International Meeting on Graduate Student Affairs in …...Visions for the 21st century”. Last October Tom Tierney (FGSA Treasurer) traveled to the annual meeting of the Mexican

From Tom Tierney, FGSA Treasurer

Planning for a joint meeting of theCanadian, American and Mexican gradu-ate students in each of the physical soci-eties (called CAM2003) is under way. Atthe invitation of Dr. Carmen CisnerosGudino, President of the Division ofAtomic and Molecular Physics for theSociedad Mexicana de Fisica (SMF),FGSA Treasurer, Tom Tierney, attendedthe annual SMF meeting in Leon,Guanajuato Mexico during the week ofOctober 27, 2002.

During this meeting, Tierney notonly had the opportunity to meet Mexican

undergraduate and graduate students, butalso to attend the conference sessions.The discussions with the students consti-tute the first stage in drafting a programfor the inaugural meeting that will incor-porate the interests of American andMexican students.

One of the results of these discus-sions is the decision that the conferencewill be held in Merida, Yucatan Mexicoduring the month of October. TheCAM2003 meeting will be held in paral-lel with the annual SMF meeting suchthat students may see the broad scope ofphysics research currently conducted inMexico. In addition to the oral and poster

presentations of work performed by stu-dents, several topical sessions will beheld. These sessions include: graduateeducation in the three countries, how todevelop international collaborations,career development, reviews of majordiscoveries in the 20th century and majorphysics problems for the 21st century.The FGSA is very excited about thepotential this conference has to offer. Wewelcome your input! If you would like toshare ideas or participate in the planning,please email [email protected]. Pleasesee Karsten Heeger’s article in thisnewsletter for further details.

From Karsten Heeger, FGSA Chair

2002 was an exciting year for the FGSA. -For the first time FGSA participated as anindependent forum at the annual APSmeetings and division conferences. In2002 the Forum on Graduate StudentAffairs hosted several APS sessions inaddition to special student receptions atthe March and April meetings. A studentlunch was organized for participants at theFour Corners’ meeting.

A broad program of meeting activitieswas initiated last year by FGSA’s chairChad Topaz and organized with the sup-port and help of the APS staff. The ses-sions at the APS meetings included:“Astrophysics in the 21st Century,”“Improving Physics Graduate Education,”“Lunch with Experts,” “How to find and

Hold a Faculty Job,” and “RethinkingGraduate Education.” These sessionswere attended by both students and seniorAPS members. The attendance numbersof these sessions varied between 25 and150 students and up to 200 scientists.

The traditional student receptions atthe March and April meetings, organizedwith support of the FGSA, were a big suc-cess. A quiz with great prizes tested thestudents’ knowledge of physics trivia andeveryone enjoyed the free food and drinksthat were kindly sponsored by the APS.

For 2003 FGSA is planning an evenmore ambitious and exciting program. Inaddition to activities at the annual APSmeeting, FGSA is heading the organiza-tion of a graduate student conference forstudents from Canada, Mexico, and theUS.

International Meeting on Graduate Student Affairs inMexico, October 2003

Plans for the Future, Notes From thePast

APS Forum on Graduate Student Affairs

FGSA Newsletter

International Graduate StudentMeeting October 2003. . . . . . . . . . 1

Plans for the Future, Notes From thePast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Join Us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Letter From The Editor . . . . . . . . . 2

Integrity in Research . . . . . . . . . . . 3

A Letter From The Past Chair . . . . 4

Interviews With Famous PhysicistsProfessor Joseph Polchinski . . 4Professor Robert Jaffe . . . . . . . 5

FGSA Executive Officers (2003) . . 8

CONTENTS

The American Physical Society hasagreed to jointly organize a conference forgraduate students together with theCanadian Association of Physicists (CAP)and the Mexican Society of Physics(Sociedad Mexicana de Fisica or SMF).This joint Canadian, American andMexican conference (CAM2003) will beheld in Mexico in October 2003 and willbe the fourth such meeting over the past15 years. For the first time it will beorganized as a graduate student confer-ence by student representatives from thethree countries. The SMF has offered tohost the meeting as a satellite to theirannual meeting and will act as the local

organizing committee.The goal of CAM2003 is to bring

about 200-300 students and scientisttogether in Merida, Mexico, for a uniquegathering under the theme “StudentVisions for the 21st century”. LastOctober Tom Tierney (FGSA Treasurer)traveled to the annual meeting of theMexican Society of Physics to start theplanning process for the CAM2003 stu-dent conference. He hosted a session withstudent participants of the SMF meetingto discuss ideas for next year’s meetingand to make contact with our fellow stu-dents from SMF. A NSF proposal for sup-port of the organization and American stu-

dent participation in this Canadian,American, and Mexican conference wassubmitted in late October. We are hopefulfor a favorable review which would allowus to move ahead and pursue the planningand organization of CAM2003.

