Reflections before a Job Interview at Sandia National Laboratories – 1969
Everything in my world feels exciting and new! This must be the golden payoff pot at the end of an academic rainbow of adventures. My tomorrows and their tomorrows seem open, rich and challenging. Also, they might prove to be remunerative.
Long days and nights of non-stop worrying filled with studying, writing theses plus jumping through a myriad of academic hoops that the Pennsylvania State University, PSU, maintains for professional credibility are fading ghosts from the past. There is a historical protocol to university traditions that was developed long, longg ago, way back to the thirteenth century at the University of Paris. People from all over the world place a great deal of merit and importance on the way our beloved forefathers and foremothers behaved and believed.
The ethereal tones of Gaudeamus igitur so reminiscent of medieval Germanic graduation ceremonies at Goettingen University circa 1850, still ring in my ears. However, few people living in the USA today, can relate to such old-world customs but, somehow, I still find them charming and emotionally moving. Again, there seems to be no accounting for tastes.
But that was long ago, and this Albuquerque scene is taking place, today. Here, I am, sitting alone in a motel room in Albuquerque, New Mexico, preparing to deliver a one-hour presentation on the propagation and absorption of a plane electromagnetic wave propagating into vast regions of a relativistically hot plasma medium, such as the corona of a star, maybe our own Sun!
This is bizarre and rather unbelievable. Where is Merlin, the Magician, making all this hoopla possible? is Steven King at work here? Maybe, I have slipped into the Twilight Zone and Rod Sterling will appear to shake my hand? Is there life after magneto-hydrodynamics? I am not sure, at the moment!
Life does not get any better than this for a thirty-year-old guy, who only ten years ago, was wandering the gray, soiled, cobblestone streets of a moribund, industrial, Massachusetts city that had already lost its way and its former importance after the local, textile sweatshops had moved their lung-clogging operations to the Carolinas, North and South.
For me, the empty lunch pail of opportunity in Lowell, Massachusetts had driven me to greener pastures elsewhere. How happy I find myself slowly reminiscing on all those fine and encouraging teachers at l’Ecole St-Louis, the Marist brothers at Le College St-Joseph and the many professors at the Lowell Technological Institute, LTI, now called U-Mass Lowell. it is only a glint of a memory from days long ago and far away.
Life’s demands and economic crises move us reluctantly onwards even when we resist and refuse to budge. This truth seems to hold for cities, towns and people, too. Nobody wants to be pushed around like a hockey puck on the ice with no say in the matter.
But, I digress. This second portion of my PSU life experience had lasted 30 months from March, 1967 to September, 1969. These were transition times when all five family members – my Frau, Beryl, and her three teenage children plus myself – were adjusting to life in a quiet, central Pennsylvania college town after surviving the cultural stress and excitement of learning a new language and culture while managing our daily lives in a Bavarian fashion in Munich, Germany.
Being now married, my domestic life in State College contrasted sharply with the previous, bachelor ease, freedom and discovery of living in a somewhat Spartan but intellectually very stimulating environment at the University Club on College Ave. This social club offered serious students of proven ability an opportunity to live off campus but adjacent to the main university facilities.
The Club provided meals and lodgings for some 40 graduate students and visiting, foreign professors with many opportunities to share opinions and exchange professional concepts in common areas. At the time, it was, in effect, a men’s club where membership was not determined by excessive amounts of dollars oozing from one’s wallet, but rather by civility, an interest in international affairs and academic accomplishments.
