Biography - In Memoriam - UC online
- DRAFT -
IN MEMORIAM
Kenneth Morse Crowe
Professor of Physics, Emeritus
Berkeley
1926 - 2012
On February 1, 2012, the subatomic physics community lost one of its most versatile, creative and talented members. In his thirty-three years (1958 to 1991) as a Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley and a research physicist at the "Rad Lab" (Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, later renamed the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Kenneth M. Crowe distinguished himself and launched several important fields of physics, not to mention the careers of many students.
Ken was born in Boston in 1926. His parents had a vacation resort business on Simpson Island, where he worked summers as a youth and learned to sail on the local waterways. His lifelong love of sailboat racing is legendary among the many colleagues and students who later crewed for him in races on the San Francisco Bay. Always devoted to his family, he is survived by his wife, Penny, and his children Christina, Laura, Gabrielle, Cathy, Timothy, Jeffrey, and stepchildren Michael and Karen.
Ken skipped his high school senior year to attend Brown University, graduating in 1948. He taught electronics for the Navy on Treasure Island and in 1952 received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, with Luis Alvarez and Wolfgang Panofsky on his committee. He was a research associate at Stanford University’s Hansen Laboratories of Physics until 1956, when he joined the Rad Lab at Berkeley, where in 1957 he coauthored the influential book, "Fundamental Constants of Physics", with E. Richard Cohen and Jesse DuMond. A year later he joined the UC Berkeley Physics faculty as a Professor; there he became known as a demanding, inspirational teacher. Much of his later career was devoted to the precise measurement of fundamental constants, notably the magnetic moment and other properties of the muon.
Ken’s publication record spans a period of 63 years, including more than 225 publications, and covers, even defines, the full breath of a field that came to be known as "medium energy physics". His interests were many, and to us he will remain a role model for having the courage and intellectual strength to transgress the boundaries of one’s own narrow field. He performed pioneering experiments in such diverse topics as fundamental properties of pions and muons, pion induced electromagnetic interactions in nuclear physics, pion-interferometry in high energy heavy ion reactions and muon-catalyzed fusion. The seminal experiments of his group at the Rad Lab's 184-Inch Cyclotron spurred the development of an important new discipline in solid state physics and chemistry: muon spin rotation/relaxation/resonance (µSR). In the 1970s he became a key promoter of many of these scientific directions at the new "meson factories" in Los Alamos, NM, Vancouver, BC, and Villigen, Switzerland. In the 1980s Crowe was a founding member of an international collaboration to perform the Crystal Barrel Experiment at the Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR) at CERN, used to test the fundamental theory of nuclear physics, quantum chromodynamics (QCD). That experiment discovered and clarified major aspects of the low-energy meson spectrum. It lasted several years, during which Ken and his wife, Penny, lived across the border from CERN headquarters in the French countryside, a home fondly remembered by his colleagues, not least for Penny’s bouquets of wildflowers and her excellent cooking.
Ken was a leader in investigating muon and pion reactions and their underlying principles. Many of his students and postdocs from the United States and other countries sought him out in Berkeley or were lucky enough to make his acquaintance here, and are now leaders in their fields.
Crowe’s former students are consistent in remembering their mentor as a perfectionist whose respect was hard to win but, once won, whose loyalty and generosity were boundless. This was as true on the water as in the laboratory. A fiercely competitive yachtsman, he sailed his 5.5-meter sloop for the Richmond Yacht Club but insisted on crewing it with landlubberly students and postdocs who couldn’t tell a sheet from a painter; even when they got the skipper in trouble with the race officials, they would be treated to a drink at the bar once safely back onshore.
Ken Crowe was a Fellow of the American Physical Society, was named a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 1980, was awarded the Humboldt Senior Scientist Award in 1987, and was a Scientific Associate in the CERN Fellowship Program from 1990-1991. One colleague from his youth confided, "We all thought Ken would be the one [among our cohort] to win a Nobel prize," but his scientific legacy was shared instead among the many colleagues and students whose careers he launched.
- Jess H. Brewer and Peter Kammel, 2012-2013
Partially based on Personal Memories of Kenneth Morse Crowe
Thanks also to Paul Preuss, LBNL.