Stay tuned for more information onCAM2003 and other exciting FGSAactivities next year, and be sure to checkour website(http://www.aps.org/units/fgsa/) regularlyfor news and updates.

Hope to see many of you at the APSmeetings and at CAM2003 in Merida,Mexico this year!

Plans for the Future, Notes From the Past Continued from page 1

From Jennifer West

In this second issue of the FGSA newslet-ter we have updates from the forum offi-cers, interviews with 2 famous and wiseprofessors, articles on human integrityand more. We have been working veryhard in our forum and hope you like thedirections our group is taking. We wel-come communication from our members.If you would like to contribute an articleor have any interests you would like to seementioned in our newsletter, please sendus an email.

This newsletter comes out after the2002 midterm elections and what I findmost interesting is the number of peoplewho did not vote. Approximately 55% ofthe population stayed home. During thesame year, our membership has almostdoubled. It makes me curious - whatcauses us to get involved? What causessome to remain uninvolved? What can wedo to encourage people to speak theirminds and become involved, both on asmall scale (the FGSA) and on a largerscale (national voting)?

Certainly the amount of time devotedto social and economic issues in anydebate is alarmingly low. Watching thetelevision debates and ads does not inspireor compell a person to cast a vote.Apparently in the race for governor ofMassachusetts, one candidate aired televi-sion ads that showed early photos of hiswife and himself at a highschool dance,and early family photos from raising theirchildren. And that was it. The opposingcandidate bought air time for ads equallydevoid of political content.

I would like to echo Professor Jaffefrom MIT (interviewed in this newsletter)and say that it is a good idea for us to getinvolved with any issue that we feelstrongly about, whether it be federal fund-ing for the hard sciences, education, cam-paign finance reform, war and peace,postdoctoral salaries, anything at all. It isharder to do this when we have familiesand houses (for those of us who don’talready!).

Becoming involved may mean agreater involvement for those of us doingresearch in collaboration (probably all ofus!). This touches on Brian’s article aboutscientific integrity. If our names are on ascientific paper, to what extent are weresponsible for the reported results?According to the independent reviewersof the Schon case, the collaborators werenot guilty of intentional deception. Thequestion of how responsible co-authorsare for results is an active area of studyright now, and one we might want to thinkabout. I know that I have my name on apaper with at least 7 co-authors. I wouldnot have felt comfortable unless I wasable to reproduce the results of the dataanalysis myself, which I was able to do.In my case it was not difficult, since theraw data was x-ray satellite data easilyaccessed by all members of the group, andmore or less easily reduced. I may havediffered with the first author in his inter-pretation of some of the features in thedata, but at least I was confident that thefeatures were indeed there.

In large collaborations it is not realis-tic for each co-author to do all the analy-sis him or herself. However, leaving alarge part of the data analysis to only oneperson strikes me as unwise. Unwise notonly because of the possibility for somekind of data faking, that is actually theleast worry statistically speaking, butbecause of some data mistaking. It is easyto make mistakes in data analysis. Andunless you write scripts for every step in

Join the FGSA! Current APSmembers may join the Forum onGraduate Student Affairs (FREE) byamending their membership onlineat http://www.aps.org/memb/unitapp.html orby checking the box on their renew-al form.

Nonmembers of the APS may joinboth FGSA and the APS (and anoth-er Forum free!) online at http://www.aps.org/membstudents.html or http://www.aps.org/membhalfprice.html.The membership fee is WAIVED forfirst-time student members. Newregular members (and all juniormembers) may join at a special rateof $50.

Join Us!

