Lande, K.
Oral history interview with Kenneth Lande, 2020 May 18.
Interview with Kenneth Lande, professor emeritus in the Department of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania. Lande recounts his early childhood in Austria and his familys escape to New York City from the Nazis has a young boy. Lande describes his interest in science, which he developed during his time at Brooklyn Tech, which he pursued as an undergraduate at Columbia. He describes working on bubble chambers under the direction of Leon Lederman at Nevis Lab in Westchester, and why he gave no consideration to graduate schools other than Columbia. Lande discusses his research at Brookhaven and he describes the major projects of the early 1950s including the Cosmotron and Ledermans cloud chamber. He describes his thesis research on K mesons and explains that he accepted a job offer at the University of Pennsylvania before he defended his dissertation. Lande describes Penns and Princetons joint effort to become competitive in accelerator physics, and he explains his growing involvement in neutrino physics and work at Los Alamos in the 1960s. He explains the need to work underground when studying neutrino events caused by cosmic rays, and he describes his involvement with the Homestake mine collaboration. Lande describes his research involving gallium at the Baksan Observatory in the Soviet Union, the importance of the Kamiokande experiment, and he provides a history of neutrino physics that connects Darwin to Hans Bethe. He compares his research at Brookhaven, Fermilab, and Los Alamos, and he explains why he discourages undergraduates from memorizing anything as a way to encourage critical thinking. At the end of the interview Lande reflects on how collaborations have grown enormously over the course of his career, and looking ahead, he sees his contributions to neutrino research as prelude to something much bigger and fundamental for future discovery.
Kenneth Lande is a professor emeritus in the Department of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania. Lande completed his graduate studies at Columbia University and has conducted research at labs such as Brookhaven, Fermilab, Los Alamos, and Baksan Observatory in the Soviet Union.
Davis, Raymond, 1914-2006
Fenyves, Ervin J.
Lande, K.
Lederman, Leon M.
Steinberger, J.
Baksan Neutrino Observatory (Russia)
Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Columbia University
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory
University of Pennsylvania
Accelerators.
Astrophysics
Bubble chambers.
Cloud chamber
Cosmic rays
Gallium.
Mesons
Neutrinos
Nuclear fusion
Particles (Nuclear physics)
Radioactive decay.
Interviews. aat
Oral histories. aat
Transcripts. aat
Zierler, David, 1979- interviewer.
AIP-ICOS
American Institute of Physics. Niels Bohr Library & Archives. One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740, USA