthy family in northern china a place just across the pacific from california called santone province and my grandfather in 1920s made a tour around china and came back told his wife my grandma and told my grandma that the chinese society is going to collapse the only way we're going to save ourselves is to have all our children have education so my father my father's father my father and all went to school and they began to sell their land and to edu to educate their children this simple simple act enable all of them not been cured by the communist but difficult times my mother her father studied in japan he came back to china and was one of the early designers of the railroad in china and joined the revolution in 1911 somebody betrayed him so he was called and he was killed my my mother at that time was three years old and my my grandfather my mother's mother has sold everything they have to start the revolution and so now he was killed and so my grandma became penis but she decided i'm not going to stay in this little village i'm not i'm going to take my daughter my mom who is 3 years old to make sure she has education so at 8 30 she left the village and went to study to work for a missionary and then went to school and eventually became a teacher in grammar school brought up my mother so my i would say my mother who is a family my mother and her mother are really quiet quite determined person they really have a great influence on me this is a question that you could take in many directions but having that that childhood having that that background how has that influenced your your career your life the way you think about uh science if that's if that's the right way to ask the question um i think my father and my mother always at home mentioned to me the story of great physicists like isaac newton james clark maxwell michael faraday so ever since i was young i've heard about their names and what they do even though i didn't go to school i listened to them about the stories and that really has some influence on me and i also think my mother's mother who really had a very difficult life but never give up i always look forward perhaps have some indirect influence on me so as a as a young phd graduating from the university of michigan uh what were your interests and and what was what was next for you at that time i want to serve and study strong interactions strong interactions interaction among nucleus try to understand nuclear forces and after that i went back to colombia huawei colombia there was an experiment done by accelerator in cambridge called cambridge electro accelerator cea no longer exists now and they measured the size of the electron one experiment on scea another experiment done at cornell all shows electron has a science it's a measurable size this is a very important experiment because according to modern quantum electrodynamics electron should have no size no maximal diameter so i was a colombia i decided this is such an important experiment i really should repeat it i think it made me think probably 1965 around november it's a 64 65 around november i drove from columbia university to to harvard to talk to talk to the physicist about repeating the experiment with with the method i developed and the professors were very polite to me said well you know you never done experiment like this took us 10 years to do these things and you can you're welcome to join us but we'll we will not have will not have a place for you to do the experiment besides you have no financial support and i remember that day because i talked to the professor at harvard and that day there was a a blackout so i i want to talk to him for a few minutes then his face disappeared he was in the dark and so i went back to colombia and thought a little bit about it and realized this is such an important experiment it really should be measured again so i contacted my friends in europe at cern and they have went to hamburg to build a identical accelerator called daisy d e s y and they said well why don't you come talk to us at that time there were very few high energy freedoms in germany because as a consequence of the war in 56 or 65 i went there they said yeah boom will support you to do this experiment so i went back to columbia told the faculty and they said look you've never done such experiment takes normally five to ten years and you are a assistant professor you have to teach so i would please give me a half year leave and and they were very kind they gave me a half year leave but they said you're not going to finish this in a year but maybe we should give you a year leave but we'll guarantee you you're not going to finish it because you have no experience with this fortunately for us we finished in seven months and so the experiment at cornell the experimental in camp in cambridge both wrong the electron has no measurable science because of that experiment because there's somebody from nowhere nobody knows who i am and i've never done anything before and people began to notice then after some time i realized a light ray light ray troublesome space it has no mass no rest mass but if the energy is high enough since energy and mass are e equal to m c square and so light ray must have an open opportunity to change to a massive particle this must happen so now i have a very high energy library from the accelerator it must be able to produce massive particles and this particles then will go back to light ray and goes to a electron positive and it's a very rare process but must exist people have looked at before and never was i never found the result and so i did a series of this experiment and found indeed they do exist the library can cancel a massive particle and go back to a light ray and go to the electropositon pair and then mit began to show interesting and so i think it's 67 i came to visit mit the head of the physics department was professor weiskopf i had a conversation with