Physicists From The United States

"The results of my little experiment [Sokal affair] demonstrate, at the very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy. The editors of Social Text liked my article because they liked its conclusion: that "the content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project" [sec. 6]. They apparently felt no need to analyze the quality of the evidence, the cogency of the arguments, or even the relevance of the arguments to the purported conclusion."

"When scientific research is increasingly funded by private corporations that have a financial interest in particular outcomes of that research—is the drug effective or not?—scientific objectivity is undermined. When universities are more interested in patent royalties than in the open sharing of scientific information, the public suffers. There are hundreds of important political and economic issues surrounding science and technology. Sociology of science, at its best, has done much to clarify these issues. But sloppy sociology, like sloppy science, is useless or even counterproductive."

"But why did I do it? I confess that I'm an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them."

"... I am going to go out on a limb, and argue that"

"We believe string theory has a set of solutions, some of which might describe our world. Even leaving aside the question of few vacua or many, and organizing principles, perhaps the most basic question about the landscape is whether it will turn out to be more like mathematics, or more like chemistry."

"... for almost as long as people have been anticipating ... thinking about , the prime candidate for new physics, beyond the , ... has been supersymmetry."

"There are still many open questions that need answering: Why does gravity defy the notion of space-time in short distances? Why are there humongous quantum fluctuations in shorter distances? How is a larger Universe possible? These questions relate to the hierarchy problem and fine tuning and are divided into two stages. First, one should ask: “Why is there a macroscopic Universe that is not broken in the Planck scale,” and second: “Why are there large scale structures in the large Universe and they are not broken into Planck scale black holes?”"

"... nature has very few good ideas — it recycles them in subtle and interesting ways, over and over again — and it's our job to understand how that works."

"The stakes are higher than the past. We aren’t asking about this or that particle, but something much more deeply structural about physical reality. … By far the best way to settle this question is to lead a charge to the highest possible energies and build a 100-TeV collider."

"The black hole information paradox is probably the most important issue for fundamental physics today. If we cannot understand its resolution, then we cannot understand how quantum theory and gravity work together. Yet very few people seem to understand how robust the original Hawking arguments are and what exactly it would take to resolve the problem."

"Two of the major questions left unanswered by the Standard Model of particle physics have to do with hierarchies of mass scales. The first is the problem: what determines the masses of the s and s, and why do they span such a large range, e.g. why is the top quark 3 × 105 times heavier than the electron? The second is the gauge hierarchy problem: why is the weak scale seventeen orders of magnitude smaller than the ?"

"The hierarchy problem is the elephant in the room. ... And it originally showed up in the context of doublet–triplet splitting problem."

"The exact description of any physical process must include the effects of quantum gravity. But our experience suggests that there is a separation of scales, so that under suitable conditions we get 'lab physics'; i.e., physics described to good accuracy by quantum fields on gently curved spacetime."

"This is the best few tens of billions years in the history of the universe to do cosmology."

"Whether in physics and mathematics or in the humanities, when something really finally works, it has a certain perfection to it, a feeling of inevitability, like it was so completely obvious all along, and it couldn't be any other way."

"In the fuzzball paradigm, the black hole microstates have no interior, and radiate unitarily from their surface through quanta of energy E ∼ T. But quanta with E ≫ T impinging on the fuzzball create large collective excitations of the fuzzball surface. The dynamics of such excitations must be studied as an evolution in superspace, the space of all fuzzball solution |Fi⟩."

"... like most physicists, I really enjoy talking about physics."

"Superstring theory has been studied intensively since 1984, when the discovery of Green and Schwarz of anomaly cancellation convinced many physicists that it provides a consisten theory of perturbative quantum gravity, gauge interactions and chiral matter. The basic difficulties in quantizing general relativity and supergravity (non-renormalizability or at least strong coupling at the Planck scale) are visible at low order in the loop expanison, while superstring theory was shown to be well-defined and finite to all orders."

"How did particle physics get itself into its current state where some of its most prominent practitioners question whether their colleagues have given up on science?"

"We have an incredibly successful theory called the Standard Model. ... It still leaves open several questions."

"In this kind of physics, everybody is always looking ... to the smart people and what is everybody else working on."

"The standard model is just too good. It's too hard to find an experimental result that disagrees with it, and too hard to come up with theoretical advances that will address some of the things it leaves unexplained."

"It has always seemed to me that the hard thing to understand is not quantum mechanics, but where classical mechanics comes from (in the sense of how it emerges from a “measurement”)."

"The Higgs boson is an essential part of the analogy to the Meissner effect in superconductivity that leads us to an excellent understanding of the masses of the electroweak gauge bosons W± and Z0 as consequences of electroweak symmetry breaking."

