White and male...so goes physics

Loraine Decherd

"We Know Physics is Largely White and Male, But Exactly How White and Male is Still Striking"

Most current physics students will likely never have an African American physics teacher, says a new survey

by

Shannon Palus

July 14th, 2014

smithsonian.com

In the entire United States, of the thousands and thousands of college physics and astronomy faculty, only 75 are African American or Hispanic women, says the American Institute of Physics. According to a new survey by the AIP, female racial minorities make up less than 1% of the 9,050 physics faculty members in the country.

According to the new survey data, just 2.1% of physics faculty in the country are African American and 3.2% Hispanic. Those values come nowhere near the representation of those groups in the general population, where 13% of Americans are black and 17% Hispanic. The overwhelming majority--79.2%--of physics faculty are white. “[M]ost physics students will never see a black faculty member,” says the AIP report. And the situation doesn't look set to change: the number of African American faculty members has flatlined since 2000.

Last year, a separate report from the American Institute of Physics found that women aren't doing any better. They found that the representation of women in physics is still incredibly low. But unlike the lack of movement in physics' racial diversity, the outlook for women is slightly more optimistic: while 14% of all faculty members are female, more than 25% of the new hires in 2010 were female.

Minority women in science “have traditionally been excluded because of biases related to both their race or ethnicity and gender, constituting a double bind,” explains a 2005 report from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Maleness and whiteness, even separated, hijack diversity efforts says the AAAS: “[W]omen's science organizations are overwhelmingly white, and the minority science organizations, overwhelmingly male.”
The number of staff on the payroll, though, is only part of the picture, says the AIP:

    Counting numbers of faculty members cannot tell us about the everyday experiences and workplace environments of academic physicists. It also does not tell us about possible inequities in salaries and in promotion and tenure rates.

As a 2012 study showed, biases are often unconsciousness. In their study, the researchers found that both female and male faculty members were less likely to hire an "applicant" for a lab position when the resume had a female name at the top.

The roots of bias run deep, and in some part stem from the idea that physics is a select club, the exclusive realm of brilliant, excentric white men: “The image of Einstein, with his shock of white hair and seemingly superhuman intellectual accomplishments, is not one that most people would gravitate toward nor view as achievable,” says a 2005 International Conference on Women in Physics presentation. A 2006 American Physical Society presentation expands: “And for African American Women this image is less attainable than for most, for we have less in common with him than the majority of the physics community.”

We revere people like Einstein, Newton, Hawking and others because their intellectual pursuits broke the mold of the time--their thinking expanded our knowledge of the universe and helped us to understand our place in it.

Yet just like for these great white men, new ideas often come from new ways of thinking. The different perspectives and experiences of those who--by nature of their gender or skin color--have tred a different path through life should be valuable to all people who care about scientific discovery. Not just because diverse ways of thinking could set the stage for new scientific ideas but because, at its heart, physics explores the underpinnings of the universe, and the keys to the cosmos should be accessible to everyone.

There are exceptions...

University of Texas

Deceased--John King

John King
1925 to July 6th, 2014

"John King, professor emeritus of physics, dies at 88"

Innovative researcher and educator was a champion of attacking science problems with “ferocious vigor.”

by

Teresa Lynne Hill

July 7th, 2014

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Professor emeritus John G. King ’50, PhD ‘53, an experimental physicist, transformative physics educator, and leader of the MIT Molecular Beams Laboratory in the Research Laboratory for Electronics for 42 years, died on June 15 at his summer house in Wellfleet, Mass. A longtime resident of Cambridge, King was 88. The cause of death was congestive heart and renal failure.

“John was an inspiring teacher and experimentalist. His educational passion was creating hands-on experiments built from ordinary parts you can find at any hardware store, what he lovingly called ‘mulch,’” said MIT senior lecturer in physics, and former King student, Peter Dourmashkin ’76 (physics), ’78 (math), PhD ‘84. “He was MITx before MITx.”

King was born in London and educated in France, Switzerland, and the United States. He came to MIT as an undergraduate in 1943 and completed his undergraduate studies in physics following war service for the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and the Harvard Underwater Sound Lab. He joined the MIT physics faculty in 1953. King was named the Francis L. Friedman Professor of Physics in 1974 and retired from MIT in 1996.

King was renowned for his null experiments — those designed to test fundamental principles. He helped develop the atomic clock and invented the molecular microscope. King’s best-known experiment, still found on the first page of most electricity and magnetism textbooks, is the measurement of the charge magnitude equality of the electron and the proton, and the neutrality of the neutron to a 10-20 of an electron charge. King also conceived an imaginative experiment, prompted by cosmological ideas, to set a hard limit on the possibility that matter, over cosmological time, begets new matter, a version of what was once called the steady state cosmology.

Building atomic and molecular beam research

Professor of physics emeritus Rainer Weiss ’55, PhD ’62 was a colleague of King throughout his student and faculty years at MIT and considers him to be “one of the most creative and imaginative experimental physicists of his generation.” Both physicists were students of Jerrold Zacharias, who began the Molecular Beam Laboratory at MIT shortly after World War II. Molecular beam experiments measure the properties of individual atoms in a vacuum unperturbed by interactions with other molecules. The technique provides precise and universally reproducible values for the energy levels and other parameters of these quantized systems. King began his work in molecular beams by pioneering new methods to measure the charge and current distributions in the nuclei of the halogens. He discovered the magnetic octupole moment of the common isotope of iodine.

During his years as director and principal investigator of the Molecular Beam Laboratory, King transformed the research conducted there. It branched into molecular beam techniques applied to collective body physics, cosmology, and biophysics. More than 100 undergraduate and 25 doctoral students obtained their degrees working on these topics during King’s tenure at the laboratory.

At a 2000 gathering to celebrate King’s career, Fred Dylla ’71, SM ’71, PhD ’75 described working in the Molecular Beams Lab as “getting your hands dirty and being surrounded by brilliant students who were around all the time.” Dylla is currently executive director and CEO of the American Institute of Physics (AIP), a nonprofit umbrella organization for 10 scientific societies that publishes scientific journals and provides information-based products and services.

Applying atomic beam techniques to biophysics, King invented a molecular microscope using water molecules rather than light as the illuminating projectile. His idea was to map the locations where water would evaporate or stick on small biological samples such as cells with biologically interesting spatial resolution. Working models of the device were developed for some biology labs, though the technique has yet to be widely adopted. 

When inventions such as the molecular microscope were not as successful as he had hoped, King attributed the failure to insufficient effort in combining enough money and skilled personnel. Achieving this winning combination required, in his view, an attack on the problem with “ferocious vigor.” Moderate vigor was not enough.

Reinventing physics education

Dissatisfied with the lab exercises used in mid-century physics pedagogy, King worked tirelessly on innovative methods that stressed hands-on learning and independent thinking. In 1966, he initiated the Project Lab, in which students developed their own open-ended research projects. His belief that anyone could “find something interesting to study about any mundane effect” reflects the independent spirit of King’s own early and eclectic science education. He told his students that “the best way to understand your apparatus is to build it.”

As an adviser, King quickly became a project participant. Charles H. Holbrow, professor of physics emeritus at Colgate University and currently a lecturer at MIT, recalled that King had “the wonderful gift of seeing physics in everyday phenomena and turning these into research projects.” Some 2,000 MIT undergraduates experienced Project Lab.

