![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/luke-sollitt-main-pic.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nLet\u2019s begin by Inquiring into your early years, your childhood, where you were born, where you grew up, what your family was like? Do you have siblings? What did your parents do, and how young were you when you developed an interest in what has become your career?<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n I was born in Boston. My mom lived in Vermont at the time, so it\u2019s kind of a home state. We moved to the Washington DC area, to Alexandria, when I was about four. I have a brother whose name is Ian. He is not quite 2 years older than I am. He lives in Maine. Unfortunately, my mom, my father, and my stepfather, I\u2019ll talk all about them, none of them are with us anymore. When my mom lived in Vermont, she was a postal carrier but was dissatisfied with that life. She had been an executive at the age of 22 In New York City, in the early 1960\u2019s, which was very unusual at the time. She worked for the Wool Bureau.<\/p>\n For the what bureau? The Wool Bureau? I didn\u2019t know there was one.<\/strong><\/p>\n You\u2019ve seen the wool label in wool clothes? The one that says \u201cIt\u2019s Real Wool\u201d? Well, that\u2019s her. She actually made that happen. She\u2019s the one who turned that into a nationwide thing. Anyway, she and my father parted ways when I was quite young, so she was a single mother and decided that she was going to take a one way trip to Virginia to throw herself into the mill there. She started a newsletter as a single parent with two little kids.<\/p>\n I was five years old when Star Wars came out. The movie had a pretty significant effect on my life, particularly given that the main character has the same name I do. But my first inkling that I wanted to do something associated with the stars and space exploration may have actually come a little bit before that, when I was four. One day we were at a laundromat, and I was left in the back of the station wagon. Let\u2019s remember that this was the \u201870s. My mom had some library books in the car, and there was this book on astronomy. I was young enough at the time that reading for me was still very new, and I looked at big paragraphs as scary things. I remember just looking at the pictures of the stars and thinking how wonderful it all was. And by the time I was nine years old it was all over and I wanted to be \u2013 am I really going say this to the whole world? \u2013 I wanted to be a scientist, an engineer, and an astronaut. All those things.<\/p>\n What\u2019s the matter with saying that to the whole world? Those are laudable goals.<\/strong><\/p>\n What I wanted to do at such an early age seems embarrassing but the fun part is I\u2019ve actually gotten two of the three.<\/p>\n Yes!<\/strong><\/p>\n I suppose I\u2019ve made my peace with it all.\u00a0 I had figured out very early that I wanted to be in science, but my stepfather didn\u2019t think much of it. He used to tell me things like \u201ca physicist is a boy with a toy\u201d and other disparaging things about my chosen vocation. We moved from Alexandria to Calvert County, Maryland, and I lived there from the age of 9 to 14. So I spent those really formative years in what I felt as a kid to be a very boring part of the world with not a lot of friends, and I was an intense geek at the time. Being a geek is OK now, being a nerd is cool, right? We\u2019re all nerds. That wasn\u2019t true when I was ten, and so I didn\u2019t have the best time growing up. I was so dissatisfied with life in Calvert County that I decided I was going to get the heck out of Dodge and go to college, and so I did that at the age of 14 by going to Simon\u2019s Rock College in Western Massachusetts. \u00a0I was there for two years and then I went to the University of Maryland. But there was a little problem for me, going to college at 14: I\u2019d never done homework. Homework wasn\u2019t a thing for me. I didn\u2019t care. If you\u2019re in college and you sit down at the physics class, I was the kid that you despised because I was the kid that would come in, take the test, and ace it, having never done anything.<\/p>\n Well,\u00a0 let me interrupt because you mentioned that you went to college at age 14 and I was about to ask if you were in Mensa or something? Because that\u2019s quite an accomplishment to be able to do that. And then you said you didn\u2019t do any homework, and that\u2019s even more amazing. So how did that come about? Do you just have natural ability?<\/strong><\/p>\n Truth is, I was actually bored and it was kind of unhealthy. The not doing homework thing is really bad, you don\u2019t want to do that. I got over it later, I\u2019ll come to that, but I\u2019ve learned lots of lessons on the way, chief of which is that brains are neither necessary nor sufficient a condition to do great things in life. It helps, but it\u2019s neither necessary nor sufficient. Anyway, I was never in Mensa, I never bothered with Mensa. I went to one Mensa meeting and I found it impossibly boring. So yeah, I was a little bit weird. I was a little bit of a mutant in school but truth is, I was terribly bored and I only started doing better in school when they skipped me a grade and started letting me skip ahead and do other things. I started doing summer programs with the Center for Advancement of Academically Talented Youth (CTY). They sent me to Arizona State University for a summer. I went to Franklin and Marshall University in Pennsylvania