Daniel Kennefick interview with Jim Anderson

0:00 Well, actually I think I definitely very interestingly covered a lot of, most of the things I was interested in. One thing that occurred to me was, you mentioned debates at meetings back in the sort of 50s, 60s period on vocal vibration and energy and that sort of thing. One thing I've been trying to follow to a certain extent is the role of kind of conferences and meetings. I suppose sort of the arena for discussion, as opposed to just reading everyone else's paper. Kip was telling me, for instance, that you used to organize the Stevens meetings back in the... Yeah, we had Stevens meetings for sort of three-for-alls in the sense that there was no formal program. They were almost like Alcoholics Anonymous or a friend's meeting if someone had something to say. They weren't supposed to be formal presentations, but really, what am I doing, what am I thinking about, what kind of, here's what I've come up with. Try to say it in ten minutes at the most, and people would join in on the general discussion. It was very free-ranging. I think that they probably had a... At least I like to think that they had an impact on the subject, because they were well-attended. Lots of people came. The trouble is, of course, a number of people came in kind of in the crackpot category. There was no way of denying them, letting them speak if you didn't let somebody else speak, so you just had to sort of grin and bear that. I've certainly heard a number of people recollecting fondly, and they seem to be sort of the template or whatever for meetings by the West Coast. Yeah, there's a lot of Syracuse Stevens meetings in various parts of the world. I was to almost all of the GR conferences. The first one was a 1955 anniversary.

2:30 Key terms may include, for example, quantum mechanics, algebra, mathematics, physics, quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics theory, quantum mechanics theory, quantum mechanics theory, quantum mechanics theory, quantum mechanics theory, quantum mechanics theory, quantum mechanics theory, quantum mechanics theory, quantum mechanics theory, quantum mechanics theory, Then they began to get out of hand, at least as far as I'm concerned, becoming a huge, you know, four or five hundred people. I kind of stopped going to them just for a bit of fun. But I think that the Stevens meetings, I think, were small. People did have a chance to interact directly with each other. So I think in that sense they could serve a much better role. And at the meetings and conferences at that time, was there much general debate about the existence of gravitational waves, or was it really only a few people who were there? No, it wasn't an awful lot. There were other things that gave a little bit of concern, but not too much. There was a pressing problem until Taylor-Holtz binary pulsar came along. And then people had to sit down and really begin to think about it. And then start asking themselves questions like, has what's been done make sense? Is it really derived from the underlying equations of general relativity or hidden assumptions that are in there or what? And that came after the Stevens. I guess the 60s and 70s sort of stopped. Joe Weber did talks on his gravitational detectors here. In fact, that was one of the first times we heard about the attempt to do these things was here at the students. But not too much on the...

5:00 And the actual radiation factor. That wasn't a big topic at that time. That's the impression I've got. But then, sort of as you say, in the 70s, I certainly think things seemed to pick up and I got the impression that it was fairly vigorous debate. For instance, if people are arguing back and forth about what, quote unquote, the formula was out of the channel. Oh yeah, there was a number of things. Papers, again, let's see, what's his name, up in British Columbia, Cooperstown. He tried to do a calculation, which in retrospect I think was doomed before it started, and he wanted to take two objects and hold them together with a strut, and then break the strut and see what happens. The idea being that... You then knew what the past history of the system was up to the point where you broke the strut, because in the gravitational problem, since it's nonlinear, the gravitational wave that's emitted by a system is scattered by the gravitational field of the system itself, and it's scattered back onto the system, so in order to know what's going on In principle, you should have to know the entire history of the system. So he wanted to start with something he thought was clean, that he could say what they... and then he broke the strut. Breaking the strut is not a trivial problem. And he claimed that he didn't get the point at all. But I think that nobody believes that. And then there was just a controversy a little while ago about gravitational radiation. What was it called again? No, I better not say it because I remember reviewing a paper on it. Again, the mistake was in the identification. Calling something something because you thought it should be that without sufficient justification.

