Interview with Luke Sollitt

[NASA]

Let’s begin by Inquiring into your early years, your childhood, where you were born, where you grew up, what your family was like? Do you have siblings? What did your parents do, and how young were you when you developed an interest in what has become your career?

I was born in Boston. My mom lived in Vermont at the time, so it’s kind of a home state. We moved to the Washington DC area, to Alexandria, when I was about four. I have a brother whose name is Ian. He is not quite 2 years older than I am. He lives in Maine. Unfortunately, my mom, my father, and my stepfather, I’ll talk all about them, none of them are with us anymore. When my mom lived in Vermont, she was a postal carrier but was dissatisfied with that life. She had been an executive at the age of 22 In New York City, in the early 1960’s, which was very unusual at the time. She worked for the Wool Bureau.

For the what bureau? The Wool Bureau? I didn’t know there was one.

You’ve seen the wool label in wool clothes? The one that says “It’s Real Wool”? Well, that’s her. She actually made that happen. She’s the one who turned that into a nationwide thing. Anyway, she and my father parted ways when I was quite young, so she was a single mother and decided that she was going to take a one way trip to Virginia to throw herself into the mill there. She started a newsletter as a single parent with two little kids.

I was five years old when Star Wars came out. The movie had a pretty significant effect on my life, particularly given that the main character has the same name I do. But my first inkling that I wanted to do something associated with the stars and space exploration may have actually come a little bit before that, when I was four. One day we were at a laundromat, and I was left in the back of the station wagon. Let’s remember that this was the ‘70s. My mom had some library books in the car, and there was this book on astronomy. I was young enough at the time that reading for me was still very new, and I looked at big paragraphs as scary things. I remember just looking at the pictures of the stars and thinking how wonderful it all was. And by the time I was nine years old it was all over and I wanted to be – am I really going say this to the whole world? – I wanted to be a scientist, an engineer, and an astronaut. All those things.

What’s the matter with saying that to the whole world? Those are laudable goals.

What I wanted to do at such an early age seems embarrassing but the fun part is I’ve actually gotten two of the three.

Yes!

I suppose I’ve made my peace with it all.  I had figured out very early that I wanted to be in science, but my stepfather didn’t think much of it. He used to tell me things like “a physicist is a boy with a toy” and other disparaging things about my chosen vocation. We moved from Alexandria to Calvert County, Maryland, and I lived there from the age of 9 to 14. So I spent those really formative years in what I felt as a kid to be a very boring part of the world with not a lot of friends, and I was an intense geek at the time. Being a geek is OK now, being a nerd is cool, right? We’re all nerds. That wasn’t true when I was ten, and so I didn’t have the best time growing up. I was so dissatisfied with life in Calvert County that I decided I was going to get the heck out of Dodge and go to college, and so I did that at the age of 14 by going to Simon’s Rock College in Western Massachusetts.  I was there for two years and then I went to the University of Maryland. But there was a little problem for me, going to college at 14: I’d never done homework. Homework wasn’t a thing for me. I didn’t care. If you’re in college and you sit down at the physics class, I was the kid that you despised because I was the kid that would come in, take the test, and ace it, having never done anything.

Well,  let me interrupt because you mentioned that you went to college at age 14 and I was about to ask if you were in Mensa or something? Because that’s quite an accomplishment to be able to do that. And then you said you didn’t do any homework, and that’s even more amazing. So how did that come about? Do you just have natural ability?

Truth is, I was actually bored and it was kind of unhealthy. The not doing homework thing is really bad, you don’t want to do that. I got over it later, I’ll come to that, but I’ve learned lots of lessons on the way, chief of which is that brains are neither necessary nor sufficient a condition to do great things in life. It helps, but it’s neither necessary nor sufficient. Anyway, I was never in Mensa, I never bothered with Mensa. I went to one Mensa meeting and I found it impossibly boring. So yeah, I was a little bit weird. I was a little bit of a mutant in school but truth is, I was terribly bored and I only started doing better in school when they skipped me a grade and started letting me skip ahead and do other things. I started doing summer programs with the Center for Advancement of Academically Talented Youth (CTY). They sent me to Arizona State University for a summer. I went to Franklin and Marshall University in Pennsylvania the following summer. I learned Greek. After that I went to the Rock, but when I was 16, I went to the University of Maryland as a junior . . . and promptly fell apart because you can get away with what I did for only so long. Not doing homework might have worked in the introductory physics classes, but once I got into the upper division classes, that’s when reality hit and it hit hard. I was weeded out. I flunked out of physics. I did. My last semester as a physics major the first time around I had a C, a D and an F on my transcript in physics. I got a C in quantum mechanics, largely because the professor was being kind. I got a D in electricity and magnetism because that’s what I deserved, and I got an F in my lab class. My lab class! Remember that one for later, because I absolutely deserved it. I did nothing. I was horrible. I was really out of it.

You have more than the average number of degrees, so I’m trying to put this all together. You’re going to walk us through how that all came about, right? How despite all this you are very well credentialed?

