PROFILE: Val Logsdon Fitch
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Basic research in 1964 by Nobel Prize-winning physicist may advance humankind's understanding of the universe
Copyright © 2006 by E. A. KralEven though most people on Earth probably have a religious or philosophical viewpoint on the existence of our universe and indeed on life itself, the scientific field of physics offers a rational explanation of its origins and evolution based on a fixed system of principles, or laws, tested by laboratory equipment and subsequent discoveries.
The field of physics, of course, is difficult for most of us to understand. It does involve the study of the physical properties of anything, and its major branches, according to the physics entry in Encyclopedia Americana, Vol 22 (2003), are "mechanics, optics, electricity, magnetism, acoustics, heat, and atomic physics," which are "linked by such concepts as energy, mass, force, acceleration, and change."
Other sciences such as astronomy, physical chemistry, and plasma physics involve applications of physics and have contributed to the field's advancement. Mathematics is also fundamental in the formulation of its theories as is engineering in the development of its experimental equipment.
Present scientific theory is that the universe was created about 14 billion years ago with an explosive event called "the Big Bang" from matter in a "cosmic egg" as small as a needle point. And as author Charles Flowers wrote in one chapter of his book Instability Rules: The Ten Most Amazing Ideas of Modern Science (Wiley & Sons, 2002), "the universe almost instantaneously grew billions of times larger, at the same time releasing oceans of energy that created more matter."
Over a million years, "once matter was formed and hydrogen gas continued expanding outward, the stage was set for the birth of stars and galaxies." Once the first stars stabilized in a few billion years, some of them caused "the formation of heavy elements essential to our lives on Earth: iron, oxygen, and carbon, among others." Eventually, the elements spread out, resulting in the formation of several billion galaxies, including our Milky Way, each containing billions of stars like our own Sun.
Moreover, the elements led to the formation of planets in our solar system about 10 billion years after the "Big Bang" and contributed to the make-up of all known life, which in its lower forms on Earth began over 3 billion years ago.
At present, scientists believe the universe is open and continues to expand, and there is no center. They also calculate that our Sun will die in about 5 billion years, "joining billions of other stars in the Milky Way that have already suffered the same fate."
More about the evolution of the universe, the Earth, and life is in readable articles in the October 1994 issue of Scientific American.
Of course, research in theoretical physics by many individuals in recent history has led to much of our current knowledge of the universe. In the 20th century, for example, Danish physicist Niels Bohr proposed a theory of atomic structure, the renowned Albert Einstein conceived his general theory of relativity, and Werner Heisenberg in Germany developed quantum mechanics.
But science is a self-correcting process, and other mysteries about the universe need resolution. For example, after the Big Bang, an equal number of particles and antiparticles formed, and should have annihilated each other, resulting in virtual nothingness. Instead, more matter than antimatter remained in the universe. Why did that happen?
A significant discovery in 1964 by Val Logsdon Fitch, a native of Merriman, Nebraska, and James Cronin may eventually help scientists explain the mystery.
Preceding his career as a particle physicist and educator, Fitch had spent his formative years in northwestern Nebraska, where he was born in 1923 on his parents' 4-square-mile ranch about five miles northwest of Merriman, a village with a 1920 population of 346 in sparsely populated Cherry County, which on the north borders the state of South Dakota. His mother was a former local school teacher, and Val was the youngest of three children.
About 40 miles northwest of the Fitch ranch was Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and the culture of the Sioux Indians was part of his early environment. Because his father could, to some extent, speak their language, they made him an honorary chief in recognition of his friendly interest.
At the age of three, he moved with his family to the town of Merriman, after his father, who became badly injured after an accident while riding his horse, could not continue managing the ranch and its cattle. Two years later, the family moved several miles west to Gordon, a town with a 1930 population of 1,958 in adjacent Sheridan County, where his father entered the insurance business.
Val attended the local public schools, graduating from Gordon High School in 1940. Out of a class of 67 graduates, he was named valedictorian. The May 23, 1940 Gordon Journal also reported he was voted the most outstanding boy in his class, and received a letter in the sport of track. Previously, he earned a letter in football.
Meanwhile, his parents had retained ownership of the ranch but left its operation mainly to others. As a youth, Val conducted electrical and chemical experiments in the basement of his parents' home at Gordon, and on the ranch the gasoline engine that powered his mother's washing machine was used by him to build go-carts and lifting devices, according to his brief autobiography in Marianna Cook, Faces of Science (W. W. Norton, 2005), a 175-page book that features autobiographies and photos of 77 scientists. Of these early experiences, he noted, in part, that "it was a rich life for one interested in how everything worked, in what made the world tick."
At the same time, his older brother Lyle had earned his bachelor's degree from nearby Chadron State Teachers College in 1935 and a master's degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1938. Lyle C. Fitch, who went on to earn his doctorate in economics from Columbia University in 1946, became distinguished as an administrator for New York City, as president of the Institute of Public Administration, and as a writer of articles, reviews, and books. His obituary appeared in the December 31, 1996 New York Times.
