University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1890 by John D. Rockefeller, the school is located on a 217-acre campus in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, near Lake Michigan; the University of Chicago holds top-ten positions in various international rankings. The university is composed of an undergraduate college as well as various graduate programs and interdisciplinary committees organized into five academic research divisions. Beyond the arts and sciences, Chicago is well known for its professional schools, which include the Pritzker School of Medicine, the Booth School of Business, the Law School, the School of Social Service Administration, the Harris School of Public Policy Studies, the Divinity School and the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies; the university has additional campuses and centers in London, Beijing and Hong Kong, as well as in downtown Chicago. University of Chicago scholars have played a major role in the development of many academic disciplines, including sociology, economics, literary criticism and the behavioralism school of political science.
Chicago's physics department and the Met Lab helped develop the world's first man-made, self-sustaining nuclear reaction beneath the viewing stands of university's Stagg Field, a key part of the classified Manhattan Project effort of World War II. The university research efforts include administration of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, as well as the Marine Biological Laboratory; the university is home to the University of Chicago Press, the largest university press in the United States. With an estimated completion date of 2021, the Barack Obama Presidential Center will be housed at the university and include both the Obama presidential library and offices of the Obama Foundation; the University of Chicago has produced faculty members and researchers. As of 2018, 98 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with the university as professors, faculty, or staff, making it a university with one of the highest concentrations of Nobel laureates in the world. 34 faculty members and 18 alumni have been awarded the MacArthur "Genius Grant".
In addition, Chicago's alumni and faculty include 54 Rhodes Scholars, 26 Marshall Scholars, 9 Fields Medalists, 4 Turing Award Winners, 24 Pulitzer Prize winners, 20 National Humanities Medalists, 16 billionaire graduates and a plethora of members of the United States Congress and heads of state of countries all over the world. The University of Chicago was incorporated as a coeducational institution in 1890 by the American Baptist Education Society, using $400,000 donated to the ABES to match a $600,000 donation from Baptist oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, including land donated by Marshall Field. While the Rockefeller donation provided money for academic operations and long-term endowment, it was stipulated that such money could not be used for buildings; the Hyde Park campus was financed by donations from wealthy Chicagoans like Silas B. Cobb who provided the funds for the campus' first building, Cobb Lecture Hall, matched Marshall Field's pledge of $100,000. Other early benefactors included businessmen Charles L. Hutchinson, Martin A. Ryerson Adolphus Clay Bartlett and Leon Mandel, who funded the construction of the gymnasium and assembly hall, George C. Walker of the Walker Museum, a relative of Cobb who encouraged his inaugural donation for facilities.
The Hyde Park campus continued the legacy of the original university of the same name, which had closed in 1880s after its campus was foreclosed on. What became known as the Old University of Chicago had been founded by a small group of Baptist educators in 1856 through a land endowment from Senator Stephen A. Douglas. After a fire, it closed in 1886. Alumni from the Old University of Chicago are recognized as alumni of the present University of Chicago; the university's depiction on its coat of arms of a phoenix rising from the ashes is a reference to the fire and demolition of the Old University of Chicago campus. As an homage to this pre-1890 legacy, a single stone from the rubble of the original Douglas Hall on 34th Place was brought to the current Hyde Park location and set into the wall of the Classics Building; these connections have led the Dean of the College and University of Chicago and Professor of History John Boyer to conclude that the University of Chicago has, "a plausible genealogy as a pre–Civil War institution".
William Rainey Harper became the university's president on July 1, 1891 and the Hyde Park campus opened for classes on October 1, 1892. Harper worked on building up the faculty and in two years he had a faculty of 120, including eight former university or college presidents. Harper was an accomplished scholar and a member of the Baptist clergy who believed that a great university should maintain the study of faith as a central focus. To fulfill this commitment, he brought the Old University of Chicago's Seminary to Hyde Park; this became the Divinity School in the first professional school at the University of Chicago. Harper recruited acclaimed Yale baseball and football player Amos Alonzo Stagg from the Young Men's Christian Association training Shool at Springfield to coach the school's football program. Stagg was given a position on the first such athletic position in the United States. While coaching at the University, Stagg invented the numbered football jersey, the huddle, the lighted playing field.