In contrast, my first stint at seeking an advanced education and professional credentials in Happy Valley – the local residents call their township this affectionate name – had taken place in a time period from September, 1961 to October, 1963. Those efforts had resulted in my obtaining an Master of Science degree in physics from a nationally acclaimed university. In 1963, that piece of paper would give the holder a potential entry pass at several research universities and national laboratories. For starters, I was pleased.
contrasted sharply with the relative ease and Spartan, but academic ambience at the University Club
It stood in sharp contrast to my previous life experiences as a boarder at the University Club, living off campus from September,1961 through October,1963. provided meals and lodgings for some 40 graduate students and visiting professors
and and was quite different
Pleasing and impressing individual members of my doctoral committee from the Physics Faculty had been a 30-month-long challenge that was highlighted by ephemeral hopes and constant concerns regarding the status of my NASA-funded research appointment. NASA can give, but NASA can, also, take away, and suddenly. I never felt safe and secure for fanancial reasons. Fortunately, the powrs that be at the
Knowing how to be well-liked by the students and respected by professors as a doctoral candidate in my multi-disciplinary position required my wearing several hats, simultaneously. I was expected to conduct a theoretical thesis through the Nuclear Engineering Department on the interaction of a plane electromagnetic wave with a relativistically hot plasma medium plus also supervise and run a hands-on, teaching laboratory for seniors in the Electrical Engineering Department. When I was not occupied with these duties, I also interfaced with one of my thesis advisors, a kindly older gentleman, in the Physics Department.
Sometimes, I wondered which scientific flavor was more likely to stick to me. Was I a product of a nuclear, electrical or physics environment? This dilemma could be frightening. I must not become a multi-personality, scientific freak! There are no jobs for such people!
– there were four, who often wanted differing proofs of competence – After about ten years of preparation delving into the stressful contents of experimental and theoretical physics, which took me to laboratories and Institutes in Pennsylvania, California and West Germany
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Sandia Labs colloquium – E&M theory. hot plasma medium,
My new boss, Jack Walker, arrives punctually at my White Winrock motel at Louisiana Blvd and I-40 sporting a new, white, open, convertible Ford and carefully sipping from a cocktail glass. At least, it seems to be a cocktail glass, but my eyes have never been very sharp so I need to postpone any facile decision. Slowing down in the motel’s parking area, he spots me looking out onto the city from the balcony of my room. He waves to catch my attention. I am pleased, excited, confused, worried and, generally, hyper! “Is all this true or am I a hap;ess character caught in a Twilight Zone episode? Will Rod Sterling suddenly pop out of the cheap woodwork to shatter this moment of keen delight?”
“Might this transitory moment in local time-space – maybe, Einstein’s theory was warping my brain – prove to be sheer self delusion? Was I kidding myself? After all, even as a twenty-year-old, I had dreamt of becoming a scientist, ein Wissenschaftler, un scientifique – someone like Schrodinger, Ampere, Rutherford or Curie, perhaps. How often does the ethereal dream world of a young, naive, Franco-American person with zero, financial backup actually develop into real life?”
Now, I am facing a conundrum, a clash of cultural identities. Can a guy, who reads and sometimes understands the philosophical insights of Kafka, Brecht, Durrenmatt, Camus, Sartre and Dostoyefsky – all cloudy, heavy thinkers – and also enjoys the gifts of van Gogh, Manet, Monet, Mary Cassatt ( Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878), the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Mary Lou Harris, plus International folk dancing ever find happiness and true peace of mind in the dusty land of cowpokes, rustlers, crooked politicians of all persuasions, Chicano and Chicana native speakers, pueblo Indian cultural dances, Taos artists, and to do so while in the care and feeding of the nation’s thermonuclear weapons stockpile?
The latter task is a heavy one, indeed. No relative of mine has ever come close to succeeding in such an endeavor. Finding myself here at the historic crossroad of Louisiana and I-40 today, I feel like a cultural curiosity or a weird pioneer from the East Coast blazing new trails for those other Bostonian types, who might choose to take the road less travelled as Robert Frost had often proposed.
really happening to me after five years of graduate school plus two years of experimental work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and 18 months of studies at the Max-Planck Institute.