the following summer. I learned Greek. After that I went to the Rock, but when I was 16, I went to the University of Maryland as a junior . . . and promptly fell apart because you can get away with what I did for only so long. Not doing homework might have worked in the introductory physics classes, but once I got into the upper division classes, that\u2019s when reality hit and it hit hard. I was weeded out. I flunked out of physics. I did. My last semester as a physics major the first time around I had a C, a D and an F on my transcript in physics. I got a C in quantum mechanics, largely because the professor was being kind. I got a D in electricity and magnetism because that\u2019s what I deserved, and I got an F in my lab class. My lab class! Remember that one for later, because I absolutely deserved it. I did nothing. I was horrible. I was really out of it.<\/p>\n You have more than the average number of degrees, so I\u2019m trying to put this all together. You\u2019re going to walk us through how that all came about, right? How despite all this you are very well credentialed?<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah, I can do that. So I got the C, D and the F and my stepfather, who never wanted me to be a physicist anyway, took the opportunity, since I\u2019d been in college for 4 1\/2 years, to apply a little pressure. And so he said to me: \u201cYou will graduate by the end of the year or you\u2019re just out. We\u2019re not paying for you anymore.\u201d And I said (to myself), \u201cWell, I want to graduate, so what can I graduate in?\u201d And I thought, I can graduate in German, because in addition to physics, I had also been taking German classes. I\u2019ve also studied Russian, Latin, Greek, Gothic and Middle High German. So I know a very little bit of a whole bunch of languages, but I love language. Language is great!<\/p>\n Let me jump in here again because I saw that German was one of your B.A. degrees and I thought, well maybe you have German ancestry and you were trying to connect in that way with your family history?<\/strong><\/p>\n Nope. The closest my family gets to Germany is that my grandfather\u2019s parents came from Brest-Litovsk, in what is now Belarus near the Polish border. It was invaded by Germany. They were Jews.<\/p>\n Well, that wasn\u2019t what I was thinking. I thought perhaps Sollitt might be a German name. But anyway, this is very impressive. Please continue.<\/strong><\/p>\n OK.\u00a0 Well so I flunked out and I thought, well, I can get a degree in German because I\u2019ve been studying German. I started taking German when I was 12 or something, 11 or 12, and I kept at it. Then I did Russian for a couple of years. I did German when I transferred to University of Maryland, so I said \u201cI can do that\u201d. I had to take all the senior level requirements in a single semester. The chairman of the department said, \u201cI don\u2019t think you\u2019re going to make it\u201d but I did and he wasn\u2019t very happy: I didn\u2019t do any homework.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t a big deal to take a couple of summer classes, and then I was out. I got my degree in German, a degree that I had never wanted. I had wanted a physics degree. And I was 19, I had just turned 19. I was, in fact, a little disappointed that I didn\u2019t get my degree at age 18, but I got it at 19, and graduated in August of 1990. That was right around the time when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and we had the biggest recession since the Great Depression, and you had Harvard graduates waiting tables in Boston, that was all they could get. That was the environment into which I graduated with my unwanted degree in German with, you know, some lousy grades, although my GPA wasn\u2019t awful. My first job was doing temp work for WFTY-TV channel 50. I did accounts receivable. I worked with a temp agency and I had to learn the job of accounts receivable by taking the test to see if I could do the job. So I thought \u201cI don\u2019t know how to do this, but OK, I\u2019ll take the test.\u201d It\u2019s like this is how you do this and that\u2019s how you do that, so OK, you can do receivables now! \u00a0I worked for them for a couple months and then I went through the Administrative Careers with America test, a very, very brief resurrection of the Civil Service Exam. And very foolishly, where it said you can indicate where you\u2019re willing to work, for some insane reason, I said \u201cLos Angeles.\u201d I\u2019d never been there but it sounded like fun. So I put that down as a potential location, with a bunch of other places, and the only offer I got was from the Internal Revenue Service in the Los Angeles district.<\/p>\n I read about the IRS in your bio, and I was going to ask about it, so please tell us about that experience.<\/strong><\/p>\n I was employed as a Revenue Officer.<\/p>\n It so doesn\u2019t fit with what you\u2019ve been telling us about who you are. But go ahead (laughs<\/strong>).<\/p>\n Let\u2019s just say it\u2019s been a circuitous route! I joined the IRS as a Revenue Officer in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, thanking my lucky stars that I had an actual job. And it was for a rather miserable salary that I drove my mom\u2019s car across the country to get there. A Revenue Officer is the person who knocks on doors and collects the taxes. \u00a0I was hired as a GS-7. This was not a job that I liked. In fact, it was a job I viscerally hated but I did this job for nearly 4 1\/2 years of my life. It taught me some really important lessons.