Stagg is the namesake of the university's Stagg
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Brookhaven National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory located in Upton, New York, on Long Island, was formally established in 1947 at the site of Camp Upton, a former U. S. Army base, its name stems from its location within the Town of Brookhaven 60 miles east of New York City. Research at BNL specializes in nuclear and high energy physics, energy science and technology and bioscience, nanoscience and national security; the 5,300 acre campus contains several large research facilities, including the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and National Synchrotron Light Source II. Seven Nobel prizes have been awarded for work conducted at Brookhaven lab. BNL is staffed by 2,750 scientists, engineers and support personnel, hosts 4,000 guest investigators every year; the laboratory has its own police station, fire department, ZIP code. In total, the lab spans a 5,265-acre area, coterminous with the hamlet of Upton, New York. BNL is served by a rail spur operated as-needed by the New Atlantic Railway.
Co-located with the laboratory is the Upton, New York, forecast office of the National Weather Service. Although conceived as a nuclear research facility, Brookhaven Lab's mission has expanded, its foci are now: Nuclear and high-energy physics Physics and chemistry of materials Environmental and climate research Nanomaterials Energy research Nonproliferation Structural biology Accelerator physics Brookhaven National Lab was owned by the Atomic Energy Commission and is now owned by that agency's successor, the United States Department of Energy. DOE subcontracts the operation to universities and research organizations, it is operated by Brookhaven Science Associates LLC, an equal partnership of Stony Brook University and Battelle Memorial Institute. From 1947 to 1998, it was operated by Associated Universities, Inc. but AUI lost its contract in the wake of two incidents: a 1994 fire at the facility's high-beam flux reactor that exposed several workers to radiation and reports in 1997 of a tritium leak into the groundwater of the Long Island Central Pine Barrens on which the facility sits.
Following World War II, the US Atomic Energy Commission was created to support government-sponsored peacetime research on atomic energy. The effort to build a nuclear reactor in the American northeast was fostered by physicists Isidor Isaac Rabi and Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. who during the war witnessed many of their colleagues at Columbia University leave for new remote research sites following the departure of the Manhattan Project from its campus. Their effort to house this reactor near New York City was rivalled by a similar effort at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to have a facility near Boston. Involvement was solicited from representatives of northeastern universities to the south and west of New York City such that this city would be at their geographic center. In March 1946 a nonprofit corporation was established that consisted of representatives from nine major research universities — Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, University of Rochester, Yale University.
Out of 17 considered sites in the Boston-Washington corridor, Camp Upton on Long Island was chosen as the most suitable in consideration of space and availability. The camp had been a training center from the US Army during both World War I and World War II. After the latter war, Camp Upton became available for reuse. A plan was conceived to convert the military camp into a research facility. On March 21, 1947, the Camp Upton site was transferred from the U. S. War Department to the new U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, predecessor to the U. S. Department of Energy. In 1947 construction began on the first nuclear reactor at Brookhaven, the Brookhaven Graphite Research Reactor; this reactor, which opened in 1950, was the first reactor to be constructed in the United States after World War II. The High Flux Beam Reactor operated from 1965 to 1999. In 1959 Brookhaven built the first US reactor tailored to medical research, the Brookhaven Medical Research Reactor, which operated until 2000. In 1952 Brookhaven began using the Cosmotron.
At the time the Cosmotron was the world's highest energy accelerator, being the first to impart more than 1 GeV of energy to a particle. The Cosmotron was retired in 1966, after it was superseded in 1960 by the new Alternating Gradient Synchrotron; the AGS was used in research that resulted in 3 Nobel prizes, including the discovery of the muon neutrino, the charm quark, CP violation. In 1970 in BNL started the ISABELLE project to develop and build two proton intersecting storage rings; the groundbreaking for the project was in October 1978. In 1981, with the tunnel for the accelerator excavated, problems with the superconducting magnets needed for the ISABELLE accelerator brought the project to a halt, the project was cancelled in 1983; the National Synchrotron Light Source operated from 1982 to 2014 and was involved with two Nobel Prize-winning discoveries. It has since been replaced by the National Synchrotron Light Source II. After ISABELLE'S cancellation, physicist at BNL proposed that the excavated tunnel and parts of the magnet assembly be used in another accelerator.