"If there is no connection between quarks and leptons, since quarks make up the proton, then the balance of the proton and electron charge is just a remarkable coincidence. It seems impossible for any thinking person to be satisfied with coincidence as an explanation. Some principle must relate the charges of the quarks and the leptons. What is it? A fancier way of saying it, and more or less equivalent, is that for the electroweak theory to make sense up to arbitrarily high energies, the symmetries on which it is based must survive quantum corrections."

"Each second, some 1014 neutrinos made in the Sun and about a thousand neutrinos made by cosmic rays in Earth's atmosphere pass through your body."

"Yoichiro Nambu was one of the most influential theoretical physicists of the twentieth century. His deep and unexpected insights often took years for others to understand and fully appreciate. They include: spontaneous symmetry breaking, for which he was awarded half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics; the theory of quarks and gluons; and string theory."

"The idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking was introduced into particle physics by Nambu ... in 1960. He suggested that the low mass and low-energy interactions of s could be understood as a reflection of a spontaneously-broken chiral symmetry, would have been exact if the up and down quarks were massless. His suggestion was that light quarks condense in the vacuum, much like the s of superconductivity. When this happens, the ‘hidden’ chiral symmetry causes the pions’ masses to vanish, and fixes their low-energy s to s, s and each other."

"Ideas and techniques known in quantum electrodynamics have been applied to the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory of superconductivity. In an approximation which corresponds to a generalization of the Hartree-Fock fields, one can write down an integral equation defining the self-energy of an electron in an electron gas with phonon and Coulomb interaction. The form of the equation implies the existence of a particular solution which does not follow from perturbation theory, and which leads to the energy gap equation and the quasi-particle picture analogous to Bogolyubov's."

"It was the great multiplicity of the hadrons that led to the formulation of the quark model. Without some organizing principle such a large collection of particles seemed unwieldy, and the possibility that they might all be elementary offended those who hold the conviction, or at least the fond wish, that nature should be simple."

"Neither quarks nor leptons exhibit any structure on a scale of about 10-16 cm, the currently attained resolution. We thus have no experimental reason but tradition to suspect that they are not the ultimate elementary particles. Accordingly, we idealize the quarks and leptons as pointlike particles, remembering that elementarity is subject to experimental test."

"Sally told me... it cost about $75,000 to make a half-hour program. ...[T]he original grant was for $750,000. We eventually got $6 million... [P]art of the proposal... was to make a pilot program that cost hundreds of thousands... and took three years... And that was a make-or-break—either they accepted the pilot program or the project was dead. ...It became the second program in the series... "The Law of Falling Bodies." ...this absolutely beautiful pilot program ...which cost $350,000 ...everybody loved it and they said, “Go ahead.” ...And that meant ...classy computer animation and ...actors ...We did all kinds of things you just don’t do in educational television."

"[N]obody ever made a million dollars on . Five years after the series went public, we got a letter ...saying, "You’ve crossed the threshold. You now share in the revenues." ...But by then, there were no more revenues. ...I didn’t care ...That wasn’t the purpose ...Later on, we applied to the for an additional $3 million to turn out a high school version ...without calculus."

"[I]t was no longer a television camera at the back of the room. It was now a production, with programs, and all the production values... [I]t... evolved into something far beyond anything I had imagined."

"I taught Physics 1... [b]ut not from the Feynman books ...We used some conventional textbook ...but I sort of redesigned the course. ...By the time I started teaching it the second time, I started to get worried, because... I would go on teaching the same course forever... [or] I would leave it and somebody else would teach it and it would become a completely different course... One way of preserving memory is to write a textbook, but I had already written States of Matter...been there, done that. I didn’t want to do that. And then it occurred to me that television was bound to play some role in the future of education. ...What I vaguely had in mind was that the lecture could be taped by a television camera at the back of the room."

"So I went to Murph... and he said, "I’ll give you a little money to look into it." ...I think $50,000—and I hired... Don Delson... head of AV... to be my assistant... We learned all kinds of things..."

"There are 25,000 high schools in the United States... and the number of qualified high school physics teachers... in the range of 2,000 to 4,000. So most high schools do not have anybody qualified... and physics is taught in most high schools. ...Many of the so-called crossover teachers, who were teaching physics but weren’t trained ...were teachers. Home economics had fallen out of favor."