<\/p>\n My first lesson came on the very first day, when I attended a training session for hundreds of people (there had been a huge District-wide hire). About the first thing the first speaker said was that because we are now in the government, we must not only avoid impropriety, but the very appearance of impropriety. And that is something that I have lived by ever since. I think it\u2019s the way you must be. I was in what they sometimes call retail government. My job was to literally go knock on doors of delinquent taxpayers and say, \u201cHi, you owe the government money or there are government tax returns that you haven\u2019t filed\u201d. I would do this driving my own car. And back in 1991, when I started, April of 1991, I was 19 years old. One taxpayer joked that he didn\u2019t realize that the IRS was hiring from high school these days! (laughs)\u00a0 Yeah, I looked pretty young. I started off wearing a suit and tie and the whole bit with the badge and everything. Everybody was terrified of me. So I ditched the suit. I ditched the tie. I grew my hair out. I wore rumpled blue jeans and a rumpled shirt. I mean, I looked terrible. But everybody talked to me. I never brought out the pocket commission unless I had to. And what I found was that I ended up being really, really good at the job. I was the number two rated Revenue Officer at GS-9, the year I was rated in the district. The first-rated GS-9 Revenue Officer in LA District that year was a really nice lady named Gail, a really neat lady, a grandmother.<\/p>\n As a Revenue Officer, my attitude was markedly different from many. I didn\u2019t approach delinquent taxpayers as, well, delinquents. I just went there thinking that they were people with a problem that needed to get fixed. My attitude was, \u201cHi, I\u2019m from the IRS, I\u2019m here to help, and I\u2019m serious. Let me help you\u201d. I never, ever, ever wanted to seize things. I never seized a car. I never seized a house. Other people did. They were keen to do it but I wasn\u2019t. I managed to avoid all that stuff by basically dealing with taxpayers like real people. And I ended up closing tons and tons and tons of cases, something like three or four times as many cases as the next person in my group, because of the way I dealt with people, treating them differently, respectfully.<\/p>\n I got my GS-11 at the age of 22. I was the youngest GS-11 that anyone could think of, and one day one of my co-workers said that I would eventually be the Assistant Commissioner of the IRS. That idea filled me with dread\u2026 But I mean no disrespect to the hardworking Revenue Officers and others at the IRS \u2013 their job is truly thankless, but so utterly necessary. So I was doing the job, although I despised it, and then one of the best jobs in the IRS came up, which was to do the exact same job for the International District. I transferred to L\u2019Enfant Plaza in Washington, DC and International sent me as far as eastern Canada for my first training trip. I went from Montreal to Quebec City to New Brunswick to Halifax to Prince Edward Island to Newfoundland. What a great trip. It was wonderful. I met interesting new people and it\u2019s a very different sort of thing there because you have no enforcement authority whatsoever. You basically have to ask very nicely, but I was pretty good at that because that\u2019s how I did my job in LA.<\/p>\n Had people gone there to escape the oversight of the IRS?<\/strong><\/p>\n No, it\u2019s not that they were trying to escape the long arm of the IRS, it\u2019s just that people who live abroad still have U.S. tax obligations. They still have to pay tax on their worldwide income, whether they live in America or live outside of America. A U.S. citizen living in Canada still has to file a U.S. tax return, and they run into tax trouble, too.<\/p>\n But you were talking about enforcement authority. You don\u2019t have it in Canada or overseas, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah, the way it works is the revenue officer gets a case once it\u2019s been through the automated collection system. Automated collection systems are at the big IRS centers and they\u2019re the ones who make the phone calls, send the registered letters, and all that stuff. I\u2019m not sure what they do today. This was 30 years ago. And once the automated collection system runs through all the stuff they do, they ship it out to revenue officers who go and knock on the doors and say \u201cYou need to talk to me\u201d. And if they get ignored, or they don\u2019t comply with the agreements that they make with the revenue officer, which would have to be signed off by group managers, then the Revenue Officer can take action under civil enforcement authority. Civil enforcement authority includes things like seizures and levies. You can levy wages, you can levy bank accounts, you can levy rents. You can levy any form of income, any asset. You can place a notice of federal tax lien on the person, which then attaches to all their real estate. You can actually make seizures of anything a taxpayer owns. If they have nice artwork, you can seize that, too. It\u2019s a lot of power, and to be honest it\u2019s pretty scary. But the reason you can do that is because the long arm of federal law exists throughout the country.