Cahn, Robert N.
Oral history interview with Robert Cahn, 2020 July 21.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Robert Cahn, Senior Scientist Emeritus at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Cahn recounts his childhood in the San Francisco area, and he describes his early interests in math and science, and he describes his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he was influenced by Dan Kleppner and Ed Purcell. Cahn describes his summer internship at SLAC, and his travel experiences in Europe after graduating. He describes his decision to pursue graduate work at Berkeley and he explains the political tumult that had convulsed the campus in the late 1960s. Cahn discusses his work with Dave Jackson on Regge theory and his postdoctoral work at SLAC, which was focused on quark research. Cahn describes his work at the University of Washington, where he collaborated with Lowell Brown, and he explains his decision to join the physics faculty at University of Michigan, where he collaborated on several projects with Gordy Kane and where he became interested in parity violation in atoms. Cahn explains his decision to move to UC Davis, and he describes the opportunity at LBL that presented itself shortly thereafter. Cahn describes the way LBL has been integrated with the physics department at Berkeley, and he discusses his tenure as Director of the Physics division. At the end of the interview, Cahn describes LBLs increasing involvement in cosmology, the fundamental discoveries that have been made over the course of his career, and he considers some of the philosophical or metaphysical issues that arise in investigating how the universe works.
American physicist. Senior Scientist Emeritus at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
Brown, Lowell S.
Cahn, Robert N.
Jackson, John David, 1925-2016
Kane, G. L.
Kleppner, Daniel
Purcell, Edward M.
Harvard University.
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Davis
University of Michigan
University of Washington
Astrophysics
Nuclear physics
Quarks.
Regge theory.
Supernovae
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