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Obituary from Physics Today, December, 1998 Physics Today Shlomo Alexander Zeev Luz, Robijn Bruinsma, Yitzhak Rabin, and PierreGilles DeGennes Citation: Physics Today 51(12), 73 (1998); doi: 10.1063/1.2805729 View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.2805729 View Table of Contents: http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/51/12?ver=pdfcov Published by the AIP Publishing This article is copyrighted as indicated in the article. Reuse of AIP content is subject to the terms at: http://scitation.aip.org/termsconditions. Downloaded to IP: 67.165.142.171 On: Sun, 25 May 2014 19:19:27 WE HEAR THAT tory. Futrell is currently the Willis F. work with the project after his move. IN BRIEF Harrington Professor of Chemistry at Thomas Ackermaii has accepted the the University of Delaware. He will Last May, Thomas Mason, formerly position of chief scientist of the US De- replace Teresa Fryberger, who led an associate professor of physics at the partment of Energy's Atmospheric Ra- the EMSL during its first year of op- University of Toronto, became the deputy diation Measurement (ARM) program. eration as interim director. project manager for neutron science at He is currently making the transition to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. his new position, and next summer will In February, Stephen Strom, a pro- move from Pennsylvania State Univer- fessor of astronomy at the University William Moerner became a professor sity, where he is a professor of meteor- of Massachusetts, Amherst, will join of chemistry at Stanford University in ology, to Pacific Northwest National the National Optical Astronomy Obser- July but, until his lab is ready next Laboratory, where ARM is based. Ack- vatories as an astronomer in the sci- spring, he will continue to do research erman is replacing Gerald Stokes, who ence/operations division in Tucson, Ari- at the University of California, San will direct the environmental and health zona. Strom served as director of the Diego, where he had previously held sciences division at PNNL. Ackerman Large Millimeter Telescope project the position of distinguished chair of will also be a Battelle fellow, only the from 1996-98 and will continue to physical chemistry. second person to bear such a title. In September, the White House gave OBITUARIES ten individuals and ten institutions Presidential Awards for Science, Math Shlomo Alexander and Engineering Mentoring. One of hlomo Alexander, a versatile physi- the ten institutions was the physics Scist who both experimented and department at Bryn Mawr, where 59c theorized on condensed matter, was of graduates in recent years have been killed in a car accident near Caesarea, physics majors—ten times the national Israel, on 6 August. average. (See PHYSICS TODAY, August Born in Freiburg, Germany, on 4 1996, page 57.) September 1930, Shlomo grew up in Jerusalem, where he earned a BSc In September, Michael A. Stroscio, from the Hebrew University of Jeru- principal scientist at the US Army Re- salem in 1955. Under the guidance of search Office, received the 1998 Harry Saul Meiboom, he earned a PhD in Diamond Memorial Award from the physics from the Weizmann Institute Institute of Electrical and Electronics of Science in 1958. Engineers. Although Shlomo is best known for his theoretical contributions to con- The nuclear medicine division of densed matter physics, for which he Mallinckrodt Inc, in Petten, The Neth- was awarded the Israel Prize in 1993, erlands, has dedicated a new building to he began his research career as an Powell "Jim" Richards. Richards experimenter. As part of his thesis SHLOMO ALEXANDER suggested the medical use of technetium- work, he helped to build a high-reso- 99m in 1960 while working for Brook- lution nuclear magnetic resonance (PNQR) spectroscopy. He formulated a haven National Laboratoiy, from which spectrometer—no small feat in 1950s new theory, which involved the sudden he retired in 1983. With its short halflife Israel. Using this instrument, he stud- approximation, to account for the effect and absence of beta decay, technetium- ied the structure of the proton NMR of molecular jumps on the PNQR re- 99m is now used each year in nearly 20 spectrum in vinyl derivatives. Con- laxation and applied it to molecular million diagnostic procedures worldwide. trary to the generally accepted view in crystals. In these systems, he discov- those days, he found that proton spin- ered second-order displacive phase In a ceremony in Heidelberg, Germany, spin couplings could be negative, as transitions, which, though well known in September, the Astronomische Ge- well as positive. He then went on— in ferroelectrics, were a surprise in sellschaft presented the 1998 Karl still as part of his thesis—to use the molecular crystals. Schwarzschild Medal to Peter A. Dirac vector model to explain the origin In 1969, Shlomo moved to the He- Strittmatter, in part "for his theoreti- of the coupling sign. brew