<\/p>\n When you go to a place like Canada, you\u2019re way past federal law. You can\u2019t seize anything or levy anything unless there\u2019s a tax treaty with that country. And if there is, then you can do things according to the way the treaty is written. I think in Canada that enforcement was done through requests to Revenue Canada. But to first order, you have no power in Canada, so what you\u2019re reduced to is \u201cLet\u2019s try to make this work\u201d, because if you have somebody who\u2019s been living in Canada for 40 years and doesn\u2019t want to go back, well, then their obvious move is to renounce U.S. citizenship and tell you to go away. That\u2019s if they never want to go back, if they don\u2019t care about their U.S. citizenship. But most folks do.<\/p>\n Anyway, so I did that trip and I was planning my next one, until one day, and you have to understand I went to the University of Maryland in College Park, which is literally down the road from L\u2019Enfant Plaza. It\u2019s like 10 miles away or so, and I was back in familiar areas. In fact, I grew up in the area when I lived in Maryland and Alexandria, so I knew the place really, really well. I was living on Capitol Hill at the time. And one day, I\u2019m not kidding here, at International, I was literally sitting at my desk scribbling physics equations, just like the Gary Larson cartoon (The Far Side): \u201cWhat\u2019s this? Jenkins, physics equations? Do you enjoy your job here as a cartoonist?\u201d<\/em> The cartoon character Jenkins, was literally me. I was scribbling physics equations, and I looked down and I said, \u201cOh, God, I really have unfinished business\u201d. So I went right up to the University of Maryland, to my old faculty advisor, a guy named Joe Redish. And I marched into his office, waved my hand, and said \u201cHi, Joe. How do I restart? How do I get back in? What do I do?\u201d And he started off listing books for me on how to get ready for it, saying \u201cDo this book, do that book\u201d. And then he stopped, thought about it for a moment, and said \u201cNo, forget all that. Go get the Feynman Lectures on Physics and give them a read.\u201d\u00a0 And I said \u201cOK, sure\u201d. So I got the Feynman Lectures on Physics and started reading them. They\u2019re brilliant. I mean brilliant.<\/p>\n I\u2019m sure they are.<\/strong><\/p>\n But they\u2019re not effective if you\u2019re learning physics for the first time. It\u2019s the last thing you want to do. It is effective if you\u2019re doing something like what I was doing, which is getting back into the field or getting a different perspective, or as a great reference book. They\u2019re wonderful for the right purposes, and I started reading the Feynman lectures that summer. I read them every day, all day. I read them on the subway to and from work. I read them on lunch hour. I read them on breaks. And as I read the lectures, I finally decided that I had to see about going back to school. So I went back up to the University of Maryland, walked into the registrar\u2019s office and said \u201cOK, I graduated a bunch of years ago and I want to come back. What\u2019s the process?\u201d And they said, \u201cWell, here\u2019s a 3\u00d75 card. \u00a0Fill it out, please.\u201d So I filled it out and handed it back to them, and they said \u201cYou\u2019re in!\u201d \u00a0And I said, \u201cWhat? That\u2019s it?\u201d I just filled out a 3\u00d75 card and then arranged for student loans.<\/p>\n I told my mom what I was doing \u2013 I was talking to her about returning to physics before I re-enrolled. She was very, very supportive of my going back to get my physics degree. It was unfinished business. But I didn\u2019t tell my stepfather right away because I knew he wouldn\u2019t approve. I knew I would have to tell him eventually. My opportunity came on Father\u2019s Day, 1995. By this time, my Mom and stepfather had divorced. But it was a crowded affair: my step-siblings were there with spouses and families, other friends were there. And I finally announced to everyone what I was going to do at the end of summer, which was leave the IRS and go back to school to get my degree in physics. Everybody in the room congratulated me, saying what a wonderful idea that was, and isn\u2019t that great. Except my stepfather. He didn\u2019t say a word. I knew he would not be happy about this \u2013 especially the way I ambushed him with it, in front of this huge crowd. But I knew that I absolutely had to present my decision as a fait accompli: if I had gone to him to tell him I was thinking about doing this, he would have been on me until I dropped it. At the end of the day I was the last person there and he walked up to me and he said, \u201cI don\u2019t know how to react to this news, that you\u2019re going back to school. It\u2019s as if you\u2019ve told me that you\u2019re quitting your successful government career to go back and study remedial English\u201d. That\u2019s a quote.<\/p>\n Oh my!<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah.<\/p>\n So it wasn\u2019t just a matter that he was paying for your education. He really objected to what you wanted to become through your education.<\/strong><\/p>\n Yes, that\u2019s why he would say things like \u201cA physicist is a boy with a toy\u201d. He saw physicists as unserious, as non-intellectuals, which is a huge mistake.<\/p>\n I should say.<\/strong><\/p>\n But I went back and set myself a goal. Now you remember those classes that I got the C, the D, and the F in? I registered for the same three classes and the graduate secretary told me \u201cYou can\u2019t do that. It\u2019s too much work. You\u2019re going to die!