Approached by a student seeking a thesis experiment or a colleague with an idea, King would, before long, be sketching ideas on the backs of envelopes, estimating orders of magnitude, and offering ideas on how to build and run the experiment.  Fred Dylla’s own undergraduate thesis with King was designed to determine the difference in charge between an electron and a proton. Still considered a highly sensitive measurement, the experiment utilized $20 worth of equipment.

A King student from his MIT sophomore year through graduate school, Samuel A. Cohen, director of the Program in Plasma Science and Technology at Princeton University, learned how to operate a drill press and to build his own electron multipliers. At the same time, he was being influenced by King’s ideas. He says, “John’s mind kept jumping decades ahead, from atomic beams to superfluid He3 to molecular microscopy — always decades ahead.”

King believed that an understanding of fundamental science concepts should extend beyond physics course curricula. For years he championed the creation of a “Corridor Lab.” Never entirely realized at MIT (a couple of experiments now grace the Infinite Corridor), Corridor Lab would have placed 100 experiments, each demonstrating a scientific principle, along the miles of MIT hallways. Anyone passing could interact with an apparatus; faculty members could send students to experiment with them; and other departments could participate. King envisioned similar modules in a wide range of venues to further public understanding of science.

With other educators in the late 1950s and ‘60s, King worked on the revitalization of high school physics, following the startling realization on the part of Zacharias that “while students had taken physics, they didn’t understand anything.” When the 1957 launching of Sputnik spurred a nation-wide alarm and allocation of money to improve science teaching, King became deeply involved. In cooperation with the influential Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC), he produced — and acted in —eight physics movies, including “Times and Clocks,” “Interference with Photons,” “Size of Atoms from an Atomic Beam Experiment,” and “Velocity of Atoms.” One of the films featured King demonstrating a principle of physics by driving one of the Bugatti automobiles he had meticulously restored down the Massachusetts Turnpike at high speed.

A lengthy 2009 interview for the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics shows King’s ongoing interest in science as a basis for a healthy and rewarding intellectual life. Speculating on the significance of the earliest point on the educational spectrum, he proposed that each child at birth be equipped with a kit of simple tools (balls, funnels, etc.) designed to stimulate a life of joyful investigation. A more advanced set of gear would be universally furnished at age six.

A life of invention

Family, friends, and colleagues paint a portrait of an energetic, curious, and engaging man who applied these characteristics equally to his intellectual, professional, and personal lives. King’s wife, Jane Williams, recalls him as “interesting, imaginative, ingenious and lots of fun.” In addition to his enthusiasm for physics and the value of science as the basis for understanding the world around us, she says, he was throughout his life “passionate about classical music, poetry, and any kind of dictionary. Since his early years were spent in France, he cared about things French, including French wines.”

King’s French stepfather introduced him to the tinkering that informed much of his approach to science, especially science teaching. As a high school student at Phillips Exeter Academy, he had his own laboratory. In life, as in science, he remained a relentless tinkerer, once rebuilding a bus, complete with bunks, to transport his large family to the farm in Woolwich, Maine, where he and his first wife, Elizabeth, lived for many years. She and several of their eight children still live in or around Woolwich.

King was the recipient of many honors and awards for contributions to physics and physics education. These include the Alfred P. Sloan Award (1956), the AAPT Robert Millikan Medal (1965), the E. Harris Harbison Award (1971), and the Oersted Medal (2000), the most prestigious award of the American Association of Physics Teachers. His numerous publications include co-authorship with Paul Gluck of Jerusalem of “Physics Project Labs,” (Oxford University Press) to be published in fall 2014.

In addition to his wife, King is survived by a daughter, Martha, and sons Andrew, James, Charles, David, Benjamin, and Matthew; granddaughters Sara, Katy, and Lily; stepchildren Cynthia, David, Catherine, and Nicholas; and eight stepgrandchildren. His oldest son Alan predeceased him.

A memorial service will take place at MIT in October.

John G. King [Wikipedia]

Schrödinger’s Cat's perspective by Sarah Donner

Krypton Radio...

We’ve spent decades wondering whether the cat in the box was dead, or alive, or how it could be both at once. The biggest problem, according to geek chanteuse Sarah Donner, is that in all this time nobody has bothered to ask the cat what it thought.

Sarah has a clear bright voice, a charming presence, and that so-necessary sense of humor that makes each of her songs a delight. This song, called The Rebuttal of Schrödinger’s Cat  was filmed entirely on location at the Princeton Plasma Physics Library. And it’s brilliant.

What is color?...the "Physics Girl" knows

"Meet ‘The Physics Girl’, Winner of Alan Alda’s “What is Color?” Video Contest"

by

Joanne Manaster

June 9th, 2014

Scientific American

Imagine you are a 5th grader while watching this video. Would you love it?

If it caught your interest, as it did mine, you are in good company. This is the winning entry for the 2014 Flame Challenge put on by Alan Alda and the Center for Communicating Science. The challenge this year was for someone to explain “What is color?” so that a 5th grader would understand.

The competition is judged by 27,000 5th graders from around the world and Dianna Cowern AKA +Physics Girl captured their attention with her snappy, fun video full of comedic energy. I reached out to Dianna and asked her a few questions about her deserving-to-win video AND a few other things about her road to physics outreach.

Looking at your youtube page, I notice that you began airing videos about two years ago, trying to answer “What can you do with a Physics degree?” What made you decide to do videos in the first place?

The “Science Dating Show” started it all! My senior project in high school was a video podcast where three contestants would compete for a date with the host by proving to be the most scientifically literate. I think the idea still has promise! (joking) But it did spark my interest in video editing. And the motivation for the show applies to what I do now – take a popular topic and sneak in some science. Though now, I am not so subtle with the science.

Fast forward four years through college, I had just graduated with a degree in physics. I was not sure what I wanted to do. I decided to have some fun with the career uncertainty many recent graduates face and made a “101 things to do with a physics degree” video. It was pretty silly, and was meant for my friends and family. But the videos I made subsequently got more attention than I had imagined (we’re talking 10s of views!), especially on topics related to physics. It was at that point I thought I could possibly make something, albeit small, of my channel in the realm of science communication and education.

Your winning video format is quite a departure from your initial video format. I love the creative way you demonstrated the concept of color. It is clear you were thinking of your target audience of 5th graders as you designed this. Did you script the entire video yourself? Did you have a team assisting you? Tell us a bit about how you went about creating this video and your transition to this new video presentation style.

The creation process was more stressful than I had hoped. I was in Ireland when I got an email about the competition. I made the decision to enter on the plane ride back, which meant I had four days until the deadline. It was a rushed process of writing, filming and editing, and my editing file became corrupted the day of the deadline. It kept crashing and deleting portions of the video which I had to redo multiple times. I thought I was not going to make it!

Also, thank you for the compliment! It was definitely a different style from my other videos. In past videos, I made do with what resources I had—namely a black sheet, a camera, and my room. But for the Flame Challenge, I wanted to try something much more colorful. The only thing I needed was a cameraman. A friend of mine was nice enough to stand and press record as I pranced around the neighborhood in ridiculous outfits, ran repeatedly into my car, and frantically shouted filming directions. Thinking back on it, this video was so much fun to make.

Since your physics degree is what brought you to video creation, please tell us about your path to physics and then to physics outreach.

I loved physics in high school. I had two fantastic teachers who lit the flame with lessons on neutron stars, launching cars – all the cool stuff. So when I got to MIT I decided to take the hardest physics class, or as it was affectionally nicknamed, “physics for masochists.” I passed my first physics exam by only a few points, with a score of 35%. Because that class challenged me so much and taught me to think about the world in a whole new way, I was hooked. And I was doing much better than a 35 by the end of the class.