him and he said to me we would like to hire you but at mit associate professor has no tenure at that time since i've done some experiments some of them are somewhat important in the world of physics so i had quite a few offers all have tenure might is the only one which did not carry 10 and at that time i really didn't understand what tenure is i said that's fine but i only have one condition professor weiskopf asked what is your condition i said i would i will come here without tenure that's fine but please allow me to work based on the development of physics not working at the cambridge electronic solution which is near harvard square and they said that's fine and with that condition i came to mit after two months i was in a faculty lunch after the lunch or the senior professor went to the room for a 10-year faculty meeting and i was not and and so i went to the header department i said you know i have not much interest in the university affairs i'm very busy with experiment but not allow me to to listen to what's going on it's a bit excessive and besides my other offers are still pending and professor wise club said no don't do anything and two months later my key to his great credit gave me a tenure so so to get attendee at that time was important to get a good offer from somewhere else and that's how i stayed at mit i never dreamed that i would stay in my most my career at mit i thought since i don't have tenure or come here for a few years then i will become so i'm curious to i want to ask just a bit more about the experiment that you did in hamburg where you managed to do the experiment in seven months that they said would take much longer to what would you attribute that that success i mean was it a different way of thinking about the problem than other people were thinking about it or pure hard work i mean what uh wow um normally when i do experiment i spend a lot of time thinking through what could be the signal what could be the background what experimental check i will make so if if i'm giving hundred hours to use the accelerator i will spend more than 60 hours checking my instrument to make sure when you make a mistake it's normal it's your instrument always is your instrument so i spent basically spend time check the instrument also i normally follow in great detail the electronics logic the size of the detector and the pressure of the counter all the technical details i spend all the time follow all the details when you make a mistake it's normally in your instrument and i make sure i understand if you know there's something wrong with your instrument then you can correct you're going to make a mistake if the instrument is not working and you do not know as you mentioned you've spent most of your career at mit 1969 i guess was the year that you arrived officially said i don't remember i thought it was like fixed yeah it could be 69 but around that time well tell me a little bit about what what the environment at mit was like then um has it and has it changed significantly i mean no oh i found this is a great place because i was given a lot of support from the school of science from the physics department and from the laboratory for nuclear science they really go out of their way to support support and also the laboratories in europe in germany in switzerland and in holland in italy in russia they all support my work and collaborate with me the reason they collaborate with me i think if you analyze it is i've always managed to choose an interesting topic and so physicists think this is an important topic and second everyone my experiment has produced some important results so far we have not yet made a mistake and third i always make sure that people who did the work receive proper recognition be a professor be the graduate student in this way you can people will work with you otherwise if you continually making rounds around making a mistake and take over or or take all the credit away nobody will support you you mentioned professor weiskopf at that time were there other other people uh at mit at that time that had a significant influence either on your career or on your your thinking that that are worth talking about well oh i would say herman fishbach the late head of the department of physics francis lowe the previous provost the whole physicist and martin deutsch a very famous physicist and they all had very important influence now there's also steve weinberg i was at that time at mit i normally come back to mit and talk to physics with these people tell me a little bit about how you view the collaborative nature of your work uh you know i mean are you how important is it for you to be surrounded by people like that who are providing interesting questions or maybe interesting ideas interesting answers there are two kind of experimental physicists one to check people's theory another tries to choose its own topic both are very important but to prove somebody's theory you don't learn much it's when you destroy somebody's theory you learn something new so for a physicist experimental physicist to choose the right topic it's very very important but in physics political pain it's really not important because the advancement of physics you try to modify public opinion to destroy common feelings then you can move ahead so in most my experiments at the beginning there were a lot of objections uh the one in hamburg i already mentioned the one which i eventually got a nobel prize in brookhaven that was a very difficult experiment the experiment originally come from the fact i was measuring light rays to change to massive particles and then go back to light rays goes to the electron positive pair now he was very curious to me why all these particles all has a mass of one billion electron volt namely the mass of proton i asked myself why is this why this like this people's explanation was there are only three type of quarks in the universe with three type of