Yeah, I can do that. So I got the C, D and the F and my stepfather, who never wanted me to be a physicist anyway, took the opportunity, since I’d been in college for 4 1/2 years, to apply a little pressure. And so he said to me: “You will graduate by the end of the year or you’re just out. We’re not paying for you anymore.” And I said (to myself), “Well, I want to graduate, so what can I graduate in?” And I thought, I can graduate in German, because in addition to physics, I had also been taking German classes. I’ve also studied Russian, Latin, Greek, Gothic and Middle High German. So I know a very little bit of a whole bunch of languages, but I love language. Language is great!

Let me jump in here again because I saw that German was one of your B.A. degrees and I thought, well maybe you have German ancestry and you were trying to connect in that way with your family history?

Nope. The closest my family gets to Germany is that my grandfather’s parents came from Brest-Litovsk, in what is now Belarus near the Polish border. It was invaded by Germany. They were Jews.

Well, that wasn’t what I was thinking. I thought perhaps Sollitt might be a German name. But anyway, this is very impressive. Please continue.

OK.  Well so I flunked out and I thought, well, I can get a degree in German because I’ve been studying German. I started taking German when I was 12 or something, 11 or 12, and I kept at it. Then I did Russian for a couple of years. I did German when I transferred to University of Maryland, so I said “I can do that”. I had to take all the senior level requirements in a single semester. The chairman of the department said, “I don’t think you’re going to make it” but I did and he wasn’t very happy: I didn’t do any homework.  It wasn’t a big deal to take a couple of summer classes, and then I was out. I got my degree in German, a degree that I had never wanted. I had wanted a physics degree. And I was 19, I had just turned 19. I was, in fact, a little disappointed that I didn’t get my degree at age 18, but I got it at 19, and graduated in August of 1990. That was right around the time when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and we had the biggest recession since the Great Depression, and you had Harvard graduates waiting tables in Boston, that was all they could get. That was the environment into which I graduated with my unwanted degree in German with, you know, some lousy grades, although my GPA wasn’t awful. My first job was doing temp work for WFTY-TV channel 50. I did accounts receivable. I worked with a temp agency and I had to learn the job of accounts receivable by taking the test to see if I could do the job. So I thought “I don’t know how to do this, but OK, I’ll take the test.” It’s like this is how you do this and that’s how you do that, so OK, you can do receivables now!  I worked for them for a couple months and then I went through the Administrative Careers with America test, a very, very brief resurrection of the Civil Service Exam. And very foolishly, where it said you can indicate where you’re willing to work, for some insane reason, I said “Los Angeles.” I’d never been there but it sounded like fun. So I put that down as a potential location, with a bunch of other places, and the only offer I got was from the Internal Revenue Service in the Los Angeles district.

I read about the IRS in your bio, and I was going to ask about it, so please tell us about that experience.

I was employed as a Revenue Officer.

It so doesn’t fit with what you’ve been telling us about who you are. But go ahead (laughs).

Let’s just say it’s been a circuitous route! I joined the IRS as a Revenue Officer in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, thanking my lucky stars that I had an actual job. And it was for a rather miserable salary that I drove my mom’s car across the country to get there. A Revenue Officer is the person who knocks on doors and collects the taxes.  I was hired as a GS-7. This was not a job that I liked. In fact, it was a job I viscerally hated but I did this job for nearly 4 1/2 years of my life. It taught me some really important lessons.

My first lesson came on the very first day, when I attended a training session for hundreds of people (there had been a huge District-wide hire). About the first thing the first speaker said was that because we are now in the government, we must not only avoid impropriety, but the very appearance of impropriety. And that is something that I have lived by ever since. I think it’s the way you must be. I was in what they sometimes call retail government. My job was to literally go knock on doors of delinquent taxpayers and say, “Hi, you owe the government money or there are government tax returns that you haven’t filed”. I would do this driving my own car. And back in 1991, when I started, April of 1991, I was 19 years old. One taxpayer joked that he didn’t realize that the IRS was hiring from high school these days! (laughs)  Yeah, I looked pretty young. I started off wearing a suit and tie and the whole bit with the badge and everything. Everybody was terrified of me. So I ditched the suit. I ditched the tie. I grew my hair out. I wore rumpled blue jeans and a rumpled shirt. I mean, I looked terrible. But everybody talked to me. I never brought out the pocket commission unless I had to. And what I found was that I ended up being really, really good at the job. I was the number two rated Revenue Officer at GS-9, the year I was rated in the district. The first-rated GS-9 Revenue Officer in LA District that year was a really nice lady named Gail, a really neat lady, a grandmother.

As a Revenue Officer, my attitude was markedly different from many. I didn’t approach delinquent taxpayers as, well, delinquents. I just went there thinking that they were people with a problem that needed to get fixed. My attitude was, “Hi, I’m from the IRS, I’m here to help, and I’m serious. Let me help you”. I never, ever, ever wanted to seize things. I never seized a car. I never seized a house. Other people did. They were keen to do it but I wasn’t. I managed to avoid all that stuff by basically dealing with taxpayers like real people. And I ended up closing tons and tons and tons of cases, something like three or four times as many cases as the next person in my group, because of the way I dealt with people, treating them differently, respectfully.

