Interviews from the world of science!

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Rich Manley – Culture Shock

Written By: Michael D. McClellan |

Rich Manley is going places, and he wants to take you with him. The more remote the better. He’s made his way through land as flat and featureless as a page without words, he’s scaled the Peruvian Andes at altitude, and he’s chopped his way through jungle so dense it blots out the sun. Today, the desert calls. Thousands of miles spool out behind him. Thousands more lie ahead. The earth spins. The sun rises. Long shadows shrink into puddles of shade beneath his feet. From dawn to dusk, in every direction, the landscape looks the same. The only thing that changes is the angle of the sun. No matter. Manley is as comfortable here as he would be sitting at home, kicked back on his sofa, a cup of his favorite Turkish coffee in one hand, the TV remote in the other. Nevermind that his GPS is a fickle oracle that gives inaccurate distances and leads him miles in the wrong direction. There’s no cause for alarm, no reason to freak out. Drop Rich Manley in the middle of nowhere, with a compass and a map, and the actor/producer/magician/adventurer is not only coming out of the other side unscathed, he’s going to have one helluva time in the process.

That’s where you come in.

Manley, the star of the upcoming series, Culture Shock: Bridging Cultures Through Magic, wants to share these once-in-a-lifetime experiences with you, taking you on journeys ranging from the high mountain caves of Ethiopia, to the sun-washed plains of Namibia, to the backwaters of the Amazon and beyond. Now available on the Tubi Channel, Culture Shock not only follows Manley to some of the planet’s most exotic locales, it immerses you in the indigenous cultures that he encounters along the way. Manley may not speak their language, but he connects with them through the magic and illusions that he learned from his late grandfather. They, in turn, share their unique magic with him.

“Culture Shock isn’t about the magic for magic’s sake,” Manley explains. “It isn’t about the ‘trick.’ It isn’t about, ‘Look at me, I’m trying to fool you.’ This show, at its core, is about communication through magic – energy, humility, compassion, and collective souls coming together. This is a spiritual and cultural coming of age.”

Rich Manley was seemingly born with a backpack, a tent, and a hunger to stay as far as possible from the ever-beaten path. The Concord, Massachusetts native grew up with this passion for adventure thanks, in large part, to his grandfather, a respected surgeon with a distinct Indiana Jones vibe. It was Manley’s grandfather who blazed the trail, traveling the world in search of esoteric medical knowledge and magic, then years later sharing these stories with his grandson. Manley soaked up every detail: Tales of hiking, alone, through sun, wind, rain, and snow, climbing mountains, crossing plains, and sailing across minor seas. He’d sit for hours and listen, his imagination aflame, so much so that he could practically hear the sound of his grandfather’s boots crunching on the treeless tundra, or see the shimmering heat rise up from a parched and dusty road.

Photo Courtesy Rich Manley

The result is Culture Shock (www.CultureShockMagic.com), Manley’s wild adventure show that’s full of dangerous stunts, exploration, tests of will…and, of course, plenty of magic. All of it germinating from those visits to his grandfather’s study, where he first learned sleight-of-hand and dreamed of one day performing on his own. He was 10 years old at the time, and by his teen years he was doing tricks in front of family, at events, in bars, and even on TV. At the age of 13, Manley started training in Kenpo Karate, receiving his Black Belt in four years (along with teaching status), at his local school. By his late teens, Manley was also into archeology and anthropology, going on digs to uncover Native American artifacts. All of these elements coalesce in Culture Shock.

“I studied and I trained nonstop,” Manley says. “It was a total commitment: body, mind, and spirit. To be able to bring these things to a series like Culture Shock brings everything full circle for me.”

Indeed.

Manley trained extensively and privately with Shaolin monks in those early years, learning Chan Buddhism, Chen and Yang Taiji Chuan, Chi Kung, and Northern Shaolin Kung Fu. All of it setting the stage for what was to come next: Radford University in Virginia, where Manley studied acting, media and sports. That he was able to minor in martial arts was the thing that sealed the deal.

Photo Courtesy Rich Manley

“That experience really got me to thinking about next steps,” he says. “I was able to make a connection with someone who was connected to Hollywood, and that world was very interesting to me. I’d always had an interest in film and television. The opportunity to be a part if it was exciting.”

Manley soon left Radford to become part of the crew for a pilot called Stars, Stunts, Action – an experience that further motivated him to pursue all forms of entertainment. Before long he made his uncredited feature debut in writer/director John Wells’ drama, The Company Men, which starred Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones. That same year, he made his credited debut opposite Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz in director James Mangold’s Knight and Day. From there he’s kept his foot on the gas: Additional feature credits include The Town, Here Comes the Boom, Cowboy Spirit, Bipolar, The Debt Collector, Slay Belles and the upcoming Angel One Eye.

“I’ve had a blast, and I’ve learned something each step of the way.”

It’s hardly surprising that Manley rarely sits still. In addition to Culture Shock, he stars in the upcoming post-apocalyptic series Fallen Cards, and was recently featured opposite Lacey Chabert, James Caan and Lance Henriksen in writer/director Andre Gordon’s Acre Beyond the Rye (based on Manley’s book). Not bad for a guy who happened upon Hollywood almost as if by accident.

Photo Courtesy Rich Manley

“I think it found me,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t think I could have escaped its grip if I’d tried.”

Culture Shock, it turns out, is the perfect escape.

With COVID completely changing the world as we know it, adventuring with Rich Manley in the Peruvian mountainside is a much-needed elixir for our mental health. Give it a try. Climb through clouds to Machu Picchu, the fabled “lost citadel” that perches incredibly atop a precipitous Andean peak at the edge of dense rainforest. Travel along the Amazon River as it meanders its way to the sweeping Brazilian coastline. Watch Manley share his amazing powers of prestidigitation, dazzling children and adults alike. You’ll not only find the ideal way to detox and destress, you might even find yourself planning an adventure of your own.

And if you happen to encounter a handsome stranger wearing a backpack and sporting a deck of cards, you might want to stop and introduce yourself.

Trust me, you’ll be glad you did.

Let’s talk Culture Shock: Bridging Cultures Through Magic. Where did you get the inspiration?

Culture Shock is a concept that actually started when I was about 10 years old. My grandfather was a surgeon, and he traveled around the world as part of his practice. He would visit with indigenous cultures and learn about their methods used for healing, whether it was the herbal medicines used in Peruvian Amazonia or the spiritual meditation practiced in Tibet. He also loved climbing; he spent time in the mountains of Japan, and he also climbed the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps, so there was a bit of an Indiana Jones thing going on with him – he even wore a fedora like Indiana Jones. The study in his house was filled with items he’d collected during his travels, which made it feel like you were on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark. As you might imagine, I couldn’t wait to visit and ask him questions about all of these amazing, faraway places that he had been. He also loved sailing and he loved the ocean, so there were all kinds of mariner’s tools in his study – compasses, nautical charts, astrolabes, chronometers, things like that. It felt like you were in a museum. So, because my grandfather loved adventuring, I think that in turn invoked a sense of adventure in me.

In Culture Shock, you perform magic for indigenous cultures.

That idea also came from my grandfather. Magic was something that he used to do for the people that he met along his travels. He learned magic because, in the 1940s, the medical profession was teaching surgeons to be better with their hands. Finger dexterity was just starting to become very important, so he learned magic to be a better surgeon. I was 10 years old when my grandfather taught me my very first sleight-of-hand trick.

Photo Courtesy Rich Manley

How do you select the places you visit?

My grandfather left me his journal when he passed away, which details all of the countries and places that he’d visited during his travels. He was very thorough in his journaling; there are notes about where he did magic, and notes on the cultural aspects and the traditions of the people that he visited. So, Culture Shock is based on me receiving my grandfather’s travel journal and retracing his path to all of the countries and all of the remote areas that he visited to meet these people.

The world has changed dramatically since your grandfather’s travels.

The heart of the show is about meeting all of these beautiful, indigenous people, and learning how the modern world is affecting them. We get to learn how they live, and experience their customs and traditions firsthand. It’s an eye-opening experience; some of these people are far happier with absolutely nothing than a lot of us living in First World countries today. In Western society, we have all of these things that make our lives so much easier, from relatively simple things like indoor plumbing to more complex things like cars and computers and smartphones, and yet we’re constantly bogged down by stress and anxiety. The difference is striking, and I think the viewers will see that. The people we meet in Culture Shock have been living the same kind of life for generations. It was awesome to learn about the traditions and oral stories that they’ve passed down for generations, and seeing how these help to keep them close knit and family-oriented.

Where does the first episode of Culture Shock take us? And what will we learn?

We go to Peruvian Amazonia. It was surprising to learn that many of the indigenous people we met not only have their own stories of magic, but that they have their own forms of magic that they practice. There’s an Amazonian shaman who explains that their form of magic is herb-based. While a lot of the plants in the Amazon have been discovered by the Western world, there remain some that are still undiscovered – and these plants could be potentially used to cure cancer and a lot of other diseases that plague us today.

The first episode is fascinating because it shows how some of these different plants can open you up spiritually, making you receptive to knowledge from what they call Pachamama – which is equivalent to our Mother Nature in Western society. In Inca mythology, Pachamama is a fertility goddess who presides over planting and harvesting, embodies the mountains, things like that. She’s an ever-present deity who has her own power to sustain life on this earth. The first episode goes into this, and shows how they use coca leaves to connect to the cosmos, which is what they do on the eastern slopes of the Peruvian Andes. They hold Ayahuasca ceremonies, which is their way of connecting with Mother Nature and Mother Earth. They live their lives based on the messages that they receive from the huacas, which are the spirits of the mountains, and Pachamama, which is Mother Nature.

Photo Courtesy Rich Manley

Was it hard to overcome the language barrier?

A lot of times it’s tough to communicate with these cultures that I encounter. Thankfully, I get to share a little bit about myself when I do magic. And since magic doesn’t require language, it’s a good way for me to bridge the gap and make a connection. I might go somewhere in remote Peru, where they speak a muddled language that’s a combination of Spanish and their own dialect. Or I might visit a part of Africa, where they speak a Bantu language like Swahili. So, I use magic to break down the language barrier and find common ground. There might be an awkwardness and lack of trust in the beginning, but all of that goes away when I do magic for them. At that point it’s very easy for them to take me in and say, “Okay, we can embrace this person. We can share our traditions and values with him.” Through magic, you begin to see how similar we all are, and that’s really what the show is about.

