Berkeley Physics Bids Farewell to Nobel Prize Winner and Colleague
Last Sunday in the Great Room of the University of California at Berkeley Faculty club, the physics department held a memorial for Dr. Owen Chamberlain, physicist, activist and Nobel prize winner. Owen, who died on February 28th, 2006 after a long bout with Parkenson's disease, was a protege and colleague of the late Dr. Emilio Segre, with whom he shared the 1959 Nobel prize in physics for their discovery of the antiproton.
Dr. Segre died in 1989 (the same year Owen retired) and the Berkeley physics department held a very nice memorial service for him as well. I suppose one reaches a "certain age" and memorial services start to appear on the calendar (don't get me started with the ever-aging computer side of the business - one could end up going to funerals every month at this rate). My Berkeley physics advisor, Professor Frank Crawford, retired in 1991 and died in 2003 after also suffering from Parkinson's for about a decade. While Dr. Crawford was known for his love of music, he had a bit of a rebellous streak, best exemplified by his "corrugohorn" - a length of flexible corrugated brass pipe that he turned into three basic horns: a bugle, a neck horn and a slide corrugohorn. He used to boast that he was the only member of the Berkeley physics faculty with a peddler's license, and I think that is probably still true today.
Owen was a complicated man in a department known for strong personalities and beliefs. He was an activist involved in causes ranging from nuclear disarmament (he was one of the Manhattan Project boys and knew what it could really do) to free speech. He was one of the few people who dared to engage Dr. Teller in debate, because as Dr. Charles Morehouse recalled "Teller would drag everyone else around the stage".
Owen was also a dedicated physicist who, Dr. Morehouse continued "when asked to explain how a laser worked would begin with Einstein's equations and in ten minutes with diagrams explained everything simply and clearly". It is no surprise that he always enjoyed teaching lower-division physics (my husband had him for Physics 5B) when he could have easily avoided that assignment as a Nobel Laureate. He was a charming and disarming man who's easy Swedish manner and impossibly messy office was a familiar sight to students at office hours. As Dr. Eugene Commins, professor emeritus, said "you could fit in his office, if you were very thin". However, if you needed a particular paper, he could find it in the mass of paper with "unerring accuracy", if of course "the soft and silent wings of a butterfly" failed to "precipitate an avalanche" first.
His secretary Jeanne Miller recalled how he once spent an entire afternoon writing a three page response to a letter from an Australian student assigned to write a biography of him and requesting his personal slant on his scientific discoveries, and would rather peruse a physics letter or champion a cause than spend time with red tape. Fortunately, his brother-in-law Dr. Robert Birge also happened to be the head of LBL's physics division, which served Owen in good stead when he hired Ms. Miller without ever noting whether she knew how to type - he just liked her, felt her of good character and that was enough (if only character mattered as much today, we'd have a lot fewer problems in the world). Photos, anecdotes, remininiscences, and tributes to Dr. Owen Chamberlain are available to read online at the Owen Chamberlain Memorial website.