I got my GS-11 at the age of 22. I was the youngest GS-11 that anyone could think of, and one day one of my co-workers said that I would eventually be the Assistant Commissioner of the IRS. That idea filled me with dread… But I mean no disrespect to the hardworking Revenue Officers and others at the IRS – their job is truly thankless, but so utterly necessary. So I was doing the job, although I despised it, and then one of the best jobs in the IRS came up, which was to do the exact same job for the International District. I transferred to L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, DC and International sent me as far as eastern Canada for my first training trip. I went from Montreal to Quebec City to New Brunswick to Halifax to Prince Edward Island to Newfoundland. What a great trip. It was wonderful. I met interesting new people and it’s a very different sort of thing there because you have no enforcement authority whatsoever. You basically have to ask very nicely, but I was pretty good at that because that’s how I did my job in LA.

Had people gone there to escape the oversight of the IRS?

No, it’s not that they were trying to escape the long arm of the IRS, it’s just that people who live abroad still have U.S. tax obligations. They still have to pay tax on their worldwide income, whether they live in America or live outside of America. A U.S. citizen living in Canada still has to file a U.S. tax return, and they run into tax trouble, too.

But you were talking about enforcement authority. You don’t have it in Canada or overseas, right?

Yeah, the way it works is the revenue officer gets a case once it’s been through the automated collection system. Automated collection systems are at the big IRS centers and they’re the ones who make the phone calls, send the registered letters, and all that stuff. I’m not sure what they do today. This was 30 years ago. And once the automated collection system runs through all the stuff they do, they ship it out to revenue officers who go and knock on the doors and say “You need to talk to me”. And if they get ignored, or they don’t comply with the agreements that they make with the revenue officer, which would have to be signed off by group managers, then the Revenue Officer can take action under civil enforcement authority. Civil enforcement authority includes things like seizures and levies. You can levy wages, you can levy bank accounts, you can levy rents. You can levy any form of income, any asset. You can place a notice of federal tax lien on the person, which then attaches to all their real estate. You can actually make seizures of anything a taxpayer owns. If they have nice artwork, you can seize that, too. It’s a lot of power, and to be honest it’s pretty scary. But the reason you can do that is because the long arm of federal law exists throughout the country.

When you go to a place like Canada, you’re way past federal law. You can’t seize anything or levy anything unless there’s a tax treaty with that country. And if there is, then you can do things according to the way the treaty is written. I think in Canada that enforcement was done through requests to Revenue Canada. But to first order, you have no power in Canada, so what you’re reduced to is “Let’s try to make this work”, because if you have somebody who’s been living in Canada for 40 years and doesn’t want to go back, well, then their obvious move is to renounce U.S. citizenship and tell you to go away. That’s if they never want to go back, if they don’t care about their U.S. citizenship. But most folks do.

Anyway, so I did that trip and I was planning my next one, until one day, and you have to understand I went to the University of Maryland in College Park, which is literally down the road from L’Enfant Plaza. It’s like 10 miles away or so, and I was back in familiar areas. In fact, I grew up in the area when I lived in Maryland and Alexandria, so I knew the place really, really well. I was living on Capitol Hill at the time. And one day, I’m not kidding here, at International, I was literally sitting at my desk scribbling physics equations, just like the Gary Larson cartoon (The Far Side): “What’s this? Jenkins, physics equations? Do you enjoy your job here as a cartoonist?” The cartoon character Jenkins, was literally me. I was scribbling physics equations, and I looked down and I said, “Oh, God, I really have unfinished business”. So I went right up to the University of Maryland, to my old faculty advisor, a guy named Joe Redish. And I marched into his office, waved my hand, and said “Hi, Joe. How do I restart? How do I get back in? What do I do?” And he started off listing books for me on how to get ready for it, saying “Do this book, do that book”. And then he stopped, thought about it for a moment, and said “No, forget all that. Go get the Feynman Lectures on Physics and give them a read.”  And I said “OK, sure”. So I got the Feynman Lectures on Physics and started reading them. They’re brilliant. I mean brilliant.

I’m sure they are.

But they’re not effective if you’re learning physics for the first time. It’s the last thing you want to do. It is effective if you’re doing something like what I was doing, which is getting back into the field or getting a different perspective, or as a great reference book. They’re wonderful for the right purposes, and I started reading the Feynman lectures that summer. I read them every day, all day. I read them on the subway to and from work. I read them on lunch hour. I read them on breaks. And as I read the lectures, I finally decided that I had to see about going back to school. So I went back up to the University of Maryland, walked into the registrar’s office and said “OK, I graduated a bunch of years ago and I want to come back. What’s the process?” And they said, “Well, here’s a 3×5 card.  Fill it out, please.” So I filled it out and handed it back to them, and they said “You’re in!”  And I said, “What? That’s it?” I just filled out a 3×5 card and then arranged for student loans.