quarks we can explain all the known phenomena now to look for how to the fourth quarter or fifth score it's very unpopular the theories that not look three quarks can explain everything you don't need four chords experimentalists said this is such a difficult experiment no one can do can do such experiment the the sensitivity we eventually achieved was one signal to background or one part in 10 billion one what does one participants in boston there are 10 billion raindrops per second and if you want one of them is blue you have to find that one but it's somewhat difficult so so this experiment was basically rejected by everyone by fermi national laboratory by by certain main theories that is totally rubbish not not needed for experimentalists that nobody can do this experiment finally brookhaven national laboratory somehow made a mistake approved and it was approved in 72 and two years later sure enough we found a particle which i call the j particle this particle once is discovered a subsequent family was discovered and the subsequent family mostly discovered by professor richter it has a very unique property that is it has unusual long lifetime the lifetime is about 10 000 times longer than the rest of the particles what does this mean now everybody on earth lives about 100 years if you find a family a village somewhere people lives a million years these people must be must be different meaning there are new type of metal new type of material and that's the from the fourth quarter right it is because of this that you break down the previous understanding nobody thought this exists that's how ricks and i were awarded nobel prize now of course after you have the fourth one the fifth one was found the sixth one was one now people think again six core can explain everything but if you don't look you do not know so that you've answered this at least somewhat but i was going to ask what what transpired what has developed since the that that discovery.com since that time people found the fifth score from the sex court and now people who are still continuing looking for this and looking at the core caster size as a dimension or not and no if you don't look you will never know so so tell me about winning the nobel prize uh what tell me about the experience and uh yes it was 1976 october 18th i was in my in my office in geneva suddenly a foreigner took a look at swedish accent from the secretary of the royal swedish academy of science said congratulations you have won the nobel prize together with professor victor and of course i was very happy because most of people wait for 10 20 30 years in my time was a little bit less than two years it's considered quite fast so i was very happy and later i learned and my kid also was very happy i had a huge party to celebrate this of course forgot to invite me and so when i come back and months later they had another party for me and then i made it made sure the people who work with me who contributed experiment are invited to to the ceremony uh you chose to give your acceptance speech in in mandarin which i believe was the first time anyone had ever given a speech in that language can you talk about that that decision and what it what it meant to you i was young i had very little education and through my career i was doing experiments but i as i mentioned i know a little bit about chinese history during my before i was 20. and in the chinese traditional chinese education people use their mind is considered superior people use their hand it's considered slightly less superior this this concept has a tremendous influence on students in asia that's what many many want to do to do theory but natural science the physics in chemistry in biology it's experimental science a theory however elegant if it cannot be proved by experiment it's useless an experiment can destroy the theory a theory can never destroy an experiment it's only when experiment confronted the theory you produce new theory and this is how science advise so i thought i'd give a little short speech in chinese aiming to the students in the in asia to mention natural science it's really experimental science and this was this was not popular with the u.s embassy in sweden in 1976 the relation with china is somewhat tense and so the ambassador actually come to talk to me and said well you are american and you should give the speech in english i said no okay i have no political sympathy what whatsoever with with the chinese government chinese language is a commonly used language it's one of the oldest languages and one quarter of the people on earth speaks and giving a speaking chinese it's a scientific thing it has absolutely nothing to do with politics so i decided to give it in chinese anyway that was the reason what did it mean for you personally to win the nobel prize i mean i guess i'm interested i mean in in what it what it how it changed things for you and also maybe more generally what do prizes like that mean if you read the where of half a nobel it was supposed to the price is given to people who have done the work in the previous year which is the most important previous year orphans means 30 years for 30 years 20 years in my time i was 40 years old and for experimentalists this is not considered all so having received a nobel prize was really quite helpful to me because it opens many doors for additional support for me indeed was very useful for me but if you give me a nobel prize now is it probably it's not useful and as you say some people receive nobel prizes for work that was most many years most of them in the 60s 70s or 80s so what kind of doors did it open what were the next things people suddenly increase their support to you and you have more access okay to leading scientists and i think that's really very important you you have chance to talk to other nobel laureates and access to the government this these are important things for continue to do experiments