In 1984 the first proposal for the accelerator now known as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider was put forward. The construction got funded in 1991and RHIC has been operational since 2000. One of the world's only two operating heavy-ion colliders, RHIC is as of 2010 the second-highest
Parity (physics)
In quantum mechanics, a parity transformation is the flip in the sign of one spatial coordinate. In three dimensions, it can refer to the simultaneous flip in the sign of all three spatial coordinates: P: ↦, it can be thought of as a test for chirality of a physical phenomenon, in that a parity inversion transforms a phenomenon into its mirror image. All fundamental interactions of elementary particles, with the exception of the weak interaction, are symmetric under parity; the weak interaction thus provides a means for probing chirality in physics. In interactions that are symmetric under parity, such as electromagnetism in atomic and molecular physics, parity serves as a powerful controlling principle underlying quantum transitions. A matrix representation of P has determinant equal to −1, hence is distinct from a rotation, which has a determinant equal to 1. In a two-dimensional plane, a simultaneous flip of all coordinates in sign is not a parity transformation. In quantum mechanics, wave functions which are unchanged by a parity transformation are described as functions, while those which change sign under a parity transformation are odd functions.
Under rotations, classical geometrical objects can be classified into scalars and tensors of higher rank. In classical physics, physical configurations need to transform under representations of every symmetry group. Quantum theory predicts that states in a Hilbert space do not need to transform under representations of the group of rotations, but only under projective representations; the word projective refers to the fact that if one projects out the phase of each state, where we recall that the overall phase of a quantum state is not an observable a projective representation reduces to an ordinary representation. All representations are projective representations, but the converse is not true, therefore the projective representation condition on quantum states is weaker than the representation condition on classical states; the projective representations of any group are isomorphic to the ordinary representations of a central extension of the group. For example, projective representations of the 3-dimensional rotation group, the special orthogonal group SO, are ordinary representations of the special unitary group SU.
Projective representations of the rotation group that are not representations are called spinors, so quantum states may transform not only as tensors but as spinors. If one adds to this a classification by parity, these can be extended, for example, into notions of scalars and pseudoscalars which are rotationally invariant. Vectors and axial vectors. One can define reflections such as V x: ↦, which have negative determinant and form a valid parity transformation. Combining them with rotations one can recover the particular parity transformation defined earlier; the first parity transformation given does not work in an number of dimensions, because it results in a positive determinant. In odd number of dimensions only the latter example of a parity transformation can be used. Parity forms the abelian group Z 2 due to the relation P ^ 2 = 1 ^. All Abelian groups have only one-dimensional irreducible representations. For Z 2, there are two irreducible representations: one is under parity, P ^ ϕ = + ϕ, the other is odd, P ^ ϕ = − ϕ.
These are useful in quantum mechanics. However, as is elaborated below, in quantum mechanics states need not transform under actual representations of parity but only under projective representations and so in principle a parity transformation may rotate a state by any phase. Newton's equation of motion F → = m a → equates two vectors, hence is invariant under parity; the law of gravity involves only vectors and is therefore, invariant under parity. However, angular momentum L → is an axial vector, L → = r → × p → {\displaystyle =\times {\vec
University of Utah
The University of Utah is a public research university in Salt Lake City, United States. As the state's flagship university, the university offers more than 100 undergraduate majors and more than 92 graduate degree programs; the university is classified among "R-1: Doctoral Universities – Highest Research Activity" with "selective" admissions. Graduate studies include the S. J. Quinney College of Law and the School of Medicine, Utah's first medical school; as of Fall 2015, there are 23,909 undergraduate students and 7,764 graduate students, for an enrollment total of 31,673. The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah's oldest institution of higher education, it received its current name in 1892, four years before Utah attained statehood, moved to its current location in 1900. The university ranks among the top 50 U. S. universities by total research expenditures with over $518 million spent in 2015.