\u201d But I thought that I needed to do it and I knew if I got 3 A\u2019s I was doing the right thing. If I got one A or less, I knew that at least I\u2019d given it the good college try. I\u2019d gone back and addressed this one great failure in my life, one that made my whole life feel incomplete. At least I\u2019d done it and I could move on to other things in life now and not worry about it anymore. If I got two A\u2019s, I didn\u2019t know what it would mean, but if I got three A\u2019s, I knew it was cool.<\/p>\n So I went back and within two weeks, I was just drowning in the work. It turns out there\u2019s a Physics Class Invariance Principle: every upper division undergraduate physics class takes 20 hours of homework per week. 20 hours, plus all the time that you\u2019re in class. Three classes means 60 hours of work per week, more than a full-time job. But my attitude was very different in that I now had five years of work experience under my belt. I had been away from physics for five years when I went back and my attitude was that I went to Maryland in the morning and my classes were just part of my work day. I spent the rest of the day working in the library and other places at Maryland, and I went home at night, and was done, except when I started having experiments.<\/p>\n I remember that first semester I was in the advanced undergraduate lab, the one I had got the F in, and something had changed. Suddenly, it was my favorite class! \u00a0I had the exact same lab manual, and I despised it just as much the second time around. Only this time I had enough confidence to look at it and say, \u201cThis thing is horribly written. I mean, this is awful. Where does this come from? Oh, they have a source in here. Adrian Melissinos.\u201d \u00a0Anyway, it was Melissinos\u2019 \u201cExperiments in Modern Physics\u201d. I went and found it in the library and started reading it and that became my textbook. Not just that book \u2013 I looked up every single source cited in all those experiment write-ups: books, monographs, reference materials. One of the sources was the book \u201cAlpha-, Beta- and Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy\u201d by Kai Siegbahn. I read the source material to actually learn what they were doing, and I had a blast. Oh my God, that was fun! I mean fun.<\/p>\n One of the most fun things I did was the cosmic ray experiment. It was a timing experiment that used scintillator paddles. As a particle passed through a scintillator paddle, it would knock electrons off of the sodium iodide crystals. The electrons would be reabsorbed into the matrix, releasing light that would then be picked up by photomultiplier tubes. The four paddles were hooked up to some simple logic boards to generate a coincidence circuit, where a coincidence gate would be opened by triggering the first paddle. You\u2019d get simple yes\/no signals from subsequent paddles, and if you got four yesses (energy deposited in each of the paddles within the timing gate duration), you\u2019d have a coincidence, and add that particle to your measured \u00a0cosmic ray flux. You learn something about the energies of the cosmic rays by varying the shielding between pairs of scintillator paddles. More shielding means you get fewer yesses in the paddles below the shielding. And I thought, OK, that\u2019s cool. What about trying a direct measurement of the energies of these things?<\/p>\n I went to the professor, Phillip Roos, who was a member of the board of directors of the Jefferson Laboratory (the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, a high-energy electron-positron collider in Virginia). He loaned me a very thick scintillator and I started doing actual spectroscopy with this thing. And I learned all about the Landau curve. Basically, it\u2019s what happens when a high energy particle penetrates a thin layer. How much energy does it give up? It\u2019s a quasi-stochastic process, but the distribution of energies deposited in the layer by particles from a monoenergetic beam is something called the Landau Curve. It is incredibly complicated and way past the purview of an undergraduate class to try to model or do anything with. But I did my best. And so I put that together as one of my experiments for the class and I just absolutely loved it. I just loved it.<\/p>\n In quantum mechanics, I absolutely died. Completely. \u00a0And I realized that I had major problems. I even had a call with my mom, telling her \u201cI don\u2019t know if I\u2019m doing the right thing\u201d. Looking for a way forward, I realized I couldn\u2019t do it myself. I needed to join a study group, so I started looking around, asking folks, \u201cCan I join your study group?\u201d And I kept getting the cold shoulder. What I didn\u2019t realize was that they didn\u2019t have study groups. And finally, at one point I just said OK, nobody wants me to join their study group, not realizing they didn\u2019t exist, and I decided to do a study group of my own. I started inviting people, and they were eager to join. Quantum mechanics is still the thing I know best from that period, because I ended up teaching it. I had about five or six people, mostly from a student group called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS). It was the undergraduate space exploration gang. And I ended up teaching them quantum mechanics. It was wonderful, you\u2019re jumping into it and the book is throwing all the math at you up front, like it\u2019s hitting you with a baseball bat. And at the same time, I took E&M as well. In that class I did actually fall in with a couple of guys and the three of us became an established study group for that and kept it going for a number of classes.