What we're really trying to do is have heterogeneous systems really become the foundation of our computing going forward. And that's the idea that you make every processor and every accelerator a peer processor.
Researchers probably never anticipated when they started smashing atoms and protons in our large accelerators that their science their very basic research on matter would eventually give us remarkable life-saving technology.
My first project was to build an ionization gauge control circuit for Professor Edgar Everhart's Cockcroft-Walton accelerator. In those days, vacuum tubes were the active components in electronic circuits. I can still recall the warm orange glow of the vacuum tube filaments and the cool blue glow of the thyratron tubes.
After about 1940, scientists generally stopped looking for elements in nature. Instead, they had to create them by smashing smaller atoms together.
A linear accelerator has the advantage that no magnet is required and that its cost should not rise much more steeply than with the energy of the particles required.
My interest in matters more directly concerned with the handling of particles was growing, in the meantime, stimulated by many contacts with people understanding accelerators.
As accelerators reach higher and higher energies, we may need a new Standard Model, or, at least, today's may need to be modified, but that's the way science operates.
Soon after my degree, in 1958 I went to the United States to enlarge my experience and to familiarize myself with particle accelerators. I spent about one and a half years at Columbia University.
Nevertheless, if I have at times been able to make original contributions in the accelerator field, I cannot help feeling that to a certain extent my slightly amateur approach in physics, combined with much practical experience, was an asset.