Letter From The Editor

2

the analysis (a smart thing to do by theway) then redoing and checking all stepsin data reduction can be prohibitively timeconsuming. It is important to check yourdata analysis, and unless you are writing apaper by yourself on a new result, it is agood idea to have your collaboratorscheck key results with their own analysis.More than one person should have a copyof the raw data!! That is an absolute must.

It is very good for us, the younger gener-ation of scientists, to learn from the mis-takes of our elders.

As well as learn from their glories!!Which is why we include 2 new inter-views in this issue of the newsletter. Thefirst interviewee is Joseph Polchinskifrom the University of California, SantaBarbara, a renowned high energy theoristwho is also a wonderful and inspiring per-

son to talk with. The second interview iswith Robert Jaffe, a professor and directorof the Center for Theoretical Physics atMIT, also a famous and passionate physi-cist who was kind enough to talk serious-ly with our forum. I hope you enjoy read-ing their thoughts as I enjoyed talkingwith both of them.

Letter From The Editor Continued from page 2

From Brian Utter, Member-at-Large

Science is the process of discoveringtruths about the world. Ok, perhaps it’snot that simple - biases, pride, and honestmistakes certainly add elements of subjec-tivity to the pursuit of truth, but we hopethat objectivity and integrity are the dom-inant motives in physics research. Whenwe collaborate with other scientists orread the papers of our colleagues, weexpect them to not only adhere to thesevalues, but to fully endorse and encouragethem. However, the discovery of twohigh-profile examples of blatant data fal-sification in the past years has made it evi-dent that truth is not always sacred. As thesurprise over these falsifications fades,questions about the roles and responsibil-ities of scientists have been raised.

Hendrik Schˆn, a physicist at BellLabs, was heralded as a rising star in thephysics community based on his researchin molecular semiconductors that wouldrevolutionize electronics. His resultswere good. I mean, too good.Experimental curves looked nearly liketheory and repeated attempts to reproducethese results failed. These first signs oftrouble culminated in the Septemberrelease of an independent review confirm-ing the falsification. The review summa-rized the allegations and categorized theminto three classes: (1) substitution of data,(2) unrealistic precision of data, and (3)results that contradict known physics. In16 cases, they found compelling evidenceof scientific misconduct. Schˆn has sincebeen fired and the original papers retract-ed by Bell Labs.

Meanwhile, at the Lawrence BerkeleyNational Laboratory (LBNL), the topic ofconversation is element 118 - or rather,the nonexistence of element 118. In 1999,

a team of researchers at LBNL announcedthe discovery of the heaviest artificially-created isotope observed to date, a discov-ery with important implications to the so-called “island of stability” of long-livednuclei at atomic numbers around Z = 120.Three years later, it has become clear thatthe decay chains observed were in factfalsified by Victor Ninov, a member of theresearch team. Again, the lack of repro-ducibility led to concern and the eventualretraction of the findings in 2001.

One obvious question is, “How did acouple of intelligent physicists think theywould get away with this?” There areactually allegations that Ninov has beeninvolved with falsifying data since workdone in 1994. This might be a deeperquestion of psychology, as denials ofwrongdoing from both Schˆn and Ninovprovide no obvious illumination.

Perhaps a better question is how ithappened that the coauthors of the papersdidn’t catch on. Admittedly, most of usgive our collaborators the benefit of thedoubt. Ninov’s coworkers trusted him asan expert and, for good reason, didn’t seethe need to double-check his work. Yet forsuch a major discovery, it’s perhaps a lit-tle surprising that nobody else analyzedthe raw data files. In Schˆn’s case, it’s farmore baffling, as he managed to publish apaper on average every 10 days for about3 years; many of these papers appeared inpremier science journals. Some of thesecontained identical plots, even when dif-ferent materials were being studied. Inboth cases, the collaborators have beencleared of intentional falsification of data.

Some people fear that these cases castscience and scientists in a bad light. Butto the contrary, science worked perfectlyin these instances as shocking results and

a lack of reproducibility led to inevitableretractions by LBNL and Bell Labs. Themisinformation has been identified andcorrected, even though many students andscientists now realize that they havedevoted limited time and resources to pur-suing research goals based on false data.The obvious failures were isolated to twoindividuals; for that, there is no remedy.

