Henry J Frisch, Enrico Fermi Institute,
Chicago.
James W Cronin has been awarded the Medal 2000 of the Division of Particles and Fields of the Mexican Physical Society for his contribution to the development of particle physics and astrophysics in Mexico. As a leader of the Auger experiment he supported Mexican involvement. Mexico is now playing an important role in the collaboration. It is the second time that the medal has been awarded. The first was to Leon Lederman last year.
Tel Aviv University's Sackler prize in Physical Sciences went to Juan Maldacena of Harvard and Michael Douglas of Rutgers for their work in string theory.
CERN-Asia Fellows and Associates programme offers grants
Within the framework of the CERN-Asia Fellows and Associates programme, CERN offers three grants every year to young East, South-east and South Asian* postgraduates under the age of 33, enabling them to participate in its scientific programme in the areas of experimental and theoretical physics and accelerator technologies. The appointment will be for one year, which might, exceptionally, be extended to two years.
Applications will be considered by the CERN Fellowship Selection Committee at its meeting on 30 January 2001. Applications must consist of a completed application form, on which should be written "CERN-Asia Programme"; three separate reference letters; and a curriculum vitae including a list of scientific publications and any other information about the quality of the candidate. Applications, references and any other information must be provided in English only.
Application forms can be obtained from the Recruitment Office, CERN, Human Resources Division, 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland; e-mail "Recruitment.Service@cern.ch"; fax +41 22 767 2750. Applications should reach the office before 8 November 2000.
The CERN-Asia Fellows and Associates programme also offers a few short-term associateship positions to scientists under the age of 40 who wish to spend part of the year at CERN or a Japanese laboratory and who are on "leave of absence" from their institute. Applications are accepted from scientists who are nationals of the East, South-east and South Asian* countries and from CERN personnel who are nationals of a CERN member state.
*Candidates are accepted from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, the Laos Republic, Malaysia, the Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.
Beauty's soliloquy
To be, or anti-be: that is the
question:
Whether 'tis nobler in theory to suffer
The violation of
charge conjugation,
Or to reflect against a sea of parity,
And by
opposing violate it? To C, to P;
No more; and by CP to say we
end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That matter is
heir to - 'tis a transformation
Devoutly to be wish'd.
To C, to
P;
To CP: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub:
For in CP of
theory dreams may come,
What we accelerate through this mortal
coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of
so short life;
For what would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The
detector's friction, the lepton's leak,
The pangs of despised interactions,
the hadrons decay,
The insolence of weak force and the spins
That
patient merit of the unsymmetric takes,
When the quark might its quietus
make
With a bare bodkin? Who would accuracy 1.0066 bear,
To
grunt and sweat through a weary beam,
But that the dread of something
after colliding,
The undiscover'd vertex from whose bang
No
particle returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we
have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus data does make
cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied
o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pit and
momentum
With this regard their currents turn awry,
Nina Paley (with apologies to Will
Shakespeare).
Nina Paley is a freelance illustrator, animator and
cartoonist from San Francisco. She recently created cartoons for CERN's
forthcoming educational CD-ROM. Her work can be seen at
"http://www.ninapaley.com/".
Laureates of the lake
This summer the German island town of Lindau on Lake Constance hosted the 50th annual meeting of Nobel laureates. To mark the occasion, coinciding with the centenary of the Nobel foundation, all natural sciences were included. Lindau meetings are normally dedicated in turn to physics, chemistry or medicine and attended by about 20 prizewinners and several hundred students. This year, 50 prizewinners mingled with 700 young scientists from about 50 countries.
Initiated in 1951 under the presidency of Count Bernadotte to help to reintroduce Germany to international science, these meetings, now presided over by his wife Sonja, have over the years inspired several generations of young scientists. The final day traditionally finds everyone aboard a boat to the island of Mainau, seat of the Bernadottes, for the closing ceremony, which was honoured this year by German federal president Johannes Rau.
