Wojcicki, Stanley
Oral history interview with Stanley Wojcicki, 2021 February 11.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Stanley Wojcicki, professor emeritus in the Department of Physics at Stanford. Wojcicki recounts his familys experiences in war-time Poland and his fathers work for the Polish government-in-exile in London. He discusses his familys postwar escape to Sweden from the Communists before their passage to the United States. Wojcicki discusses his undergraduate experience at Harvard and the opportunities that came available as a result of Sputnik in 1957. He explains his decision to pursue his graduate research at Berkeley under the direction of Art Rosenfeld, and his realization at the time that Berkeley was at the forefront in the revolution of experimental elementary particle physics headed by Luis Alvarez and the bubble chamber technique used by his group. Wojcicki explains how SU(3) transitioned from a mathematical concept to a central component of particle physics, and he describes his postdoctoral work at Berkeley Laboratory and his NSF fellowship at CERN to work on K-meson beam experiments. He discusses his faculty appointment at Stanford and his close collaboration with Mel Schwartz using spark chambers. Wojcicki describes his advisory work for Fermilab and for HEPAP, and the controversy surrounding the ISABELLE project and the initial site and design planning of the SSC. He explains some of the early warning signs of the projects eventual cancellation, and his work looking at charm particles at Fermilab from produced muons. Wojcicki explains that the endowed chairs named in his honor at Stanford were a retirement gift from his daughter Anne and her husband, Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Wojcicki reflects on his long career at Stanford, and he describes how the physics department has changed over the years and how government supported science has evolved. At the end of the interview, Wojcicki contrasts the sense of fundamental discoveries that permeated his early career, and he cites neutrino physics as a potentially promising area of significant discovery into the future.
Polish-American physicist. Ph.D. physics, University of California, Berkeley. Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Stanford University. Winner of the Bruno Pontecorvo Prize (2011) and the Panofsky Prize (2015).
Alvarez, Luis W., 1911-1988
Bjorken, James D.
Good, Myron Lindsay
Rosenfeld, Arthur H., 1926-2017
Schwartz, Melvin, 1932-2006
Ticho, Harold Klein, 1921-
Wojcicki, Stanley
European Organization for Nuclear Research
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Harvard University.
Stanford University
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
University of California, Berkeley
Bubble chambers.
Mesons
Particles (Nuclear physics)
Superconducting Super Collider
ISABELLE
K-Meson Beam
Main injector neutrino oscillation search
MINOS
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