<\/p>\n But it ended up being 20 hours a week per class, 60 hours easy. I was in the lab at times until midnight or later, as well as on weekends, and I ended up getting 3 A\u2019s! So in the end, I did it right. So I stuck around. I could have finished my degree in a year but I had a strategy: I wanted to get into a good grad school and I figured that no grad school would touch me with those C, D, & F grades on my transcript. Remember those? I think a C or a D in one of my math classes is really bad, but I knew no one would touch me if I didn\u2019t have really, really \u00a0good follow up grades, so I needed to take two years, not one. So that\u2019s what I did and I also knew that I needed a really good recommendation to get into a good grad school, so I signed up with something that fell out of the cosmic ray work. Originally, I didn\u2019t understand what I was getting with the energy measurements from the thick scintillator. I didn\u2019t realize yet that I was looking at a Landau curve. And Dr. Roos said. \u201cHey, go talk to Dr. Jordan Goodman, who is one of our younger professors. He does cosmic rays.\u201d So I talked to Dr. Goodman, and he literally laughed me out of his office. He was brutal. He was in particle astrophysics. He said I was doing things wrong. He told me what I was doing wrong. He said I had put my big thick simulator between the four paddles. There\u2019s two paddles above, two paddles below. I put the simulator in between them. He wanted me to put the simulator at the bottom.<\/p>\n And so having been chased out of his office like a scolded dog, I went back to my experiment. I played with what I was doing. I got the Landau curve. That\u2019s how I learned about the Landau curve. And I actually went and studied up on it. I found out by looking through things. And then I went back. I took Kai Siegbahn\u2019s book \u201cAlpha-, Beta- and Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy\u201d, a really good book, and I got my new results. I tried it his way and I tried it my way and my way worked better, and I marched right back into his office and said \u201cOK, I did this and I did this and I did this and I get this, this is the Landau curve. It looks like this crazy equation, but here\u2019s where it\u2019s coming from with the physics. I tried it your way and I tried it my way and my way worked better. He didn\u2019t laugh and I ended up working for him. He sent me first to New Mexico to work on the MILAGRO detector. This was a Cherenkov detector. Cherenkov detectors, they\u2019re water, ultra-pure water, and particles go through them at very, very high speed, faster than the speed of light in water, and they are giving off shock waves, just like supersonic shockwaves. Only this is light. It\u2019s called Cherenkov radiation. It\u2019s blue. I forget exactly why the physics makes it blue, but it does, and there\u2019s an opening angle cone, it\u2019s the same physics, just with light instead of sound, and you pick those up with photomultiplier, tubes set in the water. It\u2019s actually quite similar to the work with scintillators, but you\u2019re putting photomultiplier tubes in the water instead of on a scintillator. Same kind of deal. Different physics makes the light, but from the photomultiplier tube out, it\u2019s the same thing. So I had a one heck of an adventure one summer in New Mexico. One of the other two guys in my study group, named Aaron Eichelberger, went out with me. And we both worked on the detector over the summer. That was good times. Up at 10,000 feet, I was in the best shape I\u2019ve ever been in my life.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll bet.<\/strong><\/p>\n Just about. We were building. We had these sand filled PVC pipes at 100 pounds a pop and I\u00a0 would pick one up and take it into the detector, you know? I was basically doing grunt construction work. I helped tear down the Cygnus detector too, which was another scintillation detector. The following winter Jordan Goodman sent me to the Super-K detector in Japan. He also wrote my recommendation letters for grad school. And my plan, long story short, paid off. I was accepted by the University of Colorado at Boulder\u2019s APS Department, which is Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. \u00a0That\u2019s a very, very good program and I was going to go there until I was accepted by Caltech. Caltech is where I always wanted to go. I had applied to Caltech for transfer when I was fifteen and they said no, but for grad school they said yes. I figured they might because I was weird and Caltech does weird. Caltech is weird. (laughs)<\/p>\n I applied to Berkeley, too, mostly for my stepfather because he was a Berkeley man, but I figured Berkeley wouldn\u2019t touch me with a 10 foot pole, and they didn\u2019t. They said: \u201cNo, thank you!\u201d So I went to Tech and I ended up working in cosmic rays. I worked for Ed Stone, who was the director of JPL, who went from managing 5,000 people at JPL when he retired to managing me! (smiles).\u00a0 That was kind of an intense experience, but he taught me wonderful, wonderful things. I started off as an anomalous cosmic ray physicist. That\u2019s what I wanted to do, looking for the termination shock, but Voyager didn\u2019t get there during my time in graduate school. I remember spending a long six months trying to figure out, can I do this? I did my candidacy exam and advanced to candidacy based on anomalous cosmic rays, but then realized I didn\u2019t have enough for a thesis. That was a low point. I was depressed but one day I came into my office and there on my chair was a stack of papers about solar particles. And I said \u201cOK, I\u2019m a solar particle physicist now!