Former CERN staff member Simon Newman has been attending the Lindau meetings since 1971, when he remembers Werner Heisenberg being in a tight corner. Although Heisenberg had previously withdrawn his earlier objections to new European accelerator plans, in 1971 at Lindau he had to defend his new position against students opposed to spending on "big science".
Mark Oliphant 1901-2000
Australian scientist and statesman Mark Oliphant died in Canberra on 14 July, aged 98. Born and educated in Adelaide, he was inspired by a 1925 visit to Australia by New Zealander Ernest Rutherford. In 1927, Oliphant moved to Rutherford's Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, then the world focus of nuclear physics research. Here he went on to participate in Cockcroft and Walton's work on particle acceleration, and in the discoveries of isotopes. He eventually became assistant director of research at the Cavendish.
In 1938 Oliphant moved to Birmingham, where he initially pushed the construction of a cyclotron and the department under his direction became a focal point of UK physics. At about the same time, Rudolf Peierls became professor of applied mathematics, and Otto Frisch joined Oliphant. With the advent of the Second World War, Oliphant quickly became a major force in the UK's applied research effort. Following his suggestion, John Randall and Henry Boot at Birmingham developed the cavity magnetron, a key device ("the most valuable cargo ever") that enabled radar equipment to become smaller and more portable.
It was Oliphant who relayed the historic 1940 Frisch-Peierls memorandum (pointing out the possibility of a fission bomb) to higher authority for appropriate action. Increasingly involved in the subsequent UK wartime atomic energy research programme, he eventually transferred to the Manhattan Project, working with Ernest Lawrence on uranium separation. During this time he had the idea of what would eventually become the synchrotron - a machine to accelerate charged particles to higher energies than the classic cyclotron. However, his suggestion could not anticipate the essential discovery of phase stability.
Back in Birmingham after the war, Oliphant completed the Nuffield cyclotron and pushed for an ambitious 1 GeV proton synchrotron, the most powerful particle accelerator outside the US. This was not commissioned until after he returned to Australia in 1950 to become founding director of the research School of Physical Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra, a post he held until 1963. However, his attempts to put Australia on a "big science" footing did not meet with success. He helped to found the Australian Academy of Science and served as its first president. From 1971 until 1976 he served as governor of South Australia. In his home country he was revered for his accomplishments but had a reputation for outspoken views.
Abraham Pais 1918-2000
Abraham Pais, eminent physicist and meticulous writer, died in Copenhagen on 28 July. The 20th century was characterized by tremendous strife and political upheavals on one hand, and by unprecedented progress in science and technology on the other. Pais influenced the latter and was himself deeply influenced by the former. In his autobiography A Tale of Two Continents (1997 Oxford), he concluded: "We do not know where we are going, nor even where we ought to be going."
Pais was born in Amsterdam into a Sephardic Jewish family whose special traditions and roots went back over many centuries. This background remained a force throughout his life. After initial studies in Amsterdam, and with mathematical physics aspirations, he moved to George Uhlenbeck's school in Utrecht. Here he encountered several leading European physicists, including Léon Rosenfeld, and made regular pilgrimages to Leiden for discussions with quantum theory pioneer Hendrik Kramers.
In 1940 the Netherlands were occupied and the German administration imposed 14 July 1941 as the deadline for Jewish students to be able to earn a doctorate. Rosenfeld had asked Pais to cast meson theory in terms of projective relativity. The highly motivated student succeeded with five days to spare. Pais claims that his intense focus on this work isolated him from the calamitous events going on all around. After trying to embark on a scientific career under impossible circumstances, in 1943 he went into hiding to avoid deportation. Two years later he was arrested, and then released, indirectly because of a plea that Kramers had written to Heisenberg.
Returning to science post-war, Pais soon received offers from Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen and from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. In 1946 he moved to Copenhagen where he and Christian Møller, working on the decays of newly discovered particles, coined the word "lepton". He also worked with Bohr on contemporary quantum issues.