But while the immediate situationshave some closure, a new set of questionshave been opened. They are far morecomplex than how to respond to a partic-ular set of results that cannot be repro-duced or an individual person that has fal-sified data. They are ethical questionsabout how we communicate our truthsand how we maintain and insure ourintegrity. How much responsibility does ascientist have for the results of the entirecollaboration? To what extent can refer-ees be expected to catch inaccuracies, par-ticularly as they volunteer their time?What standards should exist for archivingdata and laboratory notebooks? Whatsanctions exist for scientific misconduct?

Science must remain focused on dis-covering truths about the world, with theintent of finding objective and universallaws. We are reminded by these failuresthat scientists are human and that as agroup we must hold ourselves and ourcollaborators to the highest standards ofintegrity.

Author’s notes: 1. The results of the independent review

can be found at http://www.lucent.com/news_events/researchreview.html.

2. For a fascinating account of the element 118 saga, see the September issue of Physics Today, or http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-55/iss-9/p15.html.

Integrity in Research

3

From Chad Topaz, Past Chair

With 2002 behind us, I want to take thisopportunity to give you a brief report onsome of the goings-on of the APS Forumon Graduate Student Affairs.

Membership. I’m pleased toannounce that since the formation of theFGSA in mid-2001, our membership hasgrown to include over 700 members. Oneof our primary goals is to keep this num-ber growing so that even more physicalscientists in academia and industry canexperience the benefits of membership. Iencourage you to let your colleaguesknow about our group. Membership infor-mation is conveniently available athttp://www.aps.org/memb.

Programming. 2002 saw the adventof the first FGSA-sponsored events atAPS meetings, including the MarchMeeting, the April Meeting, and the FourCorners Sectional Meeting. These eventsincluded scientific sessions, career devel-

opment seminars, social mixers for youngscientists, and more. The FGSA leader-ship is currently working to offer evenmore programming for the upcomingyear. One option that we are pursuing isan international meeting of graduate stu-dents, planned in collaboration with thephysics societies of Canada and Mexico,which would bring together scientistsfrom the three countries. We will keep youupdated on this exciting effort.

On-line resources. Our website hasgrown this year to include even moregraduate student resources. If you haven’tbrowsed the website recently, I encourageyou to look at http://www.aps.org/units/fgsa in order to take advantage ofcareer resources, education resources andresearch resources. Check back frequent-ly, as we are continually updating the con-tent to keep it current.

Communication. When the FGSAleadership is in close contact with themembership, everyone benefits! In order

to let you know FGSA news more fre-quently, we are planning to send brief e-mail news updates at least twice a yearbeginning in 2003. We will also continueto produce our usual newsletter. Ofcourse, we are also interested in hearingfrom you. The more feedback you give us,the more we will be able to provide thesorts of resources and programming thatinterest you most.

Leadership. FGSA Elections are cur-rently underway for the positions ofChair-Elect, Members-at-Large, andSecretary. I’d like to thank outgoingExecutive Committee members XinChen, Louise Parsons, and Jennifer Westfor their outstanding work on the FGSA.Their generous contributions of time andtalent have been invaluable to the group.

The FGSA is here for you. If youhave any questions, comments, or con-cerns for the FGSA, feel free to contact usat [email protected].

A Letter From The Past Chair

Interview with ProfessorJoseph Polchinski,of the Institute for Theoretical Physics,University of California, Santa Barbara.Professor Polchinski is a world renownedhigh energy theorist, author of the mostrecent and widely used textbook in stringtheory (called String Theory by the pub-lishers, Joe’s Big Book of String by grad-uate students and Joe himself) and famedfor his discovery of D-branes (read thebook!). Here he speaks (figuratively)with editor Jennifer West on a variety oftopics.

1. Why did you decide to pursue highenergy theoretical physics and whendid you make this decision?

JP: In high school and before, I hadalways been interested in fundamentalquestions such as the nature of gravity.But high school science can’t go toodeeply into these things, so my focus wasmore on mathematics. When I got toCaltech as a freshman I quickly learnedthat what I wanted to do was called highenergy theoretical physics. Of course, theFeynman-worshipping culture at Caltechwas a factor, but an even bigger one was

my classmate Bill Zajc, who had read theFeynman lectures in high school andtaught me a great deal. Bill has done wellalso, he’s the spokesman on the PHENIXdetector at RHIC.

