Physics Today

Anthony Leonid Turkevich Thanasis E. Economou and Gerald J. Wasserburg

Citation: Physics Today 56(6), 78 (2003); doi: 10.1063/1.1595067 View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.1595067 View Table of Contents: http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/56/6?ver=pdfcov Published by the AIP Publishing

[[[This article is copyrighted as indicated in the abstract. Reuse of AIP content is subject to the terms at: http://scitationnew.aip.org/termsconditions. Downloaded to ]]] IP: 131.215.71.79 On: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 18:27:19 and his colleagues later flew similar in- Anthony Leonid struments with improved capabilities Turkevich on the Soviet Phobos 1 and Phobos 2 missions (1988); the Russian Mars-96 nthony Leonid Turkevich, a nu- mission (1996); and on NASA’s suc- Aclear radiochemist and physicist cessful Pathfinder mission to Mars and a professor of chemistry at the (1997), which provided the first de- University of Chicago, died in his tailed analyses of Martian rocks. sleep on 7 September 2002 at his In 1965, Tony was named the James home in Lexington, Virginia. He was Franck Professor of Chemistry at the widely esteemed for his great intel- University of Chicago and, in 1970, the lectual powers, deep physical insight, James Franck Distinguished Service and personal integrity. Professor. During the 1970s and 1980s, Tony was born in New York City on Tony performed some of his most exotic 23 July 1916, the son of a Russian Or- experiments, in which he searched for thodox clergyman who became a head polyneutrons, delta particles, and of the Russian Orthodox Church in super-heavy particles within the nu- both North America and Japan. In cleus. Those studies pointed toward 1937, Tony earned a BA from Dart- the elucidation of high-energy reac- mouth College and, in 1940, a PhD in tions that involve complex nuclei and physical chemistry from Princeton Uni- Anthony Leonid Turkevich probe the basic properties of matter. A versity. His doctoral work was on diffu- senior fellow at Los Alamos, he con- sion determination of molecular struc- addressed radiochemical studies in- ducted highly classified work on the tures and dielectric investigations of volving a variety of high-energy parti- Soviet Union’s nuclear technology at the motion of organic molecules in the both Los Alamos and at Argonne Na- solid state. Shortly after his gradua- cle accelerators. Theoretical research during the early 1950s that stands out tional Laboratory. tion, he was invited to the University of Long after he achieved emeritus Chicago as a research physicist in the included unpublished but widely cited calculations he did with Fermi on nu- status in 1986, Tony switched gears department of physics; he worked on again to one of the most interesting UV spectroscopy and the radiochemical clear processes; their calculations indi- cated that the Big Bang produced a questions in theoretical physics: the studies of the fission products. double beta-decay of uranium-238 to During World War II, Tony was a mixture of gases comprising 75% hy- drogen and 25% helium by mass. In plutonium-238. With George Cowan member of the Manhattan Project. He and one of us (Economou), he deter- worked closely with W. F. Libby, En- collaboration with Nick Metropolis and others, Tony used the MANIAC com- mined the extremely long halflife of rico Fermi, and Edward Teller, first at that process and proposed the exis- Columbia University, then at the Uni- puter at Los Alamos to perform Monte Carlo calculations on high-energy intra- tence of neutrinos with a small mass. versity of Chicago, and finally at Los That notion is now gaining acceptance Alamos. His first contributions to the nuclear cascades. Tony played a key role in 1958 as an but, at the time, ran against the pre- Manhattan Project were on chemical vailing thinking. In a quite different problems associated with uranium expert adviser to the US delegation on disarmament negotiations with the field, Tony carried out pioneering hexafluoride isotope diffusion separa- 13 USSR. He was also directly involved in work on heavy methane ( CD4) trac- tion and radiochemical studies of ura- ers for modeling the dispersion and nium fission products; he carried out development of a major program for measuring the atmospheric accumula- atmospheric circulation of pollutants. that research at the University of Among the numerous awards be- Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory. tion of long-lived krypton-85. That iso- tope became the definitive measure of stowed on Tony were the E. O. That work led to his participation in Lawrence Memorial Award from the the test of the first atom bomb, which the amount of fission generated in processed fuel elements and atmos- Atomic Energy Commission (1962) and was detonated in Alamogordo, New the Nuclear Applications Award from Mexico, in July 1945; for that effort, pheric weapons tests. Tony, George Reed, and Hiroshi Hamaguchi carried the American Chemical Society (1972). he made accurate estimates of the re- He was elected to the National Acad- out (in 1957) the first precise and reli- leased power. Later that year, he emy of Sciences in 1967. In 1969, he able determination of uranium in iron joined the theoretical group at Los was elected to the American Academy meteorites, thus providing fundamen- Alamos where he worked under the of Arts and Sciences and received the tal information about chemical frac- direction of Teller on problems associ- Atom for Peace Award from NAS for tionation in planetary formation. ated with thermonuclear reactions. his work in the lunar program. In 1961, Tony proposed to NASA After the war, Tony decided to call Tony was a dedicated teacher and that it use a novel nuclear technique he himself a chemist. He accepted a posi- guided many doctoral students and was developing to obtain, in situ, the tion at the newly formed Institute for young postdoctoral scientists. His re- chemical composition of the lunar sur- Nuclear Studies (now the Enrico Fermi tirement at age 70 did not much face. His “alpha scattering instrument” Institute) at the University of Chicago change his research schedule. He con- and, in 1946, joined the university’s de- was flown on the Surveyor 5, 6, and 7 tinued to pursue his scientific interest partment of chemistry. Tony was a missions and provided the first chemi- until his health failed him shortly be- meticulous, inventive experimentalist cal analysis indicating that the Moon fore his death. and a brilliant theoretician. All of his was a differentiated body and not a Thanasis E. Economou experimental and theoretical research primitive chondrite, as was the pre- University of Chicago during the postwar years was pub- vailing thought. The results he ob- Chicago, Illinois lished in the Physical Review, although tained on the Surveyor missions proved Gerald J. Wasserburg his teaching was in the chemistry de- to be a sound basis for all of the science California Institute of Technology partment. His experimental research later done on the Apollo missions. He Pasadena, California ᭿

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