As for physics outreach, it started as way to give back to kids. I participated in Physics Nights where the undergraduate physics students would do live physics demos at local elementary. It was not until Physics Girl that I became more involved in outreach. I was hired as an outreach coordinator by my former professor, Adam Burgasser (the same professor from the masochistic physics class!) who is now at UCSD. And since then have also started working at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center as a science educator. I hope to spark curiosity in young minds so that one day, that curiosity may turn into a science career.

My readers may know that my daughter is studying physics in the College of Engineering at UIUC. This means she’s a rare breed. What do you think are the unique challenges for women in physics?

The most obvious challenge is simply that physics is hard (but extremely rewarding)! So, congratulations to your daughter for choosing it. There are more subtle challenges, though. Showing our feminine side is something I think a lot of women in physics struggle with. I felt very self-conscious walking through the physics halls to meet with my advisor wearing a girly dress. I tried to stand confidently, but I could not help feeling like I was being judged for looking so girly. I toned down makeup, jewelry, and style when I was in the physics department at MIT which seems so silly now. I should have just been myself. Then there are the tougher challenges. I would say the male-dominated physics culture is uncomfortable for many women. There is pressure to compete with, work with, and work for male physicists of very different demeanors and advising styles.

Sometimes the internet is unkind to women (Emily Graslie addressed this in her video “Where My Ladies At?”).  How do you deal with comments, etc?

I have received my fair share of comments that are, let’s say, unrelated to physics. The most common is about the size of my eyes, like my favorite, “baby your eyes are big.. like a bugs life or cartoon.” There have been comments about looking pregnant, marriage proposals, and some “creative”, explicit language. I think you have to have a sense of humor about the harsh comments. For me, laughing at explicit comments is much more productive than getting mad every time. If the comments are negative, yet have nothing constructive to offer, they are easy to ignore. Otherwise, I do take into consideration what I consider useful criticism.

Thank you, Physics Girl, for your enthusiastic videos and for being a voice of women in science! We’ll be looking forward to many more of your informative creations ahead!

Ununseptium...element #117

"Scientists Confirm The Existence Of Element 117"

by

Alex Knapp

May 3rd, 2014

Forbes

The official Periodic Table of the Elements is one step closer to adding element 117 to its ranks. That’s thanks to an international team of scientists that was able to successfully create several atoms of element 117, which is currently known as Ununseptium until it’s given an official name.

The paper for this experiment has been published in Physical Review Letters.

Element 117 was first created in a joint collaboration between American and Russian scientists back in 2010. However, before an element can be officially added to the Periodic Table of Elements, its discovery must be independently confirmed.

Ununseptium, like many superheavy elements near the end of the periodic table, is incredibly unstable, existing only for fractions of a second before decaying into other elements. In fact, scientists didn’t actually observe any atoms of element 117 – its existence was confirmed by its decay. Indeed, the elements that 117 decays to themselves decay. This can be of unique interest to scientists, though, who in the process of trying to discover element 117 also discovered two of its decay products – isotopes of elements 103 and 105 – that are among the most stable superheavy isotopes yet discovered.

As part of the Periodic Table, Ununseptium would be considered a Group VII element, putting it in the same family as flourine, bromine and chlorine.

To produce element 117, the scientists started with atoms of Berkelium (atomic number 97), and bombarded them with Calcium ions at high speeds. The result was a fusion of the calcium ions and the Berkelium to produce Ununseptium, which then quickly decayed into elements 115 and 113, as observed by the previous Russian-American team.

“This is an important scientific result and a compelling example of international cooperation in science, advancing superheavy element research by leveraging the special capabilities of national laboratories in Germany and the U.S.,” Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Thom Mason said in a statement.

The next step for element 117 to be added to the periodic table is for the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) to examine the new data and determine whether it provides sufficient evidence to say that element 117 has been discovered. IUPAC will then determine which institution will be able to name the new element.

Deceased--John Jungerman

 John Jungerman

December 28th, 1921 to March 28th, 2014

"UC Davis nuclear physics lab founder, John Jungerman, dies"

by

Jillian Sullivan

May 5th, 2014

SFGate

John Jungerman, founding director of the nuclear physics research laboratory at UC Davis who also worked on the classified project that developed the first atomic bomb, died at his home in Davis on March 28. He was 92.

Dr. Jungerman had received his bachelor's degree in physics and was working toward his doctorate at UC Berkeley when World War II began.

He wanted to join the Navy, but a faculty adviser encouraged him instead to work at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory for Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron and leader of a group of scientists trying to separate isotopes of uranium-235, a key step in building an atomic bomb.

Dr. Jungerman was 22 years old when he was recruited to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and later at Los Alamos, N.M., where the first atomic bombs were being designed and built.

After learning there would be a test explosion of the bomb, Dr. Jungerman and a couple of his friends sneaked onto the military-guarded test site in the desert of New Mexico.

On July 16, 1945, they witnessed the success of Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, as a giant mushroom cloud lit up the morning sky.

"It was a transformative experience in his life," said Dr. Jungerman's son, Eric Jungerman. "He had a mixture of this awestruck feeling about how this was going to be used, combined with excitement that they actually made it work."

Dr. Jungerman returned to Berkeley after the war and completed his doctorate in physics in 1949. He then went back to work at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory (now the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) and later worked with famed nuclear physicist Hans Bethe at Cornell University.

In 1951, Dr. Jungerman became an early member of the physics department at UC Davis. He helped grow the fledgling department from a faculty of three to more than 50, and he was instrumental in developing a world-class nuclear physics research facility for the university's graduate program.

In the 1960s, his goal to build a research particle accelerator on campus was made possible with the help of Lawrence, who offered Dr. Jungerman parts from the Berkeley cyclotron.

The building housing the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory on the Davis campus has been renamed John A. Jungerman Hall, in honor of its founding director, in 2011.

Dr. Jungerman retired from UC Davis in 1991, becoming professor emeritus of physics and returned to teach his favorite courses for several years and develop new courses on nuclear arms control, society, and the environment for undergraduates and high school teachers.

During his career, Dr. Jungerman was interested in the relationship between physics and spiritual issues. In 1954, he became a founding member of the Unitarian Fellowship (later the Unitarian Universalist Church) of Davis. In 2000, the John Templeton Foundation awarded him $10,000 for his freshman science and religion course, "Modern Physics, Cosmology and Religions," and he later wrote a book on the subject.

Deceased--Gerald Guralnik

Gerald Guralnik
September 17th, 1936 to April 26th, 2014

"Gerald Guralnik, 77, a ‘God Particle’ Pioneer, Dies"

by

William Yardlet

May 3rd, 2014

The New York Times

Gerald Guralnik, one of six pioneering physicists who in the 1960s came up with a theory that nearly 50 years later would lead to the discovery of a subatomic particle that helped explain a perennial mystery about the universe — why it contains life and diversity — died on April 26 in Providence, R.I. He was 77.

His son, Zachary, said the cause was a heart attack.

The discovery of the particle — it is known as the Higgs boson, though some call it “the God particle” — in 2012 confirmed a longstanding belief about why some elements have matter and some do not, and it earned a Nobel Prize for some of the physicists who first asserted that it existed.

Dr. Guralnik did not win the Nobel, but his crucial role in one of the most ambitious pursuits of modern physics is not in dispute.