22 Rhodes Scholars, four Nobel Prize winners, two Turing Award winners, eight MacArthur Fellows, various Pulitzer Prize winners, two astronauts, Gates Cambridge Scholars, Churchill Scholars have been affiliated with the university as students, researchers, or faculty members in its history. In addition, the university's Honors College has been reviewed among 50 leading national Honors Colleges in the U. S; the university has been ranked the 12th most ideologically diverse university in the country. The university's athletic teams, the Utes, participate in NCAA Division I athletics as a member of the Pac-12 Conference, its football team has received national attention for winning the 2005 Fiesta Bowl and the 2009 Sugar Bowl. Soon after the Mormon Pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake valley in 1847, Brigham Young began organizing a Board of Regents to establish a university; the university was established on February 28, 1850, as the University of Deseret by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, Orson Spencer was appointed as the first chancellor of the university.
Early classes were held in private homes. The university closed in 1853 due to lack of funds and lack of feeder schools. Following years of intermittent classes in the Salt Lake City Council House, the university began to be re-established in 1867 under the direction of David O. Calder, followed by John R. Park in 1869; the university moved out of the council house into the Union Academy building in 1876 and into Union Square in 1884. In 1892, the school's name was changed to the University of Utah, John R. Park began arranging to obtain land belonging to the U. S. Army's Fort Douglas on the east bench of the Salt Lake Valley, where the university moved permanently in 1900. Additional Fort Douglas land has been granted to the university over the years, the fort was closed on October 26, 1991. Upon his death in 1900, Dr. John R. Park bequeathed his entire fortune to the university; the university grew in the early 20th century but was involved in an academic freedom controversy in 1915 when Joseph T. Kingsbury recommended that five faculty members be dismissed after a graduation speaker made a speech critical of Utah governor William Spry.
One third of the faculty resigned in protest of these dismissals. Some felt that the dismissals were a result of the LDS Church's influence on the university, while others felt that they reflected a more general pattern of repressing religious and political expression that might be deemed offensive; the controversy was resolved when Kingsbury resigned in 1916, but university operations were again interrupted by World War I, The Great Depression and World War II. Student enrollment dropped to a low of 3,418 during the last year of World War II, but A. Ray Olpin made substantial additions to campus following the war, enrollment reached 12,000 by the time he retired in 1964. Growth continued in the following decades as the university developed into a research center for fields such as computer science and medicine. During the 2002 Winter Olympics, the university hosted the Olympic Village, a housing complex for the Olympic and Paralympic athletes, as well as the opening and closing ceremonies. Prior to the events, the university received a facelift that included extensive renovations to the Rice-Eccles Stadium, a light rail track leading to downtown Salt Lake City, a new student center known as the Heritage Center, an array of new student housing, what is now a 180-room campus hotel and conference center.
The University of Utah Asia Campus opened as an international branch campus in the Incheon Global Campus in Songdo, South Korea in 2014. Three other European and American universities are participating; the Asia Campus was funded by the South Korean government. Campus takes up 1,534 acres, including the Health Sciences complex, Research Park, Fort Douglas, it is located on the east bench of the Salt Lake Valley, close to the Wasatch Range and 2 miles east of downtown Salt Lake City. Most courses take place on the west side of campus, known as lower campus due to its lower elevation. Presidents Circle is a loop of buildings named after past university presidents with a courtyard in the center. Major libraries on lower campus include the J. Willard Marriott Library and the S. J. Quinney Law Library; the primary student activity center is the A. Ray Olpin University Union, campus fitness centers include the Health, Physical Education, Recreation Complex and the Nielsen Fieldhouse. Lower campus is home to most public venues, such as the Rice-Eccles Stadium, the Jon M. Huntsman Center, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, a museum with rot
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution; the institution moved to Newark in 1747 to the current site nine years and renamed itself Princeton University in 1896. Princeton provides undergraduate and graduate instruction in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, it offers professional degrees through the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School of Architecture and the Bendheim Center for Finance. The university has ties with the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton Theological Seminary and the Westminster Choir College of Rider University. Princeton has the largest endowment per student in the United States. From 2001 to 2018, Princeton University was ranked either first or second among national universities by U.