so what projects were you interested in taking on at that point in your career having just won a nobel prize at a at a quite young age and still in the middle of a research career what it didn't change me i just continued to do my experiment didn't change when you are sixties or seventies normally you do something often you do something else and i like many nobel laureates are often asked to sign petitions give public opinions i have never done that because i view receiving nobel prize is a recognition on a particular restricted contribution i have made to science perhaps this contribution is important but this does not mean then i'm an expert in sociology and politics and public policy and so i've never engaged in that basically still concentrate on what i'm doing at that point in your career in the late 1970s uh what were you interested in working on and what were in fact you working on i did two things i make you continue to measure the size of the electron fascinate how small the size of the electron and then we did one a very important experiment and that is a forces between an electron and the nucleus is transmitted by light rays forces between quarks which is the smallest element is transmitted something called gluons that's a theory and we did the experiment in hamburg indeed see the trace of the gluons that is considered a important experiment and then we also have done some experiments to see how many types of electrons are there we know there's an electron it goes through the electric wire and there is electron from space it's mass it's 200 times heavier than ordinary electrons and there are electrons inside the nucleus its mass is four thousand times heavier than ordinary electron beside these three there's no more for we never found the fourth electron it doesn't mean it doesn't exist it just means the energy we have is not high enough you will never know whether there's only three type of electron or not until you do the measurement so that another thing i was interested in is what is the original mass why different particles have different mass what mass come from and in 94 united states had wanted to build a very large accelerator called superconducting supercollider and because cause overrun and because very serious mismanagement so the congress actually president clinton essentially stopped this project and then i began to think i've been doing experimenting accelerator all my all my career maybe it's time to do something new to do something i know nothing about then i asked myself if the universe comes from a big bang before the big bang it is vacuum for this vacuum vacuum means nothing existing nothing exists so at the beginning you have if you have an electron you must have an anti-electron copacetal indeed positron exists if you go to hospital pet scans it's a positive you have a proton you have anti-protons so you have a metal you have antimatter but if the universe come from a big bang at the beginning there must be equal amount of matter and antimatter otherwise you will not have come from from vacuum so now the universe is 14 billion years old where is the universe made out of antimatter early in my career when i was still at columbia i did experiment with professor lederman another nobel laureate we found an anti-proton anti-neutron forms anti-deuteron namely antimatter nucleus diseases but i asked myself is there a universe made out of antimatter because antimatter when you enter into the atmosphere annihilates with metal so you can never detect underground so you have to go to space because metal antimatter has opposite charge so you need a magnet inside the magnet positive go one way and negative another way now put a magnet in space that's a small problem you know a magnetic compass one end will go to north another and go to south so if you're not careful if you put the magnet in space the magnet will always rotate and then use the space shutter will lose control that's why for many years people could not put a magnet in space in 75 we figure out a way to design a magnet it doesn't rotate in space it's more little trick it took 40 years to figure it out and so i remember let me see the 9th of may in 1994. i went to see the administrator of nasa daniel goldin i brought my collaborators to talk to him and normally high officers in washington doesn't see poor physicists but golden is a very curious person so he actually called he heard i had this interest and he called me you come see so i brought my collaborators so we went there at nine o'clock talk till about 12. supposedly one hour lasted for three hours he asked he's a very very intelligent person he has many many technical questions and he said why don't you come back this afternoon i want to talk to you more shout out in the afternoon and he said two things he said you may have some experience being accelerated but space is very hostile you've never done experiment in space we're not going to trust you the second thing he said is i have no money but i'm interested in this experiment and if you can put into the space station it is ideal for the space station and he said you know who supports you i said well the department of energy support me and the europeans support me and also mit support he said no we have an agreement with the department of energy with nsf with many agencies if they make a request to nasa nasa could choose to honor you so have your project reviewed by peers in the department of energy so i went to the department of energy and they were fried they were somewhat frightened there's a book do you realize what you're doing you're going to space okay it's very costly and b this is not a department energy agenda i mentioned to them what you ought to do is to choose the best scientists in the in the united states choose among the nobel laureate a member of the national academy of science to have a review see whether the experiment will propose is worth worthwhile