On July 4, 2012, he and other surviving founders of the theory received a raucous ovation when they entered an auditorium at CERN, a multinational research center headquartered in Geneva. They had been invited to hear the announcement that a younger generation of scientists had used an immense multibillion-dollar machine called the Large Hadron Collider to confirm a theory many of the older men had drafted when they were starting their careers.

Dr. Guralnik, reveling in a spectacle rare for physics, said the applause was “like a football game.”

In 1964, he and the five other physicists, working in three independent groups, published papers describing a field of energy that is everywhere all the time but nowhere to be seen. This force, they theorized, provides mass to the elemental ingredients that make up everything else: people, places, things, the living, the inanimate, the aromatic.

Decades later — after refinements by others, after major government investments around the world and after thousands of scientists sifted through the results of trillions of collisions of protons inside the Large Hadron Collider — they were told how right they were.

“The finding affirms a grand view of a universe described by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws — but one in which everything interesting, like ourselves, results from flaws or breaks in that symmetry,” Dennis Overbye wrote of the CERN announcement in a front-page article in The New York Times in 2012 under the headline “Physicists Find Elusive Particle Seen as Key to Universe.”

“According to the Standard Model,” he continued, “the Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. Particles wading through the field gain heft the way a bill going through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming ever more ponderous.

“Without the Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, all elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight. There would be neither atoms nor life.”

The other physicists were Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, who worked independently and for whom the particle was named; François Englert and Robert Brout, both of Université Libre de Bruxelles; Tom Kibble of Imperial College London; and Carl Hagen of the University of Rochester.

Dr. Guralnik, who later became a professor at Brown University, had been working with Dr. Kibble and Dr. Hagen at Imperial College at the time.

Last fall, Dr. Higgs and Dr. Englert received the Nobel for their work. Dr. Brout might have as well, but he died in 2011, and the Nobel is not awarded posthumously. Dr. Guralnik, Dr. Hagen and Dr. Kibble received other awards for their work on the Higgs.

The three could have been excluded from the Nobel for any number of reasons, Dr. Hagen said in an interview. He noted that the Nobel is not awarded to more than three people and that his group’s paper had been submitted slightly later than the others and included a reference to one of the others.

“That’s a courtesy thing,” Dr. Hagen said. “It doesn’t mean we built on them. It just means we recognize that those papers are out there.”

He added, “I’ve got to immodestly say that ours was the best.”

Dr. Hagen and Dr. Guralnik recently published a letter that took issue with the Nobel Committee’s reasoning in awarding the prize to Dr. Higgs and Dr. Englert.

“We’re not saying that they did something wrong,” Dr. Hagen said, referring to Dr. Higgs and Dr. Englert. “What we’re saying is the people that are giving the prize for it don’t really understand what they’re giving the prize for.”

Gerald Stanford Guralnik was born on Sept. 17, 1936, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and was the older of two children. His parents, David and Bella, ran an accounting business. They saw a sharp intellect in young Gerald and urged him to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He met Dr. Hagen there when both were sophomores, in the fall of 1955.

He received his doctorate from Harvard in 1964, writing his thesis on the idea of symmetry-breaking in the Standard Model — a suite of equations that has ruled particle physics for the past half-century. That same year, he received a National Science Foundation fellowship to study at Imperial College.

In addition to his son, survivors include his wife, the former Susan Ellovich, whom he married in 1963; his sister, Judith Ingis; and two grandchildren.

Some prominent physicists discouraged Dr. Guralnik from pursuing the work he started in symmetry-breaking in the early 1960s. Werner Heisenberg, who won the Nobel in 1932, suggested to him that “these ideas were junk,” Dr. Guralnik wrote in The Huffington Post in 2012. He said that Robert E. Marshak, at the University of Rochester, “told me that if I wished to survive in physics that I must stop thinking about this sort of problem and move on.”
He mostly did. After he joined the Brown faculty in the late 1960s, his work involved quantum field theory and computer applications. All the while, the search for the particle he predicted continued.

“We did not see the big picture 50 years earlier,” Dr. Hagen said. “We just thought it was an interesting problem, and we solved it and we started doing other things.”

Gerald Guralnik [Wikipedia]

Deceased--Andrew Sessler

Andrew Sessler
December 11th, 1928 to April 17th, 2014

"Former director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory dies at 85"

by

Chris Tril

April 27th, 2014

The Daily Californian

Andrew Sessler, a former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, died April 17 of cancer. He was 85.

Known as one of the most influential accelerator physicists in the history of the field to his friends and colleagues, Sessler joined the lab in 1959 and eventually became director in 1973. As director, he expanded the Berkeley lab to its largest size at the time and focused its attention toward the environment, establishing the lab’s Energy and Environment Division, or what is now the Environmental Energy Technologies Division.

“He was an outstanding scientist and a superb human being,” said Morris Pripstein, guest senior scientist at the Berkeley lab and Sessler’s colleague. “I would refer to him as a ‘mensch,’ which in the Jewish lexicon is the highest praise one can bestow on a person.”

Sessler was born on Dec. 11, 1928, and grew up in New York City. As an undergraduate, he studied math at Harvard University and he later obtained his doctorate in physics from Columbia University. Sessler began work at the Berkeley lab after serving as a professor at Ohio State University for five years.

While expanding the Berkeley lab, Sessler also made sure the lab focused more on the environment than just physics. Other than forming the Energy and Environment Division, he also worked on developing accelerators — devices that collide particles for scientists to study the structure of matter.

“Andy Sessler changed the face and character of our laboratory,” said Paul Alivisatos, current director of the lab, in a statement. “He successfully made the case for science to aid our country during its first energy crisis.”
According to Arthur Rosenfeld, professor emeritus of physics at UC Berkeley, Sessler’s great legacy in physics was his expertise in accelerator design, particularly medical accelerators, which helped treat several kinds of cancer by generating X-rays for purposes in radiation therapy.

In addition to making key contributions to physics and accelerator science, Sessler was a devoted humanitarian.

In 1978, Sessler and several other UC Berkeley physicists founded a group in response to the arrests of physicist Yuri Orlov and Israeli politician Natan Sharansky by Soviet authorities. The group publicly encouraged Soviets to cease the oppression of members of the scientific community. According to Pripstein, a co-founder of the group, Sessler played a “profound role” in the group, which eventually mushroomed into an international organization involving more than 10,000 scientists from 44 countries.

Kwang-Je Kim, a professor of physics at the University of Chicago and a colleague of Sessler early in his career at the Berkeley lab, recalled moments outside of work when they enjoyed the outdoors together, such as jogging during lunch breaks and backpacking in the Sierra Nevada.

“Andy showed how to enjoy the quality of life,” Kim said.

Andrew Sessler [Wikipedia]

Synchrotron Radiation Center to shut down--no operating money

"UW physics lab set to close in early March"

by

Nyal Mueenuddin

February 17th, 2014

The Badger Herald

A unique particle accelerator housed in a University of Wisconsin physics lab has attracted scientists from across the world and nation for years, but due to federal cuts the lab has officially been slated for closure on March 7.

The Synchrotron Radiation Center allows scientists to examine the composition and chemical structure of a given material, Joe Bisognano, the lab’s director, said.

After funding cuts from the National Science Foundation and the lab announced its preparations for closure, UW provided the lab with short-term funding as alternatives were sought. Bisognano said he has been looking for other sources for funding over the past several years, but with a shortfall of approximately $5 million, he has announced that the lab will be forced to close in March.