I told my mom what I was doing – I was talking to her about returning to physics before I re-enrolled. She was very, very supportive of my going back to get my physics degree. It was unfinished business. But I didn’t tell my stepfather right away because I knew he wouldn’t approve. I knew I would have to tell him eventually. My opportunity came on Father’s Day, 1995. By this time, my Mom and stepfather had divorced. But it was a crowded affair: my step-siblings were there with spouses and families, other friends were there. And I finally announced to everyone what I was going to do at the end of summer, which was leave the IRS and go back to school to get my degree in physics. Everybody in the room congratulated me, saying what a wonderful idea that was, and isn’t that great. Except my stepfather. He didn’t say a word. I knew he would not be happy about this – especially the way I ambushed him with it, in front of this huge crowd. But I knew that I absolutely had to present my decision as a fait accompli: if I had gone to him to tell him I was thinking about doing this, he would have been on me until I dropped it. At the end of the day I was the last person there and he walked up to me and he said, “I don’t know how to react to this news, that you’re going back to school. It’s as if you’ve told me that you’re quitting your successful government career to go back and study remedial English”. That’s a quote.

Oh my!

Yeah.

So it wasn’t just a matter that he was paying for your education. He really objected to what you wanted to become through your education.

Yes, that’s why he would say things like “A physicist is a boy with a toy”. He saw physicists as unserious, as non-intellectuals, which is a huge mistake.

I should say.

But I went back and set myself a goal. Now you remember those classes that I got the C, the D, and the F in? I registered for the same three classes and the graduate secretary told me “You can’t do that. It’s too much work. You’re going to die!” But I thought that I needed to do it and I knew if I got 3 A’s I was doing the right thing. If I got one A or less, I knew that at least I’d given it the good college try. I’d gone back and addressed this one great failure in my life, one that made my whole life feel incomplete. At least I’d done it and I could move on to other things in life now and not worry about it anymore. If I got two A’s, I didn’t know what it would mean, but if I got three A’s, I knew it was cool.

So I went back and within two weeks, I was just drowning in the work. It turns out there’s a Physics Class Invariance Principle: every upper division undergraduate physics class takes 20 hours of homework per week. 20 hours, plus all the time that you’re in class. Three classes means 60 hours of work per week, more than a full-time job. But my attitude was very different in that I now had five years of work experience under my belt. I had been away from physics for five years when I went back and my attitude was that I went to Maryland in the morning and my classes were just part of my work day. I spent the rest of the day working in the library and other places at Maryland, and I went home at night, and was done, except when I started having experiments.

I remember that first semester I was in the advanced undergraduate lab, the one I had got the F in, and something had changed. Suddenly, it was my favorite class!  I had the exact same lab manual, and I despised it just as much the second time around. Only this time I had enough confidence to look at it and say, “This thing is horribly written. I mean, this is awful. Where does this come from? Oh, they have a source in here. Adrian Melissinos.”  Anyway, it was Melissinos’ “Experiments in Modern Physics”. I went and found it in the library and started reading it and that became my textbook. Not just that book – I looked up every single source cited in all those experiment write-ups: books, monographs, reference materials. One of the sources was the book “Alpha-, Beta- and Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy” by Kai Siegbahn. I read the source material to actually learn what they were doing, and I had a blast. Oh my God, that was fun! I mean fun.

One of the most fun things I did was the cosmic ray experiment. It was a timing experiment that used scintillator paddles. As a particle passed through a scintillator paddle, it would knock electrons off of the sodium iodide crystals. The electrons would be reabsorbed into the matrix, releasing light that would then be picked up by photomultiplier tubes. The four paddles were hooked up to some simple logic boards to generate a coincidence circuit, where a coincidence gate would be opened by triggering the first paddle. You’d get simple yes/no signals from subsequent paddles, and if you got four yesses (energy deposited in each of the paddles within the timing gate duration), you’d have a coincidence, and add that particle to your measured  cosmic ray flux. You learn something about the energies of the cosmic rays by varying the shielding between pairs of scintillator paddles. More shielding means you get fewer yesses in the paddles below the shielding. And I thought, OK, that’s cool. What about trying a direct measurement of the energies of these things?

I went to the professor, Phillip Roos, who was a member of the board of directors of the Jefferson Laboratory (the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, a high-energy electron-positron collider in Virginia). He loaned me a very thick scintillator and I started doing actual spectroscopy with this thing. And I learned all about the Landau curve. Basically, it’s what happens when a high energy particle penetrates a thin layer. How much energy does it give up? It’s a quasi-stochastic process, but the distribution of energies deposited in the layer by particles from a monoenergetic beam is something called the Landau Curve. It is incredibly complicated and way past the purview of an undergraduate class to try to model or do anything with. But I did my best. And so I put that together as one of my experiments for the class and I just absolutely loved it. I just loved it.

