51社区黑料

(Jeff) Why don't you start by telling us what led to you coming to SFU, including where you were before applying.

(Dave) I finished off my doctorate in 1975. At that point, I intended to go to Cambridge on an NRC postdoc. Before committing, I went to Cambridge and spoke with the director of Applied Math and Theoretical Physics on Silver Street. And then thought hard about it because a very good friend of mine, Peter Scharbach, who was a cousin of Nobel Prize winner Gerard 't Hooft, had gone to Oxford and reported that both he and his friends were having difficulty getting job interviews back in Canada.

At the time in Canada there was an accumulated pool of about 400 physics postdocs and there was an average of two, three, four academic vacancies in physics a year. And basically, universities which were hiring could simply look at the local pool. They didn't have to go across the ocean to find people.

So with that in mind, what I decided to do instead of going to Cambridge was to go to the University of Alberta. Now, this was after a very long conversation with Lynn Trainor at University of Toronto who was previously on faculty at U of A, and he reminded me of how many famous theoreticians were at U of A at that time. For example, Werner Israel was there, who worked with Stephen Hawking on the "no hair" theorems for black holes. Yoshushi Takahashi, famous for the Ward-Takahashi identity in quantum field theory, was there. Those are the people in my domain, but then there were quite a number of high-profile people in condensed matter physics as well.

So I thought about it, and went to U of A. And what happened when I got there was, even though I was on full support, they asked if I would participate in a first-year teaching program.  So I did that for eight months and then they said, do you want a faculty position? It's not tenure track, but it'll last for two years. Whatever, we'll see what happens. So I took that. At the end of two years, my wife and I were looking forward to having our first child. And I decided, well, I've got to find a tenure track position. I can't hang around in this kind of position forever.

An opening came up at SFU. It was in the chemistry department, which is where the nuclear group was at that time. And my background at that point was general relativity and particle physics. At the last minute, I saw their ad in the Globe and Mail, rather than the standard physics magazines.

I responded and just a couple of days later, they said "come for an interview", which is really easy from Edmonton. I did the interview, but before I went there, because I didn't know that much about SFU, I went over to TRIUMF just talk to all my TRIUMF buddies about what the 51社区黑料program was like. So the interview, I guess, went well. They phoned me, I don't know, I think it was about a week later and said, you want the job?

And so we moved to Vancouver. We were quite happy in Edmonton, but I had always loved Vancouver. I first hitchhiked here in 1968, I guess, when I was 20 years old. And I just thought it was a great place. So then we came. So that was the job search.

(Barbara) You were hired into the chemistry department in 1978, but in 1982 you joined the physics department. How did your connection to physics evolve?

(Dave) I had joined the chemistry department which was a really great group. It worked out very well socially and intellectually. But by the time four years had passed, I didn't have a single graduate student. And so even though the chemistry department had a big nuclear chemistry group on the experimental side, I think that theoretical physics students were just sort of nervous about getting a degree in a chemistry department, having to satisfy certain kinds of requirements which weren't required in physics. And so I thought long and hard about it and I decided I just couldn't carry on with not having any graduate students.

So we talked it over and I switched over to physics and I think within two weeks I had four graduate students.

(Barbara) Wow.

(Dave) So these were all students who were available, but they just didn't want to have a PhD where the background was nominally chemistry. And physics, I'm told, was quite happy to have me. I think Klaus Rieckhoff said: "yes, welcome him with open arms".

There were of course consequences that followed from this, because this is a transfer of a position from one department to another. And so there were negotiations in the background as to what would happen if physics then had another vacancy coming up, et cetera, et cetera. And it all worked out quite well.

(Jeff) Who else was in the nuclear chemistry group at the time when you hired on?

(Dave) Ralph Korteling and John D鈥橝uria were both running nuclear reaction programs at TRIUMF. Tony Arrott was building his neutron dump. Colin Jones was in M枚ssbauer spectroscopy and used nuclear sources. Paul Percival used unstable elementary particles as a probe of materials. The person I replaced was Brian Pate, who then went over to UBC and was doing nuclear imaging.

