Steven Greene:  

UPDATE 2021 Who'd have guessed that, after being so indifferent with math and physics at EHS, I'd have attained a Ph.D. in Physics? After EHS I attended CU, first in Denver and then in Boulder. I worked my way through CU Boulder at the university's Nuclear Physics Laboratory, operating a cyclotron and building/doing experiments with the staff, grad students, and post docs. While there, I was president of the local chapter of the Society of Physics Students and Sigma Pi Sigma. I was also a member of the service fraternity Alpha Phi Omega. Living both on and off campus was a great time - the most fun for the least money I ever had, including class. Skiing, rock climbing, swimming, scuba, and figure skating were my favorite sports. The CU Physics Department sent me to Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico for the summers to help build the experimental facilities for the new linear accelerator they were building as the flagship facility for the US nuclear physics program. After taking a BA degree from CU in 1975, the university hired me as a research physicist to be stationed at Los Alamos. After a year there I had been recruited by a number of grad schools and started at the University of Texas in Austin in 1976. I accepted there because they would let me continue conducting the research we were starting at the unique Los Alamos facilities. I conducted many experiments with scientists from all over the world. My dissertation focused on developing and using an apparatus to investigate the last, unexplored, class of direct pion interactions, the pion double charge exchange reaction. Previous attempts had been either completely unsuccessful or returned wildly discrepant results. Theory predicted either zero or extremely small strength for these reactions. My apparatus was highly successful and opened these reactions for use in both nuclear reaction and nuclear structure studies. Before finishing my doctorate (in 1981) I was recruited by various universities for post-doctoral positions (UCLA, MIT...). I accepted at New Mexico State University because they let me both continue to explore the pion work I had done, but also work with other national and international laboratories on exploring fundamental interactions between pairs of protons and neutrons, the nucleon-nucleon system. These forces must be understood, and how they are modified by the presence of additional nucleons, to understand the atomic nucleus. After a year as a post-doc, and finishing my dissertation for the Ph.D. at UT, I was promoted to Assistant Professor at NMSU. All this time I still lived and worked in Los Alamos. About a year after that I was recruited to join the research staff at Los Alamos National Laboratory to continue doing the work I was already engaged in, but also to take on leadership roles in some of the various projects our research division was involved in. The Laboratory was operated by the University of California for the US government, so now I was a technical staff member of one of the most energetic research programs in the world. We worked with folks from all over the world, doing scores of important experiments in basic and fundamental nuclear science. We ran experiments 24/7, for up to 9 months a year. I was scientific advisor for a number of grad students from various universities and sat on many of their examination committees. Great times! Los Alamos sits at 7000'+ in the Jemez Mountains outside Santa Fe. Excellent outdoor recreation and fabulous cultural activities deriving from the mix of Anglo, Hispanic, and Native American cultures and the Arts. (I remember running into one of our EHS teachers, Susan Hagen, at the Santa Fe Opera one summer.) I met and courted a lovely lady in 1984 and married her in 1985. We both had exciting, demanding work, and a great environment for doing it. As an example, in 1991 we spent five weeks in the Soviet Union. I was invited to lecture at a number of institutions across Russia and Ukraine as a guest of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. They invited Ann to accompany me to talk with institute staff about the use of integrated software business systems to help manage their businesses. There was an attempted coup against the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev during that time, which was put down. It did not affect us and our activities, but we did find ourselves among quite a reduced number of westerners for a while, as others fled or cancelled visits. It is a vast country, heavily forested in many areas. We were hosted to a number of banquets and cultural events and venues in Moscow, St. Petersburg (just changing from Leningrad), Kiev, Kharkov, Dubna, Troitsk, Pushkin, and such. Traveling across country by train was lots of fun. We had an hilarious adventure getting out of the SU when our air carrier, Pan Am, went bankrupt and stopped flying. Briefly, we caught the very last Pan Am flight out of Moscow, and the very last Pan Am flight out of Europe (Frankfurt), lest we be stranded for weeks. I would return to Russia years later to review work being done by Russian colleagues on aspects of applied physics similar to work I was leading at Los Alamos and elsewhere. Despite their years of coping with the Soviet system they were still very able physicists. In the mid 90's the emphasis in the national nuclear physics program shifted fro...Expand for more