Kenneth Ford

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Kenneth William Ford (born May 1, 1926 in Palm Beach ) is an American theoretical physicist.

Life

Ford studied at Phillips Exeter Academy and at Harvard , where he made his bachelor's degree "summa cum laude" in 1948. In 1944 he won the Westinghouse talent competition for young scientists. In 1950/51 he worked in Los Alamos and in 1951/52 in the Matterhorn nuclear fusion project in Princeton on the development of hydrogen bombs. Among other things, he calculated the likelihood that the compressed “fuel” would be efficiently converted and estimated the explosive power (i.e. the energy released). In 1953 he received his doctorate under John Archibald Wheeler at Princeton University.

From 1953 he was a member of Indiana University , where he became an associate professor. In 1955/56 he was a Fulbright Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Göttingen. From 1958 he worked at Brandeis University , first as an associate professor, then as a professor and, in 1963/64, chairman of the physics faculty. In 1961/62 he was a National Science Research Fellow at Imperial College London and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). From 1964 he was a professor at the University of California, Irvine (and faculty chairman until 1968), from 1970 at the University of Massachusetts in Boston (1972 to 1974 as faculty chairman). Then he worked in administrative posts.

From 1975 to 1982 he was President of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, from 1982/83 he was Executive Vice President of the University of Maryland and from 1983 to 1985 President of Molecular Biophysics Technology Inc. He was then an Education Officer at American for two years Physical Society and from 1987 to 1993 CEO and Executive Director of the American Institute of Physics . He then worked part-time as a teacher at Germantown Academy, where he lives in Philadelphia, and occasionally as a scientific advisor.

Ford first dealt with theoretical nuclear physics, later also with elementary particle physics and quantum electrodynamics (e.g. in the 1960s with muonic atoms). With Wheeler he published papers on semiclassical scattering theory. In addition to his theoretical work, he is also involved in physics education.

From 1974 to 1977 he was editor of the American Journal of Physics and in 1972 President of the American Association of Physics Teachers , whose Oersted Medal he received in 2006. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science . From 2000 to 2006 he was co-editor of The Physics Teacher.

In 2015 he published his memoirs (see list of books) without observing any confidentiality requirements from the US government. The competent authority insisted on cuts, even though Richard Garwin himself judged that there was nothing in it that was not previously public. However, Ford was directly involved in the project at the time and was thus able to give the writing more authority and authenticity. In particular, this concerned a point that had already been disclosed earlier, namely that it was possible for the radiation and plasma of the hydrogen “fuel” to be in thermal equilibrium. One of the obstacles in developing the Teller-Ulam concept was that it was not thought possible for a long time.

Ford is married for the second time and has four sons and three daughters.

Books

  • Basic Physics, Blaisdell 1968.
  • Die Welt der Elementarteilchen, Springer, Heidelberger Taschenbücher 1966 (The World of Elementary Particles, Blaisdell 1963).
  • Classical and modern Physics, Xerox College Publishing, 3 volumes, 1972 to 1974.
  • How small is small? A brief history of quanta. Ullstein, Berlin 2008 (The Quantum world-quantum physics for everyone, Harvard University Press 2004).
  • with John Archibald Wheeler: Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam - a life in physics, Norton 1998 (Wheeler's autobiography).
  • In love with flying, H Bar Press 2007 (his experience as a pilot of small and glider planes).
  • Building the H Bomb - A personal History, World Scientific 2015.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Kenneth W. Ford: Building the H Bomb - A Personal History. Singapore: World Scientific 2015, ISBN 978-9814632072 .
  2. ^ Ford, Wheeler: Semi-Classical Description of Scattering, Annals of Physics, Vol. 7, 1959, p. 259, Applications of Semi-Classical Scattering Analysis, ibid, p. 287.
  3. ^ Hydrogen Bomb Physicist's Book Runs Afoul of Energy Department
  4. ↑ For example by Freeman Dyson in 2009 in his biography by Edward Teller for the Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences.
personal data
SURNAME Ford, Kenneth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ford, Kenneth William (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American theoretical physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 1, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Palm Beach