Bulletin Number Two 1987

Q. Would you please tell us the process o f your discovery? A. From 1964 to 1972,I worked in Hamburg with the Electron Accelerator. There I used very high energy lightwaves and let them hit anuclear target. I was able to demonstrate that light, ordinary light, changes itself to amassive particle when the energy is high enough. That is indeed very strange, because we know light normally has no mass. Most of my work in these years had shown that all these light-like particles have a mass, about the mass of a hydrogen atom. I was asking myself, why do all these particles only have the mass of hydrogen? Could it be a heavier one? To look for heavier particles, we did an experiment, a very complicated one because these particles are very difficult to find. At last we found the J-particle, which basically is like lightwave except that it has a much heavier mass. Q. During the sixties much o f the fashionable physics o f that time was strong interaction ， Regge poles and so on, and yet you weren't doing that. Why did you choose the particular branch o f physics that you did? A. This is a very good question. I always feel that there are basically two kinds of experimental physicists. The first kind follows the trends: they do what the theoretical physicists tell them to do, but then they are always behind people. The second kind picks a topic of their own. If you want to pick a topic of your own, clearly, most of the people do not support you, and you really have to believe what you are doing is important. Q. Is your research team funded by many govern ments? A. My research team for the J-particle was funded by the United States Government. My work in Geneva is performed at CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, and is funded by thirteen governments. Q. May we know the scale o f funding fo r your current experiment? A. We have 400 PhD physicist and about 1,000 technicians, and a little bit more than 100 million US dollars for equipment. For salary, maybe another hundred million US dollars for four or five years. But this is only a very rough estimate because in my group, there are many people from China and from the Soviet Union. For those from socialist countries, the salary is very different. Q. Why do so many governments support your research? A. There are only four places in the accelerator at CERN where one can do experiments in high- energy physics. I have designed an experiment which is fundamentally different from the other three experiments and our purpose is to find out the origin of masses. We attempt to answer the question why different particles have differ ent masses and where mass comes from. The topic is very interesting and that's the main reason for government support. Q. When you say where mass comes from ， I assume you are looking fo r Higgs particles? A. Higgs particle is one, SUSY particle is another, and technicolor is yet another. Q. You just gave a reason fo r government support but surely you cannot expect a senator to understand why this experiment is more signifi cant than the other? A. The major support comes from three govern ments —Switzerland, the Soviet Union and the United States, and in these countries the people who make decisions to support the physicists certainly understand the importance. Even though it costs 100 million US dollars, the amount is still too small for a senator to be bothered with. It is still at the operational level of government. Q. I f I may follow this up again, there is now possibly a growing feeling among physicists in other specialities ， biophysicists and so on, who say that 100 million US dollars could be used to do a lot o f biophysics, or flu id mechanics or what have you, and therefore we should re­ think our priorities. Would you comment on this? 18 INTERVIEW