Physicists in Mourning

December 30, 2005

Since I was forgiven for starting the year of physics by blogging about birth, I hope I will be forgiven for ending the year of physics by blogging about death.  On the eve of December 25 one of the spokespeople (tranlation: leaders) of MINOS, Doug Michael, died at forty-something after struggling with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, diagnosed in February of this year.  Doug was a outspoken personality in particle physics and worked hard to make the MINOS detector what it is today, and more recently was fighting to convince Fermilab how important it was to invest in getting as many protons to the beamline as possible so we could really get the most physics out of the enormous investment in the NuMI beamline.  There's no way I can do justice to Doug's personality or accomplishments here, although I can at least point folks to the famous "how to talk like Doug" web site from his old collaboration MACRO, and to my entry about the talk he wrote for the NuMI Beamline Dedication (and this just in:  a video from 1995 of Doug talking to Alan Alda about MACRO for the TV show Scientific American Frontiers). 

Cat James, a MINOS physicist whose physicist husband died a year and a half ago (also while in his forties) sent out email to the MINOS collaboration mailing list telling how when her husband died, people sent their rememberances of Harry to the spokespeople of his current experiment, and then they collected all the emails and put them together in a book for Cat and also for Harry's family.  She suggested we do the same, and the letters have been coming in even though so many people are away on vacation these days. 

I had the opportunity to read the book at Harry's memorial service, and I was amazed at the diversity in the book:  diversity in not only in nationality and in generation, but also in how many different sides of Harry were remembered there.  Although the book has yet to be synthesized for Doug, I can already predict that there will be letters from Greece, Japan, and lots from England and Italy, just for starters.  There are already letters in from physicists just starting their carreers who have benefited from Doug's ear and advice, and a physicist "pushing 80" who helped advise Doug as a graduate student. 

The rememberance of Doug I would write about (once I figured out how to say it the right way) is his "feeder" side.  We once had a very detailed conversation about his creme brulee technique (which involved using the blow torch he had around his house for plumbing), and the fact that when the MINOS collaboration meeting was held at Cal Tech (his home institution), he picked a fantastic Mexican restaurant for the collaboration dinner and then (very quietly!!!) footed the over 100-person margarita bill himself.  (Doug, if you're reading this, I apologize for yet again spilling the beans...)

As much as I've written about my own family and our adventures this past year, I realize that probably I have not done justice to the "families" that evolve every time a collaboration comes together to do physics.  After spending nine days "in the bosom" of my own family I am reminded of what family really means:  we don't necessarily all look the same or play the same instruments (see photo at left).  We also don't all deal with stress the same way, but we do all have a common goal:  the only difference is that with experiments the primary goal has to do with something you learn in the future, with a secondary goal of training studens so they can direct the next experiment and solve the new mysteries that most experiments end up uncovering.

In families (or at least mine, I think) I would say one goal is to get as much out of the past (and present) as possible to teach the next generation.  On the other hand, after nine days of four generations of my family in Florida, I am realizing that in the case of both "blood" families and physics families, not only the youngest generation learns, and not only the oldest generation teaches.  Doug was definitely still learning and teaching in his impossible to duplicate way, and there are many branches in his physics family not only who are mourning, but who will carry on his legacy.