In 1946 Pais took up a position at Princeton IAS at a time when a wind of change was blowing through quantum field theory. In 1947 he attended the famous Shelter Island conference, which marked the birth of modern quantum electrodynamics.
After continued forays into field theory, the mysteries of the newly discovered particles began to intrigue him. In 1951 he was the one who showed that the new particles (subsequently called "strange") had always to be produced in pairs - a phenomenon that came to be called "associated production". Working with Murray Gell-Mann, who was also intrigued by the plethora of new particles, he looked at their possible classifications. This work led to their suggestion that mixtures of neutral kaon states could have different symmetry properties, and therefore decay in different ways. This set the scene for the subsequent discovery of CP violation. Continuing with neutral kaons, in 1955 Pais, now working with Oreste Piccioni, pointed out the possibility of "regeneration", one of the most bizarre quantum phenomena.
Pais became a naturalized US citizen in 1954. In 1963 he moved to Rockefeller University, New York City, where he immediately became active in attempts to extend the pattern of particle symmetries.
In 1972 a chance invitation to write a review article launched him on an entirely new career as a writer. Benefiting from widespread contacts made during his research career, his subsequent output was prolific: besides numerous contributions to anthologies and festschrifts, it began with the classic 1982 Einstein biography Subtle is the Lord (Pais got to know Einstein well at Princeton) and continued with the informative Inward Bound: of Matter and Forces in the Physical World (1986); then another classic, Niels Bohr's Times, in Physics, Philosophy and Polity (1991); an autobiography, A Tale of Two Continents: a Physicist's Life in a Turbulent World (1997); a second Einstein volume, Einstein Lived Here (1994); and, most recently, The Genius of Science: a Portrait Gallery of 20th-Century Physicists (2000).
Pais received major awards in the US and in the Netherlands
for both his physics and his writing.
The left-handed
cellist
In his autobiography A Tale of Two Continents: a
Physicist's Life in a Turbulent World (1997), Abraham Pais writes of how
he wrote his 1986 masterpiece Inward Bound: of Matter and Forces in
the Physical World.
"Selecting pictures for Inward Bound caused me some problems. The book deals with so many personalities...which to choose? I simply could not make up my mind...as a result the book has no pictures at all. Except for one on the dust jacket. One day I received my copy of the CERN Courier, and saw...the picture I had been vaguely looking for."
John Thresher 1929-2000
Former CERN research director John Thresher died suddenly on 25 August. South African by birth, he obtained his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at Cape Town and his DPhil at Oxford in 1956, where he had won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. He started his career at the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell, and then spent two years at the Berkeley Bevatron before returning to the UK in 1963, joining what is now the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL).
At RAL, with Paul Murphy and Phil Duke, Thresher formed a counter group that initiated a series of comprehensive and successful measurements of pion-proton elastic and charge exchange scattering. It was largely for this work that he (together with Paul Murphy) received the Rutherford medal of the Institute of Physics in 1980.
Thresher's association with CERN began in 1968 when he and his group worked on a CP violation experiment at the Proton Synchrotron and later at the SPS on a programme of measurements in the hyperon beam. In 1975 he became head of RAL's High Energy Physics Division and in 1981 associate director for particle physics. This key position involved coordinating all UK particle physics experiments funded and supported through RAL.
From 1986 to 1991, Thresher was CERN director of research with responsibility for the new LEP experimental programme. All of the LEP experiments owe a great debt to him for his tireless support and encouragement both before and after LEP start-up in 1989. He retired in 1992.
Thresher will be remembered by his friends
and colleagues worldwide for his drive, dedication, enthusiasm, experimental
skill and enormous capacity for work. He delighted in the success of his
colleagues, especially the younger ones, and fostered many of their careers.
He never lost his sense of wonder at the beautiful world we live in and that
he helped so signally to understand better, both as an active researcher and
as a wise and highly effective administrator. He will be missed but not
forgotten.
George Kalmus.