University, where he established cal work on stellar structure and star In 1961, Shlomo went as a postdoc a theoretical physics group at the uni- formation within rotating and strongly to AT&T's Bell Laboratories to study— versity's Racah Institute. From that magnetic fields and for his observa- with Phil Anderson—the interactions time on, he never set up an experimen- tional work on white dwarfs and on between magnetic moments in metals tal lab again, though he always main- quasars." Strittmatter is a regent's and to participate in experimental work tained a close connection with experi- professor of astronomy at the Univer- on metals and superconductors. At the mentalists. sity of Arizona and director of the uni- same time, he wrote two definitive pa- In the 1970s, Shlomo continued his versity's Steward Observatory. pers on dynamic NMR line shapes, using work on dynamic effects on NMR spec- the density matrix formalism. tra and studied fluctuation effects on In February, Jean Futrell will become In 1962, Alexander returned to the NMR in superconductors. He also the new director of the Environmental Weizmann Institute and initiated theo- branched into new directions—namely, Molecular Sciences Laboratory at the retical and experimental activity in phase transitions, disordered systems Pacific Northwest National Labora- pure nuclear quadrupole resonance and soft condensed matter. Many of This article is copyrighted as indicated in the article. Reuse of AIP content is subject to the terms at: http://scitation.aip.org/termsconditions. Downloaded to IP: 67.165.142.171 On: Sun, 25 May 2014 19:19:27 DECEMBER 1998 PHYSICS TODAY 73 his works in this period became classic. a Mecca for colleagues and students Papapetrou to the Dublin Institute for His study of helium adsorbed on gra- alike. He collaborated with an enor- Advanced Studies, where he started to foil, for example, {Physics Letters, vol- mous number of people from a variety work on Schrodinger's unified field the- ume 54A, page 353, 1975) was the of fields, ranging from organic chemis- ory. He found exact spherically sym- forerunner of numerous works on com- try to mathematical physics, and even metric solutions and proved that non- mensurate-incommensurate transi- ventured outside of physics to econom- .singular solutions to the nonsymmetric tions, and the Alexander-McTague the- ics—a subject he worked on with his field equations do not exist. In 1948, ory of the liquid-solid transition is now wife Esther. Age and scientific stature he became a physics research fellow at standard textbook material. had no effect on his youthful mind: He the University of Manchester, where Shortly after he was introduced to remained energetic, inquisitive and he worked mainly on problems con- polymers during his sabbatical at the open-minded, and would address a nected with the equations of motion in College of France in 1976, Shlomo de- young student with the same courtesy general relativity. He introduced veloped the scaling theory of polymers and respect as a public or scientific marked simplifications in the deriva- attached to surfaces. His seminal pa- celebrity. He had a passion for scien- tion of the slow-motion equations, and pers on this subject gave birth to a new tific integrity, and deep awareness of derived the equations of motion of spin- branch of polymer science, and there the need to protect science against dan- ning test particles, partly in collabora- are hundreds of references to the "Al- gers ranging from downright fraud to tion with Ernesto Corinaldesi. exander—de Gennes brush" in the lit- the presentation of half-baked ideas as In 1952, Papapetrou moved to East erature. This work was followed by scientific truths. Berlin, where he established a relativ- another classic in the area of soft con- ity group in the German Academy of densed matter: the first lattice gas Shlomo was a noble human being, Sciences of the German Democratic model of microemulsions. a brilliant physicist and a dear friend. Republic. His work there, often in In 1978, Shlomo was elected dean We are deeply saddened by his death. collaboration with the younger re- of the faculty of science and mathemat- ZEEV LUZ search workers whom he was training, ics at the Hebrew University, a position Weizmann Institute of Science included a proof of the nonexistence of he held until 1981. Rehovot, Israel periodic, nonsingular solutions to the Following many visits to UCLA in MEIR WEGER gravitational field equations, investi- the beginning of the 1980s, Shlomo Hebrew University of Jerusalem gations of gravitational shock waves joined the UCLA physics faculty in Jerusalem, Israel and further studies of the equations of 1986. There, he made major contribu- ROBIJN BRUINSMA motion. tions to the study of transport and University of California, Los Angeles Papapetrou moved to Paris in 1962 excitation dynamics in one-dimen- YITZHAK RABIN to become a research director at the sional disordered systems.
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