So it was mainly chemists, but Tony was involved then as well from Physics. And Vish at that point had migrated from condensed matter physics over to particle physics but he wasn't doing work which was experimentally related. He was doing quite fundamental work, but it wasn't related to the TRIUMF program.

When I came to SFU, I basically switched fields. It wasn't a really big switch but I hadn't done that much nuclear physics previously. So I had to brush up on that. And I learned a fair amount of nuclear astrophysics, like enough to be able to teach a third-year course on it and converse with people in the field.

(Barbara) And when you switched into physics, who were you working with then?

(Dave) Basically, no one in the physics department. I just kept on working with the chemists. Because of SFU's relationship to TRIUMF, the lab had given me an office. And so parallel to the work I was doing with the 51社区黑料guys I started working with Richard Woloshyn on phase transitions in the early universe. And Byron Jennings, I think maybe a couple of years later. Byron reminded me when I retired that my most cited paper, his most cited paper, and the director of the Michigan Superconducting Cyclotron's lab most cited paper was a review which the three of us wrote together that defined a particular aspect of reaction theory and experimental analysis.

The environment for me was good. I enjoyed SFU, but I also enjoyed the TRIUMF side. There were a reasonable number of students, not a huge number. But nevertheless, it was a fine environment.

(Barbara) Looking back, do you see pivot times or times where new directions were taken in the Department?

(Dave) From my point of view, one of the things that was important was the founding of the Theory Institute with Mike Plischke. When I came to SFU, I felt relatively isolated, like in the sense that this is Vancouver. It is in the Northwest corner of the continent. I was used to a constant flow of visitors from the US and Europe during my time in Toronto.

So Mike and I got this institute together. There was a certain amount of opposition to it, I think in both departments. It wasn't part of the 51社区黑料fabric at the time and so we were very fortunate we got the money for it.  Also fortunately, two years earlier, I had helped run a summer school at Banff where we had a lot of excellent international speakers who had come up to Vancouver. So it was easy to sort of go down my list of people who I had invited to Banff and say "would you come to Vancouver" in addition. And so, from my point of view, that really, really helped. TRIUMF was very, very good too at bringing people in. But our geographic location in something that won't change. I'm not saying it's a disadvantage, but it's something we have to be aware of.

I'll give an example. When I was still at U of T, Murray Gell-Mann came up for a week, founder of the eightfold way, the symmetry analysis of elementary particles. Gell-Mann arrives in Toronto and gets a phone call from Stanford and it looks as if they've discovered the fourth quark. And so, you know, like this is hot off the press and all of us start working like crazy. We calculated the radiative decay of mesons with the charm quark in it, et cetera, and rushed off to publication. That wouldn't have happened if Gell-Mann hadn't been at U of T at that point. It would have been the usual slow reporting with the data finally coming through. We heard about it, by which time all the good work and, you know, the low hanging fruit's already been done. And so I think that a steady flow of visitors is important.

(Barbara) When did you found the theory institute?

(Dave) It may have been 1979 or 1980. And it wasn't a big deal, in one sense, but the university wasn't used to spending money on that. For example, my startup funding was, I think, about $500 for books. And when I would buy a book, I had to take it down to the departmental administrator and have him stamp it, "property of 51社区黑料" just to make it clear, this is not my book, it's their book.

And so the idea of trying to get a budget of $5,000 just to bring visitors here was, in some people's views, not a good way of spending money. I mean, they鈥檇 rather spend it on equipment and other things. But to us, it was very important.

And I think, from my perspective, at least, it really helped in that transition time. It also raised the profile of so many fields, too, that were not represented in the physics department because we would select, for the speakers, people who we thought were doing interesting work no matter what their specialty. And so there was a much broader quasi-colloquium program running in the theory institute because of that. We didn't use it for postdoc or student salaries: it was exclusively for visitors.