Culture Shock isn’t a one-sided experience. There seems to be a real symbiotic relationship between yourself and the people you meet.

Very much so. We were in the mountain area of Pitumarca, Peru, where we came upon a Quechua village. These are people who live up in the Andes Mountains, which is at a very high-altitude. They acclimated a long time ago, grow their crops, and survive in a harsh environment. I met a small village family, and I did some magic for them. They had never seen Westernized magic, which is basically sleight-of-hand tricks, and they were fascinated by it. You can see their reactions; they had the hugest smiles on their faces, which you’ll see in the footage when the show comes out. They had a wonderful time, and we did as well. It was just amazing meeting them, and seeing how innocent and pure they were when they smiled.

After doing magic for them, they introduced me to the village shaman. It was such an awesome experience because they performed a ceremony for me, the mountain ritual in which they give thanks to Pachamama – Mother Nature – and the huacas, which are their version of spirits contained in rivers, mountains, and all of the land. This was in the winter months in the Andes Mountains, so the sky was very overcast at the time the mountain shaman prepared the ritual. It was also very cold, with a mixture of snow and rain. He began the ceremony and we all circled around him. I just felt this energy – you could feel the wind blowing, and you knew that something was going on – a calmness, and the presence of something else around us. I won’t get into too much detail about the ceremony because you’ll be able to watch it…but after the ceremony, the clouds actually separated and you could see the blue sky above. I turned to my cohost and one of the other guys in the crew, and we all couldn’t believe what we were seeing. We were equally stunned to think that this ceremony, with the shaman giving thanks to the mountains, could actually clear up the weather that was so overcast and inhospitable just a few moments before. It really put things in perspective. The magic that I do is obviously just a way for me to entertain, have some fun, or make light of the situation. But after experiencing what happened during that ceremony…it convinced me that there really is some form of magic out there.

Photo Courtesy Rich Manley

How did you learn magic?

The first tricks that I learned were from my grandfather. There is this one trick, where you have a card in your hand, and you make it disappear and reappear. It’s a difficult trick to do if you have small hands, so, being 10, I had to work on it. From there I read books, watched shows about magic, and then developed my own tricks based on the principles and the basics of sleight-of-hand. I really enjoyed watching David Blaine and Criss Angel growing up, so I’d watch their shows.

When did you start performing magic in public?

During my teen years. I worked in restaurants as a server, so I started out by doing magic tricks for the customers. Then, I became a bartender when I was a little older, and I’d do magic for the people there. I just enjoyed going out and doing tricks. I would do a lot of magic.

You’re more of a close-up magician than someone who does the big stage illusions.

Yes. I prefer that kind of setting over the big stage tricks. It goes back to my roots being in sleight-of-hand. Cards are the thing that I’m most comfortable with, but I enjoy taking everyday objects and doing tricks. If I’m at a bar, I might see a salt shaker, so there might be an opportunity to do something with that. Or I might want to do a trick with something that someone has on them, like a ring or a dollar bill. I like the magic to be organic. Nothing to set up. I was never into the bigger stage allusions only because for me, I loved watching them, but I didn’t have a burning desire to perform them. That’s because I prefer a more intimate setting.

Photo Courtesy Rich Manley

What about street magic?

When you’re doing street magic, you’re performing in a very intimate setting. It’s basically the same thing as if you’re doing close-up magic at a bar or at a restaurant: Everyone’s right there, right in front of you, so the stakes are higher in terms of people seeing what you are doing. You have to control a lot more, and there’s more psychology involved than a lot of people understand. Part of it is managing people – talking to them as you’re performing, keeping their minds occupied while you’re doing the sleights and making the moves. You’re always engaged with the people you’re entertaining: You’re talking to this person. You’re talking to that person. You have to be very aware that someone could come up behind you, or that someone could be standing at just the right angle to see what you’re doing. There’s a different energy that comes with that type of magic. Whereas, if I’m doing magic on a stage, there’s less of a challenge because everything is controlled. I prefer an uncontrolled environment. I want to be able to take a deck of cards, or take a common item off of someone, and then entertain them while all of these other things are going on, and while people are looking at you and trying to figure it out. That has always been fun for me.

You were into archaeology at a young age. How did that influence what you’re doing today?

I started to get into archeology about the same time that I was getting interested in magic, which was around 10 years old, so the two kind of went hand-in-hand. Maybe I liked it so much because I’d always been drawn to Indiana Jones. I was very fascinated with Egypt. The ancient Egyptians actually had their own forms of magic – they would actually do a few tricks that you see today, like tricks with rings, cups, and balls. As I became more interested in Egyptian culture and history, that sparked a lot of my other interests in anthropology throughout the world, such as in Africa, Japan, and Asia. As I got a little older, I started looking into things that I could do locally to enhance my knowledge and understanding of both archaeology and anthropology. Growing up in Massachusetts, there was a lot of Native American activity, so I joined an archaeological society in my later teens. We went on digs in Wayland, Massachusetts, which was really cool because we found all of these different arrowheads and tools. I enjoyed that a lot. I also enjoyed learning the techniques of mapping out what we’d found.

Photo Courtesy Rich Manley

You went to Radford after graduating from high school. Why Radford?

Growing up, there were three main interests in my life – magic, archaeology/anthropology, and martial arts – so I went to Radford primarily because it offered a program where I could minor in martial arts. I honestly didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life at that point, but I knew that I loved martial arts; I’d spent time training with Shaolin monks from China as a teenager, and at one point I was training eight hours a day – it was all that I was doing with my free time. It helped me mentally, because the meditative effect of doing martial arts, especially Shaolin, which they consider moving meditation, goes hand-in-hand with having that center that permeates into everything else that you do. It also gives you the discipline and the Zen mentality that you experience when you visit different cultures. My time in the martial arts has really helped that regard. It’s given me a better understanding of other people as well, which really helps with a show like Culture Shock.

You weren’t at Radford long before you made the jump Hollywood. Please tell me about that.

While I was at Radford, I met a man named James Houston. He was the owner of a local martial arts school. I met him through Dr. Jerry Beasley, who was my guidance counselor there at Radford. Jerry used to write for Black Belt Magazine, and he’s a member of the Black Belt Magazine Hall of Fame. During the 1980s he worked with Joe Lewis, the legendary, undisputed American heavyweight kickboxing champion, so he’s someone you listen to when he’s giving advice. He told me that I had to talk to this guy, James Houston, who owns this school and who could really help me reach my potential and become a great martial artist.

So I met James, who is a very charismatic and interesting guy. He was always traveling to Hollywood, and at the time he was working on a TV show called Stars Stunts Action, where he would do behind-the-scenes interviews. He’d talk to people about their martial arts, their stunt work, and working in Hollywood as a stunt person. I was fascinated by this whole thing. I said something to the effect of, “Hey, if you have any openings, I’d like to come along…” So he hired me as a production assistant, and I moved to Hollywood and started meeting people in the stunt and martial arts worlds.

Photo Courtesy Rich Manley

Did you think it would lead you to where you are today?

I was enamored by the whole Hollywood scene. I didn’t know where it would lead, but I knew that I needed to trust my instincts. In my head I said, “Hey, maybe I can use the martial arts skills that I have to do martial arts in movies.” I was willing to do whatever I could find, whether that was stunts or acting roles. And I was still doing magic. I was invited to a lot of Hollywood parties, so I would do magic for people at the parties. That was the start of me saying, “I want to use my magic and martial arts skills and see where these take me.”

Like an upcoming movie project! Please tell me about Acre Beyond the Rye.

Acre Beyond the Rye is a film based on a book that I wrote. After I finished it, I brought it to a friend of mine who’d self-published a couple of books. He took a look at what I wrote, really liked it, and offered to take a pass at my draft. He immediately dived in and did some rewrites, at which point we put our names on it jointly as co-authors, and then he went through his publisher to publish the book. That was the easy part. Making a movie was something that I’d always wanted to do, but it’s not something that can be done in a vacuum. For that reason, there was a period of time early on when I wasn’t ready to make Acre Beyond the Rye. Besides, when I first came to Hollywood, I was auditioning to get into someone else’s projects rather than making my own projects. But then I started meeting individuals in the business: I got a job at Paramount, and I also worked as a script supervisor and writer for another company, so I used those experiences to network and build my contact list.

Photo Courtesy Rich Manley

How were you able to take a self-published book and land a movie deal? Especially one that stars James Caan?

Oddly enough, my big break came while I was doing magic tricks at an L.A. sushi restaurant. I was doing magic for the sushi chefs, and this guy came over and introduced himself. His name is Barry Bernstein. He said that my sleight-of-hand was really good, and that he managed a lot of magicians, guys like Max Maven. He explained that he was an accountant, and then he asked me if I needed one, which I did. That was how we became friends. Before long he learned that I had ideas for all of these movies I wanted to make, including Acre Beyond the Rye, but that I didn’t have the financial means to make it happen. I had all of my contacts from my time at Paramount; I had all of my contacts that I’d met through James; and I had all of my contacts that I had through the other productions that I’d worked on. I just didn’t have the financial backing for a film, and I didn’t have a clue how to set up my own production company. Barry helped with that. We started out doing some other smaller projects, but I eventually got back to Acre Beyond the Rye, and wrote the script based on the book. Once we had a script, we used my contacts from Paramount to find a producer, a director, and all of the other pieces that we needed to make the film. We were able to put together an amazing cast, headlined by James Caan and Lacey Chabert. Barry jumped in and helped raise the money that we needed. He eventually became the executive producer, so my accountant is now my business partner.

What can you tell me about Fallen Cards?

Fallen Cards, was the first project out of the production company that I started with Barry. I actually started writing Fallen Cards while I was still at Paramount – I’d work on it when I had free time in my office. They say that you should write what you know, so I created a story of based on a magician who is also a martial artist as well. It’s set in a Mad Max, post-apocalyptic world. I spent a lot of time writing that screenplay. Like Acre Beyond the Rye, we didn’t have a lot of funding for it, so I took it upon myself to really raise money with Barry. When it came time to cast, I went out to my contacts… I knew all of these funny guys, guys like Kevin Farley, who is Chris Farley’s brother. I called up Brandon Morale, who is a good friend and who has been in a bunch of films with Adam Sandler. Even though they were primarily known for comedy, I thought it might be interesting to see them in a serious role.