After high school, Val received a scholarship to attend Chadron State Teachers College at nearby Chadron in Dawes County, a town with a 1940 population of 4,262. He attended Chadron State from the fall of 1940 through the summer of 1942, which at the time had an enrollment of 400.
During the fall of 1942, he attended Northwestern University at Evanston, Illinois, enrolling in its Technological Institute for engineering training. According to the February 18, 1943 Gordon Journal, after completing three months of classroom work, he was assigned to shop work in the laboratories of Calco Chemical Company at Bound Brook, New Jersey, just west of New Brunswick.
In the spring of 1943, Val entered the U.S. Army during World War II, and about a year later was assigned to Los Alamos, New Mexico as part of the Special Engineer Detachment to serve in technician capacities on the Manhattan Project, the secret U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb.
As a result, his early interest in chemistry had changed to physics after working alongside some of the most renowned scientists in the world. In his autobiographical Chapter 11 of All In Our Time: The Reminiscences of Twelve Nuclear Pioneers (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 1975), Fitch reported that "many of us found our work in the laboratory intellectually stimulating... We considered this army assignment extraordinarily fortuitous," and concluded that being exposed to superb physicists "had a profound influence upon us."
One of Fitch's first tasks was to build "a mixing circuit for measuring the degree of simultaneity of several independently initiated explosive shock waves," and later gained first-hand experience "with the speed of propagation of detonations, Kerst's betatron at K-site, and the design and construction of better oscilloscopes for recording timing information." He was a member of the group that prepared a transmission cable over 10,000 yards used to trigger the detonation of the first bomb at Alamogordo on July 16, 1945, an event for which he was present.
During relaxed occasions, he and other soldiers in his detachment became acquainted during hiking, skiing, and skating excursions with such Nobel Prize-winning physicists as Niels Bohr (1922), James Chadwick (1935), Enrico Fermi (1938), and Isidor I. Rabi (1944). He also knew Los Alamos scientific director J. Robert Oppenheimer and other knowledgeable persons.
Years later, Fitch observed that the most accomplished experimentalists in physics at Los Alamos were also the ones who knew most about electronics and electronic techniques, and he learned "in approaching the measurement of new phenomena, not just to consider using existing apparatus but to allow the mind to wander freely and invent new ways of doing the job."
After discharge from the Army in 1946, he attended McGill University in Montreal, Canada, earning a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1948, then pursued graduate studies in physics at Columbia University, completing his doctorate in 1954.
While there, he worked under the supervision of physics professor James Rainwater, executive director of Columbia's Nevis Cyclotron Laboratory, and later recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize. Both were featured in a May 25, 1953 New York Times article for designing and operating the detecting apparatus that revealed the nucleus of an atom is about twice as dense as physicists had believed the previous half century.
In 1954, Fitch began his career as a professor and researcher in the field of particle physics at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, the fourth oldest college in the nation and one of the eight Ivy League universities that share common interests in scholarship and athletics. (It is not, however, part of the nearby Princeton-based Institute for Advanced Study, a private "think tank" which from 1933 to 1955 was the academic home of Albert Einstein.)
His direct association for over half a century with Princeton University Department of Physics was beneficial for both. For many decades, the Department has ranked among national leaders in basic research. And from 1927 to the present, 16 of its graduates and faculty members (including Fitch) have received the Nobel Prize in physics.
In the 1950s, the development of high-energy-equipment called accelerators aided particle physicists in the study of matter in the universe. All ordinary matter (defined as anything that occupies space) has an atomic structure comprised of atoms, which can be divided into smaller subatomic units (particles) called electrons, neutrons, and protons, and the latter two into even smaller particles called quarks.
For the general reader, the reference book World of Physics, Vol 2 (Gale, 2001) reminds us that "subatomic particles are very important in technology. Television sets use beams of electrons to create their pictures." More recently, some hospitals use a giant machine to bombard cancer tumors with beams of protons.
To date, the study of these basic elements of matter and the forces (electromagnetism, strong, weak, and gravitation) that act upon them, such as holding matter together, has resulted in the identification of more than 150 particles (the fundamental building blocks of matter). Some come through space as cosmic rays, others as manufactured in particle accelerators.
The same laws of physics operate everywhere because the universe is homogeneous (the galaxies are distributed uniformly throughout the universe) and isotropic (the same properties are found in all places and all directions).
Thus there is a symmetry of nature. And as reported in the previously cited Encyclopedia Americana, each individual particle or a many-particle system is linked to the rest of the universe, based on a mathematical equation from quantum mechanics.
Though the law of conservation of matter states that mass-energy cannot be created or destroyed, even though mass and energy are interchangeable, the existence of more matter than antimatter in the universe, as noted earlier, violates the law of conservation.
After the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, annihilation of an equal amount of particles and antiparticles should have resulted in an equal sum of mass-energy in the form of radiation, not in the elements that became stars, planets, and living beings.
