Oral Histories
Interview of Margaret G. Kivelson
UCLA professor of space physics.
- Subtitle:
- But You Don't Look Like a Physicist
- Series:
- Interviews not in a series, part one
- Topic:
- UCLA and University of California HistoryScience, Medicine, and TechnologyUCLA Faculty
- Biographical Note:
- UCLA professor of space physics.
- Interviewee:
- Kivelson, Margaret G.
- Supporting Documents:
- Records relating to the interview are located in the office of the UCLA Library's Center for Oral History Research.
- Language:
- English
- Copyright:
- Regents of the University of California, UCLA Library.
- Abstract:
- Growing up in New York City; Jewish ancestry; schooling and summer camp; attends Radcliffe College and majors in physics; student life at Radcliffe and Harvard University; meets and marries Daniel Kivelson; constraints on women scientists in the forties and fifties; Kivelson earns a doctorate in physics at Harvard with Julian S. Schwinger as her adviser; dissertation on the bremsstrahlung of ultra relativistic electrons; birth of children and child rearing; Daniel Kivelson is hired by UCLA and Margaret Kivelson joins the physics department at the RAND Corporation; the cold war security obsession; RAND's ties to the military-industrial complex; studies plasma oscillations with Donald F. DuBois; spends a year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study conducting research on many-body systems with Paul C. Martin; accepts a position at the UCLA branch of the University of California Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics; studies space plasma physics using data from spacecraft; investigates whether Io has its own magnetic field; sabbatical at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London; with David J. Southwood, develops models of magnetosphere movement; collaborates with scientists at the California Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory to obtain data from the Jupiter space probe; technical problems with the probe; computer analysis of data; the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; the UCLA Department of Earth and Space Sciences; the status of female scientists in academia.