7:30 There have been a number of derivations where people have come up to an intergalactic and said, ah, that looks like a momentum, so it's the momentum. And then, ah, the momentum is mv, and off you go. But that doesn't work, and you get into, and he got into difficulties with the, it has something to do with radiation from a galaxy, and the effect of the galaxy on the radiation. But again, it had to do with this problem of calling something something that called something the quadrupole moment, which really shouldn't have been called the quadrupole moment. So there have been problems like that all along. Right. The same sort of problem about what you call, when you say what you call something. Right. Have you stopped going to these big conferences after a while? Do you remember much debate at conferences in the 70s and 80s? Oh yeah, there was, people were discussing it. But not as much as they should have been. Not at all as much as they should have been. There's an essential improvement in the whole subject, and a lot of what I've done is built on that. So that I consider a very, very important contribution. So they didn't do all of the problem, but they did an important part. They didn't use the EIH surface integral method, but the fact that they introduced the singular perturbation techniques into the problem, it was really a fundamental one.

10:00 And what I did, I based a lot of it, I extended it, used other singular perturbation techniques. That was the first time it was there. Very important. I think that you've answered all my questions, some of them even before I could answer them. Well, go ahead and see if there's any. Yeah, I'd like a quick chance if I'm going to get anything wrong. One thing, actually, that, as I say, unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to, in the rush just getting ready for this trip, I haven't had a chance to go through your 88 papers as closely as I'd like, and I wasn't really aware, as you said, just when we started, how much you feel that it's a question of going back to EIH, strictly speaking, which has been strictly speaking ignored since, so I'd like to look at it again in that view. Do you have a copy? I don't think I have it with me. I think I have it. I have one back here. You have one? Well, I have... where are my readers? I have... somewhere... up here? I think I have one. I think I have one back here. You have one? Okay. All right. One thing I don't have, but Peter Bergen was mentioning today that he said you had a recent paper. Yes. I'll give you a copy, okay? Let me make sure this is, I've gone through several revisions, let me make sure this is the revision. There is an important point in here that I think that has been not appreciated by other people working in the subject, and I just have started to appreciate what's going on, and that is that all of these equations that one derives are asymptotic.

12:30 That they can't be used as initial value problems for a number of reasons, but basically what you're doing is the slow motion, you're doing essentially a matched asymptotic expansion in time. You know, Burke did a mass asymptotic expansion in space, but you also have to do a matched asymptotic expansion in time where you match The solution near some initial surface, initial data surface, where things can be changing very rapidly, but if you wait long enough, then you settle down to the slow motion behavior. So those equations, the equations that you derive, are not... Really, equations of motion, I call them in this paper conditions of motion, because they're only asymptotically applicable, and also the retarded solution that you use is only an asymptotic solution, that is, if you start up a system and impose reasonable conditions on the field. If you wait long enough, without making any other assumption, if you wait long enough, you asymptotically will obtain a retarded solution. So both of those things are needed to derive the form of the equations that people have. And that means the equations themselves don't hold for all times, but only asymptotically far from some initial start-up. And that's why you don't have runaway solutions, because runaway solutions, A, violate the conditions under which the approximation is derived, and are not solutions because you don't have equations of motion, you only have conditions. And I discussed that in here. Let me make sure. Hang on one second. Let me see if this is... Yeah.

15:00 Sort of where my current thinking is on the subject. Are you going back to California soon? Yeah, I'm going to interview a few more people. I'm going down to Washington and then to Pittsburgh. Who are you going to talk to in Washington? Rich Isakson, Dieter Berg, Charlie. Charlie Misner. I'm sure you'll get a totally different view of things when you talk to Peter. Yeah, I think so. I've written to him a couple of times and he's sent me a load of material to read. So, yeah, he's got another viewpoint about it. Yeah, totally. I think it's totally wrong. But, yeah. He keeps saying, I don't accept any of the derivations. There's a lot of things that people have given, but he hasn't come up with a sensible himself. And somehow he doesn't like singular perturbation theory. And there's somehow a feeling that you can't do it without singular perturbation theory. You haven't done it. So that's his view. And then you're going to Pittsburgh with Janus and what's his name? Okay, give them my regards when you see them. Thanks very much. Okay, and likewise. He mentioned that he's always been keen to see you go further with your work. I know, he has, and I've tried to, but I keep coming up with these...