"I... remember one morning at... breakfast, reading the '... story that had given $10 million a year for fifteen years to make telecommunications materials for higher education. ...[H]e created ...the Annenberg CPB Foundation ...to give out Annenberg’s money. ...I ...got in touch with Sally Beaty and ...KCET ...and we wrote a proposal. ...KCET ...was on the verge of going belly-up. And they tried to load the entire overhead of the station on our project. ...[W]e got the award—with KCET not involved. ...[N]ow we had no flagship station, but we had the money ..."

"When I was vice chair of the faculty, the chair... was Robbie Vogt... As soon as he stepped down... and I became chair of the faculty, he became chair of the PMA division, and he called me into his office... in 1979. We had been teaching from the Feynman physics books... using them as textbooks ever since Feynman had given the lectures, from '62 to '64. ...[T]hey had just gotten too hard. It was great for the teachers; I loved teaching from his books. But for the students—if you didn’t already know physics, trying to learn physics from those books... Seeing physics with fresh eyes all over again, it’s wonderful—that’s why every scientist in the world owns a set of these books... [b]ut to learn it for the first time from those books is just impossible. You basically need to know physics, in order to appreciate them."

"The lack of qualified high-school physics teachers in the United States is a notorious (and self-perpetuating) problem. ...[C]ombating that problem was... one of the central goals of the TMU project. ...The idea was to induce teachers to study the college-level version so ...they could use the high-school materials ...with poise and confidence."

"The problem of how to present detailed mathematical derivations is confronted... in the animated scenes. ...The comprimise solution... invented while designing the pilot program, is called the "algebraic ballet." ...done in detail, but rapidly and entertainingly. The viewer was not expected to absorb every detail... [b]ut every step was displayed... [A]ttention is never lost during these [rapid] mathematical passages."

"[A] program is devoted to Millikan's oil-drop experiment, partly as an application of Newton's second law, and... to induce... philosophical ideas about how science is... done. ...The solution ...create a ..."Millikan Museum" ...in the Norman Bridge Laboratory where he had worked. The set involved thousands of artifacts, many ...Millikan's own ...After ...shooting ...the museum was disassembled, to live on only on videotape."

"The high-school editions... video modules, averaging 15 minutes... are accompanied by extensive written materials for the teacher, including suggestions, background material, demonstrations, and sample questions... [T]eachers are willing to work very hard to improve their skills... given reasonable support, and... even teachers who are well qualified... find new inspiration in... TMU."

"Robbie... asked me to create the new physics course—at least the first year of the new physics course. And I said, “Robbie, when you were chair of the faculty, you asked for complete teaching relief. Now I’m going to be chair... and you’re giving me the hardest teaching job in the whole institution. Don’t you think that’s a little unfair?" We... cut a deal... full financial support for a postdoc so I could hire somebody to help me on my research group while I was doing all this."

"[T]he full series of 52 programs was first broadcast during the academic year 1986-1987..."

"The raw material for... both the television programs and the textbooks... was a set of verbatim transcripts of the lectures delivered by Goldstein in the revised Caltech physics course. ...[T]he material would be would be presented at two levels, at least in the textbooks if not in the television programs. The upper level... for physics and engineering majors... [t]he other textbook, which corresponds to the level of the television programs... for a more general audience. Nevertheless, it... include[d] differential and integral calculus... presented as they had arisen historically... as part of... mechanics. Mastering... simple... s and s would make physics easier to understand than... the pseudocalculus... in many college physics courses. ...Liberal Arts students had little difficulty learning calculus. ...[T]his was a "major pedagogic triumph" ...A primer, written by Apostol ...was added to the ...arsenal of aids ..."

"The Mechanical Universe project had its roots in a routine revision of Caltech's introductory physics courses... assigned to Goldstein and begun in 1979... the first major changes... since... taught by Richard Feynman in the early 1960s."

"[T]he primary audience was to be the "nontraditional student," especially "distance learners,"... [I]t was hoped that with a resourceful, dedicated local teacher... the teaching of introductory physics at any level could be enriched... [A]lso... that a large, casual, nonstudent audience would watch... for pleasure and instruction. ...[T]hat ideal target audience was the high-school physics teacher."

"Physics is not a newcomer to televised education. The first televised physics lecture dates... to the 1930s. A remarkable number of today's American research physicists—particularly... from rural and poorer sections of the country—trace their interest... to the... in the 1960s. The Mechanical Universe follows in that tradition..."

"Intellectually, technically and philosophically, physics and television are two separate cultures with almost no bridges between... [I]t is... time consuming and arduous... to span the gap... [T]here is no one... [at] Caltech... capable of reading, much less writing, a television script competently. ...[T]here is no one on the production side who knows enough... physics... to plan an important sequence, much less write a script or produce a program. This situation is a symptom of the malady of science illiteracy that ' is intended to help cure...""