and it is important in fact my only request is to choose first class review because the first class reviewer can look at the distance and have a feeling what it goes on a third class reviewer will perhaps think gee give the money to same thing what will happen to my project until the credit of doe they indeed choose first class review and the review committee there's jim cronin a nobel laureate george smooth nobel laureate and the rest of muslim members national academy and they came to mit in april my my memory could fade i think it's around the 20th of april for two days reviewed us and then they said this is a very important experiment and so do we decide to to support us in the approval letter in the standard minority which this is a good experience we should support you but our budget is limited you need to find most of your funds from europe because the quality of the review so it was easy for my collaborators in germany in switzerland in france in italy basically and holland russia to quickly support us so quickly formed from the collaboration and mr golden the administrator also in the first conversation said to me i want you to fly this experiment on a space shuttle once to prove you know how to do this and so we will approve in september formally approved in september in 97 the no 9 i think 96 two years later we were sent to space so we've been talking about the long history and development of the alpha magnetic spectrometer and i think we had just reached the point where ams one flew on the shuttle in 1998. tell me a little bit about the next phase as it were once once you demonstrated that you could fly to space and put this experiment in orbit the next phase is to install on the space station and originally we were approved for three years and space station was going to have many experiments in fact after us on the station for three years another experiment was already scheduled so we thought we will use a superconducting magnet the strength is much stronger than a permanent magnet build a superconducting magnet at the minus 253 degrees below zero centigrade it's not a trivial job it has many applications therefore the russians former service has tried many times without without success but just technically this was pretty much solved by the swiss the eth jury the equivalent of mit in switzerland did the most of the work but then there was a excellent accident with the column with colombia and so united states decided to reprogram its space project centered on send people to moon and mars so on october i forgot which day now early october i had in conversation i always see my senior collaborator go with me with the then nasa administrator the honorable michael griffin i i think the dean of science professor bob sabri went with me and the conversation lasts for one hour i present the project and mr griffin i think is a very good engineer and you can feel he can't he understands things and he at the end of the hour he said what do you want from me i said i want to carry out the original project agreed between nasa and doe and 16 countries and they have put in most of the funds and at that time we had spent already about 1.5 billion us dollars on this project mr griffin said i have no shuttle but i will continue authorized the johnson space center continues to help you to development but bear in mind we have no shuttle for you so all of a sudden the projects going forward smoothly but we're getting nowhere so i looked with my collaborators whether we can use a japanese market russian rocket even a chinese rocket but was just not practical because it was designed for a space shuttle the bottom is just too big the weight is too large fortunately a month later suddenly i received the invitation from the senate community and commerce science and transportation chairman was delayed ted stephens of alaska invited me and three other nobel laureates to discuss to have a hearing on the future of science in the united states celine of the lawyers were were still actively doing research and at that time i was not interested i know i i'm not i don't consider myself qualified to to discuss the future of science in the united states wife susan said no you should use this opportunity to explain what you are doing so i said fine so i answered yes but then later i learned when you testify in the in the commerce community you're you're given five minutes so in five minutes you cannot explain a two billion dollar experiment so i said could i please have two large tv they said yes [Music] so how i came the the first speaker put have a prepared text second speaker and i was the third one i believe i showed in five minutes ten view bureaucrats but for whatever reason during my presentation many senators came k bailey hutchinson and few others okay after my talk after my talk there were many many questions because for the first time the senators realized the space station is 100 billion dollars and there's not a single science experiment and this did not please them so after the hearing the chairman senator stevens said now the meeting is over everybody should leave but professor king could you stay so i wanted to stay and so he walked over shake my hand said you come to have lunch with me i said well my wife is here and there will have a also senior collaborator michael capelle with me and he said bring them along too so went to senator stephen's office there was a party turned out to be that day was his 82nd birthday and then took us to dinner to a lunch ask many questions why why not has not done fly such an important experiment who has reviewed this experiment this scientifically many many very tough very intelligent penetrating questions and i said to him senator if you are so interested why don't you come visit us in geneva he said okay let me see what i can do so that was october in january the senator from the senior senator from texas kay bailey hutchinson invited me