Interview with Kip Thorne — Part 2 (contd.)

0:00 And has recently moved to Mexico. He, Mitzkevich, has devoted essentially his entire career to relativity. He was a professor at the Patrice Lumumba University of International Friendship, It was a university that was set up to educate third world people. And so you get a lot of students from Africa. Patrice Lumumba was a leader, a communist leader of an African state. I've forgotten which state. So you know about him. He was assassinated and became a hero to the international communist movement. So, but Mitzkevich has written several rather nice books on relativity, and he's a classical relativist in the same tradition as a number of people in the West, the same tradition as Habas or Peter Bergman of a later generation, my generation. But there are a number of such people, as I say, but they never had the high impact that Landau had or that Falk had. And they clearly were not, none of them in the class with Landau or with Falk or with Zildovich or with Novikov. the people who were most influential were people who spanned a number of areas of theoretical physics in that country. Did any of the few people who did specialize in relativity Were any of them interested in the radiation problem? Or is that sort of considered solved? Well, you know, there are... In the 70s and 80s, there was this considerable...

2:30 Well, there were these claims that there's a serious problem with general activity with radiation and other things Logunov. Logunov was rector of Moscow University and vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a very powerful man politically, in the politics of science. And he was enamored of the De Donder-Gage formulation or harmonic coordinate formulation of general relativity and does not understand very clearly the physical interpretation of the mathematics. And he and a number of others in Russia and in communist China have taken the harmonic coordinates as being, in some sense, preferred over all other coordinate systems and have attempted to have given muddled reinterpretations of general relativity that are based on what the various metric functions look like in harmonic coordinates. And so he led a battle, basically, against general relativity that was largely motivated by his misreading of the radiation reaction predictions of general relativity and his effort to correct this by his own alternative theory of gravity, which is basically nothing but general relativity in harmonic coordinates and with, again, an improper interpretation. So it's all rather muddled. But because he was in a position of considerable political power, he raised the hackles of people like Zeldovich, Ginsburg, and Grischuk. So there was basically open warfare between him on one hand and Grischuk, on the other hand, through the 70s and 80s.

5:00 And it still continues at some level with the latest salvos being fired, I think, by Ginsburg and by Logunov. Logunov's now retired from his positions of great influence. But it must be said of Logunov that he never used these scientific controversies as, well, he never, as far as I have, I have seen no evidence that he ever punished people who are under his thumb, who fought with him openly. Griscik was under his thumb, Griscik continued to travel freely to the West and never suffered for attacking him almost patriologically in public. So I have a lot of respect for Lagunov in that sense. But this controversy then in the Soviet Union does get caught up in these political issues. And similarly in China, where a very similar attack was taken by the man who was the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences His name I never remember, but he's no longer president, but he's a Caltech graduate and a very eminent and highly revered person around here from his work here in the 40s, I guess. But I don't know great detail about this. I have had personal arguments with both Logunov and this Chinese academician over these issues. But I have to say, aside from the personal arguments, I largely have ignored their work. I mean, because I'm somewhat eminent in the field, they have taken what opportunity they had to try to convince me of the error of the ways of the main relativity community. And so this is where Bruginsky describes

7:30 one of these confrontations, which was something like a two-and-a-half-hour meeting in Logunov's office where Bruginsky was translating with sweat rolling down his face because I was being less than polite. I was warning Lagunov that he was making a fool of himself in the eyes of Western scientists and that he was really getting himself on awfully dangerous ground here. But that, as far as I am aware, is the principal form that, to the controversy, took, at least in the 70s and 80s, behind the Iron Curtain, or at least in Russia and China. So Lagunov felt that there was some problem with radiation. Clearly, for instance, fog, of course, didn't have any problems at all with the radiation problem. Why was it at Lagunov? Go try to read his papers I've gathered that the radiation came into him I think he probably see I don't remember details he may have claimed that there is no radiation reaction in general relativity and you have to do his version of gravitation theory to get radiation reaction properly but I just don't remember details There are a number of issues where he claimed general relativity just doesn't make sense. And the radiation reaction one was, as I recall, one of them. But he has a whole series of papers. He comes from the Boko Yubov School. In Russia, at least in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, Theoretical physics was divided into several different schools, and these schools were largely power centers within the Academy of Sciences, and there would be battles between the various schools in the elections of new members of the Academy and so forth, and a lot of horse trading and such. One of the schools at the Bogyubov School, Bogyubov, he's a mathematical physicist, very

10:00 eminent, but fundamentally a mathematician, and his followers are fundamentally, I mean, they just don't really have much hoarse sense, at least those that I've dealt with, much hoarse sense about physical arguments and physical interpretation of the theory, but But they, in many cases, are quite adept at manipulating the mathematics. I don't know whether that was the case of Bogonyubov, but that certainly was the case of Logunov and some others that I've known from Bogonyubov's school. There's the Tom School, basically intellectual descendants of Igor's Tom. Ginsburg is from that school. old Tom was very powerful as a major figure in the development of nuclear weapons, lead theorist, mender of Sakharov and Ginsburg. And then basically Zeldovich founded his own school and he didn't really come from either of those. And then the other main school was, at least to my knowledge, was the Landau School. So you had Landau, you had Tom, you had Volker Yubov, and then you have Zeldovich coming in somewhat later and creating an intellectual legacy. This misinterpretation of relativity, largely as far as I can see, comes out of the Volker Yubov School. And I'm sure this is vastly oversimplified, but from what I'm, from my own experience appears to me to be that just associating with that particular school's difficulties with understanding, physical interpretation of theories and developing physical intuition into things and how to make those contacts. Do you know if Fock was associated with any of those kids? Fock is a little earlier than this, and probably not, but I would guess not. He came on the scene as a major figure actually a little bit earlier than or about the same time as Landau.