The lab’s dozen technical workers will be left without jobs, and will have to seek employment elsewhere, Bisognano said. The lab’s other personnel have found jobs at other national labs, at UW and in industry, while others are retiring, a statement from UW said.

“Over the past few years, we’ve developed an infrared beam that can measure the structure and the chemical identity of the target material at the same time,” Bisognano said in a statement. “This device is the best in the world, and that’s probably the saddest part about shutting this down.”

The closing of this particular lab raises questions among educators and researchers regarding the effects and implications of federal budget cuts to basic research.

Bisognano said though the closing of this site was an unfortunate loss, places like SRC are being shut down across the country, which he said was a shortsighted move by policy makers looking to bolster the country’s economic recovery.

“The scientific community is really being squeezed,” Bisognano said. “Our children will be left a country without a scientific base and without the ability to compete in high-tech.”

Wesley Smith, a professor of physics at UW and a member of the team of UW researchers that won the Nobel Prize for Physics last year, spoke out against the continued federal cuts to basic research too, saying that there is no greater investment you can make in the future of a country than to invest in basic scientific research.

“The one thing that correlates the highest to prosperity is investment in basic research,” Smith said. “Investment in research is what drives the economic engine.”

Smith said as a society people are still surrounded by and living off the basic research done at the beginning of the 20th century and that “it is now our turn” to invest in children’s futures.

Smith said it was essential that the federal government support basic research, especially in times of economic hardship because private industries will not make the investments independently as the benefits of such research are much longer term. Private industries are more interested in marketing research than basic research, Smith said.

Despite the closing of the SRC, Smith said UW has not been hit by huge research cuts. In 2012, UW was ranked third in the nation for research funding with more than $1 billion, behind Johns Hopkins University and the University of Michigan, according to the NSF.

Synchrotron Radiation Center [Wikipedia]

Heretofore unpublished Einstein paper [1931] and commentary

 Abstract...

We present a translation and analysis of an unpublished manuscript by Albert Einstein in which he proposed a 'steady-state' model of the universe. The manuscript appears to have been written in early 1931 and demonstrates that Einstein once considered a cosmic model in which the mean density of matter in an expanding universe remains constant due to a continuous creation of matter from empty space, a process he associated with the cosmological constant. This model is in marked contrast to previously known Einsteinian models of the cosmos (both static and dynamic) but anticipates the well-known steady-state theories of Hoyle, Bondi and Gold. We find that Einstein’s steady-state model contains a fundamental flaw and suggest it was discarded for this reason. We also suggest that he declined to try again because he found more sophisticated versions rather contrived. The manuscript is of historical significance because it reveals that Einstein debated between steady-state and evolving models of the cosmos decades before a similar debate took place in the cosmological community.

"Einstein’s steady-state model of the universe" by Cormac O’Raifeartaigh, Brendan McCann, Werner Nahm and Simon Mitton

Thoughts on the "God Particle"...a dated essay

"The physics and poetics of the search for the God particle"

by

John Olson

Winter 2010

American Scholar

I don’t remember a time of greater insecurity. University of Massachusetts economics professor Richard Wolff argues that government bailouts and stimulus packages will not be enough to address the real causes of the economic crisis or to mend the “seismic failures within the structures of American-style capitalism itself.” While Wall Street has been re-floated with staggering amounts of capital, the rest of the country remains floundering on a dry, mud-caked riverbed. “The bailout package,” observed Joseph Stiglitz in a January 2009 Vanity Fair essay appropriately titled “Capitalist Fools,” “was like a massive transfusion to a patient suffering from internal bleeding—and nothing was being done about the source of the problem, namely all those foreclosures.” Climate change is wreaking havoc on the world’s population; Australia, Argentina, India, Kenya, and war-torn Afghanistan are suffering unprecedented droughts; polar ice caps are melting at a much faster rate than scientists predicted; typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods have increased in fury and devastation; the UN Food and Agriculture Organization predicts that 370 million people could be facing famine by 2050 if food production doesn’t rise by at least 70 percent; and a series of wildfires has left California, which is drought stricken and near bankruptcy, as black as a handful of charcoal briquettes. Violence seems to be on the rise across the globe, from militants in Afghanistan spraying acid on the faces of girls walking to school, to the Mumbai attacks, to burning cars in France, to drug-related killings in Mexico, to an increase in domestic violence in the United States.

Planet Earth is in a traumatic turmoil. The combined services of Superman, Batman, Spiderman, and the Incredible Hulk could not put a dent in the problem. Anything added to this hellishness would seem to be lost in redundancy, but not so: one more item of astonishing freakishness is causing anxiety from a complex in Switzerland known as CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, where something called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been sputtering into operation. Its purpose is to discover whether a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson (or the God particle) actually exists. There is a far-fetched yet widespread apprehension that a black hole created there could swallow the planet. Indeed, the entire universe.

At present, the world, including Switzerland, is still here. But that’s because the $9 billion machine located outside Geneva has been riddled with problems and delays. In September 2008, a beam of protons was successfully circulated in stages through the vast ring of superconducting magnets housed in the collider’s 17-mile-long tunnel, three kilometers at a time. A few days later, a quench (an abnormal termination of magnet operation) occurred, causing a loss of approximately six tons of the liquid helium needed to keep the collider cooled. Later analysis revealed the problem to be bad electrical connections. A total of 53 magnets were damaged in the incident. The machine has been beset by problems of a less technical nature as well. In October, in a scenario more redolent of a James Bond spy adventure, French investigators charged a physicist working at the LHC with having links to al-Qaeda. One begins to wonder if all these delays and complications aren’t owing to a more preordained cause. A pair of CERN physicists have somewhat whimsically suggested that the reason for building the collider might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make a Higgs boson. In late October, BBC News announced that engineers working on the LHC had successfully injected beams of particles into two sections of the vast machine. The experiment itself, which will involve a collision of two beams, one running in a clockwise direction, the other running counterclockwise, is scheduled for December 2009. If you happen to be reading this article past that date, it would be safe to assume that a particle with less mass than a second-generation quark has not swallowed our planet.

Not yet, anyway.

So what exactly is all this apprehension about, and how real is it? Predictions that the collision of subatomic particles at the LHC might create a black hole and consume our planet, if not the entire universe, owe more to hysteria than to science. Black holes are created by the gravitational collapse of supermassive stars, which are rare and trillions of times the mass of Earth. If a black hole were created at CERN, it would be so tiny that it would eradicate itself instantly.

Thus, fears of creating a black hole are easily dismissed. But fear has a way of expanding and exacerbating worst-case scenarios. Anxiety is exponential. Problems interact to compound into an ever-broadening chain of unlooked-for consequences. There has also been some speculation that a peculiar set of entities called strangelets could turn our world inside out and make it look like a fun house gone completely mad. A strangelet is a hypothetical object composed of a finite number of roughly equal “up, down, and strange quarks.” This anxiety, however improbable, is not entirely void of validity or charm. A strangelet, coming into contact with the familiar world, could convert ordinary matter into strange matter. As much as the current political milieu feels like some form of bizarre, parallel dimension where very little makes sense, the familiar world of nasturtiums, yo-yos, and lifeguards is still emphatically present. What would a world composed of “up, down, and strange quarks” gone awry be like? Would everything be neatly reversed? Would up be down and down be up? Would backward go forward and forward go backward? Would tomorrow happen yesterday and yesterday happen tomorrow?

