Robert Redwine

INTERVIEWER: So this is the 150 anniversary celebration with professor Robert Redwine. Let me start out by asking you where you were born and where did you grow up?

REDWINE: So I was born in Raleigh, North Carolina. My parents were both from the south, my father's family mostly in Georgia, my mother's family mostly in Alabama. They had met, actually, in Washington, D.C. during the war, and they married soon after that and decided to pick a place that was in the south, but maybe not the deep south where they were from. So they settled on Raleigh. I think they went there without having a job at the time, but eventually everything worked out. We lived there until I was seven years old in an old farmhouse. Then my father got involved in politics as a member of staff of a guy who was the governor of North Carolina. When he was elected to the Senate, we moved to the Washington area. I graduated from high school in Northern Virginia.

INTERVIEWER: Are there any particular influences that you remember from childhood which you think kind of put you on your career path?

REDWINE: I think the only thing probably was my parents. Neither one of my parents had much education. My mother graduated from high school, my father never really went to school very much, although I wouldn't say he was uneducated. His mother was a pretty remarkable person and she did a lot of what we would call home schooling now. So they came through the system then without a lot of credentials, but they both thought very highly of education. I would say especially my mother, she really expected a lot of my sister and me.

I was just brought up to think as long as I worked hard I could do whatever I wanted to do. But education was key. That probably was the main influence. Certainly neither of my parents knew much about science. They hadn't had the opportunity to. I just found that I liked that myself.

INTERVIEWER: What was it that made you decide to go to Cornell?

REDWINE: Again, I graduated from high school in Northern Virginia, and those were pretty good schools in those days. A lot of my classmates in high school went to a university, most did, a variety of universities. I had the feeling, and I must admit I don't know exactly the origin now, but I really did want to go north to experience something different. And I also had the feeling that I wanted to not be in an urban area. I had spent the last 10 years or so in an urban area, in Washington D.C., so Cornell fit pretty well. It's certainly not in an urban area.

INTERVIEWER: Kind of in the middle of nowhere.

REDWINE: Ithaca is an interesting place. But it's isolated.

INTERVIEWER: When you were there what was it that drew you to physics?

REDWINE: I just loved it. Of all the classes I was taking, this was the one I most enjoyed. And that was true from the beginning. I also should say that I did have a really interesting experience in high school physics. When I was a senior, my high school introduced what was called Physical Sciences Study Committee in physics or PSSC physics. This was actually a curriculum that was developed at MIT by Jerrold Zacharias and colleagues in the years after Sputnik. There were various efforts in the sciences to produce more hands-on, exciting curricula for high schools.

I was lucky enough to come along when this was first introduced in my high school. It was just a revelation because it was very hands -on, very practical, things made sense. To me it was just a revelation. So in some sense the start in physics really came in high school not at Cornell. Obviously I enjoyed it at Cornell as well.

INTERVIEWER: In that particular course do you think it was the subject matter, the curriculum itself that interested you? Or do you think it was the fact that it was a more hands- on approach to teaching?

REDWINE: Well I think it's hard to separate entirely, but certainly the idea of PSSC was that you don't memorize a whole lot of things. You really try to figure out what the concepts are. What the essentials of what's going on in various situations are. And this was very unlike my experience, and it was the experience a lot of students had with biology and chemistry, for example, which we had typically taken before physics. Where it just, at that time at least, was an awful lot of just memorization. It could get pretty unexciting. At least to me. So I think that was the essential part.

Zacharias and his colleagues did a remarkable job. The problem with PSSC-- it did not stick. It lasted a few years but there are very few high schools around the country now that use it. The problem was that it required a really highly trained and motivated teacher to make it work. It was just asking a lot of the average physics teacher, most of whom even today have never earned a degree in physics, even an undergraduate degree. So this remains a problem. Unfortunately PSSC did not make a huge impact over a long period of time, but it certainly made a huge impact on me.

INTERVIEWER: Did you get to do a lot of hands-on research and study as a physics major at Cornell?

REDWINE: Honestly not so much. What we now see as the UROP program at MIT, which of course has been copied at a lot of other universities, was not so common in those days. And I did not do any research in labs at Cornell and I don't remember any of my colleagues who were physics majors doing it as well. We certainly had laboratory courses. We had a course that corresponds pretty closely to what we call junior lab at MIT, but anything like UROP was certainly not common in those days.