James Hamilton 1918-2000
Born in Sligo, Ireland, James Hamilton got his MSc at Queen's University, Belfast, on the eve of the Second World War. He received his PhD from Manchester in 1948 and then became university lecturer in mathematics and fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge (1950-1960). He was professor of physics at University College, London, from 1960 until 1964, before joining the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA) in Copenhagen.
As NORDITA professor of elementary particle physics, Hamilton shaped the institute's research in the field during a crucial period and trained a whole generation of young Nordic physicists. During a period before his retirement at the end of 1985, he also served as NORDITA director. He spent an active retirement in Cambridge, continuing with his research and frequently visiting the university.
After early work on problems related to the interaction of radiation with atoms, Hamilton turned to high-energy physics and produced the well known treatise The Theory of Elementary Particles (1959 Oxford). His interests centred on S-matrix theory and he had a leading role in the efforts to understand the structure of resonances and scattering amplitudes using unitarity and analyticity. Some of his results are summarized in his book with B Tromborg, Partial Wave Amplitudes and Resonance Poles (1972 Oxford).
Hamilton's most important contribution was probably the development of sophisticated techniques for making very precise amplitude analyses of low-energy hadronic interactions, notably of the pion-nucleon interaction. Here, using dispersion relations among other tools, he and his collaborators were able to improve on the art of phase shift analysis, thereby helping to pave the way to a better understanding of reaction mechanisms and crucial concepts such as Finite Energy Sum Rules and Dolen-Horn-Schmidt duality. His insistence on such sophisticated analysis formed a school that he took with him to Scandinavia and NORDITA. He strongly cared for the young Nordic fellows whom he guided.
Hamilton had a life-long interest in mathematical
aspects of elementary particle physics and questions related to causality. He
continued to work on these questions during his retirement and published the
book Aharonov-Bohm and other Cyclic Phenomena (1997 Springer) just a
few years before his death. Hamilton left an important legacy in elementary
particle physics. His friendly spirit will be warmly remembered, particularly
by his students and colleagues in the Nordic countries and in the
UK.
Paul Hoyer, NORDITA, and Jens Lyng Petersen, Niels Bohr
Institute.
Wolfgang Koch 1933-2000
DESY physicist Wolfgang Koch died suddenly on 26 June at the age of 67. He was best known for his outstanding mastery of spin analysis in hadronic reactions. His lectures at the Herceg Novi Easter School in 1964 and at CERN in spring 1965 are still, more than 35 years later, used by students analysing hadronic final states in experiments at HERA and at LEP. In the DESY library they have updated his article by introducing the new names of particles - the only thing that had to be changed in these decades.
Koch studied physics at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, where his 1957 diploma thesis was a study of the ferroelectric properties of polycrystalline barium titanate. He then went to Bern to work in the institute of F G Houtermans, where he received his PhD in 1959 and stayed for two more years, studying the interaction of negative K-mesons in photoemulsions.
Coming to CERN in 1961, he continued his work with kaons, this time with the 1 m heavy liquid bubble chamber. He joined the CERN/MPI-Munich collaboration as a founding member and was offered a senior position at the Max Planck Institute. The work culminated in the high statistics study of p-p producing p-p+n at 17 GeV/c (1974). The analysis employed the angular distribution moments of the two-pion system, outlined in his 1964 lectures. The 1974 publication is still a cornerstone for hadron spectroscopy.
In 1973 Koch transferred to DESY as Leitender Wissenschaftler (leading scientist). He worked successively on the DASP, TASSO, Crystal Ball and ZEUS experiments until retiring in 1998. These experiments discovered the chi charmonium states (confirming experimentally the charm hypothesis) in 1975, the gluon in three-jet events in 1979 and bottomium spectroscopy in 1983. His analysis of TASSO data showed that the momentum distribution of charged particles in a jet can be used to measure the charge of the partons. A long-range correlation between the two jets in electron-positron annihilation could be observed. For ZEUS, together with PhD students, he studied the exclusive photo-production of vector mesons and their spin alignment and helped to introduce the hadron-electron separator.
