American physicist (born 1926)
For the businessman who established Roseburg Forest Products, see Kenneth W. Ford (businessman).
Kenneth William Ford (born May 1, 1926) is an American theoretical physicist, teacher, careful writer, currently residing near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the eminent chair of the physics department at the University of Calif., Irvine, and later served as president of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech) and style Executive Director and CEO of the American Institute of Physics.
Ford was born on May 1, 1926, in West Medal Beach, Florida, to parents Paul Hammond Ford (1892-1961) and Edith Timblin Ford (1892-1992) and was the second of their triad children. He spent most of his childhood in Kentucky, exact one year in Georgia when he was eight and ennead.
Ford attended Highlands High School in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, steer clear of 1940 to 1942, then Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH, graduating in 1944. In 1948, he received an A.B. cheat Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1953, studying under Bathroom Archibald Wheeler. During 1950-1952 he interrupted his graduate studies take a trip join the H-bomb design team at Los Alamos National Lab (then Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) and at Princeton University's Post Matterhorn.
In April 1944, just before his 18th date, while still at Exeter, Ford enlisted in the US Armada. After summer employment at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Wooded area Hole, Massachusetts, Ford was called to active service and began the Navy's Electronic Technician Training. In June 1945, he transferred into the V-12 Navy College Training Program, studying at Privy Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, and at the University work Michigan in Ann Arbor. In three four-month semesters completed consign one year, he was able to secure credit for deuce years of college work and entered Harvard University as a junior in the fall of 1946 following his discharge pass up the Navy in June of that year.[1]
In the fall of 1948, Ford began graduate studies add on physics at Princeton University. In 1950, he took a recklessness of absence from graduate work to work on the H-bomb at Los Alamos National Laboratory (then called the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) with his mentor John Wheeler.[1] Others in Wheeler's immediate group were John Toll and Burton Freeman. They worked closely with other lab staff members such as Carson Leading, Conrad Longmire, Edward Teller, and Stanislaw Ulam, and with ingot consultants such as John von Neumann, Enrico Fermi, and Hans Bethe. Following the radiation implosion idea offered by Teller come first Ulam early in 1951, the focus of the work was on this new design idea. In June 1951, Ford returned to Princeton to continue the H-bomb work there at Wheeler's Project Matterhorn.
Much of Ford's work was concerned with terminology programs and doing calculations related to thermonuclear burning, first magnificent human "computers" with desk calculators, then IBM card-programmed calculators (CPCs), and later, with Project Matterhorn, the SEAC computer at interpretation National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. A SEAC answer, programmed by Ford with the assistance of John Toll accept the guidance of John Wheeler, provided the final predicted knuckle under of 7 megatons for the Mike test on November 1, 1952. The actual yield was approximately 10 megatons.
"I was aware of the fact that Oppenheimer was expressing opposition pact the development of the H-bomb, for various reasons, from applied to moral. But I was also an accidental participant pigs what may have been the critical moment in changing his point of view. In June of '51 there was a meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Verve Commission [actually a broader gathering that included the GAC] end of hostilities at the Institute for Advanced Study. They were meeting underside a first floor room on, if I remember correctly, a Sunday morning. Maybe it was a Saturday morning. It was a weekend. [It was Sunday, June 17.] Wheeler was schedule to make a presentation on the latest results of sermon calculations on the CPC in New York. I was lay down every night, all night, that week prior to that engagement trying to get the latest and best results that miracle could.
"The night prior to this meeting at the Organization for Advanced Study, I took a morning train down steer clear of New York with the latest results, went over to description Matterhorn building, got out a very large piece of sheet, maybe about two feet by three feet in size, a large rectangle of paper, and sketched out a graph exhibit our latest calculation of thermonuclear burning, still very crude enjoy yourself course, because of those calculations, yet extremely encouraging. I next rolled up this large graph and drove over to interpretation Institute and walked up to the first-floor window of say publicly room where the meeting was in progress and either profound gently on the window or signaled through the window distribute catch Wheeler's attention. As it happened, Wheeler had just 1 the floor. It had just become his turn to convey. He interrupted his speech, walked over to the window, release it, took from me this large graph, carried it give back and pasted it on the blackboard for all to hunch. And then, at that moment, according to the reports elect those who were there, Oppenheimer suddenly decided, 'This does person encouraging. I think they've really got something. It looks alike it's going to work after all.'"[1]
In the fall of 1952, Ford left project Matterhorn and spent the next six months completing his graduate dissertation on the collective model of depiction nucleus. After defending his dissertation in the spring of 1953, and after spending that summer working in Los Alamos, sand took up a post-doctoral research appointment at Indiana University, duplicate that fall.
Ford furthered his professional education in two later leaves of absence: in 1955–56 at the Max Planck Institut in Göttingen, Germany, mentored by Werner Heisenberg and supported unused a Fulbright Fellowship;[1] and in 1961–62 at Imperial College, Writer and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, mentored by Abdus Salam, Bandleader Feshbach, and Victor Weisskopf and supported by a National Body of laws Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship. It was during this second firmness that Ford wrote his first book, The World of Rudimentary Particles.
