Physics in Japan as I see It

Speaker: Leon M. Lederman
   Pritzker Professor of Science, Illinois Institute of Technology

BROMLEY

 It's a further pleasure to be able introduce to you another friend and colleague, Professor Leon Lederman. Leon received his education at City College of New York, Columbia University. He directed the Nevis Laboratory at Columbia for a number of years working at Brookhaven and at Fermilab. As all of you know, he took on the Directorship of Fermilab, and in, I believe in 1989, he relinquished that position, took on a professorship at the University of Chicago. He is now the Pritzker Professor of the Sciences at Illinois Institute of Technology and he, as you know, holds a Nobel Prize for his work in Elementary Particle Physics. He also holds a U.S. National medal of Science and the Wolf Prize. Again, I know of no one who is better qualified to speak on the topic of particle physics in Japan as viewed from the U.S.. So, let me then introduce Leon Lederman who is going to speak on Physics in Japan as I See It. Leon.

LEDERMAN

 Thank you Allan. I must also say it's a pleasure to be here. I'm fascinated by the talks, the last one was especially illuminating. Whenever I'm in the company like this, in my fantasy, I would spend the first ten minutes explaining my own career in perfect Japanese. I keep remembering the story of the little mouse who was hiding in his hole, very hungry and the mouse knew exactly where the cheese was on the kitchen table, but the mouse was afraid because he heard an animal walking back and forth outside the hole. Therefore, the mouse was terrified, but hungry. And all of the sudden, whatever it was, the animal barked woof, woof.

 "Oh, "said the mouse," that's the dog. I can run faster then the dog." So, the mouse ran out of the hole and the cat jumped on the mouse, ate him up, then he wiped his whiskers and said, "It's always good to know two languages." Of course, which language you want to know will depend on the audience and where you are.

 The theme of this conference is present and future and I noticed that all previous speakers ignored the theme. So, since that's Toshi's theme and Toshi is very easy going, I'll ignore the theme, too. I will talk about past, present, and future and any other times that you can think of. And, my subject is an agreement between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of Japan on cooperation in research and development in energy and related fields.

 Now, let me organize myself a little bit and tell the story.

 Fortunately, as a Director of Fermilab, I built on the what came before, which was Bob Wilson's interest in keeping a good record of history and archives, and so, Fermilab has an excellent set of Archives. And when Toshi told me I have to talk here on Japan, I called for "Japan" and out from the archives came a big box with papers on Japan and so all of the data I have now came from re-reading these papers, and making a selection.

 In 1977, a Japanese mission of about 40 people arrived in the United States with instructions to find investments so that U.S. dollars could be recycled. You know, already in 1977, there was a trade surplus and Japan was feeling embarrassed about this trade surplus in their favor, and was looking for ways to recycle dollars into the American economy by means of various investments. One of the gentlemen, a Mr. Azuma, of the Bank of Tokyo suggested that dollars be recycled into science, which would have a benefit for everyone. And that's probably the origin of the fact that in 1978, Prime Minister Fukuda visited President Jimmy Carter in Washington.

 During that visit, Fukuda gave a talk at the New York Chamber of Commerce and made the dramatic suggestion of a Japan - U.S. collaboration in science and technology. This has been, ever since, known as the Fukuda Initiative. It was specifically stated as a collaboration that would build a better world and to ensure the prosperity and happiness of the generation of the 21st century. Already then, one was looking forward to something that would help the world in the 21st century.

 The specific suggestion had to do with energy sources and under the U.S. insistence, the agreement was generalized to include more than just energy domain of research. In September of 1978, the first working group met in Tokyo. It was chaired by the DOE's Assistant Secretary, a gentlemen by the name of John Deutch. From the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Abe lead the Japanese negotiations. Four sub-groups were assembled. In August of 1978, in Tokyo, there was an international meeting in high energy physics, what we call the Rochester Conference. I have been attending that in Tokyo and from there, I went to Korea to attend another symposium and I was called by DOE and was asked to come back to Tokyo to participate in one of the sub-groups.

 The meeting was at the Okura Hotel and low and behold, in my archives, you'll be impressed that I found the map of the 7th floor of the Okura Hotel. And this map showed, oh, the 6th floor too, 6th and 7th floor, we had two floors, that must already show you the wealth of this collaboration since it is an expensive hotel.

 Room number 653 was devoted to solar energy, and solar photo-synthesis. Number 751 was devoted to the sub-group on coal, coal conversion, liqui-faction, also geothermal energy which eventually I think disappeared. In room 657, it was high energy physics closely allied with deep sea drilling, but the drilling also faded away, eventually. There was also the sub-group on fusion, nuclear fusion. So, essentially the main sub-groups, four sub-groups that survived the first discussions were fusion, which involved exchange of people, joint research on something called Doublet Three which was General Atomic's proposed facility. The agreement even specified something like 60 million dollars from each country to advance the research and the establishment of a joint institute for plasma physics.

 I don't think that ever really happened. Included, was research on fusion reactor materials, and general R&D.