A scientist from the Atomic Energy Commission’s Sandia Laboratories is actually
drives to I see him from. He waves me down, “Come on down! I’m driving” His obvious good nature with a deep Texas drawl clashes instantly with my staid, reserved New England upbringing where garbadene suits, necktie white shirts bearing french cuff link cuffs are the marks of a Pennsylvania State University professor and a Deutsche Hochschule etiquette. “I bet that Herr Doktor Professor Hans Schuler from the Max Planck Institute in Garching near Munich would never appear in public with such obvious glee and unprofessional enthusiasm.
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Stellarator, Tokamak fusion physics
Princeton Plasma Physics Lab
http://www.pppl.gov/about/history
the National Spherical Torus Experiment
magnetic fusion research
Light atoms like hydrogen (one proton and one neutron) can fuse together so tightly that they release energy. This will only happen if the two positively charged nuclei get close enough that they overcome the electric force pushing them apart. When the nuclei get close enough, the force that binds protons and neutrons together, the strong force, takes over and pulls the nuclei even closer together.
Magnetic Fusion Energy – Tokomaks and Stellarators
Inertial Confinement Fusion Energy – Sandia Labs with Z-machine & LLNL with laser approach
http://fusedweb.llnl.gov/CPEP/
D + T => He-4 + n with
The “D-T” reaction has the highest reaction rate at the plasma temperatures which are currently achievable; it also has a very high energy release. These properties make it the easiest reaction to use in a man-made fusion reactor. As the figure shows, the products of this reaction include an alpha particle (Helium-4 nucleus) with 3.5 MeV energy, and a neutron with 14.1 MeV energy. The neutron escapes from the plasma (it has no charge and is not confined) and can be trapped in a surrounding “blanket” structure, where the n + Li-6 => He-4 + T reaction can be used to “convert” the neutrons back into tritium fuel.
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Tokamak
A tokamak is a device using a magnetic field to confine a plasma in the shape of a torus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torus_%28nuclear_physics%29
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Although nuclear fusion research began soon after World War II, the programs in various countries were each initially classified as secret. It was not until after the 1955 United Nations International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva that programs were declassified and international scientific collaboration could take place.
Experimental research of tokamak systems started in 1956 in Kurchatov Institute, Moscow by a group of Soviet scientists led by Lev Artsimovich. The group constructed the first tokamaks, the most successful being T-3 and its larger version T-4. T-4 was tested in 1968 in Novosibirsk, conducting the first ever quasistationary thermonuclear fusion reaction.[3]
In 1968, at the third IAEA International Conference on Plasma Physics and Controlled Nuclear Fusion Research at Novosibirsk, Soviet scientists announced that they had achieved electron temperatures of over 1000 eV in a tokamak device. British and American scientists met this news with skepticism, since they were far from reaching that benchmark; they remained suspicious until laser scattering tests confirmed the findings the next year.
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The Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) operated at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) from 1982 to 1997. TFTR set a number of world records, including a plasma temperature of 510 million degrees centigrade — the highest ever produced in a laboratory, and well beyond the 100 million degrees required for commercial fusion. In addition to meeting its physics objectives, TFTR achieved all of its hardware design goals, thus making substantial contributions in many areas of fusion technology development.
In December, 1993, TFTR became the world’s first magnetic fusion device to perform extensive experiments with plasmas composed of 50/50 deuterium/tritium — the fuel mix required for practical fusion power production. Consequently, in 1994, TFTR produced a world-record 10.7 million watts of controlled fusion power, enough to meet the needs of more than 3,000 homes. These experiments also emphasized studies of behavior of alpha particles produced in the deuterium-tritium reactions. The extent to which the alpha particles pass their energy to the plasma is critical to the eventual attainment of sustained fusion.
In 1995, TFTR scientists explored a new fundamental mode of plasma confinement — enhanced reversed shear. This new technique involves a magnetic-field configuration which substantially reduces plasma turbulence.
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Enough fusion energy to power all the buildings on the planet for the next two billion years!