S. News & World Report, holding the top spot for 16 of those 18 years; as of October 2018, 65 Nobel laureates, 15 Fields Medalists and 13 Turing Award laureates have been affiliated with Princeton University as alumni, faculty members or researchers. In addition, Princeton has been associated with 21 National Medal of Science winners, 5 Abel Prize winners, 5 National Humanities Medal recipients, 209 Rhodes Scholars, 139 Gates Cambridge Scholars and 126 Marshall Scholars. Two U. S. Presidents, twelve U. S. Supreme Court Justices and numerous living billionaires and foreign heads of state are all counted among Princeton's alumni body. Princeton has graduated many prominent members of the U. S. Congress and the U. S. Cabinet, including eight Secretaries of State, three Secretaries of Defense and three of the past five Chairs of the Federal Reserve. New Light Presbyterians founded the College of New Jersey in 1746; the college was the religious capital of Scottish Presbyterian America. In 1754, trustees of the College of New Jersey suggested that, in recognition of Governor Jonathan Belcher's interest, Princeton should be named as Belcher College.
Belcher replied: "What a name that would be!" In 1756, the college moved to New Jersey. Its home in Princeton was Nassau Hall, named for the royal House of Orange-Nassau of William III of England. Following the untimely deaths of Princeton's first five presidents, John Witherspoon became president in 1768 and remained in that office until his death in 1794. During his presidency, Witherspoon shifted the college's focus from training ministers to preparing a new generation for secular leadership in the new American nation. To this end, he solicited investment in the college. Witherspoon's presidency constituted a long period of stability for the college, interrupted by the American Revolution and the Battle of Princeton, during which British soldiers occupied Nassau Hall. In 1812, the eighth president of the College of New Jersey, Ashbel Green, helped establish the Princeton Theological Seminary next door; the plan to extend the theological curriculum met with "enthusiastic approval on the part of the authorities at the College of New Jersey".
Today, Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary maintain separate institutions with ties that include services such as cross-registration and mutual library access. Before the construction of Stanhope Hall in 1803, Nassau Hall was the college's sole building; the cornerstone of the building was laid on September 17, 1754. During the summer of 1783, the Continental Congress met in Nassau Hall, making Princeton the country's capital for four months. Over the centuries and through two redesigns following major fires, Nassau Hall's role shifted from an all-purpose building, comprising office, dormitory and classroom space; the class of 1879 donated twin lion sculptures that flanked the entrance until 1911, when that same class replaced them with tigers. Nassau Hall's bell rang after the hall's construction; the bell was recast and melted again in the fire of 1855. James McCosh took office as the college's president in 1868 and lifted the institution out of a low period, brought about by the American Civil War.
During his two decades of service, he overhauled the curriculum, oversaw an expansion of inquiry into the sciences, supervised the addition of a number of buildings in the High Victorian Gothic style to the campus. McCosh Hall is named in his honor. In 1879, the first thesis for a Doctor of Philosophy Ph. D. was submitted by James F. Williamson, Class of 1877. In 1896, the college changed its name from the College of New Jersey to Princeton University to honor the town in which it resides. During this year, the college underwent large expansion and became a university. In 1900, the Graduate School was established. In 1902, Woodrow Wilson, graduate of the Class of 1879, was elected the 13th president of the university. Under Wilson, Princeton introduced the preceptorial system in 1905, a then-unique concept in the US that augmented the standard lecture method of teaching with a more personal form in which small groups of students, or precepts, could interact with a single instructor, or preceptor, in their field of interest.
