Curtis Meyer's memories of Ken Crowe
I first met Ken during my first year of graduate study at Berkeley in 1983 when I approached him about doing research in his group. By that summer, I was working full time in his group. The thing that I most vividly recall was the number of different projects I was able to work on. Ken provided an environment where a motivated student could both thrive and excel. He suggested topics, and then let me run with them.
In thinking back about those days, I recall starting by trying to develop a CP-violation measurement as part of the the TRIUMF Kaon Factory. In addition to that I worked on the heavy-ion experiments being performed at the Bevatron, ran shifts on a muon-decay experiment at TRIUMF, and then worked on a successful proposal to measure pion scattering on Helium at TRIUMF. Ultimately, I became involved in developing the proposal for my thesis experiment at SIN (now PSI) measuring radiative pion scattering off the proton. Then, during my last year or so, I became involved in the design and construction of the "jet drift chamber" for the Crystal Barrel experiment at LEAR. It was just a great environment for a graduate student to really do physics and Ken made that possible both with the resources and support to do the work, his sense as to what was good physics, and ultimately his style of just letting me run with it all.
I then jump ahead about eight years to the time that I was an Assistant Professor and we were working midnight shifts together at LEAR. It seemed that we both like to fly in from the states and start out with that shift. The late night conversations we had about potential physics directions and his advice on where I was going were invaluable to me at that early stage in my career.
I like to think that it was Ken's style of letting his students run that has been what I have also tried to do with my students at CMU. We talk about the problems a lot, but they are the ones solving them, and then making the progress and showing the results. While I did not have a lot of contact with Ken after we wound down Crystal Barrel around 2002 or so, I do think of him often. Both for allowing me reach my potential, but also showing me how to let my students do the same.
