Steering a premier gathering place for theoretical physicists
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0455
David Gross , long-time director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP), has passed the baton to Lars Bildsten , who joined the institute in 1999. Established at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1979, the KITP is perhaps the oldest and most influential institute of its ilk: It brings together theoretical physicists—and other scientists—to work together on hot topics. Workshops and conferences are proposed and run by people in the wider community, with the KITP providing advice and administrative and infrastructure support. As Gross puts it, ‘We try to choose the people well. Then we give them as much support as we can so their life otherwise is easy.’ Choosing topics, he says, ‘is the most important role of the director.’
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At any given time, two or three workshops, each lasting from two weeks to five months, are running. In some cases related conferences are organized on site. The number of visitors times the number of days they stay works out close to 25 000 per year.
A few titles from among the many workshops scheduled for the next two years show the wide range of fields embraced by the KITP: ‘Frustrated Magnetism and Quantum Spin Liquids: From Theory and Models to Experiments,’ ‘Quantitative Immunology: Experiments Meet Modeling,’ ‘A Universe of Black Holes,’ and ‘Neurophysics of Space, Time and Learning.’
Bildsten was promoted from within the KITP’s ranks following an international search. He came to the Institute for Theoretical Physics—Kavli was added to the name in 2001 to recognize a donation from the Kavli Foundation—from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an associate professor. Earlier, he was at Caltech for a few years. He earned his PhD at Cornell University in 1991. His research focuses on stellar structure, neutron stars as gravity wave sources, and stellar explosions. His five-year renewable term as head of the KITP began on 1 July. For his part, Gross will stay on at the KITP.
Physics Today‘s Toni Feder spoke with Gross and Bildsten by telephone a few weeks before the changeover.
PT : David Gross, how long were you director? Do any particular moments from your tenure stand out?
GROSS : I was director for 15 years, save a month. So it’s really hard to answer the second part of your question. One event that was quite remarkable in many ways was our 25th anniversary. We celebrated a whole bunch of things at that time—25 years, a new building, and it also happened to be the week that the Nobel Prize was announced. [Gross shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Politzer and Frank Wilczek ‘for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction.’] But there have been many other milestones along the way.
PT : What do you see as your major accomplishments as director of the KITP?
GROSS : The purpose of the ITP as originally founded was to create a place where physicists from many different fields would come and work together. When I took over I thought there were many areas where we needed to be strengthened.
We initiated a variety of efforts. Perhaps the most important was to strengthen the other areas that were represented at the ITP but were not as strong as they should be—in astrophysics in particular, and that’s when Lars was hired. The other was soft-condensed-matter physics or biophysics, which I regarded as an area in which physicists were getting more and more interested. My attitude in general is that physics is what physicists do, and physicists do a lot of things.
Astrophysics has now become as strong a core activity as particle or quantum field theory. And biological physics, or theoretical biology—whatever you want to call it—has really taken off in a big way. We are part of helping to create a new community of people who don’t necessarily start out in biology but come to biological problems with other strengths. I think eventually there will be a recognized career avenue for people who call themselves biologists to be theorists. But such changes within a university department often take decades. They require hiring. Therefore institutes like the KITP that can bring in people, expose them to biological problems, and give them training will play a very important role in this development.
Other places can’t bring together 30 or so people to spend three months just to do science. In our case, we run an extremely tight and miserably underfunded show. We think we have achieved optimal efficiency.
PT : What is the KITP’s budget?
GROSS : It’s $4.6 million from the NSF. In real terms, that’s about $1 million less than we got 10 years ago. At the moment, if the NSF were our only form of support, our programs would decline by 50%.
PT : What does the money go toward?
GROSS : It covers the visitors who come here and the infrastructure and staff that help them carry out their research. Salaries of the five permanent staff members are paid by the University of California.
PT : What do you see as the challenges for your successor?
GROSS : I regard the KITP as a user facility. It’s like a national laboratory in theoretical physics. The programs are run, by and large, by people outside of Santa Barbara. They are also the ones who propose the programs. The process does require nudging, and not everyone who should propose programs is inclined to do so. Often they require some encouragement.
My goal is to arrive at a Nash equilibrium point. Nash won the Nobel Prize [in Economics for his work] in game theory. A Nash equilibrium point is otherwise known as a local maximum, where nothing you can do in the short term can improve matters. I’m not sure I have really arrived at such a point, but I am satisfied that things are great. I think the main challenge is to preserve the excellence out here.
We do have a plan, which is not a small fluctuation, of building a residence for our visitors. Lars can tell you about that.
BILDSTEN : A large initiative for me as director is to design and fund and construct what we are calling the Residence, with a capital R. Right now our visitors are housed in the Santa Barbara and Goleta communities—they are not together. The value of this project would serve in getting the science to go 24/7.
PT : What’s your expected time scale for the Residence project?
BILDSTEN : The schedule-limited, not dollars-limited [target] would be occupying it by March 2015.
PT : What other plans do you have as director?
BILDSTEN : The Residence is the largest initiative. I will also continue to work on raising the endowment and getting the engagement of other foundations that are interested in supporting theoretical efforts. And I think there is a need to find ways to enable access to our fantastic online archives, to our talks.
PT : Why did you want the top job?
BILDSTEN : I felt strongly that the opportunity to become director would allow me to impact the situation, starting from a position of tremendous strength.
PT : Will you be able to continue with your own research?
BILDSTEN : My absolute plan is to maintain my research as strong as ever.
PT : What are examples of topics in which the KITP has had a real impact?
GROSS : Big breakthroughs in early quantum computing happened during a KITP workshop. Interactions between condensed-matter and atomic physics—optical lattices and laboratories for real quantum systems—took place here when programs in cold atoms and strongly correlated matter ran together. In the 1980s the whole strategy for measuring and learning from the cosmic microwave background was worked out here. There are many other examples. In fact, we succeed every year in identifying a few things that will be hot two years from now. Our real goal is to plan programs two years ahead of time, which nobody realizes are going to be hot.
BILDSTEN : Some of these topics are driven by a large experiment that we know is going to yield data. That is often a driver for scheduling. In other fields, like experimental condensed-matter physics, it’s much harder because breakthroughs happen on a more spontaneous basis.
PT : Over the past decade or so, there has been a proliferation of institutes that mention the KITP as a model.
GROSS : Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I think I could count 30 or so such places that try to model or create a variant of our activities. Some are quite successful. I have been involved in helping groups in China, Brazil, India, currently in Japan, and other places try to pursue their dreams of things modeled on the KITP. I think the reason is, one, the KITP is very successful, and two, theorists really like to get together and do theory together, to talk and argue and spend a lot of time together.
More about the authors
Toni Feder, tfeder@aip.org