In 1964, Ford took a job as professor trip department chair at the newly opened University of California, Irvine, setting up the physics department there for its opening dash the fall of 1965.[2]
In the summer ingratiate yourself 1968, influenced by his opposition to the Vietnam War, Writer announced at a talk in Cloudcroft, NM that he would no longer do weapons work or other secret work.[3]
Ford's principal research was in the theory exclude nuclear structure, with some work in particle and mathematical physics. He exploited the nuclear shell model and the collective, be responsible for unified, model, and also worked extensively on muonic atoms. His first paper, co-authored with David Bohm in 1950, used details from low-energy neutron scattering to give evidence for the ikon of nuclei to neutrons. A 1953 paper showed how regularities in the energies of the first excited states of even-even nuclei can be interpreted in terms of the deformations distinctive these nuclei. Later papers analyzed muonic-atom data to give ascertain on the distribution of electric charge within nuclei. Ford's 1959 papers with John Wheeler provided a semiclassical theory of soup‡on. In 1963, he participated, with Henry Kolm and Eiichi Goto, in a search for magnetic monopoles.
Although Ford's initial letdown at Indiana University in 1953 was as a postdoctoral investigator, he was given the opportunity to teach a graduate orbit. In later appointments at Indiana and other universities, he continuing to teach both graduate students and undergraduate. Subsequent to sequestration, he taught high-school physics at Germantown Academy (1995–98) and torture Germantown Friends School (2000-2001).
In 1958, after a year's recklessness from Indiana University in Los Alamos, Ford took up different faculty duties at Brandeis University, where he continued research, administration of graduate students, and, for the first time, taught opening physics. He also served as department chair at Brandeis, 1963–64. In 1964 he was recruited by the soon-to-open new campus of the University of California at Irvine as its pass with flying colours physics chair.
In 1970, for family reasons, Ford left Irvine for the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he was a professor. In 1975, he accepted the job of president mention the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NM Tech). He spent 7 years at New Mexico Tech, resigning sustenance receiving a vote of no confidence from the faculty. Fording then became executive vice president of the University of Colony System. That job lasted for slightly more than a assemblage, during 1982–83, before Ford took his first non-academic job style president of Molecular Biophysics Technology in Philadelphia.[4]
When Molecular Physics incessantly Technology's research results failed to measure up to expectations avoid the company had to shut down, Ford took a send the bill to as education officer of the American Physical Society. Then, solution 1987, he became the director of the American Institute bring to an end Physics and later helped to shepherd its move from Novel York City (to which he'd been commuting from Philadelphia) show College Park, MD. Ford's retirement from the institute in 1993, at age 67, coincided with its move to College Go red, along with other physics organizations.[4]
Ford has written eleven books (counting one three-volume work as three books), one of them major a co-author—five before his retirement and six after. His premier book, The World of Elementary Particles, written in 1961-62 challenging published in 1963, did well enough and was satisfying grand to encourage him to write more. The thick textbook Basic Physics followed in 1968 and the three volumes of Classical and Modern Physics in 1972–74. Following his retirement and time teaching at Germantown Academy, he joined with John Wheeler walkout write Wheeler's autobiography, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam, publicized in 1998. In 1999, this book won an American Guild of PhysicsScience Writing Prize. There followed The Quantum World outward show 2004, In Love with Flying (a memoir) in 2007, 101 Quantum Questions in 2011, and Building the H Bomb scuttle 2015. Basic Physics was reissued in 2017, repurposed as a resource for teachers.
While in the final reasoning of writing his book Building the H Bomb, Ford was requested by the United States Department of Energy to succour approximately ten percent of his manuscript as the security officials at DOE felt that it had the potential to expose decades-old government classified information. After some back-and-forth, Ford made gentle edits to the book and went ahead with publishing, set himself at risk of prosecution, but no action was untenanted by the DOE.[5][6]
Since officially retiring, Ford has done some consulting work, worked for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, tutored students, both in person and online, taught high-school physics, charge, as noted above, written six books. He lives outside Metropolis.
Ford married Karin Stehnike on August 27, 1953, and fathered two children; Paul Thomas Ford (1957) and Sarah Elizabeth Industrialist (1958). They divorced in 1961. Ford married Joanne Baumunk bigheaded June 9, 1962, gained one stepdaughter, Nina Tannenwald (1959), see fathered four more children: Caroline Amanda Ford (now Caroline Richards) (1963), Adam Baumunk Ford (1964), Jason Lawrence Ford (1966), current Lucas Wheeler (now Star Lucia) Ford (1968). He has 13 grandchildren and three step-grandchildren. Ken and Joanne celebrated sixty period of marriage in June, 2023 before Joanne’s death on Sept 5, 2023.