Even before the ring at HEPL was operating, I had begun to think about a high-energy electron-positron colliding-beam machine and what one could do with it. |
Getting enough energy to satisfy the needs of the developing world without bringing on an eco-disaster is not going to be easy. It will require a marriage of science and technology with good international policy, something that is always hard to bring off. We need to get it right this time. |
I completed my senior thesis on the quadratic Zeeman effect in hydrogen. |
I succumbed to temptation and became a scientific administrator, first as Technical Director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center from 1982 to 1984, and then Director from 1984 to 1999. The job of a laboratory director is much different from the job of a physicist, particularly in a time of tight budgets. It is much easier to do physics when someone else gets the funds than it is to get the funds for others to do the research. |
I was born on 22 March 1931 in New York, the elder child of Abraham and Fanny Richter. |
In 1948 I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undecided between studies of chemistry and physics, but my first year convinced me that physics was more interesting to me. |
Modern science is fast-moving, and no laboratory can exist for long with a program based on old facilities. Innovation and renewal are required to keep a laboratory on the frontiers of science. |
Science is particularly needed to bring the attention of government policy-makers to problems that they don't know about yet. |
Since stepping down as laboratory director in 1999, I have devoted an increasing fraction of my time to international issues. I am involved with energy, environment, and sustainability issues, particularly as they involve new energy sources free of greenhouse gases. |
Starving the future to feed the present is a mistake - it leads to obsolescence and stagnation. Sometimes it is hard to make this understood. |
While a lab Director can get done the things that he regards as important, he has the more important job of bringing out the best ideas of the broader scientific community. |