Tran Thanh Van celebrates 65th birthday at Collège de France
The Collège de France held a two-day multidisciplinary conference on 4-5 October to celebrate the 65th birthday of Tran Thanh Van. Some 250 people came to Paris to pay tribute to the man who founded the famous Rencontres de Moriond winter meetings, the Rencontres de Blois and the Rencontres de Vietnam.
Following the Moriond tradition, the speakers were not only established scientists (including several Nobel laureates), but also a number of people at the beginning of their careers.
The Moriond meetings have taken their place alongside the major summer conferences as a place to present new results. Since they began in 1966, they have taken place annually in the French Alps. In launching the series, Tran Thanh Van had two goals in mind. One was to facilitate contacts between theoretical and experimental particle physicists by bringing them together, away from their laboratories, and providing them with a forum for discussions. The second was to alleviate the psychological barrier that tends to exist between young researchers and their senior colleagues. In the Moriond forum, young physicists are encouraged to present their work.
The Moriond spirit has percolated through the meetings, which have proliferated in both number and subject. There are now several Moriond meetings each year. Among the recurrent themes are particle physics, cosmology, astrophysics, condensed-matter physics and biology. Participants come from all over the world, and the "curtains" that have in the past separated nations have never been present at Moriond.
The conference highlighted the invaluable services rendered to science and society by Tran Thanh Van and his wife Kim. CERN Courier joins the participants in wishing both Tran Thanh Van and the Rencontres de Moriond many happy returns. Conference details are at http://events.lal.in2p3.fr/conferences/bandf/.
Martin Deutsch 1917 – 2002
Martin Deutsch, professor of physics at MIT, died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 16 August. Born in Vienna (where he studied at the same real gymnasium as Victor Weisskopf), he emigrated to the US in 1935. He did his graduate work at MIT, where he subsequently spent his whole professional life, except for two years of work at Los Alamos during the war.
Deutsch had a great flair for interesting experiments and for instrumentation. He was the physicist who first realized the importance of Kallmann's discovery of organic scintillators (1947) and introduced their use in the US. With these means, he performed many nuclear spectroscopy experiments that had been previously almost impossible. In 1951, he discovered positronium, the "ultimate atom", consisting of a bound electron-positron system. Between 1951 and 1954, he and his associates measured the most important properties of its ground state, namely its hyperfine splitting (the singlet-triplet energy difference) and the lifetime of the triplet state. That splitting, about twice as large as one would conclude from naïve arguments, is one of the most striking manifestations of quantum electrodynamics. It is fair to say that Deutsch, in a remarkable outburst of creative energy, largely cleaned up the field. Several decades passed before anything substantially new was learned about positronium.
After positronium, Deutsch switched to particle physics, in particular to work at the Cambridge electron accelerator. This field did not quite correspond to his personal style, as he was used to doing everything down to the last detail with his own hands. Nevertheless, he remained active throughout his later years, participating in the preparation and set-up of the BOREXINO solar neutrino experiment in the Gran Sasso laboratory.
Deutsch was a great teacher, both in the classroom and as a thesis advisor. Among his many students was the Nobel laureate Henry Kendall. He was also a sharp debater, mixing incisive criticism with Viennese charm. He is survived by his wife, Suzanne, and two sons.
V L Telegdi.
John Gunn 1916 - 2002
John Gunn died on 26 July, aged 85. For many years he was a significant influence on British particle and nuclear physics, and its involvement in CERN.
From the age of 32, in 1949, Gunn held a professorial chair in theoretical physics at Glasgow University. During the early 1950s, three British universities were constructing particle accelerators in emulation of developments in the US; one of these was an electron synchroton in Glasgow. Late on the scene, these machines never quite fulfilled the hopes of their proponents. However, they led to the more timely construction in the early 1960s of higher-energy accelerators - a proton machine at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and an electron synchroton at Daresbury in the north of England. Gunn took a notable part in the countrywide planning that led to these developments, and most significantly in that of the electron synchroton. The synchroton radiation from it later proved to have important applications in many other areas of science.
It was perhaps a second best for Gunn that the electron accelerator was sited in the north of England rather than in Scotland, but he and his experimental colleague Philip Dee (the initiator of the 1950s Glasgow synchroton) were successful in getting finance to build a linear electron accelerator for nuclear physics research sited near Glasgow. Initially led by George Bishop, this had a long and successful research life.
Gunn's influence continued with his appointment to the UK Science Research Council (SRC) from 1968 to 1972. At that time the question of building a much higher-energy European proton accelerator at CERN had arisen. The SRC Nuclear Physics Board oversaw both nuclear and particle physics in the UK, and advice to the government on CERN came largely from the chairman of that board and the SRC. Gunn was the chairman at the time the UK government decided that Britain should join the new CERN project.
From 1973 to 1981 Gunn was a member of the University Grants Committee (UGC), the main financier of UK universities. Here he was a forceful advocate of the so-called "dual support system", which meant that both the UGC and the SRC should directly support scientific research in the universities. Here he and others were responsible for beneficial reformation in scientific (and other) research grants from the UGC.
In the 1960s, no longer very active in hands-on physics research himself, Gunn was able to use his administrative position at Glasgow University to found three theoretical physics research groups - particle, nuclear and plasma - in the physics department.
Humorously communicative, and helpful through his wide experience, his company was much appreciated by his friends and acquaintances in many institutions.
Gordon Moorehouse.