INTERVIEWER: So after undergrad, what made you decide you wanted to go to graduate school?

REDWINE: I think that I was just having so much fun doing physics. I can't claim that I thought long term about a career. I really didn't. Certainly my family they were extremely supportive in terms of what I wanted to do, but they weren't in a position to offer advice as to what it meant to be a scientist, what it might mean to be a professor one day. I just was having a lot of fun studying physics, doing physics. I was doing pretty well, so I had the opportunity to go to graduate school. It just seemed like the obvious next step. I wish I could say I thought more deeply about it than that, but I did not.

INTERVIEWER: You were 22?

REDWINE: Exactly.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you pick Northwestern?

REDWINE: Well, they accepted me. Not every place did. And they also offered a nice scholarship, I visited and I like the area, I liked the university. It seemed like a good fit.

INTERVIEWER: While you were in school were there any particular mentors or influential professors besides the course in high school?

REDWINE: I think the one to point out, and it's fairly obvious, is my PhD adviser at Northwestern. He was certainly extremely supportive in a variety of ways, not just intellectually. He is a pretty savvy guy. He's still fortunately alive and we're in contact. He's retired now, but he was a great help. He really was, not just on the physics side. He taught me a lot about what I might expect in the profession, for example.

INTERVIEWER: So how did you wind up doing postdoc work at Los Alamos?

REDWINE: So I got my PhD in experimental nuclear physics. At that time, this was 1973, there was a brand new accelerator at Los Alamos which was really just turning on. I'll get back to that in a moment. But in our field, we really depend on these large accelerators to provide new capabilities, new opportunities to study things that weren't available before. So it's a really exciting time when a major new capability becomes available. My timing, I was extremely fortunate. I finished my PhD just when this new accelerator was about to turn on. So to me it was just a terrific opportunity. The best I could imagine. So I jumped at the opportunity to go to Los Alamos.

The accelerator was called the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. We use acronyms all the time so it was LAMPF. I arrived in August, 1973. I can't tell you the exact date, but I remember it was a Sunday evening. And the first pions, which were particles I used for a number of years, were produced by the accelerator on Monday and I was there. So the next few years were very exciting.

INTERVIEWER: And then you wound up going to Switzerland. How did that happen?

REDWINE: That's an interesting story. Again I think I was very lucky. So one of the characteristics of LAMPF, this accelerator, was that it produced many more protons than any other accelerator had produced before, so lots of power in the beam. And power in the beam raises radioactivity issues. Protons in particular produce a significant amount of radioactivity when they hit anything, basically.

So people knew this from the beginning, and the plan was to run the accelerator for the first year or so at reduced current so that a lot of measurements of radioactivity in the area could be made. Because people have to work nearby in shielded areas. And after those measurements were completed, then the final shielding was to be put in place before the beam current went up to its maximum value.

So that in fact happened. But they found after they made the measurement for the first year or so while we were doing experiments with reduced current, that they actually had a more extensive shielding job than they thought they did. And so they were going to be shut down for, they thought a year, it turned out to be about 16 months. And so I had come to know a lot of scientists there, and at the time Switzerland was building a similar but complementary accelerator. That was a year or two or so after the accelerator in Los Alamos was turning on.

And some of my colleagues who were about the same age, and were postdocs in Switzerland were going back. One of them said, look we have a position in my group at the University of Bern, would you like to come for a year? And so it sounded like a great opportunity scientifically and personally, and so I actually went to the director of the lab at Los Alamos and explained the situation. He was a remarkable guy. He actually died just a few months ago. His name was Louis Rosen.

And what I asked him was could we sort of suspend my postdoc? I'll be gone for a year and then I'll come back. He said, well I don't really think there's a mechanism to formally suspend it, but I understand what you want to do is reasonable. So if you resign your postdoc and then a year from now you want to come back then we'll have a handshake agreement. We'll definitely hire you. So that's exactly what happened. I was gone for a year and then came back and rejoined my postdoc at Los Alamos.

INTERVIEWER: Can you talk anymore about after you returned? Is there anything more to say about the work you were doing there?

REDWINE: Well again, both of these accelerators, both in Switzerland-- by the way, the accelerator in Switzerland is near Zurich --and the one in Los Alamos, they were high current proton accelerators. And they did complementary things. One was a circular machine, the one in Switzerland, in Los Alamos it was a linear accelerator. They had different timing characteristics, and this can be important to do one experiment or another.