2. Did your graduate school experienceenhance/detract from/or not affect yourdesire to do physics?

JP: I think my desire to do physics waspretty high both at the beginning and theend. My grad student experience was abit nonstandard: my advisor StanleyMandelstam was very smart and creative,but a somewhat outside the mainstream;also, I didn’t have a lot of `street smarts’about doing research. One consequence isthat I had written zero papers when Iapplied for my first postdoc (and onlythree, two of which were not very good,by the time I applied for my second). ButI learned a lot, especially about quantumfield theory; one high point was a journalclub with the other students and postdocs.

3. What advice did your thesis advisorgive you on pursuing a career in physicsacademia vs. industry?

JP: Stanley was on sabbatical my finalyear, so Bob Cahn was a surrogate. Hewas the one who gave me `the talk’ about

how bad job prospects in academia were(to which my response was the usual`yeah, I’ll worry about that when I haveto’). He also coached me when I wasnegotiating postdoc offers.

4. Did you follow his/her advice? (Joe,this is from a conversation I remembersome years ago, and you told me a storyabout your advisor giving you adviceand I really liked that story, so I am try-ing to get you to tell it again.)

JP: I am not certain which story you arereferring to, but in the one that I haverepeated the most often the hero is DavidJackson (of the textbook), and it comes abit earlier. My first two years in gradschool I was wasting a lot of time, tryingto work on several things at once withoutmuch focus. I don’t remember the details,I think it was a fairly short conversation,but the gist of it was that it was notenough to be smart, you had to work hardtoo. It made a big impression at the time.

5. What advice do you give to your owngraduate students on career andphysics in general?

JP: As I think back, I have given my stu-dents career advice of various sorts, but itvaries greatly from student to student

Interviews With Famous Physicists

4

depending on their situation (e.g. somehave to work out a two body problem,others need to be reminded what planetthey are on ... )

Supervising grad students is veryrewarding. With most of my students Ihave been able to collaborate on interest-ing problems. There is a clear progressionthat they all go through, from working outproblems that I give them to finding theirown problems and collaborating withother students and postdocs; one tries tohelp them along this process.

For advice on nonacademic careers Iam not very useful to my students andpostdocs; having followed a ratherstraight-line academic path I don’t haveany useful experience. I have alwaysworried about this, but I don’t think I’veever been asked for non-academic advice—- I guess that my students have lookedfor it elsewhere. If there are APS or otherresources that I can guide them to I wouldlike to know, though I expect that most ofthem can find these without my help.

5. Why don’t string theorists partici-pate more in the APS?

JP: There are probably many factors. Oneis that the Division of Particles and Fieldsis more focussed on the experimental/phe-nomenological side of our field. This islogical because the experimental side ismuch larger and requires centralized plan-ning (maybe there should be a Division ofString and Branes!) But at the 2001Snowmass planning meeting string theo-rists were very active participants.

Like most senior physicists I do a lotof `service to the field’ —-advisory panelsand governing boards for TASI, NSF,Aspen, and various institutions, founda-tions, and journals —- but aside from thejournals none of these are under the APS.I am also writing an article for PhysicsToday (which is way past deadline -wince), I guess that counts.

6. Have you read Flatterland and if sowhat do you think? (I’ll give you a hint,women are not lines at all, they are 2Dpolygons with all but one line segmentliving in a shadow world. Very veryadvanced creatures.)

JP: I hadn’t heard of it until your question;now I’ve bought it (I looked first in sci-fi,but it was in the math section) but haven’thad time to read it.

7. Does string theory have anything tosay to cosmology today?

JP: The connection between string theoryand cosmology has always been one ofthose things that seemed like it had to beimportant, but until recently there wereonly sporadic speculative ideas. In thelast two or three years, though, there hasbeen a convergence of interest on severalproblems in this area: the observations ofdark energy and of the CMB fluctuationsgive us new things to try to explain; therealization that we might live on a `brane’in higher dimensions has opened up awhole lot of new possibilities for models.At the most fundamental level, we do notknow what the observables in string theo-ry are, or the central defining principle,and these questions are particularly sharpin a cosmological setting. If string theoryis all that it is cracked up to be, it shouldbe a theory of the initial conditions as wellas the dynamical laws. String theory hastaught us a lot about spacetime singulari-ties, but not yet about the most interestingone, the Big Bang; there are some specif-ic ideas that are being explored, that mayor may not lead anywhere. There will bea program on all this at the ITP in fall2003.

