April Flowers

Spring has finally arrived and with it a lovely Cherry Blossom season here in DC! April is often overlooked when it comes to flowers (indeed the old adage is “April showers bring May flowers”), but the early spring blooms can be just as beautiful as their more famous summer cousins, with gentle bursts of color emerging from a still awakening landscape. For this Photos of the Month, we are going to look at some of the April flora featured in the in the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (ESVA). In fact, many of the photographs featuring flowers in the ESVA come from the month of April. Perhaps in combination with spring meetings and university breaks, something about April gets scientists outdoors enjoying the flowers!

To begin, we have to start with this photograph of Lia Telegdi in front of the DC cherry blossoms! Lidia “Lia” Telegdi (neé Leonardi), was born in Italy and met her husband, Hungarian particle physicist Valentine “Val” Telegdi , in Zurich in 1950. They came to the US in the early 50s, where Lia worked as the secretary to physicist Leo Szilard and Val taught physics and led the nuclear emulsion group at the University of Chicago. This picturesque moment was captured during a trip the Telegdis took to DC in April 1962. We have several personal photographs of the Telegdis on trips like this in the ESVA thanks to a donation by former Caltech archivist and historian of science Judith Goodstein. The collection shows the Telegdis’ personal life and also features photos of Lia’s exceptional culinary creations, about which, in a tribute to Val Telegdi’s 65^th birthday, Victor Weisskopf recalled:

Enjoying some lovely pink rhododendrons outside, William James King and E. Scott Barr pose for a picture while on an oral history interview trip for the American Institute of Physics (AIP) in April 1964. W. James King was the first project director for the AIP Project on the History of Recent Physics (1961-1964), which was one of the first major documentation efforts for the history of modern physics and laid the foundation for what would become AIP’s history program. E. Scott Barr was a physicist and historian of science at the University of Alabama. The above photograph was taken while W. James King and E. Scott Barr were conducting this oral history interview with spectroscopist Earle Plyler at Florida State University as background for E. Scott Barr’s annual series of Anniversaries of Interest to Physicists articles in the American Journal of Physics.

E. Scott Barr donated his collection of sketches of historical physicists used in this series, which can be found in the E. Scott Barr Collection . For more on the AIP Project on the History of Recent Physics see W. J. King’s article April 1964 article in The American Archivist “The Project on the History of Recent Physics in the United States ” (Vol. 27 No. 2, p. 237–243).

Here we see physics Nobel prize winner Ben Mottelson buying a bouquet of fresh flowers from a local vendor in a square in Krakow, Poland, in April 1960. At the time this photograph was taken, Mottelson was working at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita). In the early 1950s, while at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Ben Mottelson and Aage Bohr (Niels Bohr’s son) conducted experiments which led to a new theory of atomic structure that accounted for collective and individual particle motion within the atomic nucleus. This discovery would win them (along with James Rainwater) the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics. Although born and trained in America, Ben Mottelson spent most of his scientific career in Europe, becoming a naturalized Danish citizen in 1971. He also collaborated with Polish scientists throughout his career, earning the Marian Smoluchowski Medal, Poland’s highest science honor, in 1980.

This photograph was taken by atomic physicist Norton M. Hintz, who was a colleague and frequent travel companion to Mottelson, as well as an amateur photographer who donated many of his photos to the ESVA. While in Krakow, Mottelson also visited Jagellonian University where Hintz captured a fun moment of him posing with physics Professor Henryk Niewodniczanski and some ancient swords!

If you zoom in on this next photograph, you can see some lovely spring wildflowers picked by our visual archive’s namesake Emilio Segrè while in Nemi, Italy on April 1, 1975. Emilio Segrè spent the later years of his life in his native country of Italy with his second wife Rosa Mines. He moved to Rome in 1974 to continue teaching physics at his alma mater, the University of Rome, after hitting the University of California’s mandatory retirement age of 64, only to be forced to retire again in 1975 due to Italy’s mandatory retirement age of 65. This photograph was taken right about the time of his final retirement, in the picturesque mountain town of Nemi in the outskirts of Rome, less than 30 miles from Tivoli, where Segrè was born. For more on Emilio Segrè’s life check out last month’s Photos of the Month blog.