(Jeff) An interesting thread through the department鈥檚 history is the gradual spreading of research interests from the initial focus on hard condensed matter to Vish first and then you second and then I guess it stayed more or less condensed matter for a while until the late 80s when the soft condensed matter area was developed.

(Dave) At that point, Otto H盲user was recruited from Chalk River to join the physics department; he had a cross appointment with TRIUMF. We also got adjunct appointments for Richard Woloshyn, Byron Jennings, and Peter Jackson.

There was a feeling originally that 51社区黑料should really just simplify, let me just say, specialize department by department. And physics was the opposite end of the spectrum from the chemistry department, which had the standard organic, inorganic, physical chemistry, biochemistry, nuclear chemistry as groups and all of those groups then were necessarily small. Whether they were subthreshold, I can't say. But physics certainly was very well known and highly regarded in condensed matter.

Rudi Haering sort of designed it that way. The impression I get is that he realized that 51社区黑料wouldn't be able to 鈥渃ompete鈥� if it were too diffuse and decided to focus on condensed manner.

So I can see that strategy. And I think there's arguments for both. I mean, I tend to be sort of a generalist and, if I were looking for an institution for grad studies, I would choose one where I had a lot of exposure to different fields. I mean, it's obvious since I've worked in preparative chemistry, theoretical physics, and also ran a small microbiology lab for a little while later in my career, that I really appreciate breadth.

On the other hand, I agree about visibility. For example, Waterloo specializing heavily in computing very early on in getting basically just a huge reputation in that area because of their specialization.

So I could see both sides. And I guess the two departments followed different paths in the early days but probably wound up at the same place, you know, 40 years later.

(Barbara) We had some questions about your time as chair. One was whether there was anything else about hiring that you would like to follow up on.

(Dave) I took on the chairmanship knowing that a third of the faculty were going to retire over three years. And that this was an opportunity to either change direction or seriously examine the direction which we had taken. From my point of view, and not everyone would agree with this, that's when the department came of age.

In the 1990s, I had been part of the President's Committee on University Planning. That committee was great, by the way. It had really good representation and very, very forward-looking people on it. But trying to get the university community as a whole to say we're going to be a big university 鈥� we're going to hit 20,000 or 30,000 students easily, yet historically the campus had been thought of as much more like a liberal arts institution 鈥� was hard. I think if you go back to the original designs and some of the documents from the 1960s, we were aiming for 5,000 students. Small classes, small tutorials, et cetera, et cetera. And yet it just wasn't going that way in the future. You know, Vancouver's population was exploding. Surrey was exploding. We had this huge number of students coming through the high schools that we knew was going to hit us.

And so that period in the 90s was one in which some people, but not the whole university certainly, but some were thinking that we would have to think much bigger. We would have to diversify the programs. We would have to recognize that we would become as how did somebody put it to me? Not a clone of UBC, but we would move in the direction of having a lot of different programs and a lot of professional programs. And I remember having a dispute at one point with a chair on the other side of campus who said, "you know, if we do this, we'll just be like UBC." And I replied, "well, it's one of the best universities in the country. You've got a problem with that?" But that was part of the attitude at the time. The faculty of a certain age had been hired when 51社区黑料was small and that's the kind of university they wanted to continue working in. That's fine.

By the time I became chair we were into that renewal period and a lot of people were retiring, so the chance to diversify or change direction was there. And the question was: what did people want to do? We were thinking about trying to find ways of developing a plan for the department and just thinking about what we wanted to do.

Looking back, I think the biggest thing that I believe I accomplished as chair was introducing the secret ballot for hiring decisions. As you know, there's always a tendency, not just at 51社区黑料but everywhere, that when you have an open discussion and an open show of hands as you do when you want to hire this person or that person, you get undue influence from certain parts of the department. And so I think introducing the secret ballot, at least from my perspective, made a big difference. I would have people in my office when I was chair saying you know, I'd really like to do this, but I don't know whether everybody would agree with it, or I don't know whether that's the best decision given our history. So I would just encourage people to think about it and then vote the way they wanted to.

