ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

courage I had and I went back to his offi ce and poked my head in the door. And he says, “Oh, it’s you. So I
guess you’re here for the job.” And I said “Well, you never called me.” And he says, “I never call anybody.
Every year I pick the person for the job by whoever comes back. Usually there’s only one person who’s brave
enough to come back a second time and that’s the person I know is going to work hard enough to actually be
worth the time and effort.” So that was the fi rst lesson, which is you gotta be persistent. You’ve gotta keep coming
back, and that’s the culture of physicists is that they don’t give up on things.
Clip 4 - First Work-Study Assignment: So my fi rst job was to assemble planar drift chambers, which people
don’t know what those are, but they’re a common detector which consists of an aluminum frame with a gas bag
around it and you put in ethane, which is just common cooking gas and there are very, very fi ne wires in the
gas, so that when a subatomic particle that has an electric charge goes through, it ionizes it, and if the wires are
under voltage, the charge will drift to the wire and you can sense that. Well, you need very sensitive electronics,
but if you design the electronics right, you can pick that up and you can actually put a set of these through
and track the path of the subatomic particle. But of course, again, I’m just starting as a freshman, I haven’t had
more than one college-level physics course, no calculus, I don’t know anything. So my fi rst job is I’m going to
build these chambers, which I don’t have any idea what any of the words you just meant were. But the professor
who was in charge of the project said, “Here, I’ll show you how to start,” and he took me to a garage behind the
physics building, and it was a room about the size of this one, and it was fi lled fl oor to ceiling with twenty foot
steel beams and bales of this copper plated wire and tanks of gas. And he literally said to me, “Some assembly
required,” and he left. And I didn’t see him again for weeks. So I was just left with this task, you either sink or
swim, and luckily a graduate student, well he wasn’t a graduate student at the time, but he was a technician who
eventually became a graduate student and he said, “Well, you know, if you have a question you should just ask.”
So I said, “I have no idea how to start,” and he said, “Well, look, you gotta make the chambers of a design that’s
gonna be about twenty feet by six feet and so you gotta learn how to cut steel beams and so, you know, you ask,
right, you don’t know how to cut steel? Well there are people in the shop who do, you go ask them. You don’t
know how to weld? Well, you go to the shop and you ask people there how to weld, or I know how to weld. You
don’t know electronics? Well there’s the guy you work for, the electrical engineer, and you go, you ask him how
to do things. But you have to be able to fi nd out what it is you don’t know, ask people how to do it, to get help,
and if they don’t know how to do it then you gotta fi gure it out.”
So all four years were basically experiences like that, where I really learned how it is that people put together
collaborations of hundreds of people and build these detectors that are literally three or, and now fi ve stories
high, and about four stories wide. And it’s not that anybody knows how to do these things, but they, they just
have the attitude that they’re going to fi gure it out and so that part of Northwestern’s experience for me was
excellent. I don’t see how I could’ve gotten that by just picking a random college like University of Illinois and
trying to wind my way through, but Northwestern was small enough that you could fi nd the right people, and
they would guide you on the way.
Clip 5 - The Consequences of Physics: The people that I knew were at the tail end of the generation that created
the atom bomb. And in fact, some of the people had worked on the Manhattan Project. So, their idea about
what you know and what you can do with what you know was married to this very essential fact that you can
destroy the world with the right facts, if you actually understand well enough what you claim to understand, you
can build remarkable things. And you can also build really terrible things. But from the experience of having
done it…I’m listening to one of the senior physicists there, Dr. Benoski, who had been the original director of
the lab. And, hearing his stories about going to Hiroshima many years after dropping the bomb there and seeing
the museum in which they had enshrined a part of the trigger for the fi rst A-bomb, which he designed and built.
So, he’s looking in this…you know, among the shadows fl ashed into stone walls and so forth. Here’s the real aspects
of your work and what happens and how it can be used if you understand the physics part of it, but don’t
understand necessarily how it might be used once it’s out in the open. And he tells the story to students like me
about that as a way of saying you have to forge a very strong, again, this whole idea that you have to forge a
very strong identity that says that you’re not gonna live in fear of what’s to come because these decisions have
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Physics