Kenneth Watson

Kenneth Marshall Watson (born September 7, 1921 in Des Moines , Iowa ) is an American theoretical physicist.

Watson was the son of a Methodist pastor and studied electrical engineering and physics at the University of Iowa at Ames, where he graduated in 1943. From 1943 to 1946 he was at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC (and also attended George Washington University in the evening ). In 1948 he received his doctorate from the University of Iowa in Iowa City under Josef-Maria Jauch and was then postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study under Robert Oppenheimer in 1948/9 and from 1949 to 1951 at the University of California, Berkeley under Edward Teller .

From 1951 he was an Assistant Professor at Indiana University , from 1954 Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and from 1957 Professor at the University of California, Berkeley and at the same time at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory .

From 1981 he was a professor at the University of California at San Diego , where he was also director of the Marine Physical Laboratory (which is part of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography ) and retired in 1991 .

Around 1959 he was one of the founding members (with, inter alia, Murray Gell-Mann , Marvin Goldberger , Keith Brueckner , with whom he also worked on fusion research in Los Alamos in the mid-1950s ) of the JASON Defense Advisory Group , for which he worked until 1998. He was also a member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board in the 1960s (as well as the US President's Military Panel Science Advisory Committee from the 1950s), in the 1970s a member of the Defense Science Board and adviser to the Nixon government National Security Council . From the 1970s to the early 1990s, he was a member of the Navy Planning and Steering Advisory Panel. In 1971 he founded the company "Physical Dynamics" with Elliott Montroll and others, and was a member of its Board of Directors until 1981. With Goldberger, Montroll u. a. he also founded a non-profit research institute, the La Jolla Institute. He was also a consultant to Science International Corporation from 1981 to 2001.

In the 1950s, Watson dealt with the many-body problem in nuclear physics and the interaction of pi mesons with nucleons (investigation of the concept of charge independence of nuclear forces in Berkeley and Indiana in the early 1950s), partly in collaboration with Brueckner and Gell-Mann. Other areas of work were scattering theory in nuclear, atomic and molecular physics, statistical mechanics and plasma physics . With Goldberger he wrote a standard work on quantum mechanical scattering theory. From the end of the 1970s he also dealt with oceanography , especially the theory of ocean waves (Watson is also a passionate sailor) and their non-linear dynamics .

He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1974 . In 1976 he received an honorary doctorate from Indiana University.

Shang-Keng Ma is one of his PhD students.

He has been married since 1946 and has two children.

Fonts

• Marvin Goldberger and Kenneth Watson: Collision Theory . New York, Wiley 1964

Web links

• Oral History Interview with Jason
• Autobiographical Notes, PDF file
• Biography at the APS