Now, having said all that, as chair, what I tried to do was strike a balance. I noticed one of the things you were asking about was targeted hires and Pat Mooney was a targeted hire. Karen Kavanaugh put her name forward. Then we negotiated with Pat, had her out for a visit, et cetera. And that was very definitely a hire that we were all very enthusiastic about.

There were other hires which were made which were a novel step for the department. And I would say Levon Pogosian and Andrei Frolov were in that category. After the decision was made to hire both of them I was over attending a play at Jericho Theatre and Bill Unruh from UBC was sitting in front of me as it turned out. Bill turned around and said 鈥淭hank you for the hires that you've made. This is just a huge boost to the academic environment of Vancouver.鈥� Hearing that was confirmation of the strategy of trying to find areas which were new to us but not too far from what we had done. Like in other words, we didn't want to start off in a wholly different area that you couldn't talk to other people in the department - close enough so that everybody could talk together, but at the same time represented a different direction to what the department had traditionally done. And I mean, as I enthused about this before, I think it's just a great department. I love coming up for the colloquia. I love its breadth and its specialization. I think we do a lot for 30 faculty.

Another aspect was qualities that we looked for in candidates. Breadth was very, very important, no matter what research area they were in. You had people who worked in a department which is going to have three or four possible specialties such as particle physics/cosmology, biophysics, traditional and emerging condensed matter.

And you've got AMO and hires like Jeff McGuirk, Paul Haljan. You were building around a central core of about 15 plus or minus condensed matter physicists. But then a lot of people who were in either related areas or not too distant areas or had, even if they were much further away, still had a good link into the core. I think that was a lot of what went into the thinking at that point. And as I say, I use this "coming of age" metaphor because to my mind then we became much more like a big department.  Multifaceted. We weren't necessarily looking for fields that weren't strongly represented at UBC, as we might have been at earlier times. But this is defining who we are and the kind of problems we work on.

Okay, you're asking about collegiality, as opposed to a research record, and I think there were a couple of cases where there were some candidates who were quite high-flyers, but we wondered how well it would work out if they came to the department. Decisions were made accordingly. But we were happy with both teaching abilities and the research records of everybody we hired.

(Jeff) As I've said more than once, well, first of all, I view this from a different perspective being staff rather than faculty so I'm not privy to the sort of what goes on behind the doors, so to speak, but it's always struck me that physics managed to maintain the feel of the department, the collegiality of the department. I think it would be very easy to lose that with the number of new hires that were coming in. And so I was always impressed that we managed to do that. I inferred from that that there must have been a fair amount of thought considered to personalities and the ability to fit in. As a group, as well as just being a quality research person.

(Dave) Yeah, I think there's a certain amount of self-selection in who applies. People know that, okay, you're coming to a relatively young university and it is evolving. However, there were several people in the first two decades at 51社区黑料who had quite remarkable achievements in their field and they left 51社区黑料and moved on to other universities.

An anecdote comes to mind from when we were doing one of the department reviews during my time as chair. The list of who was doing the departmental review was circulated at the Deans and VPs level and people looked at Dave Weitz, for example, from Harvard. His participation impressed a lot of people, in the sense that Physics has its detractors within the university and sometimes that revolves around teaching et cetera which is completely unjustified. But that review affected people in other areas of the campus to say wow like we've actually got people in Physics who can be judged by a set of peers who are the top league internationally or within Canada or whatever.

(Jeff) I remember discussing this with John Bechhoefer at one time and he raised the point that having diversity brought perhaps a different set of grad students to the department - ones who might not be quite sure what direction they wanted to go, but were still high quality students. And so it might prove more attractive having that larger range of offerings. Do you have any feelings on that score?