In 1906, the reservoir Lake Carnegie was created by Andrew Carnegie. A collection of historical photographs of the build
Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award
The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award was established in 1959 in honor of a scientist who helped elevate American physics to the status of world leader in the field. E. O. Lawrence was the inventor of the cyclotron, an accelerator of subatomic particles, a 1939 Nobel Laureate in physics for that achievement; the Radiation Laboratory he developed at Berkeley during the 1930s ushered in the era of “big science,” in which experiments were no longer done by an individual researcher and a few assistants on the table-top of an academic lab but by large, multidisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers in entire buildings full of sophisticated equipment and huge scientific machines. During World War II, Lawrence and his accelerators contributed to the Manhattan Project, he played a leading role in establishing the U. S. system of national laboratories, two of which now bear his name. Shortly after Lawrence's death in August 1958, John A. McCone, Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, wrote to President Eisenhower suggesting the establishment of a memorial award in Lawrence's name.
President Eisenhower agreed, saying, "Such an award would seem to me to be most fitting, both as a recognition of what he has given to our country and to mankind, as a means of helping to carry forward his work through inspiring others to dedicate their lives and talents to scientific effort." The first Lawrence Awards were given in 1960. The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award is bestowed by the Secretary of the U. S. Department of Energy to mid-career scientists and engineers in recognition of exceptional scientific, and/or engineering achievements related to the broad missions of the U. S. Department of Energy and its programs; the Lawrence Award is administered by the Department of Energy's Office of Science. Each Lawrence Award recipient receives a citation signed by the Secretary of Energy, a gold medal bearing the likeness of Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a $20,000 honorarium; the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Awards honor scientists and engineers, at mid-career, showing promise for the future, for exceptional contributions in research and development supporting the U.
S. Department of Energy and its mission to advance the national economic and energy security of the United States. Beginning in 2011, the awards are given annually. One Lawrence Award is given in each of the following eight fields: Atomic and Chemical Sciences Biological and Environmental Sciences Computer and Knowledge Sciences Condensed Matter and Materials Sciences Energy Science and Innovation Fusion and Plasma Sciences High Energy and Nuclear Physics National Security and NonproliferationThe objectives of the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Awards are: to encourage excellence in energy science and technology. S. scientific and technological communities associated with the U. S. Department of Energy. Eligibility for the Lawrence Award requires that all recipients: be in the middle of their careers, defined as within 20 years of earning their highest degree*. S. Department of Energy. Nomination is made by a letter of justification, curriculum vitae, a statement explaining the nominee’s connection to DOE support, a no more than 35 word citation, a bibliography of significant publications, identifying the award category of the nominee.
An individual’s nomination is limited to a single category. The nomination materials for all eligible nominees are objectively studied by independent peer review panels, one for each of eight award categories, if worthy candidate are identified in the peer review, selection recommendations based upon these findings are made by Federal Program Officials. A concurrence request for any awardees is made to the Secretary of Energy, who holds final discretion over any selection; the reviewers are not empanelled as a Federal Advisory Committee. The identity of all nominators, all nominees, all peer review panelists remain anonymous. DOE employees must comply with regulations governing conduct of employees codified in 10 CFR Part 1010 and Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch at 5 CFR §2635. 1960 Hendrik Wade Bode Harvey Brooks John S. Foster Jr. Isadore Perlman Norman F. Ramsey Jr. Alvin M. Weinberg1961 Leo Brewer Henry Hurwitz Jr. Conrad L. Longmire Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky Kenneth E. Wilzbach1962 Andrew A. Benson Richard Feynman Herbert Goldstein Anthony L. Turkevich Herbert F. York1963 Herbert J.
C. Kouts L. James Rainwater Louis Rosen James M. Taub Cornelius A. Tobias1964 Jacob Bigeleisen Albert L. Latter Harvey M. Pratt Marshall N. Rosenbuth Theos J. Thompson1965 George A. Cowan Floyd M. Culler Milton C. Edlund Theodore B. Taylor Arthur C. Upton1966 Harold M. Agnew Ernest C. Anderson Murray Gell-Mann John R. Huizenga Paul R. Vanstrum1967 Mortimer M. Elkind John M. Googin Allen F. Henry John O. Rasmussen Robert N. Thorn1968 James R. Arnold E. Richard Cohen Val L. Fi
Val Logsdon Fitch
Val Logsdon Fitch was an American nuclear physicist who, with co-researcher James Cronin, was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment using the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. They proved, by examining the decay of K-mesons, that a reaction run in reverse does not retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the reactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time, thus the phenomenon of CP violation was discovered. This demolished the faith. Born on a cattle ranch near Merriman, Fitch was drafted into the U. S. Army during World War II, worked on the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, he graduated from McGill University, completed his Ph. D. in physics in 1954 at Columbia University. He was a member of the faculty at Princeton University from 1954 until his retirement in 2005. Val Logsdon Fitch was born on a cattle ranch near Merriman, Nebraska, on March 10, 1923, the youngest of three children of Fred Fitch, a cattle rancher, his wife Frances née Logsdon, a school teacher.