Most of what I did on both accelerators, actually, involved the use of particles call pions and muons. When a proton hits any material actually, at least an energetic proton, it will produce pions. Pions are short-lived particles that were just predicted by Yukawa many years ago and found soon after. In many ways, we think of them as holding together the protons and neutrons in the nucleus. So it was very important to study the interactions of real pions produced by accelerators with nuclei.

The other thing pions do is when they decay, they decay into a muon and a neutrino. We like to use both muons and neutrinos to do different experiments. So in fact we use those as well. Again, because we had so many more protons in the beam than anybody had before, we had more pions and muons and neutrinos than anyone had before as well. It was just a wonderful time doing experiments that just hadn't been accessible prior to that.

INTERVIEWER: Did you worry at all about your exposure to radiation?

REDWINE: Well, people have been pretty careful since the early days. I would say when the particle accelerators started in the 30s, 40s, and 50s probably the field did not know quite as much as they should have about the effects of radiation. In particular the chances of developing cancer down the road. So I think looking back there certainly were some precautions that should have been taken that people just didn't know to take.

If you look at one of the early accelerators at MIT, the Van de Graaff accelerator that was built by Robert Van de Graaff and his colleagues in the mid 20th century, many of the people, not that there were hundreds, but many of the people who worked on that accelerator did die of cancer probably a bit prematurely. There's little doubt that contributed. But that was in the 40s and 50s.

We know a lot more now, and we certainly knew a lot by the 70s. So I made lots of precautions. The amount of radiation I was getting was always being monitored. The truth is flight attendants and pilots who fly long distance get more radiation than we did then from the accelerator. People who are in airplanes a lot get it from cosmic rays because they are high in the atmosphere.

INTERVIEWER: So how did you wind up coming to MIT?

REDWINE: After I spent the year in Switzerland, and I actually went back for a few months at a time to continue doing experiments there, but I didn't move back to Switzerland, I was living in Los Alamos. I was happily doing experiments there and I had, by that time moved from a postdoctoral position to a regular staff position at the laboratory. And I must say I loved the scientific opportunities and I also liked the area. Northern New Mexico is a very special area in a variety of ways. So I very much enjoyed that.

But a number of the people who were also doing experiments at Los Alamos were from MIT. So I got to know them. And at some point probably around 1978 they began mentioning that they expected to have a faculty position and would I be interested? So I did come and interview and talked to people and eventually received an offer. I actually turned it down. I mean, in writing I turned it down.

And Herman Feshbach was head of the physics department at that time, and I had gotten to know him because he was much senior to me, but he was a nuclear theorist and a very approachable nuclear theorist that I had met at various conferences and at Los Alamos. It was typical in those days for senior scientists, especially nuclear physicists, to spend time at Los Alamos in the summer. Many of these people had been there during the war and so they really enjoyed coming back for a month or two during the summer. So it was great. You got to meet lots of people. Hans Bethe was an example of someone who was there a lot. Edward Teller, so for a young person it was really wonderful. Anyway Herman Feshbach was at Los Alamos fairly often and we had got to know each other.

So when I turned it down, and the reason I turned it down was just that I was having so much fun doing what I was doing. And I didn't think about making a change. But he called me up and basically said, look we're not going to let you get away with this. He actually raised the salary offer, which wasn't the point but it got my attention. Which probably was what he wanted to do. And so I came back to Cambridge and made another visit. Talked some more.

In the end, I think it what tipped it was while I was having a great time doing what I was doing, Herman and others got me to think 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road. And the opportunity to be in a place like MIT where one wouldn't be tied to a particular laboratory or accelerator in the long term but would be able to adjust the tools to the problem one wanted to attack. And also of course the opportunity to work with really terrific students, both undergraduates and graduate students. I think what they got me to do is think a bit more long term and I realized this was not an opportunity I should turn down.

INTERVIEWER: Do you remember what your first impression was when you got here of MIT, the culture, students, faculty?

REDWINE: Well the first thing I remember about the Boston area was how cold it was. This is not an exaggeration, but I think the first two weeks I was here in February of 1979 were the coldest two-week stretch that there's been since I've moved here. Which is more than 31 years ago. You know what it's like. I had rented an apartment in Arlington. I was doing a lot of driving around to stores, buying stuff and things like that. The car never really getting warm, et cetera. I just froze to death. But that was just unlucky. I knew a number of people at MIT already. But of course it is a different culture than a national laboratory.