Photo Courtesy Rich Manley

What was it like putting this film together?

I wore a lot of hats. I would run all over town; one minute I’d go to the prop houses and pack my car with everything needed for a particular shoot, the next I’d be packing my car with service food to feed that cast and crew. Kevin Farley looked at me one day and said, “You’re acting in this film, you’re doing the martial arts, your bringing everyone their food, you’re pickup up the props. How in the hell are you doing everything?” I just said that I’m going to do whatever it takes to get the ball rolling. The funny thing about it is that the more that I invested my time and energy to make it happen, the more people responded to it. Pretty soon we had the funding for it. I think that’s the way it is a lot of times. If you want to do something worthwhile then you just go for it. If there is value in it – if it’s a good idea and a good product – then I think people will get behind it and the resources will come. They will want to be a part of it, and word spreads and others want to be a part of it, too. That’s what happened in the case of Fallen Cards.

Let’s look ahead. What’s next for Rich Manley?

Everything is up for speculation due to COVID. With Culture Shock, we were ready to visit Madagascar and shoot an episode there when the coronavirus pandemic hit. Hopefully the situation will improve and we’ll be able to pick that back up in April, 2021. I picked this particular place because it was actually a utopia for pirates back in the 1700s. We’re going to go there and explore shipwrecks, and then go inland in search of a lost pirate colony called Libertalia. We also have a trip lined up for Greenland, and also one for Rwanda, which we’re very excited about. So the plan is to go to those countries and film those three episodes for Culture Shock.

Photo Courtesy Rich Manley

You’re living your dream. If you had one piece of life advice, what would that be?

You have to follow what you love doing. I love magic; I love martial arts; I love culture and history. Because I’ve followed what I love, and because I’ve kept pushing forward, I’ve been able to do some things that I never thought I’d get to do. So follow what you love, keep doing it, and don’t give up.

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Nik Wallenda – Facing Fear

Written By: Michael D. McClellan |

Psst. Nik Wallenda has a secret he wants to share. The record-setting daredevil, who has thrilled millions with his white-knuckle treks across the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, and – wait for it – an active volcano, found himself at a crossroads after an eight-person pyramid collapse injured five, including his sister, who ended up in a coma and had 73 screws and plates inserted into her face. Wallenda, who was anchoring that pyramid under the Circus Sarasota Big Top that winter afternoon in 2017, clung to the wire for dear life when the team’s practice stunt when horribly wrong. While he walked away without a scratch and stepped back onto the wire the next day, Wallenda wasn’t as unfazed by the accident as it seemed on the surface.

“I was battling fear,” says Wallenda, who dives deep into the traumatic event in his new book, ‘Facing Fear: Step Out in Faith and Rise Above What’s Holding You Back’ (Sept. 15/HarperCollins). “We were attempting to break a world record for the highest four-level, eight-person pyramid. After training for six weeks we brought it up to 30 feet above the ground. We were days before attempting it in front of a live audience and in front of Guinness, and then the collapse happened. I got back on the wire the next day, and performed for the next six weeks as if nothing were wrong. But then, when that contract ended, I had six weeks where I wasn’t performing. That’s when I realized that there was something different about me. I started experiencing fear. It was an entirely new emotion to me, and it became debilitating, to the point where I told my wife I was done.”

For Wallenda – a seventh-generation member of The Flying Wallendas family of aerialists – this was not only a stunning admission, but the first step in his journey to overcome fear and resume the death-defying feats that have captivated imaginations around the globe. And if you’re wondering whether Wallenda is fully healed, you need look no further than his March 4, 2020, walk across the heat-generating, gas-spewing Masaya Volcano in Nicaragua. Crossing the volcano’s active lava lake, Wallenda offered proof positive that he’s on top of his game.

“That walk was challenging in so many different ways,” he says. “Pulling it off wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t gone through the process of facing my fear and silencing the shame that came along with it. From that point I was able to work through my fear and resurrect my dreams of being a world-class aerialist.”

A holder of 11 Guinness World Records, Wallenda has more than lived up to the legacy created by his great-grandfather Karl, who brought the family to the United States in the 1920s and immediately started thrilling young and old alike.

Nik Wallenda – Photo Courtesy Rogers & Cowan PMK

“I’m very proud of our family’s place in history,” Wallenda says, “and I’m proud to do my part to carry on the tradition, even though my mom and dad tried to push me away from the industry. They didn’t want me to carry it on because of the struggles of the circus world. My great-grandfather said it best in the 1970s: ‘In this business, one day you eat the chicken. The next day you eat the feathers.’ I totally get that now. This is a very fickle, very feast-or-famine business.”

Crossing Niagara Falls into Canada on June 12, 2012, Wallenda made history of his own: Enigma Research estimates that one billion people had either seen or knew of Wallenda’s Niagara Falls walk. The event was ABC’s highest rated Friday night program since November 2007, and the highest non-sports summertime program on any of the major networks in six years. A year later, Wallenda upped the ante with a riveting walk across the Grand Canyon, completing the 1,400 foot walk in 22 minutes, 54 seconds, using a 2-inch-thick steel cable.

Nik Wallenda crosses the Grand Canyon
Tiffany Brown/Associated Press Images for Discovery Communications

Wallenda has built quite the resumé by defying convention. He’s crossed the Chicago and New York City skylines on a high-wire; he’s hung from his teeth 250 feet above the ground as part of a helicopter stunt in Branson, Missouri; and he’s crossed between the two towers of the ten-story Condado Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, recreating the very act that had killed his great-grandfather Karl Wallenda in 1978. None of it possible without a healthy approach to managing his fear.

“I’m human, just like everyone else,” he says. “Fear is something we all have to overcome. I hope this book helps others take what I’ve learned and apply it to their everyday lives.”

The Wallenda name is synonymous with thrill seeking. We’re talking hundreds of years!

My family started performing in the 1780s in Bohemia, eventually making their way to Europe and into Germany, and then on into the United States in the 1920s. We’ve been at it for quite a long time, that’s for sure!

How did your family end up in the U.S.?

In 1927 they performed in Havana, Cuba. John Ringling, who was based in Florida, heard of this amazing high-wire troupe that he had to go see with his own eyes. So, he got on a ship and went over to Cuba to watch the show that my family was headlining. When the show’s owner caught wind that John Ringling was in the crowd, he went to my great-grandfather and said, “You guys have the night off tonight.” This didn’t make sense, especially since it was a packed house and everybody was there to see them. Long story short, the show’s owner knew that John Ringling would like what he saw, and that he would immediately poach my family and bring them to the United States. Well, John Ringling was a smart man, and he knew that there was a reason my family was pulled from the show. I’m sure it had happened to him many times before during his lifetime. So he sneaked back in the following day, saw my family perform, and immediately signed them as part of the “The Greatest Show on Earth” with Ringling Brothers. The next year, in 1928, they made their way to the United States, and my family headlined at Ringling Brothers for about 17 years.

Karl Wallenda

Was that when the press starting calling your family The Flying Wallendas?

It was around the time that my great-grandfather went out on his own, opening his own show in the 1940s. In 1947 he created the famous seven-person pyramid, and performed that until about 1962. That’s when they had that tragic accident in Detroit, Michigan. A couple of my family members were killed, and an uncle was paralyzed from the waist down. My great-grandfather sneaked out of the hospital the next day against the doctor’s orders, just to get back on the wire. It was an example of him living by the family legacy, and the now famous words, “The show must go on.” That’s something I still believe in, although I use the words “Never give up.” In fact, that’s how I sign every autograph.

Your great-grandfather was the legendary Karl Wallenda. He was about as fearless as they come.

Yes, he was fearless in many ways. He went on to create these amazing pyramids performed all over the world, and he walked the wire into his 70s. He walked across Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia with 30,000 people looking on, open-mouthed, and he walked it in places like Tallulah Gorge, Georgia, on a wire 1,000 feet across and 750 feet above the ground. He was 65 at the time, and his wife handed him a martini when he reached the other side – but not before he’d stopping midway to do a couple of handstands, one in honor of our soldiers in Vietnam, and another for laughs, so he was definitely a showman with a flair for the dramatic.

My great-grandfather eventually made his way to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where my family was headlining on a show that wasn’t selling many tickets. He decided to do a walk between two skyscrapers at the Condado Plaza Hotel to help promote show. He was 73 years old at the time. He got on that wire unaware that it had been rigged unstable; the guys who rigged it weren’t part of his normal team that included my uncle, who was performing elsewhere, and my father, who was home because my mother had just suffered a miscarriage. Long story short, because of the high winds and the improperly secured wire, he lost his balance, fell, and lost his life. That was in 1978, Less than a year later I was born, and that was the legacy that I inherited.

Nik Wallenda – Photo Courtesy Nik Wallenda

Karl Wallenda’s best friend was none other than Evel Knievel.

Yes, they were very close friends. They both shared the same passion for entertainment, and also for pushing the limits. It’s just like me being friends with David Blaine, Chris Angel, and many of the other daredevils today. I think because there’s not a lot of us, and because we are all part of the same small community, that a natural closeness develops. It was the same with my great-grandfather. He and Evel Knievel spent a lot of time together during their lifetimes. They respected each other a great deal. In fact, when Evel Knievel attempted his big jump in that rocket over the Snake River Canyon, he recruited my family to open for him. If you look at the ticket stubs you’ll see the Wallenda name right there. So they were close. They performed a lot and spent quite a bit of time together.

When did you start walking the wire?

My mom was six months pregnant with me and still walking on the wire, so I’ve been walking on a wire longer than my feet have been on terra firma [laughs]. As soon as I could stand up, they had me on a wire a couple of feet off the ground. Not on my own, obviously; my mom or my dad would grab my hand and sort of walk me back and forth. I have photos of me walking on a wire at 18 months old. My great-grandfather really said it best in the book that he wrote in the 1970s. He said, “Life is on the wire, and everything else is just waiting.” That is very true. For my family it is a very literal expression, but the reality of the situation is that everybody is on a wire. That’s one of the reasons that I wrote this book, because everybody is on a wire and everybody’s trying to get to the other side. My family just does it in a literal sense: Even though there are gases in the volcano, or heavy winds in the Grand Canyon, or heavy mists at Niagara Falls, we are still going to face our fears and make it across to the other side.

Nik Wallenda

In 2013 you performed that heart-stopping wire walk over the Grand Canyon with millions watching on TV.