In quantum mechanics, I absolutely died. Completely.  And I realized that I had major problems. I even had a call with my mom, telling her “I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing”. Looking for a way forward, I realized I couldn’t do it myself. I needed to join a study group, so I started looking around, asking folks, “Can I join your study group?” And I kept getting the cold shoulder. What I didn’t realize was that they didn’t have study groups. And finally, at one point I just said OK, nobody wants me to join their study group, not realizing they didn’t exist, and I decided to do a study group of my own. I started inviting people, and they were eager to join. Quantum mechanics is still the thing I know best from that period, because I ended up teaching it. I had about five or six people, mostly from a student group called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS). It was the undergraduate space exploration gang. And I ended up teaching them quantum mechanics. It was wonderful, you’re jumping into it and the book is throwing all the math at you up front, like it’s hitting you with a baseball bat. And at the same time, I took E&M as well. In that class I did actually fall in with a couple of guys and the three of us became an established study group for that and kept it going for a number of classes.

But it ended up being 20 hours a week per class, 60 hours easy. I was in the lab at times until midnight or later, as well as on weekends, and I ended up getting 3 A’s! So in the end, I did it right. So I stuck around. I could have finished my degree in a year but I had a strategy: I wanted to get into a good grad school and I figured that no grad school would touch me with those C, D, & F grades on my transcript. Remember those? I think a C or a D in one of my math classes is really bad, but I knew no one would touch me if I didn’t have really, really  good follow up grades, so I needed to take two years, not one. So that’s what I did and I also knew that I needed a really good recommendation to get into a good grad school, so I signed up with something that fell out of the cosmic ray work. Originally, I didn’t understand what I was getting with the energy measurements from the thick scintillator. I didn’t realize yet that I was looking at a Landau curve. And Dr. Roos said. “Hey, go talk to Dr. Jordan Goodman, who is one of our younger professors. He does cosmic rays.” So I talked to Dr. Goodman, and he literally laughed me out of his office. He was brutal. He was in particle astrophysics. He said I was doing things wrong. He told me what I was doing wrong. He said I had put my big thick simulator between the four paddles. There’s two paddles above, two paddles below. I put the simulator in between them. He wanted me to put the simulator at the bottom.

And so having been chased out of his office like a scolded dog, I went back to my experiment. I played with what I was doing. I got the Landau curve. That’s how I learned about the Landau curve. And I actually went and studied up on it. I found out by looking through things. And then I went back. I took Kai Siegbahn’s book “Alpha-, Beta- and Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy”, a really good book, and I got my new results. I tried it his way and I tried it my way and my way worked better, and I marched right back into his office and said “OK, I did this and I did this and I did this and I get this, this is the Landau curve. It looks like this crazy equation, but here’s where it’s coming from with the physics. I tried it your way and I tried it my way and my way worked better. He didn’t laugh and I ended up working for him. He sent me first to New Mexico to work on the MILAGRO detector. This was a Cherenkov detector. Cherenkov detectors, they’re water, ultra-pure water, and particles go through them at very, very high speed, faster than the speed of light in water, and they are giving off shock waves, just like supersonic shockwaves. Only this is light. It’s called Cherenkov radiation. It’s blue. I forget exactly why the physics makes it blue, but it does, and there’s an opening angle cone, it’s the same physics, just with light instead of sound, and you pick those up with photomultiplier, tubes set in the water. It’s actually quite similar to the work with scintillators, but you’re putting photomultiplier tubes in the water instead of on a scintillator. Same kind of deal. Different physics makes the light, but from the photomultiplier tube out, it’s the same thing. So I had a one heck of an adventure one summer in New Mexico. One of the other two guys in my study group, named Aaron Eichelberger, went out with me. And we both worked on the detector over the summer. That was good times. Up at 10,000 feet, I was in the best shape I’ve ever been in my life.

I’ll bet.

Just about. We were building. We had these sand filled PVC pipes at 100 pounds a pop and I  would pick one up and take it into the detector, you know? I was basically doing grunt construction work. I helped tear down the Cygnus detector too, which was another scintillation detector. The following winter Jordan Goodman sent me to the Super-K detector in Japan. He also wrote my recommendation letters for grad school. And my plan, long story short, paid off. I was accepted by the University of Colorado at Boulder’s APS Department, which is Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.  That’s a very, very good program and I was going to go there until I was accepted by Caltech. Caltech is where I always wanted to go. I had applied to Caltech for transfer when I was fifteen and they said no, but for grad school they said yes. I figured they might because I was weird and Caltech does weird. Caltech is weird. (laughs)