He had sister. The family farm was about 4 square miles in size, was about 40 miles from the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre; the ranch was a small one. Soon after his birth, his father was badly injured in a horse riding accident and could no longer work on his ranch, so the family moved to the nearby town of Gordon, where his father entered the insurance business, it was here. Fitch attended Chadron State College for three years transferred to Northwestern University. S. Army in 1943. After he had completed basic training, the Army sent him to Carnegie Institute of Technology for training under the Army Specialized Training Program. Under this program, some 200,000 soldiers attended colleges for intensive courses. Fitch was in the program for less than a year before the manpower requirements of the war became too great, the Army terminated the program. Most of the soldiers in the ASTP were posted to combat units, but Fitch was one of a hundred or so ASTP soldiers who joined the Special Engineer Detachment, which provided much-needed technicians to the Manhattan Project.
The Army sent Fitch to the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. By mid-1944, about a third of the technicians at Los Alamos were from the SED. While there, he met many of the greats of physics including Niels Bohr, James Chadwick, Enrico Fermi, Isidor Isaac Rabi, Bruno Rossi, Emilio Segrè, Edward Teller and Richard C. Tolman, in some cases attending courses on physics taught by them, he worked in the group headed by Ernest Titterton, a member of the British Mission, became well-acquainted with the techniques of experimental physics. He participated in the drop testing of mock atomic bombs, conducted at Wendover Army Air Field and the Salton Sea Naval Auxiliary Air Station, worked at the Trinity site, where he witnessed the Trinity nuclear test on July 16, 1945, he was discharged from the Army in 1946, but continued to work at Los Alamos as a civilian for another year in order to earn some money. He would return to Los Alamos in summer 1948, his wartime experiences led Fitch to decide to become a physicist.
Robert Bacher, the head of the physics division at Los Alamos, offered him a graduate assistantship at Cornell University, but first he needed to complete his undergraduate degree. Rather than return to Northwestern or Carnegie Mellon, he elected to enter McGill University, which Titterton had recommended. Fitch graduated from McGill with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1948. On the advice of Jerry Kellogg, a student of Rabi's at Columbia University, was a division head at the Los Alamos, Fitch decided to pursue his doctoral studies at Columbia. Kellogg wrote him a letter of introduction to Rabi. James Rainwater became his academic supervisor. Rainwater gave him a paper by John Wheeler concerning mu-mesic atoms, atoms in which an electron is replaced by a muon; these had never been observed. Fitch built an experiment to measure the gamma rays emitted from mu-mesic atoms; as it turned out, this was a good time to search for them. Columbia had commissioned a cyclotron at the Nevis Laboratories that could produce muons.
Nothing was found, but Rainwater suggested expanding the search beyond the energy range predicted by Wheeler on the basis of the then-accepted size of the radius of the atomic nucleus as around 1.4 × 10−15 m. When this was done, they found what they had been looking for, discovering in the process that the nucleus was closer to 1.2 × 10−15 m. He completed his Ph. D. in 1954, writing his thesis on "Studies of X-rays from mu-mesonic atoms". The thesis was published in the Physical Review in November 1953. In 1949, Fitch married Elise Cunningham, a secretary who worked in the laboratory at Columbia, they had two sons. Elise died in 1972, in 1976 he married Daisy Harper Sharp, thereby acquiring two stepdaughters and a stepson. After obtaining his doctorate, Fitch's interest shifted