Very early on, it was a dream of mine to walk across the Grand Canyon. In fact, I was making plans to walk across the Grand Canyon well before I sought permission to cross Niagara Falls. It was a long and tedious process of just figuring out where in the canyon I could walk. And then there was the engineering involved, which was just as much of a challenge as actually getting on that wire and walking it.

How did you train for that walk?

I trained with wind machines creating gusts of up to 90 mph. We knew that the winds were not going to exceed 50 mph, so training at 90 mph really helped me prepare both physically and mentally. I did have to endure a couple of 43-mph gusts while I was out there the day of the walk, so it did get fairly windy. What I learned from walking the Grand Canyon is that you can never train enough. I remember being out in the middle of the canyon and thinking that, even though I’d trained in 90-mph winds, I wish I had trained at 120-mph winds. When you’re in the real setting, you’re much better of mentally, emotionally, and physically if your preparation has gone above and beyond. Thankfully everything worked out. The result was a dream come true. It was an extremely successful TV special. In fact, my Grand Canyon walk still remains the highest-rated special in the history of the Discovery Channel, which is the largest network in the world. It was a huge success, and it opened a lot of doors.

Nik Wallenda speaks at a press conference in Chicago after successfully walking the wire across the Chicago River, Sunday November 2, 2014.
Jessica Koscielniak / Sun-Times, File

How do you cross the Grand Canyon on a wire, with no harness, and keep calm?

A lot of it is the power of our mind – where we allow our mind to go, and what energy we give our thoughts. I am a believer, so I give all of my thoughts to God. There are so many times in life where my mind will want to go to a negative spot. The Grand Canyon is a perfect example. When I got hit with those 43-mph winds, my mind naturally wanted to freak out. I was then able to counter that negative thought with the fact that I had trained and prepared for that moment. Everything was going to be okay. I’d practiced walking in 90-mph wind gusts. I’m going to be okay. So I sort of talked myself down, and before you know it, my heartrate dropped down to a normal level.

Your new book is titled Facing Fear.

In some ways, I guess I never realized what fear was because I was raised to be fearless. The reason I wrote the book was because of that 2017 eight-person pyramid fall while training in Sarasota, and the fear that I experienced after that. The book talks in depth about the process that I went through to overcome fear after that terrible accident.

How do you deal with fear after something like that pyramid collapse?

After that accident, I started to experience fear to the point where it became debilitating. I actually thought I was done walking the wire. I remember that crucial conversation with my wife, where she said, “Look, I support you, but the family lives by the words ‘the show must go on.’ You do what you do to inspire people. I think you may need to dig a little deeper.” Well, that really set me off on a faith journey, one that was about finding out who I was, and then realizing that, yes, fear was a part of it, and that the seed had been planted during that accident. Reality of what happened that day hit me – I’d almost lost my sister. She was torn up and in a coma, and had 73 screws and plates in her face alone. And even though I got back on that wire the next day, I came to the realization that I was avoiding a very essential fact: Despite what I might have looked like on the outside, I was running from fear rather than dealing with it.

Acrobat siblings Nik and Lijana Wallenda prepare to attempt a highwire stunt in the middle of Times Square in New York City.

Is it fair to say that you were in denial of that fear?

That’s very true. My pastor recommended seeing this amazing Christian psychologist in town. After spending an hour with her I remember saying, “I’m fine. I got back on the wire right away. I don’t need to talk to anybody.” She challenged me and said, “You’ve got to deal with it. You have to learn about your fear, but before you can do that you’ve got to acknowledge that the fear is real in your life. And then once you do that, then you can deal with the shame.” And I think that’s when it hit me. I was ashamed of the fact that here I was, Nik Wallenda – entertainer, daredevil, risk taker – and I’m supposed to be fearless…but I’m really not. I’m human. I’m real. I experience fear like anyone else. I had to work through all of those steps in order to work my way to that shame. Only then was I able to face the fear, deal with the fear, and then overcome that fear.

The book applies to my personal struggle with fear, but it is really written for people who are dealing with fear in their everyday lives. For example, I talk to people all the time who are miserable every day when they go to work. They do it because there is a paycheck on Friday and it covers the mortgage, but they really have dreams of a different occupation. Fear is preventing them from pursuing their dreams. What happens as a result? They prefer the status quo. They settle. I wrote this book because I wanted to inspire them. “Yes, you’re in a job that you don’t like. You have to be smart – you don’t want to walk away from your job without a plan, but you can take action and prepare for the job you really want.” My hopes are that people reading this book will use the lessons that I had to go through and apply it to real world situations in their own lives. If so, then they might not have to go as deep down in the valley as I did before reaching the mountaintop.

You mentioned preparation. That seems to be a key ingredient to conquering fear.

The amount of preparation that goes into what I do is incredible. Just to give you an example, my latest TV special was on ABC, where I walked over an active volcano – the Masaya Volcano, near Managua, Nicaragua. We studied volcanoes for four years as a team just to prepare for this event. We wanted to know the effects not only on the equipment, but also on the individuals who would be closest to volcano. We also worked with many volcanologists to understand this unpredictable environment as best we could, and then developed a training regimen based upon that science.

How do you train to walk across an active volcano?

We knew that I was going to have to wear a gas mask for this walk, and the science told us that wearing a gas mask would deprive my brain of oxygen. Actually, a gas mask can drop your oxygen level anywhere between 15-to-30%. So I trained on a wire that was the same length as what I would walk over the volcano, and I wore an oxygen deprivation mask that would cut my oxygen levels all the way down to 30%. That way, I was only breathing 30% oxygen during my practice walks. The logic being, if I could perform a walk with my oxygen level that low, then performing the walk at 70% oxygen was going to much easier.

The gases were a challenge in other ways. In fact, the gases were much stronger than anyone anticipated, including my team that had done all of the studies. There was a high degree of variability with this environment. We installed safety cables in that volcano crater that lasted two months before failure, and then we had some that started failing after 10 days. That’s because conditions inside a volcano change almost daily. Gas levels can be thicker from one day to the next, from one week to the next, so it was hard to predict what window we were going to be in. I not only trained with goggles to protect my eyes from the sulfuric gases, but I trained with goggles that were fogged up on purpose, so that I literally could not see through them. I wore special suits designed to keep me hot, so that my body would be prepared for the heat. I walked with weighted vests and also with the extra weight of an oxygen tank, in case the gases got so bad and that I needed oxygen. I walked the wire like this forwards and backwards, sometimes six times per training session. Oftentimes I’d practice with all of this gear on, walking a mile-and-a-half without stopping. That way I could prepare for those worst cases, so that when I am faced with them I’ve already been in much more difficult situations. It’s similar to somebody who is about to speak in front of a large group. The more you practice, the more comfortable you get. And the more comfortable you get, the better the chances of delivering a better message.

Mr. T(L) and Nik Wallenda attend Mr. T And Nik Wallenda Celebrate National Amazing Month.

Does this training also help your concentration?

Yes, absolutely. A lot of training is about not being distracted. That was especially true for my walk over Times Square. There’s no greater distraction than all of those giant LED screens, people, taxis, and noise that you have going on in Times Square. So yeah, concentration is a huge part of it – training to not be distracted, and to stay focused. To be honest with you, I have a little bit of ADHD. My mind is everywhere sometimes. But when I’m on the wire, that’s the one place where I feel like I can stay extremely focused.

Let’s talk Niagara Falls. More than a hundred thousand in attendance, and millions watching on TV.

Niagara Falls took changing 100-year-old laws in two countries in order to get permission to walk over, so just the political part of that event was an overwhelming, monumental task. Then there was the training and the actual walk itself, followed by the network coming in last-minute and ordering me to wear a tether. That was something that I’d never done before. It’s like telling Tiger Woods that he’s got to use a specially weighted golf club instead of his trusty driver just before he tees off in a major. It’s going to throw him off because it’s different. It’s unique. And here I was, risking my life while people watching thought that the tether was going to save me. While that is true in in the purest sense, the reality is that a tether presented a risk as well. A tether could have caused me to fall. I could have gotten tangled up in it. The reality is, I’d trained for this walk without a safety. It was an extremely uncomfortable change, especially in a situation where I had never done it before and didn’t get to train with it on. But the network made the decision 10 days before the walk, and they were determined that I had to wear it. It was nonnegotiable.

Nik Wallenda edges his way along the tightrope above Niagara Falls (Image: Reuters)

What was the diameter of the wire you walked on?

I walked on a cable that was 2-inches in diameter, which was also different for me. My entire life, I had walked on a 5/8-inch wire rope, which is what I’m comfortable with to be honest with you. If someone came to me and said, “Do you want a 3-inch wire rope, 2-inch wire rope, or a 1-inch wire rope?” I would choose a 5/8-inch roped every time. It’s much smaller, obviously, but it’s where I feel at home.

What role does creativity play in preparing to walk something like Niagara Falls?

Creativity is a huge element. We actually brought in airboats to create strong winds, as well as fire trucks to simulate the heavy mist created by Niagara Falls. It’s really hard to simulate real world settings, but I have a great team of engineers and family members that are extremely creative.

A lot of my walks are creative in the sense that we are doing things never done before. There were many, many unique challenges like that when it came to walking over Niagara Falls. For example, we had these pendulum-type weights installed to keep the wire from twisting. What we learned at Niagara Falls, we took with us to help make the Grand Canyon walk a little bit safer. Then we took what we learned from the Grand Canyon experience and applied it to the volcano walk. So, we’re always learning, always pushing, and always being creative in our work.

Lijana Wallenda and Nik Wallenda walk a high wire over Times Square during the Highwire Live In Times Square With Nik Wallenda on June 23, 2019, in New York City.
Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Dick Clark Productions

Your faith is an important part of your identity. When you walked the Grand Canyon, you could be heard trusting each step to Jesus. How you use your faith to inspire and motivate others?

My faith is just like my wire walking. It’s who I am. I gave my life to Christ at three years old, so it’s really all I’ve ever known. I’m not preaching when I’m out there on the wire. When I’m on TV, I’m living my life. I think that’s why mainstream media respects it so much. There are no demands on our part to have the microphones on while I’m walking that wire. The networks could turn it off if they want, but they choose instead to keep it on. I think people respect that I’m not out there trying to change someone’s life or belief system. It’s just me being real, and that is what helps keep me calm. People are awestricken by the fact that I can stay that calm in those settings, but the Bible talks about a peace that passes all understanding. That is where I get my peace. If people’s lives are encouraged, inspired, or brought the faith because of that, then that’s me fulfilling my calling. Otherwise I just live my life by example, which is what the Bible calls us to do – to be Christlike. I don’t always succeed, but I try.