I applied to Berkeley, too, mostly for my stepfather because he was a Berkeley man, but I figured Berkeley wouldn’t touch me with a 10 foot pole, and they didn’t. They said: “No, thank you!” So I went to Tech and I ended up working in cosmic rays. I worked for Ed Stone, who was the director of JPL, who went from managing 5,000 people at JPL when he retired to managing me! (smiles).  That was kind of an intense experience, but he taught me wonderful, wonderful things. I started off as an anomalous cosmic ray physicist. That’s what I wanted to do, looking for the termination shock, but Voyager didn’t get there during my time in graduate school. I remember spending a long six months trying to figure out, can I do this? I did my candidacy exam and advanced to candidacy based on anomalous cosmic rays, but then realized I didn’t have enough for a thesis. That was a low point. I was depressed but one day I came into my office and there on my chair was a stack of papers about solar particles. And I said “OK, I’m a solar particle physicist now!” So I ended up doing a thesis on solar particles. And I found, you know, cosmic rays, solar particles, the guy who did the thesis before me put into his acknowledgements that “it is often a dry field.”  That’s a hard thing. Most folks who get cosmic ray, space cosmic ray degrees, end up elsewhere, and I did too. I was in grad school. I graduated. I did my thing and actually my defense was fun.  I didn’t want my defense to last forever, so I wanted to schedule it for 11:00 o’clock, right before lunch, because noon rolls around and everybody at Caltech goes to lunch at noon, the whole campus, everyone turns out for lunch. It’s the only time you ever see people on campus, noon. And I figured that my thesis wasn’t nearly as important to my thesis committee as lunch, so I figured they would give me an easy pass. So I proposed this time to my advisor, and he said no. He rescheduled it for, I think, 8:00 o’clock in the morning or something horrible like that, 9:00 o’clock, and I gave my talk, I did my thing. I even had one of the guys there who loves to kill grad students. We were required to have at least one of those people on our committee and I had them both times (candidacy and defense). They just love to murder the ill-prepared grad student. So I gave my talk, it was like forty, fifty minutes, and I solicited questions. And one of them said, “Well, you’ve got a typo on page 2”. And the other one said “It’s kind of thin, it’s only 125 pages. Did you do more than that? And I said, “Well, I did. I worked on anomalous cosmic rays, but I didn’t think that was worthy of going into this thesis because it’s different.   And they said “OK”.  They had essentially no questions for me. Ed looked at me and said, “I’ve been doing this for 35 years and I’ve never seen that!” So apparently I did pretty well.

You know, you would have ace’d a PhD in behavioral psychology!  There are so many ways that you did things, interacting with other human beings, understanding their motivations and what impels them, developing your own strategies for success.

Well, you know, I learned a lot of that in the IRS. There you’re walking into a situation which is absolutely beyond question, adversarial.

Yeah, you changed the job that you had there. The way they set you up to go out with a suit and tie on, and then you found that what works better is to be human and meet people at their level. And your results bore that out.

Yep. they did.

But that was you. It was almost reverse psychology that you worked on people. Instead of coming in with a hammer, you came in with a handshake, saying “What can I do to help you comply?”

Yeah, I had people actually thank me for coming into their lives. Because my assumption, my feeling, is there’s this willful naivete, which I call honor. But one mustn’t misunderstand. It is a naivete about the world and the people in it, and I decide to be that way. I decide that people have good intentions, generally speaking, but not all of them. Clearly there’s some bad apples out there. There’s no question that if you do life this way you’re going to get hurt. It does happen. But you live better. You just live better.

I think that’s a good philosophy. Now let me direct this a bit because we’ve already gone longer than most of these interviews go, but your story is fascinating. I’ve pretty much thrown away the interview questions because you’re telling about yourself and that’s what we wanted you to do. It’s just a wonderful story. It’s been different from the other ones that we’ve done and probably better for that, so I’m not concerned, but there are a couple of things we want to touch on, get your thoughts on, and then when we get this back to you on paper, if there’s more you want to say about this, or if you want to talk about something else, you can conduct your own interview and just write the way you want it. I don’t think it matters how long it is. It’ll probably be one of the longer ones, but I think when we post it, it can go down as far as there are words and people are willing to hang in there and read it. It’s a fascinating read, that’s for sure. But one of the things we like to ask is, OK, you’ve had a very, as you said “circuitous” route to getting your job, but you’re good at it, and it’s what you apparently love, because you went back to it twice, into physics, and now planetary physics. But if you weren’t a NASA research scientist, or a physicist, what would your dream job be?

Well, I mean, the dream job for me, I have to admit, as I told you: scientist, engineer, astronaut.

OK, you did answer that already.

The neat part is, when I got out of grad school, I went to work for Northrop Grumman as a system engineer and I learned about system engineering. So I’ve actually ticked off two of the three.

Yes, you have.

Let me give you a slightly different and slightly better answer than that, which is I have had a cataract in my left eye, starting from when I was very, very young, so I was unable to pursue what I otherwise might have done, which is that I would have gone after being a pilot in the Air Force or the Navy. That’s the other thing I wanted to do. I love to fly.

You’ve told us a lot about your education and about your work, but what do you do for fun?

Well, I have a family, first off.

Tell us about your family. We want to know about that, too.

My wife, Marie, actually has a PhD in developmental psychology from Cornell, which she completed in my living room at Caltech.

Really?