8. How about astrophysics, with itsstudy of quasars, supermassive blackholes, and strange quark stars?

JP: There is a very nice example. Recentideas allow for the possibility that thereare higher dimensions in which onlygravitons move, not ordinary matter.How big might these be? One way thatthese would be detected would be in theinverse-square law turning into aninverse-cube (or higher) law at some dis-tance. That this does not happen down toa millimeter in laboratory experimentssays that the new dimensions are smallerthan that. But in fact the strongest limitcomes from astrophysics: if there were anew dimension larger than a micron,supernovae would radiate most of theirenergy into higher dimensional gravitonsand would emit too few neutrinos.

9. In fact in a recent announcement atthe Harvard-Smithsonian Center forAstrophysics, a star previously believedto be a neutron star seems to be made ofbare quarks instead. Please see the urlhttp://chandra.harvard.edu/press/02_releases/press_041002.html for a generalpublic press release. Do you think thatsuch objects if found to exist could actas laboratories for string theorists or is

that too far fetched? (I am wonderingif string theory could possibly saysomething about the spectrum of suchan object - please ignore this one if it istoo unrealistic - but since the densitiesare super high, and since this might bejust plain quarks in there - well but thatwould be the domain of qcd whichmeans very very complicated).

JP: I should first say that you should con-tact my colleague Lars Bildsten for anassessment of the evidence for quarkstars, he is rather skeptical. As far asstring theory, generally the energy scalesof astrophysics are too low to get to stringphysics and I wouldn’t expect thatquark/neutron stars would be the rightlaboratories. Supernovae, which I men-tioned above, are special because they areso optically dense, and so can radiate onlyinto very weakly coupled particles. Butclues might come from unexpectedplaces. It would certainly be important tolearn the nature of dark matter.

10. String theory lives in a 10 dimen-sional space if I remember correctly. Atone point there was interest in calculat-ing the effects of one or more of thesedimensions shrinking down to zero sizeand even popping out of existence. Didthis connect up to the ekpyrotic modelof the universe?

JP: This is one of the subjects under num-ber 7 above. The `ekpyrotic universe’(which is an idea that has evolved a bit,and has several forms) requires that a con-tracting universe bounce and reexpand.This can’t happen in general relativity dueto various singularity theorems, but in thiscase the bounce looks, at least from somepoints of view, rather gentle and similar toother spacetime singularities that stringtheory does fix. So quite a few string the-orists have tried to find the right tools toanalyze it. I would have to say that rightnow things don’t look so good: there is noevidence that the bounce is as gentle asrequired (Gary Horowitz and I are writinga paper that will be out soon)

Interview with ProfessorRobert Jaffe,director of the Center for TheoreticalPhysics at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (MIT). Professor Jaffe’sresearch is mainly in elementary particlephysics and most recently in the Casimir

Interview with Professor Joseph Polchinski Continued from page 4

5

effect (read your undergraduate physicsbook!) as the limit of a conventionalquantum field theory coupled to a smoothbackground. He is a great lecturer and haseven won teaching awards at MIT. Herehe talks physics and civic duties withnewsletter editor Jennifer West.

1. The FGSA is an apolitical group,meaning that we have no political asso-ciation, NOT that we have no politicalinterest. I think all of our leaningsmight cancel out leaving us in the cen-ter. However, I have noticed that inthese days it is very hard to be any-where left of center. What do you thinkof graduate students these days whohave little political involvement, and ofthose who are strongly involved in theanti-war movement?

RJ: Of course it is not appropriate foran organization like the APS or one of itsforums to take an overtly political posi-tion. You would compromise your effec-tiveness in other important arenas.Personally I never felt more passionateabout politics than when I was a grad stu-dent, and recommend it to you as a natu-ral companion to the academic life.Before children, before mortgages, beforedisposable income, there seems to bemore time and more energy for politics.

As for your comment about the left— I agree, the US has taken a hard rightturn in the past few years. The ideologyof the right is ascendant and the old lefthas little to advocate. Perhaps the newleft is Green.

2. Does the current political situationhave a similar feel to it as it did whenyou were in graduate school? Or isthere not the same consensus againstthe activities of the government? [notefrom me: sometimes Professor Jaffe Iget the impression that there is a greatconsensus against this war and thestance of this administration, the for-eign policy that has been spelled out,however to find this consensus is not aseasy as turning on the television, I real-ly have to use my computer and seekout the voices of dissent. Do you thinkthat is true? This can be off therecord.]