What have you been doing to stay relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic?

We opened up the drive-in thrill show, which has been a huge success. We’ve played a month now in two different cities, and have basically invited a bunch of my daredevil friends to perform with me. This is something we normally can’t do, because everyone is always booked up and performing elsewhere, but coronavirus changed all of that. So I called everyone up and said, “Hey let’s all get together and put on this awesome show.” People can drive onto a lot in their car, and the action takes place high above the ground. You can watch from the inside of your car, or the front of your car, and you can tune in to our radio station and see a great show. I speak from the wire for about 20 minutes, and use that time to hopefully motivate and encourage people during these crazy times.

PASADENA, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 08: Nik Wallenda (L) and Erendira Wallenda attend ABC Television’s Winter Press Tour 2020 held at The Langham Huntington, Pasadena on January 08, 2020 in Pasadena, California.
(Photo by Michael Tran/FilmMagic)

Final Question:  If you could offer one piece of advice to inspire and motivate others, what would that be?

I would tell you that God has blessed us all with powerful minds. We have the ability to control what we allow into our minds, and also what we allow out. We have the power to filter out the negative thoughts and replace these with positives. If I am on the wire and get hit with 43-mph winds, I can immediately counter that with the thought that I trained in 90. It is definitely something that you have to practice. Fear can overtake us. Fear can debilitate us. Or, if we learn to face our fear, it can empower us.

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Henry Schaefer – The Godfather

Written By: Michael D. McClellan |

The godfather of quantum computational chemistry is rumored to have been in the running for a Nobel Prize on at least five occasions, but, like that old Tootsie Pop commercial, the world may never know – at least those of us not around when the nominees are finally revealed by the Nobel Foundation after its 50-year waiting period. Still, there remains the distinct possibility that Henry “Fritz” Schaefer might yet win the coveted Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His odds certainly increased in 2019, when the longtime University of Georgia professor was awarded the Gold Medal by the American Institute of Chemists. How accurate a bellwether is the Gold Medal? Seven of the past 14 recipients of the AIC Gold Medal have received the Nobel Prize. Whether or not he ever receives that life-changing, early morning call from the Nobel selection committee, Schaefer’s life has already changed in ways both profound and controversial. A Born Again Christian, Schaefer stands out in a profession where science and God are mutually exclusive, and where there is no room for a discussion about intelligent design. To some he’s a heretic in his field. To others he’s a breath of fresh air. Either way, Schaefer is unapologetic in his belief that Jesus rose from the dead, and argues that Big Bang cosmology provides compelling evidence for the notion of creation out of nothing.

A graduate of MIT and Stanford University, Schaefer taught at UC Berkeley for 18 years and spent one year at the University of Texas, Austin, as the inaugural director for its Institute for Theoretical Chemistry before moving to the University of Georgia, where he serves as both the Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry, and the Director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry. His work has led to the reversal of the conclusions of a number of distinguished experimentalists, and subsequent experimental studies have verified controversial predictions concerning the structure and singlet-triplet separation of methylene, the quadrupole moment of ozone, and the infrared spectrum of benzyne, to name just a few.

Henry F. Schaefer III, AIC Gold Medal, 2019

Oh, and he happens to be one for the most cited chemists in the world. To put it into perspective, a typical Thomson Reuters H-Index value for a successful scientist is 20 for 20 years of research; an outstanding scientist will have an H-Index of 40 over that same span. Schaefer’s H-Index? Try 121. One-twenty-one. That’s like being wowed by Katy Perry’s 79 million Instagram followers, only to learn that Cristiano Ronaldo tops the list with 210 million and counting.

Not that he cares.  Schaefer would rather talk about his continuously evolving lecture “The Big Bang, Stephen Hawking, and God,” which he has presented all over the world, or discuss the problem solving prowess of his current crop of PhD students. Whether he’s teaching Molecular Quantum Mechanics at the University of Georgia or studying the Bible during mid-week church fellowships, Schaefer sees cohesion between “secular” science and his Christian faith. He became a Christian as a young professor at Berkeley in 1973, concluding that the historical evidence for belief in Jesus was too compelling to ignore, and that the physical resurrection of Jesus was the most rational way to understand the stories recorded in the Gospels and by ancient historians. His faith would be tested a few short years later, and it would carry him through one of the darkest periods in his life.

“I discovered that there is no problem too heavy for Jesus,” Schaefer says. “It was during my time at the University of Texas. On a Sunday morning – December 9, 1979, to be exact – I had just returned from church and was tidying up a few things in my office in Austin. My wife called and told me that our five–month old son Pierre had just died of crib death, or sudden infant death syndrome. Whatever illusion I had that life was just a bowl of cherries disappeared forever in that instant of time. Without going into the details, I can tell you that never before nor since have I been so overwhelmed with the certainty of the love of my heavenly Father. There is no problem in your life that Jesus can’t bring you through.”

The Best Schools annually recognizes “The 50 Most Influential Scientists in the World Today,” and in 2014 Schaefer made the list, joining names like Peter Higgs (Higgs boson), Timothy Berners-Lee (World Wide Web), and Stephen Hawking (no explanation needed). Schaefer appreciates the accolades but takes it all in stride. If the Nobel Committee decides that his contributions to science make him worthy of a Nobel Prize, then he’ll consider it a capstone to an already grand and momentous career. If the call never comes, then he’s fine with that, too.

Schaefer’s place in the universe is secure.

And regardless of what anyone says, he knows that it’s a place created by the hand of God.

Please tell me about your childhood; what are some of your earliest memories, and at what point do you remember becoming interested in science?

I was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. My dad worked for the largest company in Grand Rapids, American Seating Company, which produced school seats, stadium seats, and auditorium seats, among other products. Even though I wasn’t a military child, we moved around some. We moved to Syracuse when I was one, and we lived there for seven years. From there we moved to Menlo Park, California, for five years, and then back to Grand Rapids for high school.

I became interested in science as an undergraduate at MIT. I went there thinking that I was going to be an engineer at the start, because that looked like a practical kind of career where one could earn a living and do okay, so I started out at MIT as a chemical engineering major for my first two years.

I’ve read where your father was friendly with President Gerald Ford.

It’s funny, I’ve read where they were best friends, but that would be a little bit of an exaggeration. I would say that they were pretty good friends. When he wasn’t in Washington he actually lived in the same little town of East Grand Rapids, and, once a year, he would come to the high school and talk to anybody that was interested about government. That’s the first time that I ever remember meeting him.

Henry Schaefer

In what ways did your family help lay the foundation for your scientific career?

My dad was an engineer. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1933 with a degree in civil engineering. He couldn’t find a job in the middle of the recession and wasn’t able to actually practice as an engineer, so he went back to Grand Rapids and got a job sweeping the factory for the American Seating Company. It wasn’t until eight years later, during World War, II that he was actually able to serve as a practicing engineer, working on fighter airplanes for our government. Then, after that, he got into sales and rose very high in the company. He later wanted me to go to MIT, because he thought that I would become an engineer.

Was there a particular teacher or class that helped fuel your interest in science and mathematics?

That’s a good question. My high school chemistry teacher was poor. He only lasted one year, but I liked my math teachers, both in junior high and high school. They were pretty inspiring. My high school physics teacher was outstanding. It was a great experience to be in his class.

What were your academic goals going into MIT?

I went to MIT thinking that I was going to be a high school math teacher. My first semester at MIT I was thinking that I was going to be a math major. Then I started looking around at what math majors do, and what they did seemed to be mostly about proofs, and I had never enjoyed proofs. I didn’t even like geometry, which was the one math course that I took. So, by the time the second semester was over, I knew that I was not going to be a math major. At the same time, I found that chemistry was a lot more interesting at MIT than it had been in high school, so I got on that track and transferred over to chemical engineering for the next year.

Fritz and his group circa 1972: (left to right) Henry Schaefer, Steve O’Neil, Charlie Bender, Gretchen Schwenzer, Barbara Garrison, Bob Hand, Peter Pearson, Dean Liskow, and David Yarkony.
Fritz’s 1969 red Chevy Suburban was large enough to transport the entire group.

You got your Bachelor of Science in Chemical Physics at MIT.

Yeah, I got out of chemical engineering [laughs]. Chemical engineering has changed a lot with computers, but back then the kinds of problems we solved – which were quite challenging at the time – were solved by trial and error. These were not problems that you could solve analytically. We would make certain assumptions about the solutions, and we would work through all of this stuff on our slide rules, and then, when we were done, we would find out that we hadn’t arrived at the right answer. We hadn’t made the right assumptions, so we would have to go back and keep doing this, over and over and over again, which I found to be very boring. So that’s when I decided to get out of chemical engineering. By then I was in my second year. I decided that I really liked chemistry, and that I really liked physics more than I liked chemical engineering. As it turns out, they had a chemical physics major, although it didn’t last very long at MIT. They canceled it within two years after I graduated.

What was your MIT experience like?

It was hard. I didn’t have much time for a social life. My first year at MIT, I was pretty average. That was kind of a blow. I had been a good student at an excellent public high school, but I realized that it couldn’t compare with places like the Bronx School of Science, which has produced 16 Nobel Prize winners. A lot of the students in my class were just reviewing material during their first year at MIT, whereas I was really battling with it. Once I got caught up, things were very different. The second year I was an excellent student. To my amazement, as much as anyone else’s, I became one of the best students at MIT.

Please tell me how you ended up at Stanford.

That’s a good story. I was going to go to Caltech – MIT is a nerd school, and since Caltech is the second best nerd school among universities, it seemed like the next logical step. I applied and was accepted, and I told them that I was going to come, but my attitude about that decision changed because I was engaged to a beautiful girl and thinking about marriage. And since not too many MIT nerds marry beautiful girls – it’s a rare occurrence – I had to rethink my decision in the most logical way possible. She was a year behind me, so I would be going out to California and leaving her 2,000 miles behind for a year, and then we were going to get married at the end of the school year. The more I thought about that, the less comfortable I felt. Amazingly, she didn’t feel comfortable about it, either.