(Dave) Oh, yeah. I quite agree with that. During the discussions as to how narrow the focus of the department's research should be, you face this issue of Okay, can you make a really strong department in one subset of physics? But then if you're recruiting graduate students, what happens to the students who want to work in all the other areas? They just won't come to SFU. I can't say this is universally accepted or not, but in my view, it was more important to have a bigger net to cast than to hope that you could capture all of the bright students or 50% of the bright students in the country because you have a specialty in this one area.

Now, I think there are examples where that specialization does work. And I would say Waterloo is an example of that. Which is both in terms of its computing specialty, math, its focus now on quantum computing, et cetera. It  built up its reputation on, to my mind, a number of fairly specialized areas in an effort to capture a lot of students who might go to U of T or whatever, but pull them out to Waterloo, which is just not that far away. I personally feel that Vancouver is in a location where that strategy doesn't work. So I think you have to find people who are interested in coming to the West Coast and then you offer a selection. You can't offer everything, but you offer them a good selection of topics that they can choose for their thesis. 

(Barbara) The development of the physics teaching observatory was also occurring during your term as chair. Did you start the process, or did you inherit some of the planning?

(Dave) Well, Jeff, I think you and Leigh were already talking about it. Is that right?

(Jeff) It goes back a long way but very little had been happening.

(Dave) Okay, so in terms of my involvement, there was a conversation I had with Leigh where he mentioned the possibility of having an observatory and he, I think, at that point had done some cost estimates or whatever. And I think what he had in mind was closer to what was ultimately built. It did not include public facilities for lectures or seating or that kind of stuff.

(Barbara) But was he thinking teaching and outreach? He wasn't thinking research, was he?

(Dave) Agreed, not research. I think he was thinking about a 24-inch telescope, which I think is what was ultimately bought. I don't know what his connections were with the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada at that point but in my conversations with him, that's sort of how it started.

How it evolved with me was I then went down to talk with Lee Gavel in Facilities Management about sites. To some extent to my surprise, Lee had a big picture in mind. And he said, you know, I want people, when they come up the hill and they come out of the forest, to see a science statement right in front of them. So I want to put an observatory in the line of sight of the road when you come up so that the observatory is the first thing you see with the AQ behind it. And it says "science done here".

So Lee was the one who sort of encouraged, I think, the idea of thinking much bigger and bigger. At that point then, and Barb, I remember walking over with you to that site which is sort of south of the new student center now. And it would have been an issue to service it. But nevertheless, that was the site that Lee wanted. So he and I talked then over a period of months. We talked about that site, what would be needed to service it, what would be the scope. And I guess at the end of the day, we figured that for $5 million plus or minus you could actually build a lecture theater around, you know, much like the observatory in Vanier Park.

(Jeff) Oh, the planetarium. Gordon Southam Science Centre.

(Dave)Yes, that鈥檚 right. That you could probably pull off something like that with that amount of seating.

Now, I think around the same time, Burnaby was really tightening its building code and they had a lot of demands which they were putting on any new construction and it had to do with accessibility requirements, et cetera. It would have added, I mean, looking at the dollars, it would have added quite a bit to the cost of the facility.

And as a result of that, because it wasn't just saying, okay, it's got to be wheelchair accessible, but rather that everything you do in a facility has to be, what do we say, disability blind. In other words if you wanted people to be able to go up and see through a telescope at such an elevation then you had to put a hydraulic lift in so that everyone could do that. And those requirements changed the whole scope of the operation.

At the time the university was more interested in getting money for endowed chairs than it was in building facilities. And so I sort of banged my head a little bit about this with the people who were further up the ladder than I was, but at the end, the university just said "no". Well, they probably said "not now". Their effort was going to be in taking whatever money they could get and directing it towards endowed chairs.

