Nobel laureate Chamberlain dies at 85

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Mar 2, 2006 | by Douglas Fischer, STAFF WRITER

Owen Chamberlain, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics for his co- discovery of the antiproton and a professor emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley, died Tuesday in his Berkeley Home at age 85.

Long plagued by Parkinson's Disease, Chamberlain died quietly in bed from complications of the disease, the university reported.

Chamberlain shared the Nobel Prize in 1959 with fellow UC Berkeley physicist Emilio Segre for the discovery of the antiproton, the antimatter equivalent of the proton. In the world of high- energy physics, their finding stands on par with discovery of the electron and has opened entire fields in the area of high-energy particle physics.

"Owen Chamberlain was an example of

Berkeley's best -- a brilliant researcher with a piercing intellect and a gifted and caring teacher," said UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau in a statement. "He's the last of the Nobel generation at Cal that emerged from the Manhattan Project and, with E.O. Lawrence's cyclotron, changed the face of physics."

Antimatter was once the stuff of science fiction -- material with the opposite electrical charge of that found in "normal" atoms.

Matter and antimatter annihilate upon contact in a brilliant burst of radiation, and scientists today are still puzzled why the universe seems filled with more matter than antimatter.

British physicist Paul Durac, in a famous 1927 equation, first theorized such material existed.

Stanford University physicist Carl Anderson provided the first evidence -- and won a Nobel Prize -- with his 1932 discovery of the positron, or antielectron.

But the positron is tiny, and physicists doubted other antiparticles existed. Chamberlain and Segre laid those doubts to rest with their 1955 discovery of the antiproton, a much heavier particle.

Creating antimatter takes vast stores of energy, and Chamberlain won the global race to be the first to identify the antiproton with the help of the newly created cyclotron particle accelerator in the Berkeley hills above campus.

"The discovery opened up a whole new field of physics and expanded our understanding of particle physics," said retired UC Berkeley physics professor Herbert Steiner, a graduate student of Segre's at the time of the discovery and a colleague of Chamberlain's for 40 years.

"It was a well-known goal of the whole high-energy physics community, and there was a lot of competition," he added. "They were the first to see it."

Born in San Francisco in 1920, Chamberlain graduated from Dartmouth College in 1941 and enrolled in UC Berkeley, where he soon joined the Manhattan Project. He was at the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico, losing $5 betting it would not explode.

Chamberlain started teaching at UC Berkeley in 1948, after studying with particle physics pioneer Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago. Winning the Nobel Prize, Steiner said, gave Chamberlain latitude to branch out.

In the world of high-energy physics, scientists shoot extremely focused beams of electrons at exquisitely small targets -- typically the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. The particles that shoot out of that violent smash-up are what interest physicists.

But Chamberlain, in the 1970s and '80s, discovered that what emerges from that collision depends on the rotation of those nuclei. Today entire scientific conferences are held on the subject.

Chamberlain left his legacy in the classroom as well as the laboratory, Steiner said. "Something all the students remember is his unique way of being able to explain concepts we were all unable to understand.

"We called them 'Chamberlainisms.'"

And his legacy, Steiner noted, can be found in diversity on campus today. Concerned about the lack of minorities on campus in the 1960s, Chamberlain helped establish scholarships to open the university to minority students, Steiner said. He also spent four years as director of the Ploughshare Fund, a public foundation devoted to nuclear peace.

Chamberlain is survived by his wife, Senta Pugh-Chamberlain (nee Gaiser) of Berkeley; four children by his first wife, Beatrice Babette Copper, who died in 1988 -- daughters Karen Chamberlain of Tampa, Fla., Lynn Guenther of Ithaca, N.Y., Pia Chamberlain, of San Jose and son Darol Chamberlain of Ithaca, N.Y. He is also survived by stepdaughters Mary Pugh of Toronto, Canada, and Anne Pugh of Oakland, according to the university.

His second wife, June Steingart Greenfield, died in 1991.

Contact reporter Douglas Fischer at dfischer@angnewspapers.com