So now I’m rethinking my decision and struggling with my choice of graduate schools. I wanted to select a school that worked for us both, because her father said that we could get married as long as she finished with a degree. She was an art history major at a superb university, and Caltech didn’t even have one course in art history, much less a major, so that was a problem. And then the Fellow that I had applied to work for at Stanford called me up and said, “Schaefer, why haven’t we received your acceptance yet? We’ve given you the best offer that Stanford University can.” And I said, “The truth of the matter is that I’ve already accepted at Caltech, but I’m kind of wavering on that.” Well, he wanted to know the whole story. I told him that I was going to marry the homecoming queen, and that she needed to graduate from art history at a good school. He just asked me right off the bat, “Do you know that we have one of the best art history departments in the world?” I said, “No, I don’t know much about art history, except for what my fiancé has told me.” Then he said, “Is she smart?” to which I replied, “She is much smarter than I am.” And he said, “Send me her transcript.” Within two weeks she got a letter from Stanford University, without applying, saying that they would be very pleased to have her as a student in the fall. So, that was it. We got married and went to Stanford.

Henry Schaefer: Then and Now

Were you happy with your decision to attend Stanford?

In retrospect it was a very good choice because my professor at Stanford, Frank Harris, had just a few students, and, candidly, I was a lot better than the rest of them. On the other hand, the Fellow that I was going to work with at Caltech, Bill Goddard, had 15 or 20 really, really sharp students. So, my being able to work with my boss, Frank Harris, by myself, without a bunch of super bright guys breathing down my neck, was extremely beneficial to me. He was a great advisor and we did great things together. Who knows what would’ve happened if I had gone to Caltech. I might have lost the homecoming queen. I could have ended up a failure in quantum chemistry. So, God works all things for good. Neither my wife nor I knew Him at that point. Our faith was all ahead of us.

The average layperson may think of highly successful scientists as not being approachable or relatable.

When my future wife agreed to marry me, that was a real turning point in my life. I guess my feeling was, “Boy, if she is going to marry me, then I must be okay.” Then we got married, and that feeling just grew, and grew, and grew. I felt that I went from being kind of bookish to being very optimistic about life. Again, My wife, is a huge part of any success that I have had.

I’ve gotten to become much more outgoing since my nerd times. There is no question about that. Everything is different in my life now. I have 17 PhD students that I am supposed to guide along the way to their doctorates. We also have a few admin people and some more senior scientists, so it’s a big responsibility when you’re running a big research group. It helps to have some personal skills.

Another misconception is that scientists are only interested in science. What are some of your interests and hobbies outside of the scientific world?

Well, I am interested in art to the degree that my wife takes me to art museums [laughs]. I have her do all of the research, and then when we go in there I say, “Okay, show me the 10 most important works.” I just worry about those and don’t mess with the others, because I know that I am out of my league. But I do enjoy looking at great art. A big surprise to me occurred when I was lecturing in Kraków. My wife was with me on the trip and she explained that the National Museum had a Leonardo painting titled Lady with an Ermine. We went to see it, and it was a stunning piece of art – much more interesting than the Mona Lisa, in my opinion. So, my wife gives me treats like that.

Henry Schaefer
Recognized by The Best Schools as one of the 50 most influential scientists in the world today

What kind of music do you listen to?

My parents tried to raise me on classical music, so I’m not completely devoid of a classical background. I like classical music. But I have to admit that if I go to a symphony and sit for a couple of hours, I start thinking about equations [laughs].

I remember when my sister bought home Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley, in 1956. I listened to that album and thought it was really good, so I also have a love of old style rock ‘n roll. Later, after becoming a Christian, I started listening to a lot of contemporary Christian music. I still do that. So I mix the old style rock ‘n roll with the modern, contemporary Christian music.

What kinds of books do you read for fun?

I am a member of a group of six gentlemen – four retired surgeons, myself, and a person at a clothing store – and we are called the Pickwick Club. We read a lot of Charles Dickens novels. Right now we are reading one called Dombey and Son. We’ve read together maybe half of the Dickens novels, but we also read a lot of the other old books, most of them novels from the 19th century. I feel like I know that material and that period pretty well. I love it. We also do the best of the Russians, like Tolstoy and so on, but Dickens books are at the heart of the club. And we are not aggressive readers. We may read 50 pages a week, and then talk about it. So the idea is not to tear through all of these books as quickly as possible. We have been reading Dombey and Son for the last little while. That book is 700 pages long, so that is 14 weeks. That has been special. These are all books that we should’ve read when we were 20 years old.

But it’s a good group. They have a lot of good insights, and I try to contribute.  They are nerds, too, except for our clothing guy. The physicians are older, and they didn’t read much of anything that wasn’t required in high school and college. So we are all catching up on all of these classic books that we’ve never read, and it has been a delightful journey. The first book that we read was The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. That was probably about 15 years ago. We like great literature.

What kinds of sports or physical activities are you into?

My wife and I used to play a lot of tennis. Every second or third year, when I was a professor at Berkeley, we would go to Australia for three months, to the Australian National University. We always went in their summertime. We would wake up early in the morning, and we would play tennis. At best, we were tolerably good. Eventually, we graduated from tennis to jogging together.

Fun Times
Henry Schaefer and Bill Miller celebrate the success of their new Datacraft 6024/4 minicomputer in early 1974

You are one of the most highly cited chemists in the world, with a Reuters H-Index of 120. For the uninitiated, please explain the Thomson Reuters H index.

Oh my. The Thomson H-Index is something that is very popular these days, and it is related to how many important papers that you have published. Not just the number of papers, but the number of important papers. According to their index, we have published 120 important papers. In fact, we’ve published some other important papers that never got that degree of public attention, but, in my mind, were better than some of the ones that were in the 120.

How does Thomson Reuters keep track of the number of citations?

It starts when you publish a paper. If people are interested in it, they will refer to it in future papers of theirs. That’s how they determine the H-Index.

To put your 120 H-Index into perspective, what is a number that is considered great?

I would say that 40 is considered great.

You’ve published something like 1,600 important scientific papers.

I don’t want to pat myself on the back too much. The key to publishing 1,600 papers is surrounding yourself with 15 or 16 of the most gifted young PhD students in the world, throw out a few suggestions, and see what they do. Basically, give them a lot of freedom. Not in their first year as a PhD student, but as they grow, they become more and more able to do things by themselves, and often times they are doing things much better than I would have thought. They may get stuck, but when they do, you help them out. I’ve had about 140 PhD students now, and some of them have just been extraordinarily brilliant and hard-working. So that is the secret to getting a lot of papers published – having a lot of students with a lot of ideas.

Let’s talk a little science. Erwin Schrödinger is considered a founding father of quantum mechanics.

Yeah, we like him.

To the general public, Schrödinger is perhaps best known for a thought experiment involving a cat.

The cat is pretty much irrelevant, it’s just something that people find to be cute. The question is, is the cat dead or alive? It’s not terribly relevant to anything in real life, but, in 1926, Erwin Schrödinger published several papers which showed us how to solve for the electrons, protons, and neutrons that make up the atoms and molecules. This, in turn, opened up a much deeper understanding of how the universe works.

There were others who were making significant, groundbreaking contributions at the same time, scientists like Werner Heisenberg. They were both giants in the field, but, in my opinion, Schrödinger’s work was the most profound. Schrödinger’s equation is the fundamental equation that we still use to solve for all of the properties a person would be interested in when it comes to atoms and molecules, and here we are creeping up on the 100-year mark.

The double-slit experiment is one of the most famous experiments in physics. What’s it all about?

To start off, imagine a wall with two slits in it. Imagine throwing tennis balls at the wall. Some will bounce off the wall, but some will travel through the slits. If there’s another wall behind the first, the tennis balls that have traveled through the slits will hit it. If you mark all the spots where a ball has hit the second wall, what do you expect to see? That’s right. Two strips of marks roughly the same shape as the slits.

Now let’s go into the quantum realm. Imagine firing electrons at our wall with the two slits, but block one of those slits off for the moment. You’ll find that some of the electrons will pass through the open slit and strike the second wall just as tennis balls would: The spots they arrive at form a strip roughly the same shape as the slit. Now open the second slit. You’d expect two rectangular strips on the second wall, as with the tennis balls, but what you actually see is very different: The spots where electrons hit build up to replicate the interference pattern from a wave.

So, the double-slit experiment is a demonstration that light and matter can display characteristics of both classically defined waves and particles; moreover, it displays the fundamentally probabilistic nature of quantum mechanical phenomena. If you are looking at microscopic objects, what you observe behaves as if it is a particle, or some conglomeration of particles. But if you start looking closer, and closer, and closer, with a super-resolution electron microscope, you start to see things that look more like waves. Anything that you or I can see, touch, smell, or feel, behaves in a classical manner, like particles or a conglomeration of particles. But once you get down to a level that is so small, say, 10,000 times smaller than anything that could be seen with the naked eye, then these electrons become wavelike particles.

Quantum Leap.

Electronic states change. If you’re talking about a big molecule, the wave function for these states are very complicated. But they do change by either absorbing a little packet of electromagnetic radiation called a photon, or by emitting a particle of electromagnetic radiation called a photon. So, we see the absorption and emission of electromagnetic radiation. All of the colors that we see in the universe are a result of molecules changing their electronic states due to either absorption or emission of tiny little pieces of electromagnetic radiation.

You are very well-known for your faith. When did you accept Christ into your life?

Jesus Christ came into my life during my fourth year of my 18 years as a professor at Berkeley. That’s when it happened, but it was a long process. Jesus clearly had his eye on me for a long time before that, but I was pretty resistant before becoming a Christian. Eventually, I got it.

Science and Christianity don’t often go hand-in-hand.

The entire foundation of the modern physical sciences come from Christians. Christians taught human beings how to think about science. There are a couple of exceptions to that, but virtually all of them were Christians, and many of them were very committed Christians. People like Isaac Newton, James Kirk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, and on and on and on. They wanted to understand the universe, because they believed it was a product of God’s creative genius, and they wanted to understand that genius.

As a Christian, do you view scientific discoveries from a different perspective?