Because I sat her down and fed her for a summer, and allowed her to do nothing but her thesis for the summer. I feel very proud of that. But her real passion is books; she’s a librarian. So I actually put her through library school too. She’s now a librarian over at San Jose City Library and loving it, I hope. At least I think she is. We have two children, a daughter, Lynn, who is 17 and a senior in high school.  And she loves cats. We have a cat, it’s a long story. Our son Tristan is 14. He just started high school. He likes building stuff. I need to get him focused on his math, but he likes building things and that’s very cool. I want him to keep doing that. He can be wildly creative. Mostly he likes to work in paper, but now I’m trying to get him to work in other things. So that’s the family. We like to travel. We like to go places, just go visit stuff, you know. I’m trying to sell them on California too, because I did uproot them from South Carolina, which they had known basically their whole lives, and it’s been quite a readjustment. But in terms of other things I like to do, well there’s the standard stuff, you know, music and various things and reading. And in fact, if you’re wondering about what kind of books I like to read the most, it used to be science fiction. I like science fiction, but I‘ve got to be honest: the latest thing I’m into is primary sources. That’s actually always been true and I’m going to sound really horrible here, but I’m the kind of guy who reads the original Marco Polo. I’ve read Voltaire, Giraldus Cambrensis, also called Gerald of Wales, who wrote in the 13th century. I read the English translations. Sometimes I try to read the others, but it’s difficult. My ancient languages aren’t that good. I kind of wish they were. I’d like them to be, but they’re not. I like reading histories as well, and biography and things like that. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. I’ve been trying to learn a lot about the history of the Spanish-American War period and the First World War. It’s very, very interesting. Other things I do: I’m a private pilot and in fact, I am in the middle of a long odyssey to pick up an airplane and bring it home. It’s my own. It’s called a Varga, and it’s a tandem two-seat training aircraft. It’s got a glass canopy and a low wing, and looks like a little fighter airplane from the ‘40s or something. I’m halfway through flying it from Minnesota to here. I had a few problems along the way, and had to stop in Amarillo for repairs. Hopefully I’ll be finishing the trip soon. So in the near future I’m going to have a blast. I like driving, too. I have a Jeep. It’s a funky diesel from Japan. I also like to hike, though I haven’t done a whole lot of hiking lately.

You mentioned music. Do you play an instrument?

No, no, not really. I tried. I failed.

Where does your taste run in music, then?

Oh, to all kinds of things.  I grew up in the ‘70s and the ‘80s and you know, I was poisoned by Sting, The Police, Genesis, stuff like that. But I’m a big fan of folk music. American folk music, but also English folk music and Scottish and Irish folk music as well. Even Welsh. That’s really great stuff actually. Breton and other things like that.  I’m a big fan of Newfoundland folk music, I discovered that in Newfoundland on my trip for the IRS. So I do a lot of that sort of thing and lately in the last 15 years or so, I’ve actually become a devotee of some forms of country music, so shoot me!  No, no, no, it’s all good stuff. I mean, music is music. It’s good stuff. I like classical music too. I’m a big fan of all sorts of things classical. I used to love Baroque music exclusively, but my tastes have become a little more sophisticated since then. I like all sorts of things now.

That’s very eclectic and I appreciate that. I think about when people ask me what my favorite color is and I’ve thought, how can you answer a question like that? The colors are all in context, they’re all beautiful. They’re all wonderful. We would miss any one of them if they weren’t there.

On the kids, by the way, our daughter is a violist and our son’s a cellist, so they like music too.

My kids at Badwater Basin, Death Valley. I gave a talk at the Dark Sky Festival, February 2024

Yes, you mentioned you have an airplane and a Jeep. Are you interested in mechanics at all? I know Jeeps tend to have a good amount of repairs. I don’t know if pilots fix their own planes, how does that end up going?

Luke’s Varga airplane parked at Reid-Hillview airport after he flew it to California from Minnesota.

Luke flying solo.

And with his daughter.

You don’t do a lot of fixing of your plane as a pilot (unless you really want to). The Jeep I have is a diesel from Japan, so it’s incredibly reliable. I’ve never breaks. But I have to admit, when I was in grad school, I desperately wanted to get involved in lab work. I went downstairs one day and I talked to the post doc who was leading a balloon flight project for high energy cosmic rays. And I said, “I want to get into lab work”.  And she said, “Great! I’m so glad you want to get into lab work. Here, analyze this data.” And I got pegged as a theorist, my whole career. But that all changed after I left grad school and I started working with JPL. Northrup Grumman sent me to work at JPL two days a week for a good long time, and I learned about lab work. I learned all sorts of fun things. I learned about experiment design and I started doing it. I started building things and I have really found the joy of building an experiment and making it work. I adore it. I love it. I’m doing it on a project called SPARTA, right now. I’ve actually had to build it, build the experiment, a couple of times. The last time was for Zero-G flight, and when I showed up at the airport, the PI was there and he handed me a bag. That’s not hyperbole. He handed me a bag of broken parts that I had never seen and said “Here’s your experiment. And it has to be ready in 40 hours. And we don’t know how to do it.” So I had to figure it out and make it work, in 40 hours. From nothing. And I did. And we flew and we got data and I was very, very proud of that.

Aboard Zero-G light for SPARTA

You are absolutely one of the most fascinating people that I have ever had to privilege of talking with and knowing. I’m just incredulous at your story. It’s wonderful. It’ll play very well in our series, but it really belongs in a book or a biography or something like that. A lot of people could learn from it.

