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Kaplan, David E. (David Elazzar), 1968-
Oral history interview with David Kaplan, 2020 July 13
This is an interview with David E. Kaplan, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. He recounts his childhood in New York and then Seattle, and he explains his complex Jewish-Israeli family roots. Kaplan describes his early aptitude for math, and he discusses his education at Chapman College and his transfer to Berkeley, where he completed his undergraduate degree in physics. He explains his near-accidental entrÄ› into the graduate program in physics at the University of Washington, and he describes the formative influence of Ann Nelson. He conveys the excitement surrounding supersymmetry during his time in graduate school and his research on quark masses, and he recounts his postdoctoral research, which was split between Argonne Lab and the University of Chicago. Kaplan discusses the crisis of confidence he felt in his early career and he describes his second postdoctoral appointment at SLAC where he worked with Savas Dimopoulos on supersymmetry and became involved in the B physics endeavor. He conveys his long-held contempt for string theory and attacks it on both sociological and scientific grounds, and he explains the circumstances leading to his hire and tenure at Johns Hopkins. Kaplan describes how he used startup funds to invite speakers to the department, and he explains how imposter syndrome affects faculty members as much as anyone else. He explains the various issues surrounding the cancellation of the SSC, the viability of the LHC, and the prospects of the ILC, and he offers his view on what these projects say about the state of particle physics globally. Kaplan discusses the significance of WIMP dark matter, and why more physicists should work on issues beyond string theory and collider physics. At the end of the interview, Kaplan describes how he tries to make his research an antidote to the problems he sees in the field, and he discusses his ongoing interest in general Higgs decays.
David E. Kaplan is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. Previous institutional affiliations include the University of Washington, Argonne Lab, University of Chicago, and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford.
Dimopoulos, Savas, 1952-
Kaplan, David E. (David Elazzar), 1968-
Nelson, Ann E. (Ann Elizabeth)
Argonne National Laboratory
Johns Hopkins University
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Stanford University
University of Chicago
University of Washington
Colliders (Nuclear physics).
Higgs bosons.
Large Hadron Collider (France and Switzerland)
Particle physics. gtt
String models.
Superconducting Super Collider
Supersymmetry
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
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