Bulletin Number Two 1987

goal. Besides, there is a keen sense of competi tion. In science, there is no number two: who ever discovers first receives all the credit, the second, third, and fourth will not get any credit. That also drives people forward. Q. I t is sometimes said that fo r the really junior people (graduate students andpostdocs) working in such a large team, some o f them feel that they are such a small part o f the experiment that they get discouraged and some good, young scientists are therefore deterred from entering experimental high energy physics. I wonder whether that is true? A. Yes, that's true more in other groups, but not in ours. We have been very careful, mainly because of what you said, in selecting students, making sure that we only get the very good ones. A very good student, no matter how many people there are, will stand out. It is the average or the a-little-bit-above-average or a-little-bit- below-average students that will be in big trouble in large groups. For the super-good ones, you cannot suppress them. Q. You've made many trips to mainland China and Taiwan to select young scientists to join your group. How do you select the really goodyoung people? A. We use the doctoral qualification examination developed at MIT and at ETH, Zurich — the Technical University in Zurich, a very famous school, and try it out on the existing students in the group. It is afour-hour examination, open- book. The problems are so designed that i f you understand them, you can finish them very quickly. I f you don't, no book will help. In China, every year one or two professors from our group will go to the universities there to select their best students to take the examina tion. After the examination is taken, simultane ously in many places in China, the papers are sent back to us and we grade the papers our selves, just to avoid any misunderstanding. Then out of the sixty people or so we choose ten for an interview. Then sometimes I, some times some other professor, go to China to interview the students, also for four hours. We ask the students to pick a subject on which we hold a discussion. Based on their performance at the interview, we choose four or five of them. They are normally very young, around twenty years old. Q. What do you think o f the progress in physics made by the Chinese on the Mainland and in Taiwan? A. I would say the students that we have selected from mainland China and from Taiwan are of about equal standard. But in mainland China we have more good students to select from, mainly because there are more people. In Taiwan, it is a little bit unfortunate that the best students do not study science, they are more commercially oriented. Q. How many o f them do you have in your group? A. I don't know how many in total. On and off, probably a little bit less than 200 as from 1979. Q. How do they compare with scientists from other countries? A. It is more difficult for them. Language and communication with other people are the main problems. Also the spirit of competition is not very strong in socialist countries. Scientists from the PRC like to stay by themselves, like to speak Chinese. Because of this, I have grad­ ually established a tradition when they come to work with us: they are not encouraged to speak Chinese. Gradually I try to break down their habit of always grouping together and knowing very little about the outside even after many years abroad. If you want to compete on an international scale, you really have to under­ stand what other people are doing. Q. One final small question: do you see in the next decade or so, the centre o f high energy physics w ill move from CERN in Europe to say, the Super-conducting Super Collider (SSC) in the United States? A. You know a few months ago the President of United States authorized the SSC, 82 km in circumference, and one of the conditions for approval is that it must be built in the United States. The reason for this move is that the United States wants to gain leadership. Eventu ally, the centre of high energy physics may go back to the United States. INTERVIEW 21