ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

Physics
154
George Campbell, Jr. - Video Clip Transcription
Clip 1 - Street Kid: The, I was kind of a street kid, and you know, I wasn’t, you know, formal, serious member
of the gang like the Crips and so on today, but you know, I was in gang fi ghts, and all those kinds of things.
You know, we didn’t, in those days, we didn’t have high-powered weapons like they have now. I mean, we had
things like top guns, where you know, you take a board and you have rubber bands and you fl atten out bottle
caps and you shoot people with them. We had stuff like that as weapons and so, which can hurt people, but not
kill them like, like we tend to do now. So you know, I had, I learned a lot of stuff on the streets that I think also
served me well. And quite frankly, I was lucky, I mean, I think there are plenty of times in the course of my career
when I could have gone in a variety of different directions. I could have, you know, gotten into some things
that I shouldn’t have, and…and was very fortunate. One might say that I had, you know, was given certain gifts,
and the confl uence of fortunate events took place in the course of my life which allowed me to have the kind of
opportunities that I’ve had.
Clip 2 - Interest in Physics:
I guess in high school I had a very intense curriculum at Central High School in Philadelphia. It was an extraordinary
curriculum. We had a number of professors or teachers who had Ph.D.s and so on. You know, it was sort
of Philadelphia’s answer to Stuyvesant here in New York or Bronx High School of Science. And although the
focus was not on science, it was a very broad academic curriculum. But we had, certainly had great math and
science teachers and you know, one of the things that really stimulated my interest is that every year, once a
year, we had a scientist. Philadelphia’s not too far from where Bell Laboratories is and you know, in those days
Bell Labs was the premier research enterprise in the world and you know, many Nobel Laureates and so on.
And because Central was such a high profi le academic school, Bell Labs used to send one of its physicists to,
once a year, to give a gee-whiz talk on all the latest developments and technologies that were emerging from
Bell Labs, and that was not too long after the transistor had been invented. The fi rst satellites had been launched
by Bell Labs. The laser had been invented there and so on, and solar cells, and so we had this spectacular performance
really, by a physicist once a year who came and showed off all this, you know, solar cells mounted on
little cars, and he predicted that by 1975 all cars would be powered by solar cells and so his predictions didn’t
all come true, but it was a wonderful talk and it certainly piqued my interest about this fascinating fi eld of physics…
And it wasn’t until my junior year in college or, you know, it was a fi ve-year program so it was really the
third year that I took this modern physics course and that’s when it really solidifi ed for me that this is, this is...
But I suspect that in the back of my mind I already had some inkling toward physics, even though I hadn’t sort
of consciously decided. Because of those kinds of early experiences. And it made a nice story for the P.R. at
Bell Labs because, you know, I did wind up after my Ph.D. going to work at Bell Labs and so it was kind of, I
started getting infl uenced, you know, black kid in the black neighborhood of Philadelphia having this infl uence
from a Bell Lab scientist and wind up actually being there.
Clip 3 - High Energy Physics: As the energy levels in our experimental physics arena increased, new, more
and more particles were being discovered, and so the objective was to try and understand the relationship of
these particles, the assumption being that there are a limited number of fundamental elements, building blocks,
that comprise all of the materials that exist in nature, or that one can create by various means. At one time it
was thought that the atom was the fundamental building block and there were different kinds of atoms and the
different atoms were elements. Then we discover that the atom in fact had protons and neutrons and electrons
and so they were believed to be the fundamental building blocks and then we discovered that in fact that if you
smash protons together, you found other particles and so the number of particles kept proliferating and the question
was how do we organize these, what are the fundamental blocks...and how does it all fi t together to yield
the incredibly rich array of materials and interactions that we actually see and observe in the macroscopic world
and so that was the...that’s the fi eld of theoretical physics.