 I'll say a little bit about all of these things as far as I can find out. Coal conversion had to do with something called SRC2. These were essentially synthetic fuels and the idea was that at some point, the capability of achieving synthetic fuels might be very important. Nuclear and fusion research were obvious topics. Solar energy conversion, that was the third thing, and then for some curious reason high energy physics. How it got into this group is something I really don't know exactly, but I guess it's one of the lessons of this whole collaboration business.

 So, these are the four groups and I remember that when I got off the airplane back in Tokyo, I met with DOE people and I had already enough information to begin to sketch out what the agreement would be like. The high energy conference between the U.S. and Japanese included myself, Bernie Hildebrand from DOE, Satoshi Ozaki, (who is here today!) representing Brookhaven, I was representing Fermilab, I don't know who the SLAC representative was. And then, on this side, were the Japanese led by Nishikawa. We took about two hours to get our agreement together. It was quite an easy thing. We knew each other very well; high energy physics is that kind of a subject.

 We had been meeting lots of times and I had already written most of an agreement on the flight from Korea. We discussed a little bit and we decided that the high energy group would agree on three categories. A) would be the joint use of existing or soon to exist facilities and they were in particular the rather older and small facility at KEK, the national laboratory of Japan, that would eventually grow into a major machine called TRISTAN. At Brookhaven, there was the AGS which at that time was anticipated to go into something called ISABEL and eventually to the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider which is nearing completion right now. At SLAC, the machine was PEP, electron positron collider, and at Fermilab, there was a 400 GeV machine that would grow into the Tevatron of 1000 GeV with a proton-antiproton collider. These were the machines to exploit collaboratively. B) was joint program of accelerator and detector R&D which turned out to be important with significant money numbers assigned here. C) was a long range idea for the joint construction of some new, forefront facility.

 This was the plan and as I said, we finished our work in a few hours and we immediately went to see Mr. Deutsch and Mr. Abe and we presented our results. They were very confused because the three other groups were closeted in their rooms and smoke was pouring out from under the door of their conferences. John Deutsch, who had looked at high energy physics as the least important of all of these things, was in many ways, very disgusted that we had so elegantly finished our work. We had no points of disagreement. Nevertheless, that's what happened.

 I found in my archives a sheet of paper in Japanese which I signed not knowing what it said . Maybe I will take this opportunity after my talk, to get someone to translate whatever it is I signed. However, this was the beginning of a collaboration which is still very active and very fruitful today.

 The overall agreement between the United States Government and Japan on cooperation of research and development was signed officially on May 2, 1979. The high energy people went to work immediately on further details. The first meeting of the U.S./ Japan HEP Collaboration promptly took place at Stanford to begin the set-up of the program.

 What was clear at that time was that facilities in Japan in 1979 were very limited. On the other hand, there were going to be plans for much more elaborate machines and having young Japanese physicist working at U.S. facilities would be beneficial both pedagogical, educationally, and would get them into the frontier of scientific research. And so, very early on, all three U.S. laboratories participated. The thing that was attractive for the U.S., and I'll talk more about it later, was the fact that the Japanese would not only bring young people, enthusiastic people of great ability, but they would also bring money. And although the money was small compared to the total budget for high energy physics in the United States at that time, it was incremental money and incremental money has the effect of four times, five times the value of the actual sums. And so, the Japanese intervention turned out to be extremely fruitful and many, many things were done that probably could not have been done without that input.

 At Stanford where there were specialists in collisions of electrons and positrons, a Japanese group began to work on detectors of very advanced kind and participated in a very advanced device, the multi-particle spectrometer. Ultimately, the Japanese played a crucial role in the jewel of the Fermilab program, proton, anti-proton collisions that 2TeV. In 1979, this was not yet available, in fact, the construction of the Tevatron was just beginning in '79 with super conducting magnets.

 There were other experiments. E605 is an experiment that I was involved in and the Japanese made a very strong contribution. There were pre-existing experiments the Japanese were on that were also very good. And they brought special skills in nuclear emulsions that didn't exist in the U.S. and scanning power, and so, they were prominent in the technique of looking at neutrino collisions in nuclear emulsions.

 At Brookhaven, neutrino physics was preeminent at that time and the Japanese were deeply involved. And very important adjunct to the actual doing of physics was collaborating in R&D on particle detectors on accelerators, and that involved the entire community. I found a picture of a signing ceremony where Bill Wallenmeyer and Jim Leiss were signing for the U.S. Department of Energy, Shinozawa signed for the Japanese Monbusho and Nishikawa as the head of KEK.

 I mentioned that the U.S.-Japan collaboration in high energy physics is still going on. It first ran ten years. It was reviewed in 1988 and continued for another five years and reviewed again in 1994 and again, continued for another five years. I'll show you some of the developments along those lines.

 Now, what I was interested in was what happened with the other collaborations. My non-exhaustive research indicates that in fact, very little happened to the other collaborations. Ah, yes, the fusion collaborations did have a role. It worked very well for five years in which, while the Japanese fusion facility, which I think it was called JT60 was being built. About twenty Japanese arrived at General Atomic's in California and worked on the Doublet Three. They gained a lot of experience there and also contributed both equipment >

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