Robertson, R. G. Hamish, 1943-
Oral history interview with Hamish Robertson, 2020 May 6.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Hamish Robertson, Boeing Distinguished Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Washington. Robertson recounts his childhood in Hamilton, Canada and his experiences as an undergraduate at Oxford University and his early interest in working at Los Alamos Lab. He describes his decision to pursue graduate work at McMaster University, which had just built the first nuclear reactor on a college campus in Canada, and his intent to focus on atomic beam physics. Robertson explains his post-doctoral research at Michigan State and his shift from nuclear structure physics to neutrino physics and his formative sabbatical year at Princeton and his tenure at Los Alamos, where he worked on neutrino mass. He describes his views on the standard model, and the recruitment process that led to his decision to join the faculty at UW, where he helped to create a laboratory to continue research on neutrinos. Robertson talks about the major influence of John Bahcall, and he describes the issues in physics research that remain compelling to him.
Hamish Robertson is the Boeing Distinguished Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Washington.
Bahcall, John N.
Los Alamos National Laboratory
McMaster University.
Michigan State University
Princeton University
University of Oxford
University of Washington
Atomic beams.
Neutrinos
Nuclear reactors.
Nuclear structure.
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