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Biographical Memoirs V.86 Biographical Memoirs V.86 Office of the Home Secretary, National Academy of Sciences ISBN: 0-309-54538-2, 412 pages, 6 x 9, (2005) This free PDF was downloaded from: http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11429.html Visit the National Academies Press online, the authoritative source for all books from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council: • Download hundreds of free books in PDF • Read thousands of books online, free • Sign up to be notified when new books are published • Purchase printed books • Purchase PDFs • Explore with our innovative research tools Thank you for downloading this free PDF. If you have comments, questions or just want more information about the books published by the National Academies Press, you may contact our customer service department toll-free at 888-624-8373, visit us online, or send an email to [email protected]. This free book plus thousands more books are available at http://www.nap.edu. Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. Permission is granted for this material to be shared for noncommercial, educational purposes, provided that this notice appears on the reproduced materials, the Web address of the online, full authoritative version is retained, and copies are not altered. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the National Academies Press. Biographical Memoirs V.86 http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11429.html Biographical Memoirs Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Biographical Memoirs V.86 http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11429.html Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Biographical Memoirs V.86 http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11429.html Biographical Memoirs VOLUME 86 THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS WASHINGTON, D.C. www.nap.edu Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Biographical Memoirs V.86 http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11429.html The National Academy of Sciences was established in 1863 by Act of Con- gress as a private, nonprofit, self-governing membership corporation for the furtherance of science and technology, required to advise the federal government upon request within its fields of competence. Under its cor- porate charter the Academy established the National Research Council in 1916, the National Academy of Engineering in 1964, and the Institute of Medicine in 1970. Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Academy of Sciences. INTERNATIONAL STANDARD BOOK NUMBER 0-309-09304-X INTERNATIONAL STANDARD SERIAL NUMBER 0077-2933 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 5-26629 Available from THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS 500 FIFTH STREET, N.W. WASHINGTON, D.C. 20001 COPYRIGHT 2005 BY THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Biographical Memoirs V.86 http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11429.html CONTENTS PREFACE vii LAWRENCE HUGH ALLER 3 BY MANUEL PEIMBERT HARRY BEEVERS BY MAARTEN J. CHRISPEELS 17 FRANK ALDEN BOVEY BY FREDERIC C. SCHILLING AND ALAN E. TONELLI 37 NORMAN DAVIDSON BY HENRY A. LESTER AND AHMED ZEWAIL 61 HARRY GEORGE DRICKAMER BY JIRI JONAS 79 HAROLD EUGENE EDGERTON BY J. KIM VANDIVER AND PAGAN KENNEDY 97 HOWARD E. EVANS BY MARY JANE WEST-EBERHARD 119 v Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Biographical Memoirs V.86 http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11429.html vi CONTENTS WILLIS H. FLYGARE BY DAVID CHANDLER 137 JESSE LEONARD GREENSTEIN BY ROBERT P. KRAFT 163 DONALD R. GRIFFIN BY CHARLES G. GROSS 189 WASSILY HOEFFDING BY NICHOLAS I. FISHER AND WILLEM VAN ZWET 209 D. GALE JOHNSON BY VERNON W. RUTTAN, JAMES J. HECKMAN, AND G. EDWARD SCHUH 229 ROBERT THOMAS JONES BY WALTER G. VINCENTI 241 NORMAN CARL RASMUSSEN BY KENT F. HANSEN 261 GLENN WADE SALISBURY BY ROBERT H. FOOTE 277 WILLIAM REES SEARS BY NICHOLAS ROTT 299 FOLKE KARL SKOOG BY DONALD J. ARMSTRONG AND ELDON H. NEWCOMB 313 HIROSHI TAMIYA BY ANDREW A. BENSON 335 EVON ZARTMAN VOGT, JR. BY JOYCE MARCUS 355 ROBERT M. WALKER By P. Buford Price and Ernst Zinner 379 Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Biographical Memoirs V.86 http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11429.html PREFACE On March 3, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Act of Incorporation that brought the National Academy of Sci- ences into being. In accordance with that original charter, the Academy is a private, honorary organization of scien- tists, elected for outstanding contributions to knowledge, who can be called upon to advise the federal government. As an institution the Academy’s goal is to work toward in- creasing scientific knowledge and to further the use of that knowledge for the general good. The Biographical Memoirs, begun in 1877, are a series of volumes containing the life histories and selected bibliogra- phies of deceased members of the