to visit her explaining the ms project to her and she was really very concerned with such a heavy investment and no signs at all and doing this during this meeting with her i suddenly received a phone call from senator stephen's office so my wife and i went to stephen's office and senator stevens said didn't you invite me to come to geneva i said of course he said well i'm coming and i was foolish enough to say which airline do you take and i go to the airport he said no i have my own air force yet so he came with a very important congressional stock staff okay a person particularly remembers jeff bingham extremely capable person from then on i met many senators senator nelson and senator vitter and many congressmen joe barton rob paul many many people people in the congress and the senate began to realize that something wrong okay why the money come from foreign countries so united states a has an international obligation because it is a signed agreement b you cannot build a 100 billion dollar space station without doing signs and so in in 2008 the house and senate unanimously voted a resolution i think it's hr 6063 requests nasa to add a shuttle flight to deliver us to the space station and so this was signed by into law by president bush in 208 and when president obama took office in january january to 9 january 20 2009 on the 23rd of january we were on the manifest to fly again that's how we manage mainly because people realize a carefully reviewed carefully the same experiment paid by international community kind is ideal for space station and should be used in the united states to carry out its commitment that's how we're there and it was this was it the second to last shuttle flight yeah it was on yeah in may of this year yeah may 19th so tell me now now that it's arrived and has been uh installed on the iss what uh what's the timeline what are the the expectations there's a small interloop the experiment was originally designed with a superconducting magnet very difficult to build so we build it and then we ship it to a thermal vacuum tank thermal vacuum tank is changed the temperature from plus 60 degree to minus 40 degree and total vacuum so you simulate this space we found this magnet with carries home carries 2 500 liters of very cold healing can last approximately three years as the original design just as we finished the design finish the the test there was an announcement so the space station will last for 20 years and we will be on the last shuttle that means we'll be on the station for three years and the rest of the 17 years will be a museum piece and by then it was somewhat late and that we were supposed to that was a uh 2 0 1 0 in april already was supposed to fly next year and was supposed to we have a range for for a c5 to to pick us up from amsterdam just before we mount on the truck there was this announcement this basically will last for for 20 years and so i get together with my senior collaborators and mention to them this will not do we're going to have to make a change we're going to take the whole detector apart make a change install the permanent magnet but install more detectors so the resolution is the same adding more adding more detectors and nasa was very concerned nobody can take such a complicated detector 300 000 channels but but before that i have in 208 207 i've took apart the detector assembled them took apart assemble them two or three times mainly to check whether there's something wrong so i know how long it takes so i made a decision mostly by myself to change the magnet so we change the magnet from a superconducting magnet to a permanent magnet the permanent magnet the one with fluid for the first time everything was done very quickly because the universities in universities and the industries aerospace industries in italy and germany are extremely supportive and so we managed to change it and then on august 26th last year we flew with the air force c5 to kennedy space center so so that's how we're now in space we are going to be in space for the duration of the space station which plan which is planned to be about 20 years so tell me a bit about your expectations for for the experiment i mean if it's it's so it's a very long duration experiment now um what do you hope and what do you expect to see since nobody has ever done such a sensitive precise experiment the most important thing is to make sure instrument is correct to understand the property of the instrument to monitor the instrument every information will get its new information to predict the future is very very difficult but the most important thing is not to make a mistake because if you make a mistake you're going to change the course of physics for many years given the fact it took us 17 years to build this experiment at 2 billion dollars i doubt that in next 50 years people will be foolish enough to repeat this experiment again so my i think i always mention to my collaborators the most important thing is to make sure the instrument is correct because every single major people have not done before because energy and the precision so you've spent much of your career negotiating very difficult waters that encompass not just science and extremely precise and difficult science but also politics budgets money international collaborations i was sorry if you talk about that a bit in in terms of what it takes to do that successfully and also maybe look at the the future of that very very complex relationship between politics money and science i mean you know you mentioned the superconducting super collider i mean clearly the cancellation of that had a huge impact on on experimental physics um how do you do it successfully and and and what are the pitfalls i think i i'm not qualified to give a general statement i can only mention my own experience the fact every one of our experiments has yielded a correct result we have never made a mistake we have always treated