Hildy Johnson, I'm Not
In which I cosplay as a journalist
January has been a really light month in terms of online writing for me mostly for day-job reasons: there were some big administrative tasks I needed to get done as Chair, and I’m teaching a class I last taught in 2013, so I’ve needed a lot of prep time. I’ve also got a time-consuming new side hustle going: I’m interviewing a lot of old physicists over Zoom.
The background to this is that I’ve had a couple of occasions while writing books where I needed to talk about modern atomic clocks, and the description begins “We start with several million cesium atoms cooled within a millionth of a degree of absolute zero…” and, you know, that begs for some elaboration. But at the same time, as fascinating as laser cooling is, I can’t just dump a ten-page discussion of cold-atom physics into a book about something else. So I would really like there to be a reference I could point people to, to get a reasonably readable explanation of the background of the field.
Unfortunately, there isn’t one. Other than some Scientific American articles from nigh on 30 years ago, anyway, and good luck getting access to those. So then I started thinking “Maybe I should write a book about laser cooling…” Which then led to the realization that, unlike a lot of the physics I write about, many of the principal actors from the early days of the field are still alive and active, so I could in principle speak directly to them about what it was like. Which, you know, could be a decent spine for a book-length treatment of the subject…
The one problem with this, though, is that I’m not a professional journalist. Interviewing people is not a skill I ever had to learn, and I don’t have much experience with taking things that were said to me by other people and crafting a narrative out of them. Which makes the idea of pitching a book where I promise 80,000 words of interview-based storytelling… risky.
So, instead, I pitched it as a feature article for a magazine, as a way to do a kind of trial run. Thus, Zoom interviews with old physicists. Which is a unique enough experience for me that it’s worth doing a kind of mid-process update as blog content.
It’s important to note that I’m not coming into this completely cold, since I was a grad student with Bill Phillips, who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of laser cooling. So I knew Bill would definitely talk to me, and I’ve also met a lot of the other key figures at least briefly at research conferences. As a result, a lot of the people I need to talk to may at least recognize my name, so it’s not completely a cold-email situation.
And, on the whole, I’ve had pretty good luck, including (as I noted on Twitter) a 4-for-5 success rate with interview requests sent to Nobel laureates. I knew I’d get two of them, but really thought it would be harder to get beyond that. The two that I had thought would be hardest to get to talk to accepted immediately, though, which is fantastic. I’ve actually had more trouble reaching some folks who were post-docs on the key experiments.
I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by how generous people have been with their time. I’ve been asking for an hour or so of time, but I think all but one of the calls to date have run long. I’ve also gotten a lot of follow-up emails with old photos and scans of documents from long ago, which are fun to see. There’s a bit of selection bias here, of course, in that these are the people who were happy to accept my first request for an interview, but even if everybody else stonewalls me, I probably have more than enough material for a feature-length article.
Which of course brings up a Looming Problem, namely that at some point I’m going to have to craft an actual story out of all this. I remain uncertain how that’s going to go. I mean, I have the basic outline of the history— who did what, when they did it, and where— but that by itself isn’t really enough. I still need to identify some kind of theme to structure this around, and I’m not entirely sure I have that yet. What I do have is several hours of recorded Zoom interviews, and the comically bad transcripts that Zoom generates automatically.
(I suppose I could fall back on that staple of modern Internet journalism, “An Oral History of _____” and just concatenate quotes from people I’ve talked to. I’ve previously mocked that as seeming lazy, though, so it would feel weird. Also, now that I consider the problem, I suspect there’s a good deal more art to those than it may initially seem…)
Somewhere between Good Thing and Looming Problem is the ever-expanding list of interview targets. One of the questions I’ve asked everyone I’ve talked to so far is “Who else should I talk to?” and I have yet to get a response to that that didn’t add another couple of names I didn’t already have on my list. After I finish typing this, I need to send another batch of not-quite-cold-email requests to people who were suggested more recently. I’m a little worried that this is going to keep expanding to a point where I do nothing but endlessly schedule Zoom interviews into the gaps between classes and faculty meetings.
(I’m fairly confident that this won’t actually happen, if only because the very earliest days of the field are nigh on fifty years ago now, and the list of folks with clear memories of that time is not long, and sadly getting shorter. Eventually, the set of people I’ve been told I should talk to will have to close...)
As for the question I pitched this article to answer, I’m still not sure whether this is something I’m any good at, or that I enjoy enough to want to do at greater length. I will admit to occasionally thinking mid-interview “This feels like part of a podcast,” but a lot of that has been because I’ve been talking to people I know, so we’ve gotten sidetracked with remembering funny stories and the like. I’m less certain about conversations with people I don’t already share some history with (which I’ll be doing more of in the coming weeks…). But podcasting is a category of side hustle that I haven’t gotten into yet, and I really don’t need to expand the list of extra things I do…
Anyway, it’s been an interesting challenge to this point, and is sure to become more interesting in the near future. Hopefully not in the Chinese-curse sense, but if nothing else, it’s keeping my weird career from turning boringly predictable.
That’s your quickie update on my recent activities. If you want to read subsequent reports, and the actual article whenever it gets written, here’s a button to get that in your inbox:
And if you feel the need to suggest obscure figures who I really need to interview for this project, the comments will be open:
Have you been getting releases that would eventually allow these to be incorporated in something like the APS historical archives?