This is heady stuff. My understanding of quarks and relativity is pretty limited. My preferred domain is that of poetry, not physics. Physicists tend to get irritated when poets attempt to turn mathematical formulations into metaphors. Nevertheless, the two domains share a similar appetite for knowledge: Why are we here? How does something come from nothing? How did the universe begin? Is there a supreme intelligence behind creation?

Physicists may be ill at ease when writers distort their precise mathematical constructions to illustrate a facet of metaphysical thought, but physicists themselves borrow heavily from literature. Murray Gell-Mann borrowed the word quark from James Joyce to name an elementary particle (the quark is one of two basic constituents of matter, the other being the lepton). But the poetry doesn’t stop there. There are six different types of quarks, and physicists have chosen to describe them as flavors: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. This isn’t just poetry; this is enchantment.

What intrigues me the most about the current state of physics isn’t this strange sortie into the realm of literature to find language for its formulations, but the quest itself for the fundamental nature of reality. How does one go about finding a solution to a metaphysical problem using empirical methods and expensive machinery? Wouldn’t such methods be inherently flawed, doomed to flail about in blind alleys and dead ends, another huge waste of public funds and other resources? Did the universe pop out of a proton? Can God be discovered in a quark?

The Large Hadron Collider consists of 38,000 tons of equipment located approximately 300 feet below the earth. The complex lies about 10 miles west of Geneva. Portions of the tunnel pass under the Jura Mountains of France. This is some of the most beautiful country in the world, filled with luxurious wildflower meadows, craggy cascades, pine forests, and mossy rock walls dripping with delicate ferns. It was near here in the rainy summer of 1816 that Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron watched electric storms rage above the rocky summits and discussed Erasmus Darwin’s galvanism experiments. Mary Shelley participated in these discussions, and she was especially intrigued by the prospect of reanimation. “Darwin . . . preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case,” she wrote, “till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. . . . Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.” These speculations, of course, culminated in her novel Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus, one of the world’s first cautionary tales about the dangers of science unchecked by judicious or ethical concerns.

The goal of the Large Hadron Collider is no less Promethean than the ambitions of Victor Frankenstein: to find the God particle, a “massive scalar elementary particle” predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. Its discovery would help to explain how otherwise massless elementary particles cause matter to have mass. That is to say, the Higgs boson is a noun with a long string of adjectives. Adjectives, it must be said, that contradict one another. How can a particle be massive? If a particle is elementary, how can it also be hypothetical? One feels as disoriented as if one were in the realm of surrealist poetry or the Zen koan.

Mass is not what it seems. This is because we inhabit a world of weight, density, texture, and tangibility. The realities produced by calculus and differential equations make no sense to us, literally. Our perceptions are keyed to specific sensations. Roughness, weightiness, smoothness, sharpness, dullness. Foods are sweet or bitter or a combination of the two. Some things are warm and dry, others cold and wet. We cannot conceive of a reality not immersed in such responses. Not without faith in numbers. Trajectories and orbital mechanics. Energy and force. Momentum and inertia. Some of these are available to our senses. We all know what velocity feels like. But when someone tells us that there is more space in an ingot of steel than there is steel, we balk at the truthfulness of such a statement. We might readily agree, based on what we have learned in science. But it still seems beyond the reach of imagining. Because if there is more space than steel in an ingot of steel, what does that say about us? Are we ghosts? Clouds of atoms? Symphonies of molecules? Waves of light and radiant heat? All improbable, all incredible revelations. But the fact remains: a three-ton ingot of steel is mostly space. If an atom were the size of a 14-story building, the nucleus would be a grain of salt in the middle of the seventh floor.

Two instances come to mind: Dr. Samuel Johnson dismissing George Berkeley’s ideas of immaterialism with his famous “I refute Berkeley thus,” and then kicking a rock; and Jack Kerouac’s address to an audience at the Hunter College Playhouse on November 6, 1958, during a symposium titled “Is There a Beat Generation?” It was there that Kerouac said, “We should be wondering tonight, ‘Is there a world?’ But I could go and talk on 5, 10, 20 minutes about is there a world, because there is really no world, cause sometimes I’m walkin’ on the ground and I see right through the ground. And there is no world. And you’ll find out.”
Kerouac and Berkeley were right. Johnson’s rock was essentially phantasmal, a cloud of subatomic particles. He was kicking a dream.

Quarks and leptons are considered to be the fundamental particles that constitute all matter. A quark is an elementary fermion particle that interacts via the strong force. Leptons are a family of fundamental subatomic particles, comprised of the electron, the muon, and the tauon (or tau particle), as well as their associated neutrinos (electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino). Leptons are spin-½ particles, and as such are fermions. In contrast to quarks, Leptons do not strongly interact.

The problem with these definitions, which I wicked from Wikipedia, is their circularity: one definition leads to another question and then to another definition. It is good that Wikipedia’s definitions are hyperlinked, because the process of discovering what goes on in high-energy particle physics is unending. The result of these quests is a little knowledge, a tiny bit of insight, and a whole lot of dizziness and confusion.

All this becomes even more intriguing when one begins to question what is meant by particle. It is apparent that physicists are not referring to dust motes or grains of sand. Dust motes and sand do not have spin, probability waves, or flavors like up and down.

Or do they?

In the realm of particle physics, the word particle is a misnomer. What is actually being referred to is a probability pattern, an abstract mathematical quantity that is related to the probabilities of finding particles in various places and with various properties. A particle is never present at a definite place, nor is it absent. It occupies a realm of transcended opposites mathematically sandwiched between existence and nonexistence. One must learn to think outside the framework of classical logic.

Poets do this all the time. Charles Olson once referred to the poem as a “high energy construct.” Words, feathered and smashed together, produce piquant contradictions: black light, civil disobedience, urban cowboy, act naturally, crash landing, jumbo shrimp, hollow point. One can easily imagine a poem as a word accelerator. A broth of verbal hardware bouncing through metaphysical problems like thunderous hues of afternoon reverie.

However charming this tangent might be, the fact is the Large Hadron Collider is neither a quatrain nor a sonnet. It is 38,000 tons of superconducting dipole magnets, blow valves, sleeper screws, bellow chambers, control racks, helium pipes, gauges, bus bars, flow meters, pumps, storage tanks, electrical sensors, and cryogenic fluids. All to answer the question: How does energy acquire mass?

Physicists hope that this perplexing problem will be answered by the Higgs boson—by smashing protons together at a velocity within a millionth of a percent of the speed of light. In essence, they will be re-creating conditions as they existed at the beginning of time, when the universe was an undifferentiated soup of matter and radiation, particles colliding rapidly with one another in a temperature of inconceivable strength, 100,000 million degrees Kelvin, too hot to sip from a tablespoon. Which doesn’t really matter, as you would not be able to lift the spoon to your mouth: the mass density of the universe would be in the neighborhood of 3.8 thousand million kilograms per liter, or 3.8 thousand million times the density of water under normal terrestrial conditions.

If it exists, the Higgs boson will prove itself to be an essential and universal component of the material world. Hence, its nickname, God particle. The Higgs boson gives mass to other particles by causing them to cluster around it in much the same way a group of people may cluster around one another to hear a rumor or a bit of important news. Peter Higgs, for whom the particle is named, created a model in which particle masses arise from “fields” spread over space and time. In order to give particles mass, a background field (a Higgs field) is invented; it becomes locally distorted whenever a particle moves through it. The distortion—the clustering of the field around the particle—generates the particle’s mass. Once the particle has mass, it interacts with other elementary particles, slowing them down and giving them mass as well. On the other hand, the Higgs boson may turn out to be a neat mathematical trick, a form of quantum legerdemain, in which the rabbit and hat are nothing more than a vertiginous mass of numbers, much like the numbers that appear in the movie The Matrix when Neo finally penetrates the illusory nature of his world.