I think the most difficult thing at first, the most challenging thing at first, was really the teaching. Because I literally arrived on a Sunday night and I started to teach on Tuesday or Wednesday. I was teaching recitations, 8.02, and that meant I didn't have to give full lectures, but even so the first time you teach it's a huge effort. I'm glad I didn't know how unprepared I was for it. But I had some help and I got through it.

And then it was a question of learning a lot about the overall culture. One thing I was surprised and actually pleased with was from the beginning people did not try to tell you what to do. They really wanted to let you find your own way. They would answer questions if you had them, but it was kind of like being thrown into the swimming pool without a float, but probably it's a good way to do it in the long run.

INTERVIEWER: Now you had the experience of spending some time at Cornell, you spent some time at Northwestern. Was there anything that struck you when you got here that was different about MIT? Did it feel different in any way?

REDWINE: I think it feels different in a number of ways. I mean there's no question. As we all know and we're very proud of, MIT focuses on science and engineering. It always has and presumably it always will. So while we certainly offer the same range of intellectual opportunities that any university does, we focus on science and engineering. So it does feel different.

At Cornell, for example, I was a physics major but I was living with people who were deathly afraid of physics. It's just a different feeling. Here I think for many students, especially undergraduates, they have come from high schools where they have felt very different and perhaps unappreciated in terms of their interests. Because most kids in high school are not interested in science and math, unfortunately.

And you see many students who come here who clearly feel like they're home. They've reached home for the first time in many cases. So it's a real bonding situation. I think many of our students immediately feel a very close connection to the Institute and to the rest of their classmates. I think that's a little different than most places.

One thing that I've always found here, and certainly as I managed to get some administrative roles-- you know, every large organization has politics. And universities certainly have politics. I think MIT has less than comparable institutions. Again it would be naive to say there's none, but I think most people here really are interested in getting the job done and not worrying too much about who gets credit for it. Again it's a question of degree, but I think it's a noticeable difference between many other universities. Certainly within the physics department there's much less infighting then I'd seen even as a graduate student at Northwestern. Not that I was on the inside, but you could tell that there was a lot going on there.

INTERVIEWER: So I'd like to talk a little bit about your particular areas of interest an expertise. Maybe you could describe the work that you've done or are doing and talk a little bit about why you've picked these areas. The first one I have on my list is the intermediate energy nuclear physics.

REDWINE: Yes, that's a pretty broad category. That really does cover a lot of ground. So let me talk a bit about the parts of it that I've done. So traditional nuclear physics-- I think the right way to put it is the study of the structure of nuclei. That took place over a number of decades and ultimately a couple of models emerged that have been quite successful in terms of describing the properties of nuclei.

One is the so-called shell model, which is in some ways analogous to the model of electrons in an atom. But in the case of the nucleus it's the protons and neutrons that make up the nucleus. That was pretty well developed and understood in most details by the time I was in graduate school. Another model which is in many ways complementary, they're not exclusive, is the so-called collective model. Where instead of viewing protons and neutrons as individual particles in a potential, it was more that they made up a fluid in the nucleus where you had collective motion. Again that was developed, pretty well developed by the time I was in graduate school.

And so I think in some ways to many of us, obviously not all, but to many of us the main issues in the study of sort of heavy nuclei were fairly well settled by the time I really began to be a leader in the field. And that's a good thing. That's not to say there aren't still some issues being looked at. I mean the one thing one continues to hear about is the study of super heavy nuclei. Trying to discover one additional heavy nucleus. And a lot of good people spend a lot of time on that. I personally don't find it that interesting, because I think whether that particular nucleus is slightly bound or slightly unbound isn't going to change our picture very much.

So by the time I came along, accelerators like Los Alamos had been built, not to do traditional nuclear physics, but to really go beyond that. And in particular to study the interactions of small numbers of particles. Protons and neutrons. And the theory that had emerged by that time, or was emerging at that time, is called quantum chromodynamics. And quantum chromodynamics is basically studying what makes up protons and neutrons. Not the interactions between protons and neutrons. And we believe we know now from quantum chromodynamics and lots of experiments, that what makes up protons and neutrons are quarks. And the quarks interact by exchanging gluons.