April is also a popular time for physics conferences! In 1993 the 2nd International Workshop on Physics and Experiments with Linear e+ e- Colliders was held at the end of April in Waikoloa, Hawai’i. Attendees were treated to some wild purple blooms as part of an outdoor luau, overseen by master of ceremonies Stephen Olsen, a professor of physics at University of Hawai’i at Manoa. The photo was taken by Loretta Kan Tuan, the wife of San Fu Tuan, the chair of the High Energy Theoretical Physics department at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Tuan took photos throughout the conference, which can be found in the 1993 Linear Collider Workshop collection in the ESVA. The workshop brought together scientists from the US, the EU, Russia, and Japan working on experiments with high energy linear lepton colliders. Linear e+ e- colliders work by accelerating elementary particles (leptons), specifically electrons (e-) and their antimatter pair, positrons (e+), along a straight line to nearly the speed of light and smashing them into each other. An example of a linear e+ e- collier is the Stanford Linear Collider at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory , which was the subject of several papers in this 1993 workshop. Other types of lepton colliders operate on circular tracks (synchrotrons) like the former Large Electron-Positron Collider at CERN, which was later repurposed to build the Large Hadron Collider. Lepton colliders allow scientists to study interactions of fundamental particles of the universe, and their results complement hadron colliders, which collide more complex particles such as protons.

Some pretty yellow flowers brighten up Indiana University’s astronomy building with the first signs of spring in this April photo from 1954. Professors from Indiana University’s astronomy department stand with Welsh astronomer Barbara Middlehurst, who was in a nine-month visiting position for the academic year.

On the far left is Frank K. Edmondson (1912-2008), the chair of Indiana University’s astronomy department, a position he held for 34 years. He led IU’s program to recover lost asteroids.

Next is Professor John Irwin (1909-1997), who was an active member of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and a prolific photographer. His candid photographs and portraits of astronomers and AAS members at meetings throughout the mid- to late-20^th century were donated to the ESVA, amounting to over 1300 photographs which can be found in the John Irwin Slide Collection.

To his right is Marshal Wrubel (1924-1968), a Julliard-trained pianist and, at the time, an assistant professor of astronomy. In 1955, Wrubel would become the first director of Indiana University’s Research Computing Center, which now holds his name.

Finally, on the far right is Barbara Middlehurst (1915-1995), who was working at the observatory at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland around the time this photo was taken. A few years later, she moved to the United States to work at the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin and was an active member of the AAS and IAU. Her research specialty was Transient Lunar Phenomena (TLPS), which she co-compiled a major survey of for NASA in 1968.

To close out, here are a few undated floral pictures in the ESVA. I don’t know if they were taken in April, but a post on flowers would be remiss without them!

Even physics labs can be a place for flowers! The Fermilab accelerator in Batavia, Illinois, is home to an impressive floral atrium, which was designed by architect Alan Rider in 1976. At the time it was built, Fermilab was the world’s largest research facility for high energy physics. The director of the Laboratory, Dr. Robert Wilson, wanted the physical surroundings to be comfortable and a place to facilitate collaboration. So, as a result, an atrium with a garden was built between the building’s two 16-story towers with large windows allowing natural light to fill the space and bring nature indoors. The atrium of what is now Wilson Hall, is the center point for accessing many of the social functions of the lab, including the cafeteria and library, and is overlooked by glass offices The atrium features permanent year-round tree displays and seasonal flowers to keep it vibrant year-round and boost morale during the winter months. The atrium also has wonderful acoustics which have been utilized for musical events by staff and local choral groups!

Last but not least, physicist Rose Mooney-Slater poses for an informal portrait inside some lovely rose-colored rhododendrons. Rose was the first woman to be a professional X-ray crystallographer in the United States. She earned her PhD in physics in 1932 from the University of Chicago and was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for Chemistry to work on X-ray crystallography in Amsterdam in 1939. Unfortunately, that visit was cut short due to the start of WWII. During the war, she contributed to the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Lab, where she helped establish its X-ray crystallography laboratory and served as associate chief of the X-ray structure section. After the war, she taught physics at Newcomb College, later moving to work on crystallography at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST), MIT, and the University of Florida (where this picture was likely taken).

For more on her remarkable life see this 2017 biography article by Frank Fronczek in the American Crystallography Association’s ACA Structure Matters.
Additionally, you can view her archival papers at the American Philosophical Society.