\u201d So I ended up doing a thesis on solar particles. And I found, you know, cosmic rays, solar particles, the guy who did the thesis before me put into his acknowledgements that \u201cit is often a dry field.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s a hard thing. Most folks who get cosmic ray, space cosmic ray degrees, end up elsewhere, and I did too. I was in grad school. I graduated. I did my thing and actually my defense was fun. \u00a0I didn\u2019t want my defense to last forever, so I wanted to schedule it for 11:00 o\u2019clock, right before lunch, because noon rolls around and everybody at Caltech goes to lunch at noon, the whole campus, everyone turns out for lunch. It\u2019s the only time you ever see people on campus, noon. And I figured that my thesis wasn\u2019t nearly as important to my thesis committee as lunch, so I figured they would give me an easy pass. So I proposed this time to my advisor, and he said no. He rescheduled it for, I think, 8:00 o\u2019clock in the morning or something horrible like that, 9:00 o\u2019clock, and I gave my talk, I did my thing. I even had one of the guys there who loves to kill grad students. We were required to have at least one of those people on our committee and I had them both times (candidacy and defense). They just love to murder the ill-prepared grad student. So I gave my talk, it was like forty, fifty minutes, and I solicited questions. And one of them said, \u201cWell, you\u2019ve got a typo on page 2\u201d. And the other one said \u201cIt\u2019s kind of thin, it\u2019s only 125 pages. Did you do more than that? And I said, \u201cWell, I did. I worked on anomalous cosmic rays, but I didn\u2019t think that was worthy of going into this thesis because it\u2019s different.\u00a0\u00a0 And they said \u201cOK\u201d.\u00a0 They had essentially no questions for me. Ed looked at me and said, \u201cI\u2019ve been doing this for 35 years and I\u2019ve never seen that!\u201d So apparently I did pretty well.<\/p>\n You know, you would have ace\u2019d a PhD in behavioral psychology! \u00a0There are so many ways that you did things, interacting with other human beings, understanding their motivations and what impels them, developing your own strategies for success.<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, you know, I learned a lot of that in the IRS. There you\u2019re walking into a situation which is absolutely beyond question, adversarial.<\/p>\n Yeah, you changed the job that you had there. The way they set you up to go out with a suit and tie on, and then you found that what works better is to be human and meet people at their level. And your results bore that out.<\/strong><\/p>\n Yep. they did.<\/p>\n But that was you. It was almost reverse psychology that you worked on people. Instead of coming in with a hammer, you came in with a handshake, saying \u201cWhat can I do to help you comply?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah, I had people actually thank me for coming into their lives. Because my assumption, my feeling, is there\u2019s this willful naivete, which I call honor. But one mustn\u2019t misunderstand. It is a naivete about the world and the people in it, and I decide to be that way. I decide that people have good intentions, generally speaking, but not all of them. Clearly there\u2019s some bad apples out there. There\u2019s no question that if you do life this way you\u2019re going to get hurt. It does happen. But you live better. You just live better.<\/p>\n I think that\u2019s a good philosophy. Now let me direct this a bit because we\u2019ve already gone longer than most of these interviews go, but your story is fascinating. I\u2019ve pretty much thrown away the interview questions because you\u2019re telling about yourself and that\u2019s what we wanted you to do. It\u2019s just a wonderful story. It\u2019s been different from the other ones that we\u2019ve done and probably better for that, so I\u2019m not concerned, but there are a couple of things we want to touch on, get your thoughts on, and then when we get this back to you on paper, if there\u2019s more you want to say about this, or if you want to talk about something else, you can conduct your own interview and just write the way you want it. I don\u2019t think it matters how long it is. It\u2019ll probably be one of the longer ones, but I think when we post it, it can go down as far as there are words and people are willing to hang in there and read it. It\u2019s a fascinating read, that\u2019s for sure. But one of the things we like to ask is, OK, you\u2019ve had a very, as you said \u201ccircuitous\u201d route to getting your job, but you\u2019re good at it, and it\u2019s what you apparently love, because you went back to it twice, into physics, and now planetary physics. But if you weren\u2019t a NASA research scientist, or a physicist, what would your dream job be?<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, I mean, the dream job for me, I have to admit, as I told you: scientist, engineer, astronaut.<\/p>\n OK, you did answer that already.<\/strong><\/p>\n The neat part is, when I got out of grad school, I went to work for Northrop Grumman as a system engineer and I learned about system engineering. So I\u2019ve actually ticked off two of the three.<\/p>\n Yes, you have.