And so a lot of what we've done in the last few decades is to try to elucidate the detailed structure of protons and neutrons in terms of quantum chromodynamics. And it's been quite interesting, in fact. At the beginning we thought that probably the proton, for example, is a pretty simple object. It contains two up quarks and a down quark, and a few gluons running around. And it turns out that this picture, an experimental picture, was developed primarily by Jerry Friedman, Henry Kendall from MIT and Dick Taylor from Stanford, and they won the Nobel Prize for this. And certainly the picture is true. There are those quarks there. But we now know from other experiments that in addition to that there are a lot of quark-antiquark pairs, and many more gluons than we originally thought that make up the protons. So it's these details, structures, of protons and neutrons that I've spent much of my career since coming to MIT on.

INTERVIEWER: Can you articulate what it is that keeps you interested?

REDWINE: I'm not sure how many-- you know probably most scientists would be a little bit surprised at the question. It's almost like, why wouldn't I be interested? Intellectually these are very intriguing questions. The opportunity to find out something that nobody else has known is I think a really exciting motivation for any scientist. And we also know that history is not just for show or money. That if we continue to push these technical boundaries that lots of good things turn up that benefit society.

You know certainly, as we'll probably talk about later, one of the projects, the lab I'm involved in now is pushing this medical physics project for cancer therapy. And these techniques came out of nuclear physics. So while most nuclear physicists I think do not think every day, well what application might this have? We are certainly always very aware that one of the reasons we're doing this, one of the reasons-- probably the main reason --that the government is supporting this is because history has shown that this will provide big dividends in a practical sense for society.

INTERVIEWER: Is there anything else to say about the research that you've done?

REDWINE: I've also, at different times, done research in the area of weak interactions. This of course is a long story, but basically neutrinos, which I mentioned before, interact weekly with the other particles. The weak interaction is one of the four fundamental forces we believe exist in nature. Four and only four. And it turns out that in nuclear physics certain types of reactions can be very powerful tools to study the weak interaction. And so like many scientists I've done a variety of experiments.

You asked why pick this as opposed to that, and I think in general there are different reasons. Some of them quite practical. There certainly is no dearth of interesting problems to study. So what one looks at, in addition to whether the problem is interesting, is do I have the resources to do this? Do I have a student who is interested in doing it? Is the appropriate tool available? Like the type of accelerator that we want to use. All of these questions come into play at any given time. These days, projects have become pretty large. Both in terms of number of people in collaborations, size of the equipment, the funding that's needed to do it, and the time scale.

So you have to pick pretty carefully these days. And one should, because I would say that somebody entering that field now will probably do no more than five experiments in his or her career. At least in my area that would be true. And that certainly was not the case when I started. We could do an experiment every year or two.

INTERVIEWER: And why has that changed?

REDWINE: Just that to do, to study the science we want to study, we have to really use large pieces of equipment. Which of necessity involve lots of money, lots of people to build, run it, et cetera. And a lot more time to get it done. So it's driven by the times. But it's a fact.

INTERVIEWER: Can you talk a little bit about the Bates Linear Accelerator Center?

REDWINE: The Bates Linear Accelerator Center actually came on in a time scale sort of the same as the accelerator in Los Alamos. A couple of years later. And so I was well aware of it. I did not visit until 1978, but I collaborated with a number of people in Los Alamos who also did experiments at Bates. The accelerator is an electron accelerator. It's also a medium energy accelerator. And it was really designed primarily for very high resolution. And the idea that was used to get better resolution than other people had been able to before that is called energy loss spectrometry. It was actually developed by Stan Kowalski and Bill Bertozzi at MIT. So Bates was able to do experiments that no one else had been able to do before. It wasn't at that time the sort of experiment I was doing, but I was well aware that this unique capability existed.

And when I started talking in 1978 to the people at MIT about the possibility of coming as a faculty member, it was clear that one of the reasons they were interested in me was they wanted to broaden their scope in the field by the sort of experiments that I was doing at Los Alamos. By no means did they expect that I would drop everything at Los Alamos and only work at Bates. On the other hand, one of the attractions for me was the opportunity to broaden my scope by getting involved in experiments with the electron accelerator at Bates. Which I did. So through the 80s in particular, I did probably half my work at Los Alamos. Doing a lot of commuting. Which isn't easy. Two airplane rides and a two hour drive. But I got used to it. But also doing experiments at Bates. And one of the things we did was not just use the energy law spectrometry, but also do photo pion experiments.