all collaborators correctly give them high visibility is the way i manage to have such a large collaboration together i do not involve myself in personality disputes and financial issues like in germany or france or italy they agree with me they will build this detector apart you get detectors experiment has many detectors so each country take a responsibility of the detector they agree with me on specification and procedures of tests and i sometimes help them to for them to meet with the government and then they request their own funding they do their own thing every three months everybody get together we'll have a meeting meeting normally i have about two or three hundred people the meetings chaired by me and we can sometimes last whole week and i want to make sure every person who has something to say say whether it's a professor whether it's a laboratory director or even a young graduate student my only requirement yes only one person talk if the young student talks everybody is quiet to listen and normally i listen very very carefully i probably remembers what this person have said now what they said last year what he said three years ago if there's an inconsistency i will ask the question why but very often there are conflicts a detector a french thing should be built like this the italian things should be built like this and there's only one space and i have to choose one over the other and this decision is done by me after carefully listening to all the presentations but this decision is always on physics ground you cannot say well these people have spent so much money if i don't choose theirs okay and they lost their job this and that you choose it because you think that is the best for the experiment if i have not understood i do not make a decision i will come back in two or three months again i will ask the experts people stay with me because so far the decision has been correct now if you keep making random wrong decision people walk away from you but it's very important to listen to everyone particularly the young people and do not let any outside influence financial or political influence disturb you because it's a very serious matter once in space there's no way for you to change it do you think it's getting more difficult to to launch these kinds of very very large time consuming and expensive experimental projects i mean is it is it getting harder to navigate these waters that we've been discussing or or not i would not know how to answer this while i was much younger i was doing small experiment nobody believed me so i had difficulties now i have people tend to have some confidence that i do reasonable work and people support me but in the causes so much you have to involve in so many things so i don't know which one is more difficult for me in general okay almost all my experiment has been somewhat difficult there's always people object you have to be somewhat tolerant of other people's mistakes looking out over the next 20 or 30 years i don't know i'll let you choose the time frame how about what are the what are the really really exciting questions that that you think people are going to be tackling in experimental physics and how are they going to tackle them i would not know people businesses when you ask them to predict future it's normally you get in nowhere when brookhaven national laboratory was built in 1960s the original purpose the result of the review by the national academy but to study nuclear force what was discovered was there are two kind of neutrino the j particle the violation of fundamental symmetry called cp violation when stanford linear accelerator was built was to study property of electricity what was discovered was part-time inside the cork you interviewed professor friedman and the the side particle with the other part of the a particle and the third family of the electrons so when you build something something new you ask the best expert to say what you can do but expert is based on existing knowledge the advancement of physics is to advance beyond the existing money so it's very difficult to predict the future it sounds like early in your career when when you had a lot of people were very skeptical about the the kinds of experiments you wanted um having having a certain number of mentors and people who actually were willing to take you seriously and take you take take your ideas uh seriously was very important and i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about mentorship in the sciences both both as someone who benefited from mentoring and also someone who presumably because become a mentor since now i would say the person the two person who really had influence on me one is professor robbie and nobel laureate who mentioned to me the most important thing for experimental physicists is choose the right topic to do research and the second person who i knew quite well richard feynman and before i do experiment i normally go to see him explain to him he listened quite quietly and often ask me a simple question so look sam if you don't do this what else you're going to do and just from this personal interaction i learned many things another person i think who i listen carefully is professor steve weinberg used to be at mit now at texas who really is a very deep physicist so i would not know called these three mentors or not but i talk to them a lot do you uh consciously try to play a similar role in uh encouraging younger physicists or is it something that just i do not know when i came to mit in the physics department there were there was a very different very different department many very good physicists now many years has passed there are many professors had worked with me before of particular interest is professor borlaug vice lodge professor of ice launch um i met in the cafeteria i served on saturday afternoon i was drinking coffee came dressing a very shabby clothes he said i just escaped from poland