12:30 And I don't know to what extent he had his own intellectual legacy later. I knew him somewhat, but he clearly, by the time I was there, he was not having the kind of impact that these others were having. But he had a huge impact on world physics, both relativity and quantum theory. From his work in the late 20s, early 30s, then relatively later. I gather Tam must have been a considerable stature, because Stravansky had this story of himself and Tam holding Landau down so that he wouldn't leave up an attack in Felt, while I felt outlonging his position on radiation. Yeah, well, Tam could, I gather, do that. TAM put together the theoretical team, the key theoretical team that did the initial work on the hydrogen bomb design. Zeldovich was already in the game in his own approach, and TAM put together, but was mostly doing the atomic bomb design, and TAM put together the hydrogen bomb team, and Zeldovich of that and running along in parallel with him. The Thames team was himself, Ginsburg, who later got ejected because he married a woman who had been sent to exile for supposedly trying to assassinate Stalin, but included Ginsburg and Sakharov and somebody else's But you find a description of this in Sakharov's autobiography. You get some sense of Tom's role and influence in that autobiography. And similarly you'll get some sense of it in Ginsberg's historical writings.

15:00 Oh, yeah. Just brief on that. I don't know if it makes sense, Troutman, for instance, drew a link between Laguna and Rosen's biometric theory. Is your recollection of that something that Laguna himself said? I have never, I don't recall any link at all, never being mentioned before to me, between Rosenblum and Lagunov. I doubt that Rosenblum ever visited the Soviet Union. Well, Rosenblum, not Arnold. Oh, I'm sorry, Rosen. Oh, let's back up. Between Lagunov and Rosen. I also don't recall any link there, but it's conceivable. I got an impression that Trappen was just saying that he thought that at bottom, Fox and Rose's positions amounted the same thing, and that therefore I guess he was extrapolating it. But I just wondered if perhaps he... I don't know anything about it. Because Rose did visit the 7E coach, but at a pretty early stage. Yeah, I just don't know. I was trying to get together the truly important meetings, and I'm glad that you mentioned some of the ones there from the period of the late 60s, early 70s. I was going through a bunch of publications. So I guess it was GR7 in Israel in 1974, where, so I gather that was when Joe Weber and his people were sort of confronting each other. And this is, you have this date when? This is 1974. We're already beginning some two years or so earlier at, there's a meeting in Poland, probably 72.

17:30 It's an IAU symposium on gravitational radiation, I guess, at which point Bruginsky had null results. Nobody else did yet, probably. That's basically when the confrontations really started. There are confrontations there. There are confrontations in Ereche to one of the summer schools, which could be around 73. There are confrontations at the Israeli meeting, basically every major meeting from then on through the 1970s. There are some form of confrontation. There was a big public confrontation that I was not there between Dick Garwin and Joe Weber. It was probably an American Physical Society meeting, I would guess, probably around 1974. Garwin was not really a member of this community, but went in and quickly did a Webber-type gravitational wave experiment. He's an excellent experimenter, and then attacked Webber quite vitriolically. People within the community were, by and large, except to some extent Tony Tyson, were by and large much more gentlemanly in the handling of it. Garland had no holds barred. Yeah, I clearly gathered that. You know there is a history of all this. Two papers, two historical papers on this. I've forgotten who the authors are. Yeah, there's Collins, Harry Collins has done two papers. Okay, so you know that. And also recently Alan Franklin has been.

20:00 None of them sort of went into that much, but in any case, more from my own interest then, so... But I was not at the telemedia meeting, so... So, more from the radiation reaction point of view, Ehlers organized this around the summer school, and 76, but you were saying you weren't at that? I wasn't there either. I think I may have dropped in for an afternoon or something. Wait a minute, 76. No, I was probably not there at all. Bill Burke was there, as I say, but I wasn't there. I mean, I was basically ignoring the issue. So you wouldn't probably remember anything after that day because I guess there should have been the GR8 meeting the next year was that that meeting is the one in Canada is that right it's just a gap in my probably in Waterloo Canada and I may have proceedings up here in the bookcase and I think I vaguely I suspect that the confrontations were still continuing I just don't remember much detail from this. I would be occasionally dragged in, I'd be at a meeting and Arnold Rosenblum would give a speech or something and I would occasionally feel I had to stand up and make some brief statement. Or I would just sit and listen to other people deal with it. But I, Alfred Cooper Stalk, one or the other, that I, aside from sitting through it, you know, occasional things like that, I just wasn't paying much attention. Yeah. Okay. In any case, fortunately, I think most of the ones with that, I guess that, uh, I don't know if you were at that meeting, Demore made a particular point of that when the Texas meeting was held at Munich in 1980, that was when Joe Taylor announced that they were seeing the change in the future.

22:30 Yeah, I was not at that meeting. Okay. So I'll let you go. Thank you. Thank you.

27:30 Thank you. Thank you.

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45:00 Thank you. Thank you.