So I was disappointed with that as my thinking was that there are people who don't want to endow chairs but they do want to look at facilities or they want something which is public like this. They have a different idea as to what they want to do with their money. But nevertheless, that was the decision at the time. And so I just sort of left it, tasked it to Barbara. And then very fortunately with Howard's connection, well, both Howard's enthusiasm plus his connection to his brother, then this became financially feasible.

I'd have to go through and um I'm guessing that when Howard got involved was when it started to take off.

(Barbara) I inherited the project from Dave and spent a lot of time trying to find a place to put it. And then we needed money. And then we got Howard involved.

(Dave) Right. And then it took off because we got the money.

(Barbara) But you left me a design of this building with the observatory and classroom on that field in front of the student union building.

(Dave) Yeah. And that was worked out in conjunction with Lee Gavel and Vic Allen.

(Barbara) I think that site eventually got squashed because of the lights they put on the playing field.

And so then we looked at other sites, you know, including on top of the library. We got fairly far along with the site attached to the DAC.

(Dave) Perfect.

(Barbara) But then it looked like it would cost a million dollars just to do the reinforcement of the hillside. I mean, it was just crazy. And then there was all this having to adhere to the Ericsson plan, right?

And so I think it was Lee that came up with the idea of making it a garden ornament, and we decided to split the two sites. We split the classroom from the observatory, put the observatory in front of the admin building as a garden ornament. And then the studio went into the new chemistry building.

(Dave) But all things considered, I think it was a good decision as it turned out, in the sense that the bus loop or whatever is now one of the main entry points to SFU. You go back 20 odd years and we were focusing on the transit center over in the mall and the focus has changed. And so I actually like the idea that, okay, that鈥檚 where all the buses come. There's where maybe the gondola will come, who knows, and that's where the parking lots are that are still left. So that's a good entry point. And I like the idea of there being the Gibson Art Museum, the First Nations Center, the observatory, all within easy walking distance. So I think in terms of people coming up to take part in any of those events, you're not going to get lost walking around campus. It's a short hop from the main transit hub to any of those public facilities.

(Barbara) Are there any other highlights from your time as chair that we've missed?

(Dave) In thinking about it, the thing I wanted to talk about was a negative one. And it's still, I think, a negative and that is Surrey.

I think the Surrey campus was dropped on us out of the blue. In one sense, people were interested, but the building became available as BC Tech had folded. And everybody over at the province is looking for new ways of getting involved in Surrey, which at that point was expanding by leaps and bounds, just as it is now. I'll make a blanket statement. I don't think the university was prepared for taking over the campus at any level. I think initially the view was, okay, well, we've got some money. What can we do with it?  I'm really happy with hiring Sarah Johnson under the Surrey umbrella. I was delighted with what Neil Alberding did in setting up studio physics at Surrey. Again, that was a case where I went to Mike and I said, we need tens of thousands of dollars for new equipment to do studio physics. Then Mike said, well, there's money to do it at Surrey. So, okay, away we go.

But the decision making, I think, was so fast and to my mind sort of crystallized too fast. I would have preferred to see a slower approach to it where we would have thought a lot harder about what's the overall purpose of the campus. And now that there is a medical school going in there and there are several hospitals, there's the possibility of creating a medical imaging centre. Personally, that was something I think we should have considered harder. But I think the decision was coming down the pike just too fast. Money's available. We've got to hire people. There is some classroom space. We鈥檝e got to get people over there right away. And I think a little bit of second thought would have helped.

Which is not to say anything bad about what we ultimately did at Surrey, but in terms of my time as chair, the thing which really frustrated me was not being able to take more time for the Surrey campus and really have a clear goal in mind. Otherwise, I think it's great. At the dean's level, Mike was attempting to get land and funding for a science building.

(Barbara) We wondered if you could tell us something about the redevelopment of Physics 120 because you were very much involved in that in the early 1980鈥檚.

