Frank Crawford (physicist)

Frank Stevens Crawford (born October 25, 1923 in Scranton , † July 28, 2003 in San Rafael ) was an American physicist . He was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley .

Life

Crawford first studied music in Phoenix (Arizona) , was drafted into the US Air Force in 1943 and was a radio operator in a B 17 bomber in Italy. He was shot down once over Yugoslavia and smuggled out of the country again by the partisans. From 1946 he studied physics in Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in 1948 and received his doctorate in 1953 under Luis Alvarez . Crawford was a member of the Alvarez team in Berkeley, who made numerous discoveries in elementary particle physics with bubble chambers in the 1950s and 1960s, which were further developed after the invention by Donald Glaser of Alvarez and coworkers in Berkeley (they replaced the ether used by Glaser with liquid hydrogen). This was the main reason why Alvarez received the Nobel Prize in 1968. They discovered numerous new particles and resonances and, as a by-product, muon-catalyzed nuclear fusion. From 1958 Crawford was a faculty member at Berkeley, but also continued research at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory .

He was musically interested and played a range of instruments from flute, clarinet and saxophone to piano. From the 1970s he gave courses in acoustics and musical acoustics and he invented a wind instrument consisting of a flexible metal tube for gas installations (corrugahorn), which he demonstrated and sold on campus. His interest in wave phenomena resulted in the well-known Volume 3 of the Berkeley Physics Course on waves, published in 1968. From the 1970s he published many articles in the American Journal of Physics , which often dealt with the physics of everyday phenomena. He built visual and acoustic demonstration experiments, some of which were on display in the corridors of the physics faculty in Berkeley.

In 1977 he was a pioneer in adaptive optics and demonstrated flexible mirrors ( rubber mirrors ) to compensate for optical distortions caused by atmospheric turbulence. From the late 1970s he worked with Richard A. Muller on the early automated supernova search.

In 1991 he retired in Berkeley and last dealt theoretically with cosmological questions. Most recently he suffered from Parkinson's disease. He was married twice and had a son and daughter from his first marriage.

Web links

• Obituary in Berkeley