Well, there is much more of a sense of awe. Much more of a sense of, “Wow, so that’s how God did it.” An atheist can be resistant to that thinking. Sadly, I think atheists miss out on the beauty of science. That’s not to say that there aren’t extraordinary scientists who are atheists. Once you teach an atheist how to do science, they can do it, and do it very well. The Christian contribution was to show them how to do it, and continue to do it. There are so many Nobel Prize winners and other award winners who were Christians, and, like atheists, they can have a sense of awe and wonder about what they discovered, but I think it’s a little bit different. Walt Whitman, who is not one of my favorites, once said, “One of the best things in the world is to see a sunset and know who is responsible for it.” So I have a little bit of that sense, and I don’t know that an atheist does. It’s an interesting comparison, but it is what it is.

Has being a Christian changed the way you are perceived in the scientific community?

It has. Some people don’t like me. There are others who think I am great. It’s a mixed response. With my PhD students, they are all my children, whether they are Christians, atheists, or anything in between. They are all my children and I treat them all the same. We have to get along with our students, or nothing gets done in my field. I think that if a student knows that I am a Christian, and that is really, really offensive, they might not choose to work for me. I had one student who wrote in to me and said that he really wanted to come and work with me, but then he found out that I was Christian and he just couldn’t have that in his life, so he wasn’t going to come. And I wrote back and said that that’s fine. We are still all friends.

Please share with me a blessing that has resulted from combining your faith with science.

Life is different when you attempt to put Jesus first. You’re not always successful in that, and it is a very different perspective on life. My wife says that I am a much better husband since I became a Christian. And we had been married for about seven years when we became Christians – we became Christians at about the same time. One didn’t lead the other. We both felt the call at about the same time.

Do you think the Fibonacci Sequence helps prove the existence of God?

It’s interesting. I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but maybe I should. Clearly, the Fibonacci Sequence is a beautiful sequence that arises from the mind of God. Other than that, without thinking about it some more, I wouldn’t want to say too much.

From a faith standpoint, how would you describe yourself?

I’m what they call an Old Earth creationist. That is to say that I think the universe probably is 13.7 billion years old, but I have reservations about the most popular theories of evolution. So I think the universe is old, and I think what is happening at the Big Bang is described in the first couple verses of the Book of Genesis. That is the beginning. Creation out of nothing. That’s what the Big Bang says.

Henry Schaefer

Does being a Christian give you a greater appreciation for science?

I think it does. Others might disagree with me, but I think science gives you a sense of how everything all fits together. It reinforces our understanding of everything as a seamless fabric – the spiritual world, the scientific world, and how it all fits into one beautiful picture with no inconsistencies.

Final Question: You’ve achieved great success in your life. If you could offer one piece of advice to aspiring scientists, what would that be?

That is simple – run to Jesus.

,

Takaaki Kajita – Ghostbuster

Written By: Michael D. McClellan | Nobel laureate Takaaki Kajita is a quiet, unassuming man, and humble to a fault. The Japanese physicist, who, in 2015, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass, isn’t particularly big on interviews and doesn’t sit down for many. When he does, his answers are usually brief and unfailingly polite, and often dominated with one-liners. Consider: Shortly after the announcement that Dr. Kajita had won the Nobel Prize, he was interviewed by Adam Smith, Nobel Media’s Chief Scientific Officer, and it went something like this:

Adam Smith: How did you hear the news [winning the Nobel Prize]?

Takaaki Kajita: Well, I just, well actually, when I received the phone call I was checking my e-mails.

[AS] In your office? Right. And what was your first reaction?

[TK] Well, that was really a surprise to me.

[AS] I imagine it is still sinking in.

[TK] Yes, yes, still kind of unbelievable.

[AS] You sound as if you are alone, are there not people around you yet?

[TK] Well actually I’m in a small room so no one around.

[AS] I’m sure that very soon you will be surrounded by people.

[TK] {Laughs] Thank you.

Joe Exotic of Tiger King fame he’s not, but that suits Kajita just fine. He’d rather be anywhere else but in front of a microphone, preferably at home with his wife, Michiko, or at the University of Tokyo, where he serves both as a Principal Investigator at the Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, and as the Director of the Institute for Cosmic Radiation Research. Meet him on the street, and there would be little to reason to suspect that his discovery had effectively rewritten the balance sheet of the universe. It’d be easier to imagine sitting down with Kajita in a Japanese bar, talking about the finer points of Kyudo over a bottle of saki, than it would be to think that his work had just turned the Standard Model on its head. How significant of an achievement are we talking? The Standard Model is only the most accurate scientific theory known to human beings. More than a quarter of the Nobel Prizes in physics of the last century are direct inputs to or direct results of the Standard Model. Many recall the excitement over the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, but that much-ballyhooed event didn’t come out of the blue – it capped a five-decade undefeated streak for the Standard Model. Every fundamental force but gravity is included in it. Every attempt to overturn it, or to demonstrate in the laboratory that it must be substantially reworked – and there have been many over the past 50 years – has failed.

Princess Sofia and physics laureate Takaaki Kajita arrive in the Blue Hall for the 2015 Nobel prize award banquet in Stockholm City Hall.PHOTO: REUTERS

That is, until Kajita introduced the world to something called Super-Kamiokande.

While the name might conjure images of a fire-breathing creature in a Godzilla film, Super-Kamiokande is actually a neutrino-observing facility located 1000 meters underground in Hida City, Gifu Prefecture. Inside it is a cylindrical tank which holds 50,000 tons of super-pure water. Its inner walls are lined with 11,000 photo-sensors designed to identify muon neutrinos produced by cosmic rays. In simplest terms, the sensors record flashes of light caused by debris speeding away from a neutrino hit.

At this point you may be wondering what neutrino oscillations are, so let me drop an analogy on you: Imagine you’re the driver of a truck that delivers ice cream, and the company you work for sells the three standard flavors – vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. Now, imagine that you load your truck with all three flavors at the factory and drive it to the ice cream store across town, where you swing open the cargo door and make a shocking discovery: The vanilla and strawberry ice cream that you loaded has turned into chocolate! Welcome to the strange world of neutrino physics, a world in which these incredibly small, ghostlike particles change flavors as if by magic.

Godzilla reference, check.

Ice cream analogy, check.

Now, the backstory:  First predicted in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli, and experimentally observed in 1950, neutrinos come in three flavors – electron, muon, and tau. The mass of a neutrino is less than 1/1,000,000th of that of an electron. If you liken the weight of an electron to that of an elephant, the weight of a neutrino would be lighter than a one yen coin. They do not hold a charge; the word “neutrino” is a combination of the Italian word “neutro,” which means “neutral or electrically neutral,” and the diminutive suffix “-ino.” Literally translated, “neutrino” would mean something like “little neutral one.” Because neutrinos are extremely light and do not hold a charge, they do not interact with most other elementary particles. Several trillion of them pass through the palms of your hands every second. In fact they pass through everything, including the Earth, unimpeded.

Lifetime Achievement
Takaaki Kajita receiving the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics

Neutrinos have long been of interest to physicists, who, for decades, couldn’t explain why the number of electron neutrinos measured in experiments on Earth did not match the amount predicted by the best solar models. Chemist and physicist Raymond Davis was the first to encounter this phenomenon, which later came to be known as the Solar Neutrino Problem. Davis, who in 1967 built a neutrino collector – a tank holding 100,000 gallons of cleaning fluid nearly a mile underground in South Dakota’s Homestake mine – was as perplexed as anyone. Calculations predicted that of the 10 million billion neutrinos passing through the tank every day, roughly one would interact with a chlorine atom and change it to argon. But the detector, operated all the way until 1994, recorded only about one-third the expected number of neutrinos. Over time, a prevailing theory emerged – that the neutrinos were oscillating from one flavor to another and avoiding detection.

The Problem:  How do you prove it?

Enter Dr. Kajita and Super-Kamiokande.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on a boat inside the Super-Kamiokande

The giant detector, which went live on April 1, 1996, is able to observe atmospheric neutrinos coming from all directions. Two years later, Kajita and other members of the Super-Kamiokande Group made a groundbreaking discovery:  The number of neutrinos made on the opposite side of the Earth that had flown the long distance to the Super-Kamiokande detector was only about half as high as the number of neutrinos that came down from the atmosphere directly above the detector.

This could only mean one thing:  The discrepancy in numbers was due to “neutrino oscillation,” a phenomenon in which neutrinos change into other types of neutrinos while in flight. As the muon neutrinos created on the opposite side of the Earth passed through the Earth’s interior, they transformed into tau neutrinos, which is why observations showed fewer muon neutrinos than expected.

So, they oscillate. What’s the big deal?

2015 Nobel laureate Takaaki Kajita

Like photons, neutrinos were thought to be massless. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity states that objects with mass will never reach the speed of light, and that objects without mass will always travel at the speed of light. Also, the faster an object travels, the slower time passes, and once an object reaches the speed of light, time will stop for the object (the object will cease to experience time). Since neutrinos oscillate, they are experiencing time. The fact that neutrinos oscillate while they travel at a speed that does not reach the speed of light proves that they have mass. This, in turn, tells us that there is something missing. The Standard Model cannot be complete.

Kajita, whose responses can be as elusive as the ghostlike particles he’s chased for decades, has taken his newfound scientific superstardom in stride. He gets it. The Nobel Prize is a pretty big deal. His place in the pantheon of great neutrino ghost hunters is secure. The Standard Model will fundamentally change, and he is directly responsible. You’ll just have to forgive him if he doesn’t go all Tiger King over the hubbub, because he’s checked his ego at the door a long time ago. With Takaaki Kajita, its all about the pursuit of science. Maybe its dark matter. Maybe its something else. Maybe proving that neutrinos have mass is lightning in a bottle. It doesn’t really matter, because, at the end of the day, doing good science is good enough for him.

Please tell me about your childhood; what are some of your earliest memories?

I grew up in the Japanese countryside in Higashi-Matsuyama, a small city located about an hour’s train ride north of Tokyo. I grew up in such a peaceful environment. My house was surrounded by rice fields on the north, east, and south, so I was surrounded by nature. I think that this was very important to me in terms of becoming a scientist.

At what point do you remember becoming interested in science?

To be honest, I became most interested in science when I got involved in my graduate courses. Almost accidentally, I entered Professor [Masatoshi] Koshiba’s group, just as he was starting the Kamiokande Experiment. While I didn’t know much about it, I quickly realized that it was really a very wonderful opportunity for me. I really enjoyed working on the Kamiokande Experiment. At that point, I essentially decided to become a physicist.