Theorists believe the excess of matter came from "violations of a symmetry called charge-parity, or CP," reported the authors of "The Asymmetry between Matter and Antimatter," published in the October 1998 Scientific American.
Though it was earlier thought that nature obeyed three basic symmetry rules, researchers in the 1950s found that symmetry of parity (P) was "not absolutely conserved in the beta decay (electron emission) of certain radioactive nuclei because the nuclei emitted more lefthanded than righthanded electrons," and there was lack of conservation of charge conjugation symmetry(C) when some processes gave preference to particles over antiparticles.
Despite these problems, researchers were able to keep the physical laws intact by joining charge conjugation and parity into a combined CP conservation rule. But in 1964, Fitch and Cronin discovered a violation of the combined CP conservation rule.
When the two Princeton University professors decided to test CP symmetry, they found the opposite of what they had expected. While conducting their study at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York for about a year, they used advanced equipment such as "a spark chamber that permitted precise determination of the tracks of decay products ....and a particle accelerator capable of imparting energies up to billions of electron volts," report the Fitch and Cronin entries in Nobel Prize Winners (H. W. Wilson, 1987).
They worked with beams of neutral K-mesons, now called kaons, which are composed of a quark (short-lived, which travels an average of only a few centimeters before decaying), and an anti-quark (long-lived, which travels tens of meters before decaying). The two quarks, however, do not annihilate each other because they are not the same types of quarks.
The hypothesis of CP conservation predicted certain properties for mesons (kaons) that are electrically neutral and decay by weak force. According to CP symmetry, a short-lived K-meson (quark) decays into two pi-mesons (pions), while a long-lived K-meson (anti-quark) decays into three pi-mesons (pions).
In 1964, Fitch and Cronin found that the long-lived K-mesons (anti-quarks) decay to two pi-mesons (pions) at a rate of about one out of every 500 decays. Under CP conservation, the anti-quarks should have decayed to three pions, not two.
According to the October 1998 Scientific American article previously cited, "Few experiments in particle physics have produced a result as surprising as this one. Theorists found it hard to see why CP symmetry should be broken at all and even harder to understand why any imperfection should be so small."
The experiment by Fitch and Cronin was the first to reveal that matter and antimatter do not always conform to CP conservation, Thus, because the anti-quarks decay a little faster than quarks, the result is that quarks do not have a partner to annihilate. Over a long period of time, the small difference in their decay increase means that eventually only quarks, or matter, remain.
For their discovery, Val Fitch and James Cronin were awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in physics at Stockholm, Sweden for what a November 7, 1980 Science article described as "a textbook-perfect experiment." And a description of the ceremonies and Fitch's reactions was published in the February 22, 1981 Omaha Sunday World Herald Magazine of the Midlands by Val's brother Lyle.
New research on subatomic particles many years later by a multinational team of about 600 physicists and engineers showed that CP violation occurs in another type of particle, the B meson, reported a July 7, 2001 New York Times article. This verification of the original 1964 experiment will enable the scientific community to continue with its study of the relationship between CP violation and the existence of more matter than antimatter in the universe.
Val Fitch also made contributions through several leadership positions during his distinguished career of research and teaching. He served as member of the President's Science Advisory Committee from 1970 to 1973, as chairman of the Princeton University Physics Department from 1976 to 1981, as chairman of the Physics Advisory Committee to the National Science Foundation from 1980 to 1983, and as president of the American Physical Society in 1987-88.
He was elected as a fellow and member of several organizations, including the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in 1966. His many honors include the Research Corporation Award in 1967, the Ernest O. Lawrence Award in 1968, and the John Price Witherill Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1976.
It is also noteworthy that Fitch received in 1984 the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, representing Chadron State College, and that he returned to his former Nebraska home area in 1985 to receive Chadron State's Distinguished Service Award and speak at its 74th Annual Commencement.
According to the May 14, 1985 Chadron Record, he not only reminded members of the Class of 1985 that several major world problems remain to be solved but also complimented them by saying, "Less has been presented to you on a platter. You have to dig more for what you have, you are better able to cope with unexpected situations. As I like to say, you have a survival fitness coefficient that is very high."
Aside from the 1980 Nobel Prize, he also received the prestigious National Medal of Science in 1993 for his pioneering experiments in physics. There were also several other forms of recognition, including honorary doctorates from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1995 and Princeton University in 2000.
For biographical sources besides those previously mentioned, consult Biographical Dictionary of Scientists--Physicists (Blond Educational, 1981) and Notable Twentieth-Century Scientists, Vol 2 (Gale, 1995). There are also entries in Encyclopedia Americana, Vol 11 (2003) and Who's Who in America, Vol 1 (2006).
Born in 1923 near Merriman, Nebraska to Fred B. and Frances N. Logsdon Fitch, the youngest of three children, Val was married in 1949 to Elise Cunningham, with whom he had two sons. Four years after her death in 1972, he was remarried to Daisy Harper, and has three stepchildren. Since 1994, he has served as professor emeritus at Princeton University.