(Dave) Okay. My perspective was that I enjoyed learning about quantum mechanics when I was in high school, just doing extra reading. And then coming to university, it was a topic which was most fascinating to me and it was hard to get material. And so you'd read, you'd learn a little bit of stuff here and there. That was a time when the quark model had recently come out. I thought it would be good to do introduce that in first year if possible, because that was the kind of thing I had been looking for in first year. And I thought, well, if you carve out a little bit of Physics 120, then maybe you could try it. 

Now, what I found interesting in preparing the material (I just wrote the supplementary material myself, /~boal/120.html), was the attitude of one particular faculty member who, at one point when we were trying to hire someone related to TRIUMF, had said, "I don't want another something something prima donna particle physicist in this department".

And yet, having said that, he was the one, of all the faculty, who sat down and read through the book. And he did all the problems. And by doing that, he brought himself into another field. But I really admired him for doing that. And so the department, I think, was pretty much behind the idea of introducing modern physics. You had people like Klaus Rieckhoff saying, "do it once and do it right". Like you want to do quantum theory in first year, hardcore stuff before the students had got the calculus under their belt? Nevertheless, the first semester I taught modern physics, it was just mayhem. The students were utterly unexposed, by and large, to the idea that you could subdivide an elementary particle into further components. Or that there were neutrinos, things like that. And the students didn't have a lot to fall back on: a lot of their TAs hadn't come through a program which had a strong modern physics component so it was pretty wild at times, but everybody survived first year. And then after that, I rewrote some of the text and tried to, I would just say, make it more inclusive for people who hadn't been exposed to quarks and relativity in high school or just had a very mechanics-oriented first year. So I thought it worked out well. I don't know what the overall opinion was.

(Jeff) Now, my understanding was that part of the motivation was to hold off on introducing sort of the standard curriculum for a few months until the students had calculus under their belt.

(Dave) Yeah, that's a good point and so the supplementary material had to be written in a way that you didn't need calculus to read it.

I want to go back to motivation for a little bit. In parallel with our considering modern physics, we also had discussions with Phil Winnie and Kieran Egan. Phil had written on motivating students and the difficulties of doing online material. Kieran was a friend of Dave Huntley鈥檚 and he had written on what motivates students in high schools. He said that, for that age range, irrespective of their interest in physics, they're interested in extremes. They want to know what's the biggest, what's the smallest, what's the fastest. And that sort of lent itself, I think, to introducing modern physics; that is to say, okay, here are the extremes. We're going to talk about galaxies and the Big Bang model, and we're going to talk about the smallest things, elementary particles. I think that's why the material was accepted even though it was really quite foreign to what they'd seen in high school.

(Dave) As a high school student, I intended architecture as a career. And so I read Canadian architectural magazines and I saw articles on SFU. And of course, the design was just impressive. And then I came for the job interview. Coming up the hill, you're going through the woods. I think this was March or something like that. It wasn't sunny, needless to say. And coming through the trees and then seeing the AQ up there, I mean, this is, wow, this is really the place.

So I always just loved the design per se. Once I got here, particularly as I started into my career, I really appreciated what I would call the ramified aspect of the architecture of the place, in the sense that the layout has all these little branches that go out from it and it's easy to get from one place to another.

Early on, I remember having a hard time forming my mental map as to how to get from point A to point B in the shortest period of time. Just because there were so many pathways. But beyond that, I think the architecture really fosters interdisciplinary work in SFU. And I think 51社区黑料is relatively unique in having that kind of structure to it. I did a couple of sabbaticals back East where I was working on a campus where either the buildings are very far apart or where they're all towers. You just go up and down on a tower and you might see a colleague in the elevator or whatever, but that's about it.  You couldn't find out what the seminars were or the colloquia. Whereas SFU, that's all easy and you run into people in the hall and say, "oh, by the way, there's a talk coming up on Friday". You might be interested, et cetera, et cetera. So I think it's really great.

• Transcript 20250331_edited.docx
• Transcript 20250407_edited.docx
• Phys 120 supplemental material /~boal/120.html