At Penn State in the early 1960s, Jack Lowenthal from Brooklyn, Guido Mueller from Berlin, but recently from New Jersey and I, Paul Bolduc, from Lowell’ Centralville enclave formed the critical mass of an underground, socio-economic club of naive, enthusiastic graduate school misfits seeking to make the world or, at least , the post WWII, American world into a brilliant and generous Brave New World, a technologically advanced society of citizens, all pseudo-Impressionists in the arts, literature theater, research, medicine and a glowing Enlightenment. Clearly, our benign visions lacked a critical element, a serious reality check.
We all read excerpts and, often, whole books by Camus, Sartre, Durrenmatt, Dosteyefsky, Kafka, Brecht, and, of course, Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Equally, we had much to say – sometimes, with some insights – about Das Kapital, Mein Kampf, Jeffersonian democracy and, naturally, The Rights of Man.
XXXX In the smoke-filled taverns and bistros of Marseilles, Berlin and Lausanne during the years of Hemingway’s Lost Generation, we might easily have passed for
Competing political systems and values were usually examined at the dinner table of the University Club, where we each had a sparsely furnished, private bedroom
a PSU-based communal living quarters,
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Those were the days, my friend
Russian source material
Jack Kerouac, literary iconoclast, On the Road
“Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream”
― Jack Kerouac
“What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?”
― Jack Kerouac
The Beatles, Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Joe Dimaggio, Ted Williams, Arthur Godfrey, Howard Hughes, Einstein, von Braun, Gary Shepherd, U2 Spy plane, B52 bomber, ICBMs, Megaton device, Chuck Berry, Little Richards, Ed Sullivan, bomb shelter, “Duck and cover”, Cuban missile crisis, Bay of Pigs disaster, CIA, KGB, Kennedy assassination, Vietnam advisors, XXX, XXX, Rock Hudson, Doris Day, Gary Powers, Russian satellite, Uri Gagarin, firdt man in space, Civil Rights activists,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Steve Allen, Dick van Dyke, Emmylou Harris,
dos Pasos, Hemingway, Janis Joplin, student protests at Berkeley,
Johnny Cash, Ring of Fire, I walk the Line
Kris Kristofferson Help me make it through the night
Cotton Fields – The Highwaymen – 1962
Roy Orbison : Pretty Woman,
Bruce Springsteen
Hang down your head Tom Dooley
Simon and Garfunkel
Everly Brothers
Janis Lyn Joplin
Joan Baez – http://www.biography.com/people/joan-baez-9195061#awesm=~oE2p4occdMUOO2
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Essentials of the Memoir
a) introduction
b) Key theme – transitions, changes, conflicts, contrast?
c) Lowell vs. Penn State vs. Livermore vs. Munich – what?
d) University Club antics
e) Penn State Univ. Saga => a two part story: 1961 to 1963 and then 1967 to 1969
f) Part #1: University Club with Howie, Jack, Guido, Louis and me: all very collegial, challenging and educational,
g) Part #2: home life with Beryl, Rick, Bob and XX, the young Sarah Barnhart of the family, Isreal neighbors, salt and pepper couple, Nuclear Eng. Department plus physics department
h) Study material to focus on: plasma physics, E&M theory, Beryl’s Bill in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive, 1968, death and despair, invite Denise to State College to live and work
i) theoretical vs. experimental thesis, mathematical physics is my stronger suite, working with PSU profs with other work connections to the AEC, now the Department of Energy labs and Cal Tech’s NASA program – a very big advantage later on.
j) electromechanical skills and experience all lacking,– Yes, I could do a little carpentry work, no background in machining metallic components- I do recall many hours of repairing my second hand bicycle bought for $15.00 from my cousin Arthur, Uncle Walter’s son. I was okay with hammer, saw, screw driver, mechanical drill with many cuts and bruises to prove my point.
k) SNL: an outstanding engineering and R&D lab – world renown
l) Los Alamos National Labs: LANL, no interest in my background
m) Others: Physics International, GE Electronics, xx in Los Angeles
Sarah Bernhardt