Again this is the same particle I'd been using at Los Alamos, but doing complementary experiments at Bates. And I really liked working at Bates. I did from the beginning. The people deserve-- well, a lot of people deserve credit for it, but the founders were really Peter Demos and Bill Turchinetz, who ran it from the beginning. And also people like Phil Sargent, who was responsible for the accelerator complex there. And they were extremely welcoming to not just me but lots of other people coming in. It was a great place for students in fact. They got a wide range of experience in hardware and software.

INTERVIEWER: And you were also working at a lab in Hamburg?

REDWINE: OK, this came a bit later. The involvement in Hamburg started around 1990. This actually coincided with the arrival at MIT of Richard Milner, one of my colleagues now, and soon after he arrived at MIT he initiated an experiment with others at the DESY laboratory. DESY stands for Deutsches Electronen and SYnchotron. It's a German electron synchotron. This particular experiment, which went by the acronym of HERMES, also was aimed at using the particular characteristics of the electron beams in Hamburg to study the structure of protons. Again we've been doing this for awhile now using different complementary probes. And Richard ended up spending a lot more time in Hamburg than I did, but I would come and go and that's a very nice laboratory. It has a huge amount of technical support, something which has become more difficult in the US.

INTERVIEWER: It sounds like a lot of the work that you've had has been in collaboration with others. Can you talk a little bit about the collaboration that takes place at MIT?

REDWINE: Well I think certainly in the experiments that we do again, because of the scale, it's absolutely necessary to collaborate. And not just with MIT colleagues, but with typically colleagues now at many other institutions. The typical experiment for us now might involve 200 people from 15 institutions, just roughly. So collaboration becomes absolutely key.

In my own research group at MIT, and this is within the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, we have funding from the Department of Energy for a fairly large group doing several different experiments at once. We have currently about six faculty members, six or seven postdocs, and about 15 graduate students as well as a number of UROP students, undergraduates, who work with us. Now we're not all doing the same experiment at the same time. We typically are involved in several different experiments, and not everybody is involved in every experiment. But what we do try to do is to use the size and flexibility of the group so that we can really be leaders in the projects that we're involved in. It's unlikely that just one or two people would get involved. If we're going to get involved in a project, we like for 10 people to get involved so we can really play a leadership role. So the collaboration is absolutely key. And certainly the local group, I've mentioned some of the names already. We're very close and we do collaborate very strongly I would say.

INTERVIEWER: What do you see as the benefits of collaboration? The value of it?

REDWINE: Well, I think the simple value, the first thing is that we wouldn't be able to do these projects if we didn't collaborate. They're just not of a scale that one person or even one or two people could really be very effective. It's just a fact of life. But also you always learn things from other people about science and about other human characteristics. And so I certainly have enjoyed it. I think in general these collaborations are real meritocracies, at least the way they are run at MIT. That is a young person if he or she shows great merit and ability can get promoted very quickly in the collaboration. I should also say, and this is sometimes not appreciated, but you know different scientific areas can be very different. If you look at the typical biology lab run by a faculty member now, this could involve 20-25 people. But for the most part, those individuals are working alone on their own projects. Now they have group discussions, this sort of thing, and they know what each other is doing, but they're working on their own project. And that's the way it should be in biology and chemistry.

But in physics, at least in high energy and nuclear physics and space physics as well, the structure is much more vertical. Of necessity. And so if you're working within that structure, you may work closely with a small group of people but what you do gets fed in and goes up, et cetera. And so it's actually pretty easy to see who's really doing well and who's not. So we try very hard to promote and recognize-- for our own good as well as theirs --the young people who are doing well.

INTERVIEWER: Maybe this is a good time to talk about teaching. How does that fit in with your research? What's your attitude about it? What's it like teaching at MIT?

REDWINE: First of all, as I mentioned before one of the attractions to come to MIT was the opportunity to teach. If I didn't want to teach, I would have stayed at the national laboratory. So I came with the idea that this really is an important part of my life. And is going to be an important part of my life. And I'm very happy to say that has been the case. I never lost that attitude. As you probably well know, we do evaluate our faculty members pretty strongly, especially in the first few years. And so the question always comes up, how important is teaching compared to research? And I think there have been some changes over the last 30 some years since I've been here. I did sometimes when I first got here get advice, well meaning advice from some senior faculty as to, you know you really shouldn't spend much time on teaching because research matters so much more. Not everybody said that. And I didn't take that advice because it didn't sound right to me. It didn't sound like what I wanted to do. So one has to find a balance.

