Lepage, G. Peter
Oral history interview with Peter Lepage, 2021 January 19.
Interview with Peter Lepage, Tisch Family Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Cornell. He recounts his childhood in Montreal and his decision to pursue an undergraduate degree in physics at McGill. Lepage discusses his Masters work at Cambridge University and his decision to do his thesis research in particle physics at Stanford. He describes the fundamental advances happening at SLAC during his graduate years and his work on bound states of electrons and muons under the direction of Stanley Brodsky. Lepage discusses his postdoctoral appointment at Cornell and his work in high-precision QED calculations in atoms, and he describes the foundational impact of Ken Wilsons work on lattice QCD and the intellectual revolution of renormalization. He describes this period as his entrě into QCD research, and he emphasizes the beauty of Ithaca and the supportive culture of the Physics Department as his main reasons to accept a faculty position at Cornell. Lepage explains how and when computers became central to Lattice QCD research and why effective field theory was an area of specialization that was broadly useful in other subfields. He describes the ongoing stubbornness of the Standard Model, and he discusses his tenure as chair of the department, then as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and his work on PCAST in the Obama administration. Lepage explains his longstanding interest in physics pedagogy, and he discusses his current work on the numerical integration program called VEGAS. In the last part of the interview, Lepage emphasizes that the most fundamental advances in physics are in astrophysics and cosmology and that lattice QCD should be kept alive because its unclear where it is going until physics goes beyond the Standard Model.
Peter Lepage is the Tisch Family Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Cornell University. He completed his graduate studies at Cambridge University and conducted graduate research at Stanford. Lepage previously served on President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Bethe, Hans A. (Hans Albrecht), 1906-2005
Brodsky, S.
Caswell, William E.
Cooper, Barbara Hope, 1953-1999
Drell, Persis S.
Lepage, G. Peter
Sapirstein, Jonathan Robert
Wilson, Kenneth G. (Kenneth Geddes), 1936-2013
Cornell University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (U.S.)
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Stanford University
University of Cambridge
Bound states (Quantum mechanics)
Lattice gauge theories.
Monte Carlo method
Particle physics. gtt
Perturbation theory. phys-t
Physics -- Study and teaching
Quantum chromodynamics
Quantum electrodynamics
Renormalization (Physics)
Scattering (Physics).
Science and state
Standard model (Nuclear physics)
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