RJ: There was no significant antiwarmovement **before** the VietnameseWar started. We were deep into it beforethere was any coherent opposition thatyou could watch on the television. Tens ofthousands of American GI’s were dead by

the time the opposition had the attentionof the mainstream newsmedia.

Today’s situation seems different in manyways. In the early ‘60’s few really knewwhat was going on in Southeast Asia.What is happening today in the MiddleEast reads like an open book. It’s won-derful that there is a strong, vocal, andgrowing opposition to a new Gulf War.However it amazes me, as it did in the‘60’s, that the majority of American’sseem to support US aggression.

3. Theodore Roosevelt once said (in afit of wisdom): “To announce that theremust be no criticism of the president, orthat we are to stand by the presidentright or wrong, is not only unpatrioticand servile, but is morally treasonableto the American public.” What do youthink of this?

RJ: Of course I agree with Roosevelt.Early on, Bush and Ashcroft made rashstatements questioning the patriotism ofthose who disagree with them. Howeverthey seem to have retreated on this front.And, remember, in the old days thingswere far worse: there was Edgar J.Hoover lurking in the shadows.

4. You were (are still?) on the advisoryboard of the Office of MinorityEducation and a member of theCampus Committee on Race Relations[the MIT Tech newspaper, V119, 1999].How valid do you think the concernsare over unequal treatment of minorityand female students in the sciences?

RJ: I left the CCRR after helping tolaunch it and serving on it’s board for 5years. It was time for new blood. Myinvolvement with the OME was moreperipheral and ended shortly after myterm as Chair of the Faculty. Minority andwomen students are doing better at MIT ingeneral, but not much better in Physics.The situation is particularly troubling forwomen. We have lots of excellent womenundergraduate physics majors at MIT, butmany leave physics in graduate school. Ifear that the graduate student culture inphysics is predatory and isolating, but Idon’t know for sure. I talk regularly withseveral young women physicists. Theirstories are all different. A common threadis that they are turned off or disappointedby thoughtless behavior of their profes-sors or fellow students that an ambitiousyoung man would shrug off. So manyyoung men think they’re smarter thanthey are; so many young women scientistsdon’t seem to recognize their great talent.

5. Your fellow interviewee in thisnewsletter is Joseph Polchinski, a won-derful string theorist at the Universityof California, Santa Barbara. You gavea talk today on the Casimir effect andmentioned something about the possi-bility that putting boundary conditionsof orbifolds may not be the most physi-cally realistic thing to do – you wereteasing your colleagues, but what doyou really think of string theory (M-theory really) as the best candidate forunification?

RJ: String theory is a wonderful intellec-tual activity, which attracts many brilliantyoung, mathematically inclined theorists.I value having a strong, creative, andambitious string group here at MIT —they make life in the CTP exciting.However physics is undoubtedly anexperimental science. There are hugeimpediments in the way of bringing stringtheory into contact with experiment. Itsaddens me that so many young theoristswould not know a proton if one hit themsquare between the eyes!

7. When is the next full scale revolutionin physics going to happen? Will itinvolve the Casimir effect? QCD?

RJ: No one knows. However, I would betthat it will involve our conception of thevacuum. The vacuum of quantum fieldtheory is littered with our theoreticaldetritus: zero point energies from everyfluctuating field, condensates from theelectroweak phase transition, from thechiral phase transition of QCD and possi-bly from others. We require they all can-cel, not to zero as we thought until the mid1990’s, but to an incredibly small numberthat just happens at this era to be approxi-mately the same as the energy densities ofradiation and matter. Hard to believe. Ican’t help thinking that we simply havethe wrong conception of the vacuum. Theonly relation to the Casimir effect is apedagogical one: the Casimir effect isoften quoted as evidence for the “realityof the vacuum energy of quantum fields”.Instead it is a (fascinating and important)force between material objects, leavingme wondering: what is the empirical evi-dence that the way we treat the vacuum inquantum field theory is correct?

