Hans, I would really enjoy seeing an straightforward earthly measuremnt of Vacuum Drag before I die. And have thought a little bit about how some measurements with < 100 Mev electrons would be able to do this. How would you go about it?

I do not have sufficient credibility to get others interested in this adventure. But you would. 1960 was the most enjoyable year of my life. Might be that in 2004, we could drive a terrestrial confirmation of vacuum drag. Do you want to play?

When I first worked with him, [Gene Commins] was a grad student, and then he was an instructor. He worked under—with Polykarp Kusch. It was Kusch’s lab. But Gene just liked doing it. And they made you feel a part of the lab. I made use of my experience there. I’ve written chapters about [laugh] some of them in my later work. It was just very formative, if you will. I was sorry, in some sense that when—after I graduated, they wouldn’t let me work in the lab anymore. They needed the spaces for other students.

Zierler: And I’m curious, Allan, how did you develop an interest in the theory of weak interactions? Where did that come from? ....

Franklin: Well, what got me interested in looking at it, well, there were a couple of things. Parity violation was a big thing, made a [laugh] big impression on me. I was an undergraduate at Columbia when it was announced....They stopped classes.

Zierler: [laugh]

Franklin: They stopped physics classes to announce the experimental results. That always had a big effect on me. And also, when I learned more and started working in history and philosophy, there was a problem. When the V-A theory was proposed, there were three experiments that disagreed with it. And I was interested in why did they do that. Why did they propose a theory that was known to be refuted?

And so then I had to—then I went into—I had to do the history of how did we get to V-A, that there were good reasons for believing V-A, so there were reasons for questioning the experimental results. And they all turned out to be wrong, which was suggested interestingly by the theorists, Feynman and Gell-Mann and Marshak and Sudarshan. So, you know, it was an interesting historical question and philosophical—why do you propose a theory that’s known to be refuted?

Zierler: Yeah. So what’s the answer?

Franklin: ....Well, when you have a disagreement between theory and experiment, theory could be wrong, experiment could be wrong, or they both could be wrong.

Zierler: Sure. [laugh]

Franklin: And they can’t both be right. And so in this case, it turned out of course that the experimental results were incorrect.... [I]n the case of V-A, there were lots of things that V-A had going for it. And so people said, “Well, maybe we ought to redo those experiments.” Now that leads you to my current work, or my most recent work, [which] is, do experiments need to be replicated?