Henry Kendall 1926-99
MIT professor Henry W Kendall, a 1990 Nobel Laureate and long-time environmentalist, died while diving in February. He was 72 years old.
Along with Jerome Friedman and Richard Taylor, he was one of the key members of the team studying the scattering of high-energy electron beams at the then new two-mile linear accelerator at SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which in 1967 found the first experimental evidence for hard scattering centres deep inside the proton. These centres were to be identified as quarks. Prof. Kendall studied mathematics at Amherst College, graduating in 1950, and earned a physics PhD at MIT in 1955. He taught at Stanford from 1956 to 1961, before joining the MIT faculty in 1961 then becoming a full professor in 1967 and the J A Stratton professor of physics in 1991.
A founding member of the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1969, Prof. Kendall served as its chair for the past 25 years. He was deeply involved with arms control and nuclear power safety issues. He played a leading role in organizing scientific community statements on global problems, including the Call for Action at the Kyoto Climate Summit in 1997 and the World Scientists' Warning to Humanity in 1992. He was on a panel of scientists who briefed President Clinton on the dangers of global warming in 1997. For 10 years Prof. Kendall advised the Department of Defense as a member of the Jason Group and the Institute for Defense Analysis.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, he received the Bertram Russell Society award in 1982, the Environmental Leadership award from Tufts University's Lincoln Filene Center in 1991, the Ettore Majorana-Erice Science for Peace prize in 1994, the Award for Leadership in Environmental Stewardship from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future in 1997 and the Nicholson Medal for Humanitarian Service from the American Physical Society in 1998.
In addition to his intellectual accomplishments, he was an accomplished mountain climber, scuba diver and photographer. During his college years he co-authored successful books on shallow water diving and on underwater photography. Later efforts included Energy Strategies: Toward a Solar Future in 1980, Beyond the Freeze in 1982, Fallacy of Star Wars in 1985 and Crisis Stability and Nuclear War in 1988.
Bjoern Wiik 1937-99
Bjoern Wiik, one of the most dynamic figures on the world particle physics scene and the chairman of the directorate of the DESY Laboratory in Hamburg died in a domestic accident on 26 February.
Born in Norway, Wiik moved to Germany in 1956 for nine years of physics studies. From 1965 he spent seven years at SLAC, Stanford, where his lifelong interest in high-energy physics was kindled.
In 1972 he came to DESY, becoming Leading Scientist in 1976, and a key member of the TASSO detector team at the PETRA electronpositron collider, which went on to discover gluon effects in 1979. He shared the European Physical Society's 1995 High Energy and Particle Physics prize for this work.
During this time, Wiik also pushed forward the idea of what was later to become the 6.4 km circumference HERA electronproton collider at DESY. In the early 1970s, several world projects included an electronproton collision option.
Many of these fell by the wayside, but a 1977 paper by Wiik and Chris Llewellyn Smith underlined the important physics potential of using electrons as a probe of hadron structure. HERA was pushed strongly by the physics community from 1980, finally becoming operational in 1992 and providing an important new focus for world particle physics research in Europe. Wiik led the work for HERA's high-technology superconducting proton ring. The new physics insights that HERA has produced testify to Wiik's imagination and insight into pushing such an unusual physics scenario.
In 1993 Wiik became chairman of the DESY directorate, succeeding Volker Soergel. As well as nurturing the HERA experimental programme at DESY, he was extremely proud of DESY's growing multidisciplinary role as a synchrotron radiation centre and of the integration into DESY of the former East German particle physics centre at Zeuthen, near Berlin.
Wiik saw DESY continuing as one of the few national labs to figure also a major world accelerator centre, and he was a key player in the world effort for a new generation of electronpositron colliders, with an international 33 km superconducting TESLA machine and associated developments envisaged for DESY.
Most recently he was also chairman of the International Committee for Future Accelerators, and he had characteristically channelled much energy into this influential role.
Kenneth A Johnson
Kenneth A Johnson of MIT, who was a world authority on quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory, died on 9 February.
After studying at the Illinois Institute of Technology and Harvard University, he became research fellow and lecturer at Harvard and a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, Denmark, before joining the MIT faculty in the autumn of 1958 and becoming a full professor in 1965.
His research deepened our understanding of quantum field theory and quantum electrodynamics. In quantum field theory he was the first to observe the dimensional and chiral anomalies. His work in quantum chromodynamics provided a method of describing the properties of a system of confined quarks the famous MIT "bag model". He was a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.