Jacques Prentki 1920–2009
The theoretician Jacques Prentki, a major figure of CERN, passed away on 29 November 2009 in his 90th year.
Jacques Prentki arrived at CERN in 1955 and remained until the end, continuing to visit the laboratory three times a week after his retirement. He had a very eventful life, with many tragic episodes that he overcame.
Born in Lyon of a Polish mother, Jacques did not often see his father, who was working in the Congo. When his father died in 1939, his mother, who had no resources, decided to return to Poland. As a result, Jacques was in Warsaw when the Germans occupied the city. Risking his life, he followed the courses at the clandestine university. Once, he was picked up in the street in a round-up by the German police who wanted to “test" a new camp. On the way to the camp, on a curve where the train slowed down, he jumped out, saving his life.
After the war, Jacques took up physics in Lublin and then in Warsaw. In 1947 he moved to Paris where he entered the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, first working at the Institut Henri Poincaré and later at Ecole Polytechnique. It was there that he made friends for life, such as Philippe Meyer, Pierrette Benoist, Claude and Nadine Marty, Anatole Abragam, Jean Yoccoz, and Bernard D’Espagnat. All attended the Séminaire Proca, one of the rare places where modern physics was studied at the time. It was during this period that Jacques returned to Poland to visit his mother and was arrested as a spy from the West. A famous biologist, who had been his protector during the war, succeeded in convincing the police to send him back to Paris. It is there that he met his wife Marysia and together they had two sons, Marc and Pierre – who, unfortunately, is no longer with us.
In 1955, a year after the foundation of CERN, Jacques moved to Geneva and became the second member of the theory division, the first being D’Espagnat. Jacques acted as a link between successive division leaders, Bruno Ferretti, Markus Fierz and Léon Van Hove, before himself becoming a revered division leader during two periods, from 1967 to 1970 and from 1975 to 1982. He became a French citizen but kept his attachment to Poland as well as to France, where he was born. In parallel to his functions at CERN, he was professor at Collège de France from 1964 to 1983, where he gave a series of lectures beautifully calligraphed by Louis Jauneau.
Jacques made very important contributions, first in the field of nucleon and meson interactions and nuclear physics, then in the search for symmetries in elementary particles and in weak interactions. At CERN, D’Espagnat was his main collaborator in the beginning, but he also had other very illustrious collaborators, including Abdus Salam and Martinus Veltman. Jacques also had strong contacts with experimentalists, some of them being close friends, such as Charles Peyrou, Georges Charpak and Pierre Lehmann. At the time of CERN’s major discovery of neutral currents, Paul Musset visited him almost every day, seeking advice.
Jacques had a very critical mind and often debated with friends such as Wladimir Glaser for the fun of it, even changing sides once he thought he had won an argument. This probably saved his life when, on a train in Poland, someone asked him: “Don’t you think that the communist regime is disgusting?" He replied: “No! Not at all!". Of course the person was a provocateur. Many theoreticians appreciated this critical sense and, before publishing their work, submitted it to Jacques. In this way they saved themselves the trouble of publishing a wrong or dubious result.
Jacques was a person with an immense interest in everything cultural: artistic, literary, historical, musical and, naturally, scientific. He was also a man with an extremely warm personality, welcoming and helpful with everyone, irrespective of their social level; he was also very modest. At CERN and elsewhere in the world, including in particular France and Poland, we will all deeply miss Jacques.
His friends at CERN