In this interview Charles Barnes discusses his childhood in Canada; his early affinity for mathematics and science; undergraduate years at McMaster University; wartime work in the British-Canadian atomic energy project at Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories; his Ph.D. studies in physics at the University of Cambridge, working with Otto Frisch; his 40-year career in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) W. K. Kellogg Radiation, including the labs history and research, as well as its role in the physics and astrophysics community, and the labs relationship with Caltech administration; his nuclear physics collaborations with William Fowler, Thomas Lauritsen, Charles Lauritsen, and Robert F. Christy; his accelerator-based investigations and post-war work in quantum field theory with Murray Gell-Mann and Richard P. Feynman; investigations into stellar evolution and stellar nucleosynthesis and the awarding of the 1983 Nobel Prize in physics to William Fowler for his work in nucleosynthesis; his work with John Bahcall on the solar neutrino flux; the research contributions of Kip Thorne, Jesse DuMond, Felix Boehm, Maarten Schmidt, and G. J. Wasserburg, among others; his views on current trends and future directions in physics and astrophysics.