The 2015 Nobel physics laureate professor Takaaki Kajita (center) poses with his gold medal together with wife Michiko (left) and daughter (right) after the 2015 Nobel prize award ceremony. PHOTO: REUTERS

In what ways did your family help lay the foundation for such a successful career?

I think that this is a very difficult question. I’m not sure how much influence I received from my parents. When I was a child, Japan was still a rather poor country, but I think my parents were already thinking that I should go away to a university so that I could work in an exciting field.

Was there a particular teacher or class that help to fuel your interest in science and mathematics?

In high school, one of my teachers was a physicist, and from his lectures I discovered my interest in astronomy. Certainly, through his lectures, I thought that astronomy was quite interesting.

What was high school like for you?

I went to Kawagoe High School, a rather typical small-town school. This school had a tradition of allowing students to do whatever they liked rather freely. Therefore, I spent a lot of time practicing Kyudo (Japanese archery). I was not particularly good at Kyudo, but I liked it. During one’s time as a high school student, you have to decide what you intend to study as an undergraduate once you are admitted to a university. Since I was interested in physics as a high school student, my choice was rather clear: I decided to learn physics in the undergraduate course at Saitama University, a local university near Tokyo.

Takaaki Kajita

How would you describe yourself?

If I were to describe myself, I would say that I am simply extremely lucky. I was involved in experiments that I liked, and by accident I encountered a very interesting problem. I later I found that this problem was due to neutrino oscillations. So, I was very lucky.

Do you have a sense of humor?

Well certainly, I don’t have much of a sense of humor.

But in a news conference at the University of Tokyo, shortly after the Nobel announcement, you thanked the neutrinos for winning the award. And since neutrinos are created by cosmic rays, you thanked them, too. That’s funny!

I must admit, I thought it was funny, too [laughs].

What are some of your interests and hobbies outside of the scientific world?

To be honest, I am too busy to really have hobbies, so I have no hobbies. Okay, if you insist, drinking Japanese saki would be my hobby [laughs].

How about art, music, or literature?

Yes, I enjoy each, but I do not have much time to spend on these things.

Let’s talk about your undergraduate studies. You stayed close to home and attended Saitama University.  Were you initially unsure about what you wanted to study.

Officially I was learning physics at Saitama University, but, to be honest, I continued to spend a lot of time practicing Kyudo – even more seriously than during high school. I regret that I should have learned more physics during my undergraduate studies, because these studies in undergraduate courses form the basis of everyday research. Knowing this, I continued to spend a lot of time doing Kyudo – so much so that, until the latter half of the third year, my life was really focused on Japanese archery. That changed before the final year. I decided then that I wanted to learn more about physics, so I quit Japanese archery at that time. Well, at least after that I did not take Japanese archery so seriously [laughs]. So that was my life as an undergraduate student. In any case, I found that physics was indeed interesting. So I decided to continue to studying physics at the graduate level.

What excited you most about physics then, and what excites you most about it today?

Today, I am more interested in the research related to astronomy and astrophysics – the universe, cosmic rays, and dark matter. When I was taking the undergraduate courses, I was very interested in particle physics, particularly experimental particle physics. This is because I thought that theoretical physics was too difficult to me. I really enjoyed experiments, such as going underground, constructing the detectors, and so on. I enjoyed this work very much. So, I think I made the right decision.

You pursued your graduate studies at the University of Tokyo. Please tell me about his experience.

I learned everything about experimental particle physics in the graduate course at the University of Tokyo. As I mentioned earlier, I was particularly interested in experimental particle physics. Very fortunately, Professor Masatoshi Koshiba accepted me as a graduate course student in his group at the University of Tokyo. My life as a graduate course student began in April of 1981. Katsushi Arisaka was also a student in Professor Koshiba’s group. He had just finished his Master’s thesis based on a Monte Carlo study of a nucleon decay experiment. This was the Kamioka Nucleon Delay Experiment, also known as Kamiokande. He was the only student working on Kamiokande in early 1981. Just when I started my studies, production of newly developed photomultiplier tubes – PMTs – with a diameter of 50 centimeters began. Katsushi Arisaka convinced me that Kamiokande would be a very interesting experiment and asked me to work on it, which I started to do.

Friend and Mentor
2002 Nobel laureate Masatoshi Koshiba

You mention Professor Masatoshi Koshiba, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Professor Koshiba was my physics advisor, therefore he had a very significant influence on me. Well, he is a big boss [laughs]. He would not tell us many of the details of our experiments, he would leave the research up to us. But he told us how one should be a scientist, especially how to be an experimental physicist.

You applied for postdoctoral studies through the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) but your application was rejected. Dr. Koshiba came to your rescue.

In Japan, the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science posts positions that are  open to every scientific field. I applied, but unfortunately I was not selected. I had no idea what I was going to do after I obtained my PhD. Then, Professor Koshiba received approval for some positions from the University of Tokyo. I do not know the details about how he managed to do this, but afterwards he hired me. The position was for a fixed time…well, he told me that my job was only for one year, but eventually, I stayed in this position for two years.

Princess Sofia and physics laureate Takaaki Kajita

Let’s talk about Kamiokande. What were the early days like?

I enjoyed the preparation work for Kamiokande. In early spring of 1983, we started the construction work on the Kamiokande proton decay detector in Kamioka. It took almost four months to finish building the detector. I liked the construction work, watching the detector being assembled slowly but steadily. After it was filled with water, data taking with the Kamiokande experiment began in early July of 1983.

In 1986, you discovered that there was a significant deficit of the muon neutrino events when analyzing the Kamiokande data.

Oh yes, this moment was really crucial for me. I had a great feeling of excitement, and I also had the feeling that I made a mistake somewhere.

Neutrinos at that time were thought to be massless – and they were also at the heart of the Solar Neutrino Problem.

Well, as I said, I joined the Kamiokande experiment during my graduate course studies, and I received my PhD based on my research for proton decay at Kamiokande. I continued to work on Kamiokande after getting my PhD, as I was still interested in the proton decays and I wanted to improve the proton decay analysis. Through this kind of improvement study, I realized that there was something strange in the background of the proton decays in the atmospheric neutrinos. Basically, there was a substantial deficit of muon neutrinos in the atmospheric neutrino events, and that was the beginning of my interest in neutrinos.

Super-Kamiokande – Kamioka Mozumi mine in Japan – 1000m underground

Let’s talk about your research at the Super-Kamiokande Neutrino Observatory. How does it differ from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada?

The detection principle of the neutrino interaction is similar to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. We detect radiation created by particles which are created by neutrino interactions. However, in terms of the details, our detectors are different. First of all, our detectors are not so deep. Our detectors are only 1 kilometer deep. Also, the structure of the detector is different. In SNO, they have kind of a cylindrical volume at the center of the detector to hold the heavy water. But in the case of Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande, we simply use normal water. Therefore, we do not have the special container for the heavy water. We simply use a water tank to hold the water.

With heavy water, SNO is able to observe electron neutrinos from the sun. And also, SNO is also able to observe the total neutrino flux from the sun. But, in the case of normal water, we can observe these solar neutrinos by the neutrino electron scattering. So, the actual mechanism of detecting solar neutrinos are completely different.

What’s it like working with teams of other scientists and researchers?

I worked in both the Kamiokande and the Super-Kamiokande. Kamiokande was initially a small team. I think we had certainly more than 10 people, but, on the other hand, in the Super-Kamiokande, we had more than 100 people. So we had a big team.

At that time, the other main members of Kamiokande were Teruhiro Suda from the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research of the University of Tokyo, and Atsuto Suzuki and Kasuke Takahashi from the High Energy Accelerator Research Center. Soon after I joined the Kamiokande experiment, Yoji Totsuka returned from Deutsches Electron Synchroton and started to help us. Soon he too joined Kamiokande. Kazumasa Miyano from Niigata University and Tadashi Kifune from ICRR joined during the preparation stage of the experiment. Also, Masayuki Nakahata, who was an undergraduate course student, worked with us. So, as you can see, experiments like those being conducted at Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande require the involvement of many different people with different strengths and skillsets.

The director of the University of Tokyo Cosmic Ray Research Institute, Nobel laureate winner Takaaki Kajita
Kazuyoshi Yamamoto photographing

Did you enjoy being part of a team?

Well, I do enjoy participating in teams. As far as the data analysis is concerned, I was one of the conveners of the atmospheric neutrino analysis. So, we had video meetings, which was the way to discuss and analyze the data. Also, we had collaboration meetings two or three times a year. I should mention that, in the analysis, both my Japanese and U.S. colleagues played very important roles in the initial stages of the Super-Kamiokande analysis.

Science takes creativity and creative thinking.  Do you have an example?

This is a very difficult question. It depends on how you define creativity [laughs]. Well, certainly we always tried to improve the analysis, but I don’t know how much of this activity is related to creativity. I’m not sure. I’m sorry. I don’t have a good answer to this question.

Since 1949, there have been twenty-eight Japanese winners of the Nobel Prize.  And you are only the ninth to winner the Nobel Prize for Physics. What does that mean to you?

I don’t ordinarily think about this question. Certainly, I feel that I’m very lucky because, well, for example, in 1949, it was not possible to carry out experimental research in Japan. But, in my time, I was able to conduct experimental physics. For that I feel really lucky.

In what ways did winning the Nobel Prize change your life?

Oh yes, since winning the Nobel Prize I have been very busy. One good thing is, I have opportunities to speak about the problems facing Japanese scientific systems. So, that is a good thing.

The Nobel Prize is the ultimate award, but I get the sense that your focus has always been on the science, and that there was never a preoccupation with whether or not you would win it.

Oh yes. Yes, absolutely. As I said, in Kamiokande, I accidentally found the deficit of atmospheric muon neutrinos, and that was really important for me. I really wanted to understand what was going on and that was essentially the only motivation for me to carry out the research.

It’s not every day that someone’s work challenges the Standard Model the way yours did. To me, the significance of that statement is far more profound than the actual Nobel Prize. Do you ever stop to think about that?

When we found the deficit of muon neutrinos we thought this could be due to neutrino oscillations. And, of course we realized that if it is indeed due to neutrino oscillations, this could be a very important work.

Takaaki Kajita

Final Question: You’ve achieved great success in your life. If you could offer one piece of advice to aspiring scientists, what would that be?

For many people, the reason he or she becomes a scientist is an interest in nature. So, I hope that many young people, although they may be busy, don’t forget their initial interest in nature. I believe that this is the single most important thing in order to become a good scientist.