Tom Case's memories of Ken Crowe

I was a graduate student of Ken's from around 1988 till 1993. I already had a background in solid state physics and building MRI scanners but had little experience in particle detectors or anything in the MeV to GeV range.

There were many projects at Berkeley searching for the next highest energy particle (at the time the Top quark) or maybe something you could spend your graduate career {\sl not\/} finding, like dark matter, but I just wanted to get well grounded in all the "mundane", "well-known" particles in-between (and actually witness a lot of them myself. Ken had been there laying the foundations so people could scale higher peaks and was still working on many interesting projects in parallel on these "older" particles. In Ken's group I could brush up on atomic physics, nuclear physics, weak interactions, strong interactions, fusion research, heavy ion collisions... all at the same time. I could watch anti-protons eat protons at CERN and wander around all the old and new experiments and hear the history from Ken.

At PSI I could watch muons cause 5 of the 6 hydrogen fusion reactions and finally get past the lies I was told in Junior high school about how the sun works. (We did figure we could witness the 6th reaction, the one that actually runs the sun and has never been seen on earth, but it would take about 10 years).

I enjoyed sitting with Ken doing simple experiments that really made principles sink in; like sticking a pad of paper between a radiation source and detectors and changing the particle energy by adding and removing pages. I could tell he loved the ultimate simplicity behind a good scientific measurement and he really liked to share such things.

At CERN Ken and Penny lived nearby in a village in France. It was always a great pleasure to have dinner with them and talk about something other than physics. Usually with a wildflower arrangement on the table that Penny had picked in the surrounding hills that day. Sometimes we would head off to some small old french village nearby for lunch and enjoy the views of the French alps. Equally nice was visiting the hexagonal house on stilts on the San Francisco bay with Ken's boat docked out back.

I learned a great deal from Ken and his students and colleagues and will remember those times fondly.

Tom Case

Senior Staff Scientist
Xradia Inc.
Pleasanton CA

Feb 28, 2012