His clever programs, for example for the calculation of thrust, have inspired students. His many lectures and seminars at schools and conferences were brilliant, very critical and of extreme clarity, reflecting his deep understanding. We have all profited from his presentations and from many discussions with him.
Koch also assumed various responsibilities in the DESY laboratory with the same care that we knew from him in physics. He was chairman of the Wissenschaftliche Ausschuss (scientific committee) and of the Computer Users Committee (while there was a lack of computing time) and organized the weekly physics seminars. In 1975 he had a serious heart attack and he had several operations in the ensuing years.
Physics has lost a person who made visible and
important contributions. Those who worked with him will miss a friend who
could always be relied on to give good advice.
Hans Bienlein,
DESY.
Tom Ypsilantis 1928-2000
Detector virtuoso Tom Ypsilantis died in Geneva on 16 August. Born in 1928 into a Greek family living in Salt Lake City, he studied physics at Berkeley where he obtained his master's degree and then became a graduate student of Emilio Segrè. Together with Owen Chamberlain and Clyde Wiegand, he joined the historic 1955 experiment at the new Bevatron that observed the first antiprotons. It was the subject of his PhD thesis.
After postdoctoral positions in the US and after playing a pioneer role in teaching modern physics in Greece, he came to CERN in 1968 and met Jacques Séguinot. This was the origin of a lifelong friendship and, at the same time, of a series of proposals and realizations of innovative particle detectors. Ypsilantis was a most inventive physicist, always ready to discuss his ideas and to share them with others. His imagination was conceiving instruments that, being well in advance of their time, were often difficult to construct, and here Séguinot had a lot to contribute. Ypsilantis and Séguinot, working in Max Ferro-Luzzi's group, proposed the technique later named Ring Imaging Cherenkov (RICH) counter. Together with Tord Ekelöf they introduced this technique for high-energy physics: the first large-scale application was for the DELPHI experiment at LEP. More recently they worked in the framework of the LAA Project on noble-liquid calorimetry and on a very large water neutrino detector based of the fast-RICH technique. The "AquaRICH" was described by Ypsilantis as "a Superkamiokande with spectacles". He also made a major contribution to the LHCb experiment at CERN.
His
scientific goal was the invention and construction of detectors capable of
opening new avenues in experimental particle physics. He was so
knowledgeable in this field that in 1995 he became editor of Nuclear
Instruments and Methods. To realize his dreams, he never considered
personal interests or, even less, career advancement. Thus, over the years he
was associated with CERN, Ecole Polytechnique, Collège de France and
recently, INFN. At times he was even without a position and a salary, but still
he continued to work as ever. He will be sadly missed by the high-energy
physics community.
His friends.
The Ypsilantis
connection
Tom Ypsilantis came from a distinguished family. In
1821, Prince Alexander Ypsilantis, a general in the Russian army, led a
charge across the Danube against the Ottoman Turks. It was the beginning of
Greek independence.
Hendrik Casimir 1909-2000
Although he spent much of his professional life in industry, Hendrik Casimir was one of the great Dutch theoretical physicists. Graduating from Leiden in 1928, he researched at Leiden (with Paul Ehrenfest), Copenhagen (Niels Bohr) and Zürich (Wolfgang Pauli), before returning to Leiden in 1933 at Ehrenfest's insistence. When Ehrenfest committed suicide in 1933, Casimir acted as head of Leiden theoretical physics until the arrival of Hendrik Kramers.
In 1938, Casimir was a visiting lecturer in Utrecht while George Uhlenbeck was visiting Columbia. At Utrecht his pupils included Abraham Pais (see above), who talked of "lucid lectures". In 1946 he moved to the Philips research laboratory in Eindhoven. His many physics contributions include the elucidation of mathematical operators for handling the quantum mechanics of rotations (the Casimir Operator) and predicting the quantum mechanical attraction between closely spaced conducting plates (the Casimir Effect). He helped found the European Physical Society and became its president in 1972. In 1979 he was one of the key speakers at CERN's 25th anniversary celebrations.