8. There have been reports of possiblestrange quark stars, out of the Centerfor Astrophysics of all places. Theyfound 2 stars that radiate like solidbodies but are either too cold or toosmall to be neutron stars. The scientists

Interview with Professor Robert Jaffe Continued from page 5

6

raise the possibility of strange quarkmatter. Could your research in quarksand QCD say anything about thesefindings?

RJ: My friends in astrophysics havedoubts about the quark star interpretationof these objects. The possibility existsthat quark matter with the optimal “chem-ical” composition of up, down and strangequarks, may be stable at zero externalpressure. If this is so, then huge, star-likehadrons, bound by the strong interactionsrather than gravity, could exist somewherein the Universe. The most interestingthing about such compact objects is thatthey would have no **minimum** mass

or radius. Thus they could rotate muchfaster than neutron stars. A sub-millisec-ond pulsar would be the most exciting andcompelling signature of such a beast.

Even if quark matter were not stable atzero external pressure, it might formunder pressure, deep in the cores of neu-tron stars. The challenge, then, is to finda signature that could be detectible fromour great distance.

9. Freeman Dyson gave a wonderfullecture, like yours but much lighter onthe equations, and was wonderingwhether the laws of physics as we knowthem allow for the possibility of life

continuing on forever. He concludedthat eternal life is NOT ruled out, if lifeis analog rather than digital, though wemay have to change our forms to some-thing like a black cloud of dust thathibernates. The alarm clock system of3 black clouds, 2 orbiting the other andeventually crashing or interpenetrat-ing, sounded very interesting. What doyou think of this vision of the future?

RJ: I’m afraid life is best approximated asa delta function in spacetime. More of usshould be concerned with whether life cansurvive the next millennium and leave thesubsequent 10^50 years to Freeman!

Interview with Professor Robert Jaffe Continued from page 6

7

ChairKarsten Heeger

Chair-Elect Anne J Catlla

Past ChairChad Michael Topaz

TreasurerTom Tierney

FGSA

SecretaryDeborah Chang

Newsletter EditorJennifer Rittenhouse West

Member-at-large (2003)Kelly Korreck

Past WebmasterXin Chen

Member-at-large (2003)Brian Utter

Past SecretaryLouise Parsons

ChairKarsten Heeger Lawrence Berkeley NationalLaboratory Physics Division Bldg 50R5008 1 Cyclotron Road Berkeley, CA 94720-8158 Phone: (510) 486-7432 Fax: (510) 486-6738 [email protected]

Chair-ElectAnne J Catlla ESAM Dept Northwestern Univ 2145 Sheridan Rd Evanston, IL 60208 Phone (847) 491-9688 [email protected]

SecretaryDeborah Chang 4555 15th Ave NE Apt 228 Seattle, WA 98105 Phone (206) 280-6594 [email protected]

TreasurerTom Tierney Los Alamos NationalLaboratory Plasma Physics Group, P-24 PO Box 1663, Mailstop E526 Los Alamos, NM 87545 Phone:(505) 667-6944 [email protected]

Past ChairChad Michael Topaz Department of Mathematics Duke University Box 90320 Durham, NC 27708 Phone: (919) 660-2872 [email protected]

Member-at-large (2004)Jodi Ann Cooley University of Wisconsin Physics Department 1150 University Ave. Madison, WI 53706-1390 Phone: (608)265-6669 [email protected]

Member-at-large (2003)Kelly Korreck University of Michigan 2455 Hayward Space Research Building Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Phone: (734) 763-5368 [email protected]

Member-at-large (2004) Matthew A Leigh 2000 E Roger Rd Apt D5 Tucson, AZ 85719 Phone (520) 624-7243 [email protected]

Member-at-large (2003) Brian Utter Dept. of Physics Box 90305 Duke University Durham, NC 27708-0305 Phone: (919) 660-2553 [email protected]

Webmaster (2003)Pieter Mumm Center for ExperimentalNuclear Physics andAstrophysics Box 354290, University ofWashington Seattle WA 98195 Phone: (301) 975-8870 [email protected]

Newsletter EditorJennifer Rittenhouse West Harvard-Smithsonian Centerfor Astrophysics 60 Garden Street, MS 64 Cambridge, MA 02138 Phone:(617) 495-2638 [email protected]

FGSA Executive Officers (2003) ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰

AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETYForum on Graduate Student AffairsOne Physics EllipseCollege Park, MD 20740-3844