Well, I have to tell you, coming here to Ames is in many ways absolutely a culmination. I giggle when I come to work, are you kidding me? And I tell everybody this, I’m a NASA fan boy. And I will put the disclaimer out first that I understand that NASA is a large, dysfunctional government agency that is going to break your heart. OK, it’s going to do it because that’s what big dysfunctional government agencies do. It’s going to enrage. It’s going to make you frustrated. You’re going to want to kill it. But I love it. I am a massive fan.

Yes, you’re absolutely right. But it needs people like you.

Yeah, but when I come in, I like coming into Ames because I just giggle! I can’t believe I’m here. I can’t believe that I’m a bona fide NASA rocket scientist! After all this time, I get to finally do it. I wanted to be a scientist, you know. And the other thing that comes to me is I can’t believe they took me. I had the exact same reaction in grad school at Caltech. And by the way, so did everybody else.  I went and talked to lots of graduate students at Caltech and they all said the same thing:  “I can’t believe they took me”. It wasn’t until I got to the NSF that I learned about imposter syndrome.

Right.

It’s like, whoa, that’s my problem: imposter syndrome. Everybody has it.

I’m hesitant to bring this to a close, but we do need to and I need to explain a couple of things to you.

Sure.

One of them is that when we finally get this into a transcript narrative that you’re comfortable with, then we would like to include pictures from your life, from yourself, from your family, not just of your work, but things we’ve talked about. Anything that would go along with the narrative, You can think about that because there will be a few weeks, but we’d like you to provide a few pictures. If you’ve seen some of the other interviews you’ve seen the pictures. Pictures go a long way to illustrate and bring to life what you’ve talked about, helping people understand who you are. And we also like to ask if you have a favorite quote, something we might see on your desk or wall, something that motivates you or that you find particularly meaningful. You’ve already said one earlier in this conversation that comes from you that I really liked.

Which one was that?

It was toward the beginning, you were talking about the people who do great things. It was something like “brains are neither necessary nor sufficient to do great things”.

They’re not. Now you’ve got to work hard. You got to work hard.

Yeah. That resonated with me when I heard it. That’s a good quote.

For me the difference was that I actually sorted myself out and actually started figuring out how to do the work and that made all the difference. You don’t need genius to succeed. And genius is not enough to succeed.

I like that. And if there’s something that has been sort of a lodestar for you, maybe from Feynman or from someone along the line that you just thought, “Oh, I like that, that’s motivating” or something, that helps people understand who you are, what motivates or impels your life toward who you are today. It’s just an opportunity and you can think about it and put it in later. It’s not a problem. It’s just something that helps tell your story.

I don’t know. I used to put a quote, I thought it was from Alcuin, an 8th century philosopher, a neat guy, he taught Charlamagne, and was a student of  Venerable Bede. Anyway, from early medieval history and I have found it to be a very significant quote. It may not be eloquent, but it is (he quotes it in Latin: “Claudit iter bellis, qui portam pandit in Astris”): “That road does not lead toward war, whose gate lies open to the stars”.

That’s profound.

It is and what’s particularly profound about it is that this is coming out of the medieval Christian period and you would have thought it would be “heavens”, as in “heaven”. But it’s not. It’s astris, stars, and what that means to me is that exploration is where it’s at. Exploration keeps us away from the darker aspects of our being. We can avoid war by exploring. If war expresses the worst parts of humanity, exploration expresses the best parts of humanity.

OK. And first of all, I think that’s the first quote we’ve gotten in spoken Latin. That was Latin you were speaking?

Yes, it was.

I thought so. OK. But this is something that brings us together in a cooperative venture. The explorations that we’ve done that have included cooperation with other nations have certainly been among the few things in our world that have brought nations together. There are a lot of things that push nations apart and cause them to go to war but this is something that brings them together in a cooperative venture that transcends earth, really.

Absolutely.

That’s a wonderful quote.

It is particularly true of what we do here at NASA.

Yes.

I mean exploration. Ask me sometime about the defense value of ISS. Because the ISS is probably one of the most important national security things we’ve ever done and for reasons that are completely out of left field.

Yes, absolutely. You’re right. And we’ve seen that recently with the whole thing that’s going on over in the Ukraine.

Yeah.

They pulled out of a lot of things, but they didn’t pull out of the space station.

They didn’t. Not yet.

Anyway, this has been an absolutely fascinating interview so let’s put a close to it and then we’ll see what we’ve got when it comes out on paper. And then you can do with it what you want. And no matter what we do, this will have a limited audience on our website, but I hope you’ll give some thought to eventually writing an autobiography. It’s a story well worth hearing. I would buy it and read it, I’ll tell you that.

I was actually told to do that 20 years ago. And I thought, “What?”

Well, you’re still young!

Alright.

Thank you, Luke. This has been a joy, a delight and we’ll get back to you when we have something, and I think this will make a wonderful addition to our interview series.

I’m glad to help, alright.

OK. And yes, anything else? Any other questions or anything?

No, that’s all I got for now.

Thank you.

Take care, gentlemen.

Luke and his children in the shadow of SOFIA, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy.

Interview conducted by Fred Van Wert on January 25, 2023

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