Interview with Gary H. Sanders

Abstract

Interview October 16, 1998, with Gary H. Sanders, then project manager for LIGO; currently (2010) project manager for the Thirty-Meter Telescope. Recalls building cyclotron, Stuyvesant High School. Physics major, Columbia University (BA 1967): Mel Schwartz, Leon Lederman, Jack Steinberger, T. D. Lee; politically active. PhD, high-energy physics (MIT, 1971). Three years with Samuel C. C. Ting at DESY in Germany. Princeton postdoc with A. J. S. Smith. Brookhaven and Fermilab. Leaves for Los Alamos, 1978. To Brookhaven, 1984, kaon decay experiment. Proposes neutrino experiment, Los Alamos. Meets Barry Barish, member DOE review committee. Discusses neutrino oscillation experiments. Involved with SSC [Superconducting Super Collider] in 1989 through Ting, who builds a detector for it. Troubles between Ting and Roy Schwitters, SSC director. Barish as co-leader of U.S. groups with Ting. Ting detector project falls through; Sanders and Barish pick it up. 1993, Congress cancels SSC. Barish returns to Caltech; Sanders to Los Alamos to GLAST [Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope]; investigates WWII human radiation experiments at Los Alamos. Rochus (Robbie) Vogt removed as LIGO director, replaced by Barish (1994), who brings Sanders in as project manager. His first impressions of LIGO. Comments on Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss, Vogt, and Ronald W. P. Drever. NSB review of LIGO, fall 1994. Many LIGO scientists left. Caltech as ideal LIGO venue. Collaboration with foreign gravity-wave groups. Common data format. LIGO Scientific Collaboration. LIGO origins at Caltech in 1970s. Discusses need for openness in LIGO.