But I've always taken the attitude that teaching is very, very important. I think now it has evolved a bit. It's still not as important as research in evaluating faculty for tenure, but it is very important. I would say from my years on Academic Council the way I would describe it is, if someone's up for tenure and is about to win the Nobel Prize or seems a good bet for it, it probably doesn't matter whether their teaching is of high quality or not. The person is going to get tenure. If the person is a terrific teacher but the research case isn't close, then the person is not going to get tenure. Of course the real issues are the ones that aren't so one sided.

And so I think the right way to put it, and there are many people like this, if the research case is solid. Very, very good. You know maybe not off-scale, but a good excellent research case. And if the person is a fine teacher, he or she will get tenure. And if the person is not a fine teacher, he or she won't. So it really does matter. I still, once in awhile, hear junior faculty not necessarily in physics, but in many departments, who don't seem to understand the importance of teaching. And I always try to tell them, you know you're making a mistake. You may be getting the wrong advice, or out of date advice. But for me from the beginning this was one of the reasons I came, so of course it mattered to me.

INTERVIEWER: What do you get out of it personally?

REDWINE: Well certainly the opportunity to interact with and hopefully help young people get excited about science. That's very satisfying. I give my last class this afternoon, in 802 in fact, and so we'll end with a bang so to speak. But also you always learn something. I mean even though I've taught electricity and magnetism many, many times, I always learn something. So that's exciting as well. It's a very satisfying thing to do as long as you do it well. I think if you don't do it well it probably isn't very satisfying.

INTERVIEWER: You've done some work developing a treatment for cancer with protons. Can you tell me a little bit about how that developed and how it's going?

REDWINE: Okay, so the idea of using protons for cancer therapy has been around 30-40 years I would say. And the idea is based on the following feature of charged particles like protons. So typically cancer therapy has been with photons. Either gamma rays or x-rays from an electron accelerator. And if one aims gamma rays or x rays at a tumor, you can certainly aim them very well and hit the tumor, but you also are going through tissue on the way in and on the way out. And that tissue gets damaged as well. One way to minimize that problem is to basically aim from different directions. So you always hit the tumor, but you're not always going through the same good tissue that you would prefer not to damage.

This is an especially important problem for tumors in regions where you really want to minimize damage to the surrounding good tissue. The classic example being brain tumors. So this problem has been known for a long time. And certainly damage to good tissue causes a problem for patients. It limits the dose one can give to the tumor, et cetera.

So the idea of using charged particles like protons-- and protons are not the only charged particles that are used, but they're the most common --is that if you aim a beam of protons into the body, and if you arrange the energy so the protons slow down and stop right in the region of the tumor, it turns out they give most of their energy up in the last few millimeters that they travel. And so if you aim correctly, and you adjust the energy correctly, then you can really deliver that dose right at the tumor. And you minimize the dose to the good tissue on the way in. So that's the idea.

And there are now five machines in the United States, a few in Europe, that provide protons for cancer therapy. One such machine is at Mass General Hospital. And we have some colleagues from MIT who used to work at MIT who are there now. Why are there not more than five because there's a waiting list for people to get therapy on these machines?

And the answer is that they're very big and expensive. Many of them are machines that were taken over, that used to be used for high-energy or nuclear physics that they now use for cancer therapy. But they typically could cost the hospital $200 million dollars of capital investment to establish such a facility. And that's just beyond the means of all but a relatively few large hospitals, such as Mass General. So many people around the world, not just in the US, have recognized this problem and are trying to find ways to make these machines smaller and cheaper. And the collaboration we're involved with which is a collaboration with a Texas company called ProTom. Basically, the Texas company owns the rights to a Russian machine that was produced at Protvino, which is a high-energy laboratory south of Moscow. And the accelerator is compact, certainly should be much cheaper than the typical accelerator, but it needs to be made acceptable to the Food and Drug Administration before it could be licensed to treat patients in the United States.

So we brought the machine from Russia and we have a lot of really good Russian collaborators on this and we're basically characterizing it and putting in a control system that will pass the safety standards of the USFDA guidelines. And so that's the process that's going on now. Frankly a lot of people in the laboratory are very excited about it. Because it offers an interesting technical project. But people like to think they're doing good for society. And if this thing really works, and it's still an if, and if you could have 50-100 of these machines in the United States and not just five, it would make a big difference in cancer therapy.

