Remembering木吉司先生

摘要

I first met 木吉司先生 in the late 1980s at the National Research Institute for Metals (now National Institute for Materials Science). At about the same time, shortly after the discovery of high-temperature superconductors, NRIM decided to establish, through "The Multicore Project in Superconductivity," a magnet laboratory that would include a powerful hybrid magnet to surpass a 35-T hybrid magnet (Hybrid III) then being built at the MIT Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory (FBNML). In response to this ambitious Japanese plan, the National Science Foundation created a special committee (chaired by the physicist Frederick Seitz) to formulate a new U.S. magnet laboratory that would in turn overshadow the proposed Tsukuba magnet lab. An ironic result, and at that time totally unexpected at MIT, was the eventual demise, in 1995, of a national magnet lab at MIT and the creation in 1990 at Florida State University of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.