Academy. Colleagues familiar with the discipline and the subject’s work prepare the essays. These volumes, then, contain a record of the life and work of our most distinguished leaders in the sci- ences, as witnessed and interpreted by their colleagues and peers. They form a biographical history of science in America—an important part of our nation’s contribution to the intellectual heritage of the world. R. STEPHEN BERRY Home Secretary vii Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Biographical Memoirs V.86 http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11429.html Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Biographical Memoirs V.86 http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11429.html Biographical Memoirs VOLUME 86 Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Biographical Memoirs V.86 http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11429.html Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Biographical Memoirs V.86 http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11429.html LAWRENCE HUGH ALLER September 24, 1913–March 16, 2003 BY MANUEL PEIMBERT AWRENCE H. ALLER, after finishing his second year at high L school, was dragged away by his father to a primitive mining field in northern California, where he worked helping him in an illusory quest for gold. He literally escaped from this situation to become a brilliant astrophysicist, an expert in the study of planetary nebulae, stellar atmospheres, and the chemical composition of stars and nebulae. Aller was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1962. The comparison between the observed abundances and those predicted by the main astrophysical theories—stellar evolution, galactic evolution, and the evolution of the Uni- verse as a whole—was one of the main drives in the devel- opment of astrophysics in the twentieth century. Aller was one of the first astronomers to advocate that differences in the spectra of stars and nebulae were due not only to physi- cal conditions but also to real differences in their chemical composition. A substantial fraction of Aller’s research work was devoted to the determination of the chemical composi- tion of stars of different types and of planetary nebulae, which are objects in transition between red giant stars and white dwarfs. 3 Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Biographical Memoirs V.86 http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11429.html 4 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS THE FORMATIVE YEARS Born on September 24, 1913, in Tacoma, Washington, Aller was the son of Leslie E. Aller and Lena Belle, and the youngest of their six children: Leeon, Jane, Paul, Louis, Lee, and Lawrence. His father and grandfather were involved in printing and mining, and his mother had been a school- teacher before she was married. His interest in astronomy started early in life. At the age of four he observed the total solar eclipse of 1918, which produced a lasting effect during his life. As a child living in Tacoma, a city by the sea, he was interested in the tides and their causes, and also in world geography. At the age of 10 his mother took him to visit the Lick Observatory, where he bought a small book on astronomy. During his second year in high school, in Seattle, he borrowed from the public library the book by Russell, Dugan, and Stewart on astrophysics and stellar astronomy. At that time it was not possible to predict that Russell was going to suggest to Aller to write books on astronomy, nor that Aller was going to obtain the Henry Norris Russell award for his life’s work on astronomy. In 1929, at the end of his second year in high school, Aller was taken away by his father to a mining camp in northern California, close to the border with Oregon, not far from a little village called Takilma, where he stayed for two and one-half years, never finishing the high school cycle. With the support of his brother Paul he abandoned the mining camp and went to Oakland to live with his sister Jane and her husband. Before becoming an undergraduate at the University of California, Aller became a member of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and engaged in fruitful correspondence with many amateur and professional astronomers, among Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Biographical Memoirs V.86 http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11429.html LAWRENCE HUGH ALLER 5 them Herman Zanstra, Seth B. Nicholson, Adriaan van Maanen, Edison Pettit, and Donald H. Menzel. He read a paper by Menzel on “Hydrogen Abundance and the Consti- tution of the Giant Planets,” which appeared in the August 1930 issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. This paper induced him to write to Menzel, starting a regular correspondence that later on became provi- dential for his astronomical career. When Aller arrived in Oakland from the mining camp, Menzel was teaching Astronomy I at University of Califor- nia, Berkeley.
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