i have no identification paper i have nothing but i want to study with you opening sentence and i said fine come to my office come to my office we talked for three hours i asked him to explain to me what he has studied and i asked him to ask me questions instead of me ask him questions afterwards i wrote a letter to the physics department i said this person has escaped from poland that was during the cold war time and i interviewed him i spent three hours with him and i want him to be admitted and i will pay all the costs from her from the budget i have in department that meet the team he is now a full professor a full professor at mit another interesting case it's a lady physicist dr marian white who is now has an important job in organizing the laboratory she is uh always afraid of examination examination because you know she's very scared as a consequence her grades are very poor everybody said no she doesn't belong to mit she should leave i talked to her and i had a different opinion upon she really is very very familiar with physics so at my urgent department kept her and i took her out as my student and the day after she finished her thesis there's a final oral defense i talked to her i said look mary you cannot mess up with this to keep you calm i will ask you a question first so i uh how is this thing of the pai mesa discovered so i told her this question i told her the answer i said i have asked you this just to calm you down and so next morning at 10 there was this one this is defense so as i asked mary how was the spring of primates on this major discovery she said oh no you asked me this you told me this answer yesterday and i forgot explained to the uh to the to the committee she's a really very very good physicist and that's how they let her go now she has a very high position yeah so you mentioned that the the department at mit had changed quite a lot in the last um 40 years do you mean just personnel or in terms of approach approach when i first came to mit every professor carries out their own project now you work at cern the experiment has two thousand people imagine two 2000 physicists working in one experiment and so tends to collaborate tends to be people tend to collaborate together the quality has not changed we will have a very good physics department what is it uh what is it about mit that has made it a conducive home for you you we mentioned some of your colleagues and how they've helped you but i would say they have always supported and who were removed from the shuttle manifest and my key continued support and the fact mit supported me the department of energy supporting me carries a strong signal to the europeans that this is an important thing to perceive when people want people believe in you and people when people want to support you they'll find a way to do it if people don't believe you in you no matter what you do will not change their mind you agree i do um so i'm winding down i i had one question that i wanted to ask that's a rather vague question but but you you've spoken several times about um this the the power of experimental physics and the sort of relationship between experimentation and in theory and it reminds me of the mind and hand motto of mit um i i was wondering if you could speak a bit about another kind of balance which is which is similar and is related between sort of practical application and pure knowledge and and experiments and efforts designed to push one or the other how do those two you know are they in conflict are they mutually supportive what you really want to ask is what does fundamental science pure science to do with daily life with industry 100 years ago fundamental science esteeming is a mechanics thermodynamics now using aircraft using in aircraft in many industries in 30s the frontier science is atomic physics at that time people would say well what are those things useful now is used for i.t for your communication all the things you're using today okay or 13 in the 30s considered frontier science in the 40s the frontier science is nuclear physics now it's used in energy in defense so from the fundamental research to application there's a time lag the lag timeline could be 30 years 40 years but once it's used it changes everybody's life if you don't do frontier research you're never going to push the envelope in technology so uh as we wind down i i'd like to just ask in closing is there anything that that we haven't touched on that you think is extremely important to to include in this well extremely important to me is my wife susan she had a degree in psychology phd degree she graduated from university where i went at the age when i went to university as a freshman and after who after we got married and she realized this this is my second marriage and she realized her family her her family is much more important than her career so she does a lot of administration job for a group instead of us researching psychology and she really is extremely supportive extremely important to me and you have three children there are three children two from the first marriage and one from the second marriage and all of them are good friends with each other made they all made sure nobody studied physics yeah and but they are all very close to to my wife and well i want to thank you for spending a couple of hours speaking with us this has been really fascinating and wonderful thanks very much

Channel: Pure Unintentional ASMR

Views: 752,759

Rating: 4.8666801 out of 5

Keywords: unintentional ASMR, ASMR, soft spoken, relaxing voice, relaxing video, soothing voice, accidental ASMR, ASMR whispers, ASMR unintentional, best unintentional asmr voice, best unintentional asmr

Id: MhFvF-Jqvc8

Length: 94min 20sec (5660 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/digital_bubblebath]

Interesting and relaxing; my favourite kind of video.

[u/LayClespool]

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