Physics Today Valentine Louis Telegdi Nicola Close, Peter G. O. Freund, Murray Gell-Mann, Marvin L. Goldberger, Yoichiro Nambu, Reinhard Oehme , Lev Okun, and Roland Winston Citation: Physics Today 59(7), 66 (2006); doi: 10.1063/1.2337842 View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.2337842 View Table of Contents: http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/59/7?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: 131.215.225.131 On: Mon, 24 Aug 2015 19:35:12 physics. To explain the pattern of the vaunted neutrality. Ending up in Lau- baryon SU(3) octet and decuplet repre- sanne, Val attended the legendary lec- sentations required assuming what be- tures in which Ernst Stueckelberg dis- came known as a symmetric quark cussed his causal propagator and those model, in defiance of the established remarkable diagrams that were also in- antisymmetry for fermions. Over the dependently discovered and put to mar- following decades, many other reso- velous and universal use by Richard nances were discovered for both Feynman after World War II. baryons and mesons, in many cases by In 1946 Val moved to ETH Zürich for application of Dalitz plots. During that graduate study in Paul Scherrer’s time, the nonrelativistic quark model, group. His observation of so-called with later incorporation of color SU(3) three-pronged stars, corresponding to effects from quantum chromodynam- the reaction γ+C →α+α+α, deeply ics, became established as an orderly impressed Scherrer. Though offered a description of what had formerly been position at the University of Bristol by a menagerie of particles. C. F. Powell, Val chose to go to the Uni- For Dick, quarks were real, but as his versity of Chicago, where he caught the student in 1968, I found that being tail end of the Fermi years. asked to believe in fractionally charged In line with his broad interests in particles that no one had seen and that physics, Val, together with one of us few outside Oxford took seriously (Gell-Mann) who was a guest in Val’s Valentine Louis Telegdi could be demoralizing. When their re- Chicago lab at the time, published a ality began to emerge in deep inelastic paper on charge independence in nu- ured the muon’s anomalous magnetic scattering data around that time and clear reactions involving photons, relat- moment and provided one of the most Richard Feynman developed his parton ing to the work on isospin selection stringent tests of quantum electrody- model, Dick seemed hesitant to push rules by Luigi Radicati. namics. Val Telegdi, Valya Bargmann, the new area forward. With quarks as The 1956 parity revolution put Val on and Louis Michel constructed the ele- θ−τ with the analysis earlier and the the map as a major player in particle gant, and in this context very useful, rel- eponymous Dalitz plot, he had helped physics. The University of Chicago ex- ativistic theory of the precession of the pave the way in different manners for periment by Val and Jerome Friedman spin of a charged particle moving in a Nobel Prizes, but he never made the on parity violation in the π→μ→e homogeneous electromagnetic field. In final step himself. chain is one of the three independent the latest version of this muonic “g –2” Frank Close and almost simultaneous experiments experiment, parts-per-million accuracy University of Oxford that vindicated the bold idea of T. D. Lee has been reached. Oxford, UK and C. N. Yang that parity conservation Among Val’s other important exper- is violated in weak interactions. A lot of iments were ones on KS regeneration, Valentine Louis acrimony was connected with the time- muonium, and the helicity of the muon ordering of those three independent and neutrino. He also worked on muonic Telegdi brilliant experiments. The Columbia atoms, a field in which Wu, Val’s erst- On 8 April 2006, Valentine Louis Telegdi University–National Bureau of Stan- while competitor, was also active. That died in Pasadena, California, of compli- dards collaboration led by Chien-Shiung shared research interest further fanned cations following surgery for an aortic Wu and the Columbia team of Richard the flames of an outright Telegdi–Wu aneurysm. With his passing the physics Garwin, Leon Lederman, and Marcel feud, which was fought with etiquette community lost one of its most original Weinrich were the first to publish. An that would have passed muster at the and distinguished members. Val’s con- editorial decision was made to publish courts of both the Hapsburg and the tributions to our understanding of weak the Telegdi–Friedman letter in the next Qing emperors, and yet was as harshly and electromagnetic interactions are issue of the journal in question instead of antagonistic as feuds between