Assessment and Outlook

My assignment at this conference is to assess where we are in high-energy physics and speculate on where we might be going. This frees me from any obligation to summarize all that went on here and allows me to talk just about those topics that interest me the most at this time. I will let my prejudices show and talk a bit about physics in general, CP violation, neutrinos, accelerators, non-accelerator experiments, and even theory. I start with a bit of my own history in physics and what I see as cycles in science—I think these are relevant. I began research in physics when I was in my third under-graduate year at MIT. I worked with Professor Francis Bitter in his magnet laboratory and learned how to do an experiment. I spent three years with Francis Bitter, but, as I began my second year of graduate school, I found myself becoming less interested in the nuclear magnetic moments that I was trying to measure and more interested in the fundamentals of the protons and neutrons that contributed to the moments. I shifted to particle physics, never regretting it. While in graduate school, I did both theory and experiment. It was not hard to do that back then because, if you could manipulate γ matrices, set up and solve integral equations, and understood what a Green’s function was, you could keep up with theory and even do some of your own. I think that an experimenter in graduate school today would not have an easy time keeping up with the sophisticated mathematics required to understand what is going on in string theory (but, I think it would be worth a try). In the 1950s, virtually every major university had an accelerator of its own, including MIT, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Chicago, the University of Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Berkeley, and Caltech. The really big facilities were the 6 GeV Bevatron at Berkeley, and the 3 GeV Cosmotron at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. I learned about accelerators at a time when the