<\/strong><\/p>\n Let me give you a slightly different and slightly better answer than that, which is I have had a cataract in my left eye, starting from when I was very, very young, so I was unable to pursue what I otherwise might have done, which is that I would have gone after being a pilot in the Air Force or the Navy. That\u2019s the other thing I wanted to do. I love to fly.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve told us a lot about your education and about your work, but what do you do for fun?<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, I have a family, first off.<\/p>\n Tell us about your family. We want to know about that, too.<\/strong><\/p>\n My wife, Marie, actually has a PhD in developmental psychology from Cornell, which she completed in my living room at Caltech.<\/p>\n Really?<\/strong><\/p>\n Because I sat her down and fed her for a summer, and allowed her to do nothing but her thesis for the summer. I feel very proud of that. But her real passion is books; she\u2019s a librarian. So I actually put her through library school too. She\u2019s now a librarian over at San Jose City Library and loving it, I hope. At least I think she is. We have two children, a daughter, Lynn, who is 17 and a senior in high school.\u00a0 And she loves cats. We have a cat, it\u2019s a long story. Our son Tristan is 14. He just started high school. He likes building stuff. I need to get him focused on his math, but he likes building things and that\u2019s very cool. I want him to keep doing that. He can be wildly creative. Mostly he likes to work in paper, but now I\u2019m trying to get him to work in other things. So that\u2019s the family. We like to travel. We like to go places, just go visit stuff, you know. I\u2019m trying to sell them on California too, because I did uproot them from South Carolina, which they had known basically their whole lives, and it\u2019s been quite a readjustment. But in terms of other things I like to do, well there\u2019s the standard stuff, you know, music and various things and reading. And in fact, if you\u2019re wondering about what kind of books I like to read the most, it used to be science fiction. I like science fiction, but I\u2018ve got to be honest: the latest thing I\u2019m into is primary sources. That\u2019s actually always been true and I\u2019m going to sound really horrible here, but I\u2019m the kind of guy who reads the original Marco Polo. I\u2019ve read Voltaire, Giraldus Cambrensis, also called Gerald of Wales, who wrote in the 13th century. I read the English translations. Sometimes I try to read the others, but it\u2019s difficult. My ancient languages aren\u2019t that good. I kind of wish they were. I\u2019d like them to be, but they\u2019re not. I like reading histories as well, and biography and things like that. I\u2019ve been doing a lot of that lately. I\u2019ve been trying to learn a lot about the history of the Spanish-American War period and the First World War. It\u2019s very, very interesting. Other things I do: I\u2019m a private pilot and in fact, I am in the middle of a long odyssey to pick up an airplane and bring it home. It\u2019s my own. It\u2019s called a Varga, and it\u2019s a tandem two-seat training aircraft. It\u2019s got a glass canopy and a low wing, and looks like a little fighter airplane from the \u201840s or something. I\u2019m halfway through flying it from Minnesota to here. I had a few problems along the way, and had to stop in Amarillo for repairs. Hopefully I\u2019ll be finishing the trip soon. So in the near future I\u2019m going to have a blast. I like driving, too. I have a Jeep. It\u2019s a funky diesel from Japan. I also like to hike, though I haven\u2019t done a whole lot of hiking lately.<\/p>\n You mentioned music. Do you play an instrument?<\/strong><\/p>\n No, no, not really. I tried. I failed.<\/p>\n Where does your taste run in music, then?<\/strong><\/p>\n Oh, to all kinds of things.\u00a0 I grew up in the \u201870s and the \u201880s and you know, I was poisoned by Sting, The Police, Genesis, stuff like that. But I\u2019m a big fan of folk music. American folk music, but also English folk music and Scottish and Irish folk music as well. Even Welsh. That\u2019s really great stuff actually. Breton and other things like that.\u00a0 I\u2019m a big fan of Newfoundland folk music, I discovered that in Newfoundland on my trip for the IRS. So I do a lot of that sort of thing and lately in the last 15 years or so, I\u2019ve actually become a devotee of some forms of country music, so shoot me!\u00a0 No, no, no, it\u2019s all good stuff. I mean, music is music. It\u2019s good stuff. I like classical music too. I\u2019m a big fan of all sorts of things classical. I used to love Baroque music exclusively, but my tastes have become a little more sophisticated since then. I like all sorts of things now.<\/p>\n That\u2019s very eclectic and I appreciate that. I think about when people ask me what my favorite color is and I\u2019ve thought, how can you answer a question like that? The colors are all in context, they\u2019re all beautiful. They\u2019re all wonderful. We would miss any one of them if they weren\u2019t there.<\/strong><\/p>\n On the kids, by the way, our daughter is a violist and our son\u2019s a cellist, so they like music too.<\/p>\n Yes, you mentioned you have an airplane and a Jeep. Are you interested in mechanics at all? I know Jeeps tend to have a good amount of repairs. I don\u2019t know if pilots fix their own planes, how does that end up going?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/a><\/figure><\/a><\/figure><\/a><\/figure>