great sci- seminal. Beyond those contributions, the issue containing the Columbia let- entists can get. though, what made Val unique was the ters. At the time of the parity experiment, In 1976 Val left the University of depth of his understanding of the theo- there was close scientific contact be- Chicago, where he had been the Enrico retical fine points of the physics, which tween Val and one of us (Oehme), who Fermi Distinguished Service Professor of in his fundamental particle-physics ex- discovered that charge-conjugation Physics, for a professorship at ETH periments led him to beautiful and far symmetry must also be violated in the Zürich. Val was elected to the CERN Sci- from obvious ways of testing an idea. A experiments. entific Policy Committee and soon be- Telegdi experiment was always marked The field was now moving fast, and came its chairman. In that capacity he as much by the conceptual cleverness once the so-called V–A theory of the was instrumental in starting a collabo- of its design as by the importance of its weak interactions had been proposed, it ration between CERN and Russia. Over results. became essential to accurately measure the past two decades, he spent much time Val was born on 11 January 1922 in the ratio of the Gamow–Teller and first at Caltech and then at the University Budapest, Hungary. After wandering all Fermi matrix elements in neutron beta of California, San Diego. over Europe, the Telegdis ended up in decay. A classic experiment by a Uni- For his major contributions to Italy. From there they sought wartime versity of Chicago–Argonne National standard-model physics, Val was elected shelter in Switzerland but did not find it Laboratory collaboration led by Val to the national academies of the US, Swe- until 1943, when in the wake of the Ger- found the value 1.25 for this ratio. den, Hungary, and Russia; to the Royal man army’s defeat at Stalingrad, the A fundamental CERN experiment Society in London; and to the Accademia Swiss reoriented the tilt of their much- led by Val and Garwin in 1959–60 meas- dei Lincei in Rome. In 1991 he shared the This66 articleJuly is copyrighted 2006 Physics as indicated Today in the article. Reuse of AIP content is subject to the terms at: http://scitation.aip.org/termsconditions. www.physicstoday.org Downloaded to IP: 131.215.225.131 On: Mon, 24 Aug 2015 19:35:12 Wolf Prize with Maurice Goldhaber, one of his few peers in putting keen theoret- ical knowledge to work in devising very clever experiments. A charismatic lecturer, Val stream- lined his arguments to the point that their conclusions appeared both in- escapable and natural. He would sprin- Breaking New Ground... kle his lectures with marvelous apho- risms, such as “Last year’s sensation is • World’s first commercial HTS (BSSCO-2223) this year’s calibration and next year’s superconducting magnet system for a unwanted background” and “It is easy gyrotron tube application. (2003) to be a child prodigy, but much harder • World’s first commercial 7T liquid cryogen-free to be an adult prodigy.” Val was a de- superconducting magnet system for Ion manding teacher, but he knew how to Cyclotron Resonance research. (2003) nurture talent. Val viewed humans in a straight • World’s first superconducting magnet in black-and-white fashion, with hardly space. (2005) any shadings, a trace maybe of the • World’s first stacked pancake coil wound with old Austro-Hungarian “K.u.K.” dual- long lengths of 2nd Generation HTS (YBCO) monarchy mentality impressed on him in material. (2005) his childhood. That perspective is largely the reason for the feuds he managed to • Latest releases including our new get embroiled in. His wife Lia (generally superconducting magnet recognized as by far the greatest chef in power supply! (2006) the western physics community) once asked Gell-Mann, “In physics is it really necessary to hate as many people as Val does?” He replied, “To tell the truth, I ...Keeping You Ahead don’t know, but if it is a comfort to you, in many cases Val somehow knows how 1006 Alvin Weinberg Drive • Oak Ridge. TN 37830 • Phone: (865) 482-9551 to pick the right people to hate.” Fax: (865) 483-1253 • [email protected] • www.cryomagnetics.com But Val was also capable of friend- ship in the truest sense of the word, and See www.pt.ims.ca/9466-25 those who benefited from Val’s giving friendship cherish it as one of the great things to come their way in life. The physics community has lost a The magazine that helps supremely original master at a time in which large amorphous collaborations scientists to apply high-end are necessarily the rule, and individu- alistic perfectionists of Val’s caliber software in their research! have become extremely rare exceptions.