INTERVIEWER: How far along are you on the path to getting this approved? Are you five years away, are you 15 years--

REDWINE: The goal is two years. It's an aggressive goal, but that's the goal. Two years from now. So that's not so long. There are a number of hospitals who are already providing funding in the expectation that this will happen.

INTERVIEWER: Are there other particular challenges in your field that interest you? Like the next 10-15 years?

REDWINE: Like I said before, there's never a dearth of interesting things to do. Sure, I wish I could be around forever to do these things. I'm working on experiment now which is a little bit different. Looking for what's called an electric dipole moment of the neutron. This is something we teach our students about, electric dipole moments, in 8.02. In the last couple of years I've talked a bit about this experiment to the students as well. Because there are very stringent limits currently. By experiments over 50 years looking for the electric dipole moment of the neutron.

It's been an interesting problem for a long time. The current techniques, at least the basic idea, were pioneered by Ed Purcell and Norman Ramsey at Harvard in the 1950s. And the reason we're interested in this is, if the neutron has an electric dipole moment, then it's actually an example of time reversal violation. So that basically the physical processes, the physics would look different if you run time backwards as opposed to forward.

Now there are some examples known. Very rare examples of time reversal violation, and they are built into the Standard Model of particle and nuclear physics that is often referred to. But the type of time reversal violation that would be represented by a neutron electric dipole moment is much larger and would involve extensions to the Standard Model. Which lots of people are looking for in many ways. For example, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva is looking for extensions to the Standard Model. This is a lower energy experiment that's complementary. This is a terrific experiment in terms of the science, it's a very challenging technical experiment where a lot of hard things have to work at the same time. And in an integrated fashion. So that's another project.

INTERVIEWER: When you think about the research you've done over the last few decades, are there specific contributions that you are most proud of?

REDWINE: Well I have tended to be someone who doesn't specialize in just one part of an experiment, but try to really be useful in many parts of an experiment. And again, these are within large collaborations. I think certainly in my younger days when I spent more time actually at the experiment and less time doing administration, what I was known for actually was that somehow things always worked when I was there. I'm not sure whether that was a coincidence or not. But if the electronics was messed up and nobody can figure out why the computer was crashing, I was usually the one who was able to get it through. So again, I enjoyed that. I think my collaborators did, too.

INTERVIEWER: Like a lucky charm?

REDWINE: Yeah maybe that's all it was.

INTERVIEWER: You spent some time at Princeton and Rutgers. I'm interested to know what it is about spending time at another university that is of value to you. What do you bring back to MIT?

REDWINE: So I was on sabbatical during that year. I spent about half that time at Rutgers, about half the time at Princeton. And I think in many ways it was a classic sabbatical. I actually was overdue for it. It's a chance to get away. To think, to recharge a bit. And also to think about different things. To interact with different colleagues.

I had also planned to get a long way toward writing a book that year. My first son was born right at the beginning of it. And the son got more attention than the book did, but that's okay.

INTERVIEWER: As it should be.

REDWINE: As it should be.

INTERVIEWER: So I'd like to talk about your administrative experiences. What do you see as the pros and cons of administration?

REDWINE: So first of all I should say I got into administration without expecting to. I came to MIT assuming that I would basically do my career as a typical faculty member, doing research and teaching. Of course that is what I did for the first decade or so after I came to MIT. I never, to be honest, once thought about any significant administrative role. In retrospect, I'm not quite sure why I didn't, but I didn't. Around 1992, I guess it was, the Laboratory for Nuclear Science had had a director for nine years or so. These are typically two or three-year terms. It turned out that most people in the laboratory-- the previous director was a theorist. --Felt that the next one should be an experimentalist.

Not that the previous director had done anything wrong, but everybody has strengths and weaknesses. They thought it was time to emphasize some of the aspects an experimentalist might do better. It also turned out at that time, 1992, without going into details, this was a time when the superconducting supercollider was having a lot of difficulties: political, financial, et cetera. The project ended up being closed about a year or two later. But there was more than one MIT group involved heavily, high-energy groups, with the superconducting supercollider. And there was actually strife, serious strife, between the two MIT groups, two high-energy experimental MIT groups. Because of that, it really wasn't practical to have the new director be from experimental high-energy physics.