But what about that black hole? When the LHC does fire up again, is there still a chance we may all disappear into a black hole? Will a diluted public healthcare op­tion and a hyperinflated American dollar really matter? The answer may not be a flat-out absolute no (nothing in this universe is ever that certain), but it is ex­tremely unlikely. For an LHC-style black hole, estimated to be only a billionth of a billionth of a meter across, the black hole would exist for a bit more than a few billion-billion-billionths of a second. I think I’d rather be witness to those strangelets, rogue fragments of strange matter converting Earth to miracles of gold and beatitude, the dream of the alchemists proclaimed in ingots of joy. But this isn’t physics. It’s just simple effervescence.

If the Higgs boson is confirmed, it will explain how, but not why, things exist. What is left out is our creative response to the things of this world, this universe, this dimension. Aristotle referred to matter as “stuff.” Potential without actuality. It is essence that gives the potentiality of matter its ultimate design and purpose, its declamation and aspiration. Its character and value. Its genius, its gesture. The agitations that give it life. The intention behind it. Chopin, after all, is not just notes. Chopin is the glamour of yearning.

Each creative act we perform is a God particle. We are complicit in the creation of the universe. Matter without consciousness is raw ore. It is consciousness that smelts that ore into beams and bridges, enduring alloys that shine with an inner light.

What sort of laboratory would we need to fathom the mysteries of consciousness? How do we make sense of sense? Matter without thought is random matter, but thought without matter is as empty as a parking lot on Christmas Day. Our perceptions and memories give meaning to words, but the words themselves are representative of a higher order of being. They are the strange quarks of a giant quirk called Being.

Essence is an indissoluble kernel of inner principle, an inner grammar that gives shape and meaning to things. Anything in general, anything material, anything spiritual, anything living, is the product of a creative act on our part, our participation in its being. The discovery of a particle that allows energy to acquire mass is intrinsically exciting, but what it implies is staggering. What it implies is process. What it implies is a universe that is in a continuous state of becoming. Not just expanding, but flowering, blossoming, revealing its mysteries to the pollination of our curiosity. Our involvement with it is immense; we stand at the end of a wharf gazing at the immensity of the horizon, knowing, in our deepest self, that the horizon is within as well as without.

It is more than a little coincidental that the fall of our financial institutions and the illusory nature of our wealth were revealed at approximately the same time as the Large Hadron Collider came online. Money, like language, like up, down, top, bottom, strange, and charmed flavors of quark, is a result of interactions, not fully realized realities. As long as we deepen and honor our experiences in this world with an audacious creativity and push our language to its utmost limits of possibility, we will keep those black holes and bankruptcies at bay. Language extends our ability to exist not merely because it envelops us, but because it is always in a state of potentiality. Reality may prove to be a probability pattern, but without anyone to perceive and give it value, it remains a pattern. It does not become a ship, an avocado, or a hand. It does not awaken. It does not shine.

An object that is visible to us is there with or without us. It does not require our eyes and ears, the touch of our hands, the warmth of our bodies. But without these things, without this involvement, it remains what it is in its barest sense: space, time, and probability patterns. A tendency to exist. It isn’t so much that our involvement completes or fulfills its existence, but that we reciprocate its tendencies and so become more fully alive ourselves. And if that isn’t a particle of godliness, I don’t know what is.
[John Olson is the author of Backscatter: New and Selected Poems and Souls of Wind, a novel.]

Leo Szilard's papers to be online

"UCSD to digitize Szilard papers"

by

Gary Robbins

February 5th, 2014

The San Diego Union-Tribune

UC San Diego's Geisel Library has received a grant of nearly $100,000 to digitize the papers and materials of Leo Szilard, the late physicist whose work on nuclear chain reactions helped lead to the Manhattan Project, the program that produced the country's first atomic bombs.

The library's Mandeville Special Collections has more than 50,000 items involving Szilard, who spent part of the 1950s as a consultant at General Atomics in San Diego before going on to become one of the first fellows at the Salk Institute of Biological Sciences in La Jolla. Szilard, who had a deep interest in biology as well as physics, died in La Jolla in May 1964 at the age of 66.

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission gave the grant to the University of California San Diego, whose library also houses major collections of papers from Nobel laureates Francis Crick, Harold Urey and Maria Goeppert Mayer, polio vaccine developer Jonas Salk, and children's author Theodor Seuss Geisel.

"The public is going to have access not only Szilard's creations, but to documents that show the process of that creation," said William Lanouette of San Diego, author of "Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb."

Lanouette will give a public speech about Szilard's life and career on March 5th at the UC San Diego Faculty Club, starting at 11 a.m.

Szilard changed the course of history in 1933 when he came up with the basic idea for nuclear chain reaction, which he later patented with physicist Enrico Fermi. Six years later, Szilard worked with Albert Einstein on a draft of a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that specified how the breakthrough might be used to develop nuclear weapons. A formal later was later sent to Roosevelt, leading to the creation of the Manhattan Project.

Szilard was a major behind-the-scenes contributor to the project. But he ended up lobbying the government hard against using atomic bombs against Japan, a campaign that proved to be unsuccessful.

Deceased--John R. Huizenga

John R. Huizenga
April 21st, 1921 to January 25th, 2014

"John R. Huizenga, Physicist at Fore of Nuclear Era, Dies at 92"

by

William J. Broad

January 29th, 2014

The New York Times

John R. Huizenga, a physicist who helped build the world’s first atom bomb, solve dozens of atomic riddles and debunk claims that scientists in Utah had achieved nuclear fusion in a jar of water, died on Saturday in San Diego. He was 92.

The cause was heart failure, his family said.

Dr. Huizenga (pronounced HIGHS-ing-a) was present at the main junctures of the early nuclear era and helped push back many frontiers of nuclear physics. He also took on diplomatic missions and prominent roles in settling scientific disputes.

Early on, Dr. Huizenga was part of the scientific team that discovered Elements 99 and 100 in the periodic table — known, respectively, as einsteinium, after Albert Einstein, and fermium, after Enrico Fermi, the Italian Nobel laureate who helped lead the atom bomb project at the University of Chicago.

After World War II, Dr. Huizenga attended famous lectures given in Chicago by Dr. Fermi and soon began a half-century of atomic sleuthing.

“John Huizenga conducted research at the forefront of nuclear physics and contributed a host of exceptional insights,” said Wolf-Udo Schröder, a professor of chemistry and physics at the University of Rochester and a protégé of Dr. Huizenga’s. The discoveries stimulated “vigorous research,” he added, and remain central to the field.

John Robert Huizenga was born in Fulton, Ill., on the Mississippi River, on April 21, 1921. His father was a farmer, and until high school John learned his lessons in a one-room schoolhouse.

He graduated in early 1944 from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., where a teacher got him hooked on chemistry. He entered graduate school in physical chemistry at the University of Illinois and was soon drafted into the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb.

The recruiters, he recalled in a memoir for the American Institute of Physics, a federation of physical science societies, “convinced me of the importance” of using his scientific training “in an exciting and militarily important secret project.”

