Long-time readers of Physics Today may recall a series of conversations with my opinionated friend and colleague Professor Mozart, reported in Reference Frame columns early in this decade (Chapters 8, 9, 11, 12, and 13.) In answer to inquiries about his long silence, I can now reveal that Mozart mysteriously disappeared at the height of the Gingrich revolution in late 1995, demoralized by the growing obsession with “strategic research.” I have just learned and am happy to report that he is alive and well, the proprietor of a small tobacco plantation in central Connecticut.

I had transcribed one of my last conversations with Bill Mozart in early 1995, but before I could negotiate his permission to report it in these pages, he vanished without a trace. As soon as I rediscovered his whereabouts, I sent him a brief note of inquiry, enclosing the text reproduced below, and was delighted to get it back decorated with the familiar scrawl I had despaired of ever seeing again: “PT-OK-WAM.” I am publishing our four-year-old conversation today both for the insight it sheds on the state of mind that led so productive a physicist to drop out of the profession at so early an age, and also because Professor Mozart's views on the state of our discipline in the mid-1990s remain relevant to the difficult situation in which we find ourselves today, at the brink of the new millennium.

A little background: Several years before the conversation reported below, Professor Mozart had become deeply involved in satisfying the congressional demand for international assistance in the construction of the Superconducting Super Collider. In seeking contributions from abroad he had given free range to his prodigious imagination, and for several years after the cancellation of that visionary undertaking, he was fully occupied with the unwinding of his far-flung operations. His normally sunny disposition was clouded by his ongoing dismay at the failure of the great dream.

To aid younger readers in understanding what follows, I should also explain that well into the mid-1990s there were people—even a few in the State Department—who remembered that Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, […]