In Oak Ridge, Tenn., he supervised teams analyzing the purity of enriched uranium coming out of sprawling production lines. Robert S. Norris, a nuclear historian, said the purified uranium fueled the weapon that leveled Hiroshima in August 1945.

After the war, Dr. Huizenga received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois and took a job in nuclear chemistry at the Argonne National Laboratory, which was then on the University of Chicago campus. It was there that he met Dr. Fermi. His research focused on uncovering the secrets of atomic interactions, especially with the subatomic particles known as neutrons.

His first big moment came soon after the government detonated the world’s first hydrogen bomb in the Pacific in 1952. The bomb vaporized an atoll. In sifting through the radioactive debris, Dr. Huizenga and his Argonne peers, as well as teams in Berkeley, Calif., and Los Alamos, N.M., found that two new elements — highly radioactive and unknown in nature — had formed when uranium atoms in the nuclear blast captured speeding neutrons.

The discoveries, of einsteinium and fermium, were initially kept secret for security reasons, then unveiled in 1955, not long after the scientists they had been named after had died.

In 1966, Dr. Huizenga received the government’s Lawrence Award for outstanding accomplishments in illuminating the intricacies of nuclear fission, the fracturing of atoms into pieces. That same year, he accompanied the first American scientific delegation to be sent to the Soviet Union.

He accepted a professorship at the University of Rochester in 1967 and stayed there for the rest of his career. His 1973 textbook, “Nuclear Fission,” written with Robert Vandenbosch, remains a standard in the field. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1976.

Dr. Huizenga lectured in China after its opening to the West. After one visit, in 1979, the nation’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, sent his youngest son, Deng Zhifang, to study in Dr. Huizenga’s department at the University of Rochester.

In 1989, Dr. Huizenga was appointed co-chairman of a Department of Energy panel that investigated and debunked the highly publicized “cold fusion” claims of two University of Utah chemists, who said they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature in a jar of water. If their claims had been true, the discovery would have flooded the world with energy cheap enough to supplant all rivals.

Dr. Huizenga lectured widely on the topic and in 1992 published “Cold Fusion: The Scientific Fiasco of the Century.” On the claim’s 10th anniversary, in 1999, as true believers around the globe kept looking for glimmers of hope that cold fusion could be realized, he accused them of chasing a ghost.

“It’s as dead as ever,” Dr. Huizenga told The New York Times in an interview. “It’s quite unbelievable that the thing has gone on for 10 years.”

Dr. Huizenga’s wife of 54 years, Dolly, died in 1999. He is survived by four children, Linda, Jann, Robert and Joel; two sisters, Gertrude Drew and Kathryn Disselkoen; and three grandchildren.

Dr. Huizenga summarized his career in a memoir, “Five Decades of Research in Nuclear Science” (2009). The book provided much detail on the half-lives of radioactive elements, but it also provided evidence, he wrote in its concluding pages, of “a life well lived.”


Is "Cold Fusion" possible? poll

LENR or "Cold Fusion"--same charlatan

Cold Fusion...it's back!

Deceased--Martin Fleischmann

"Cold Fusion" is alive in Columbia, Missouri

Rusi Taleyarkhan--falsified research?

Redaction from Hawking

"Stephen Hawking says there is no such thing as black holes, Einstein spinning in his grave"

STEPHEN Hawking has rocked the world of physics by reversing his lifetime’s work to claim that black holes do NOT exist – insisting they’re more like 50 shades of grey.

by

Gareth Morgan

January 24th, 2014

EXPRESS

The wheelchair-bound genius has posted a paper online that demolishes modern black hole theory. He says that the idea of an event horizon, from which light cannot escape, is flawed.

It is considered one of the pillars of physics that the incredible gravitational pull created by the collapse of a star will be so strong that nothing can break free...much of this is thanks to Hawking’s own work.

But Hawking smashes this idea by saying that rather than there being an inescapable event horizon, we should think of a far less total “apparent horizon”. And, at a stroke, he has contradicted Albert Einstein.

He sets out his argument in the paper, called Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting For Black Holes, which is likely to send his fellow scientists into a spin.

Hawking writes: “The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity.”

He suggests that light rays attempting to rush away from the black hole’s core will be held as though stuck on a treadmill and that they can slowly shrink by spewing out radiation.

Hawking told leading science magazine Nature: “There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory. [But quantum theory] enables energy and information to escape from a black hole”.

The professor’s grey hole theory would allow matter and energy to be held for a period of time before being released back into space.

The physicist admits that his idea requires a new theory that merges gravity with the other fundamental forces of nature. But he added: “The correct treatment remains a mystery.”

Hawking’s latest work was prompted by a talk he gave via Skype to a meeting at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, in August 2013.

He is attempting to solve what is known as the black-hole firewall paradox, which has puzzled scientists for almost two years. It stems from a “thought experiment” where scientists tried to imagine what would happen to an astronaut unlucky enough to fall into a black hole.

Event horizons are mathematically simple consequences of Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Black hole expert Don Page, of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, admits: “The picture Hawking gives sounds reasonable.”

But theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski of the Kavli Institute is sceptical and insists: “In Einstein’s gravity, the black-hole horizon is not so different from any other part of space. We never see space-time fluctuate in our own neighbourhood: it is just too rare on large scales.”

Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and former student of Hawking's, admits many physicists will find Hawking’s work “abhorrent”.

He says: “The idea that there are no points from which you cannot escape a black hole is in some ways an even more radical and problematic suggestion than the existence of firewalls. But the fact that we’re still discussing such questions 40 years after Hawking’s first papers on black holes and information is testament to their enormous significance."

Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory redux

An excerpt from A. C. Gilbert's autobiography:
The Man Who Lives In Paradise...

The most spectacular of our new educational toys was the Gilbert Atomic Energy Laboratory. This was a top job, the result of much experimentation and hard work. We were unofficially encouraged by the government, who thought that our set would aid in public understanding of atomic energy and stress its constructive side. We had the great help of some of the country's best nuclear physicists and worked closely with M.I.T. in it's development.

There was nothing phony about our Atomic Energy laboratory. It was genuine, and it was also safe. We used radioactive materials in the set, but none that might conceivably prove dangerous. There was a Geiger-Mueller Counter. It was accurate; a carefully designed and manufactured instrument that could actually be used in prospecting for radioactive materials. The Atomic Energy lab also contained a cloud chamber in which the paths of alpha particles traveling at 12,000 miles a second could be seen; a spinthariscope showing the results of radioactive disintegration on a fluorescent screen; an electroscope that measured the radioactivity of different substances.

It caused quite a sensation at the Toy Fair and received a great deal of publicity. But there were difficulties. It had to be priced very high--$50.00--and even at that price we managed to lose a little money on every one sold. The Atomic Energy Lab was also the most thoroughly scientific toy we had ever produced, and only boys with a great deal of education could understand it. It was not suitable for the same age groups as our simpler chemistry and microscope sets, for instance, and you could not manufacture such a thing as a beginner's atomic energy lab. So we had to drop this wonderful new addition to our line of educational toys--and toy has never seemed to me to be the right word to apply to such things. We adapted some of its features so that they could be added to our largest chemistry set--using the spinthariscope, some radioactive ore, and the atomic energy manual.

The Man Who Lives In Paradise

by

A.C. Gilbert

ISBN-10: 0911581200
ISBN-13: 978-0911581201

Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory [Wikipedia]


A. C. Gilbert "U-238 Atomic Energy Lab"