Sad to hear that John Bahcall passed away on Tuesday. Here is an email from the Institute for Advanced Study.
From: Peter Goddard
Subject: Sad newsTo the Institute Community,
It is with regret that I share the sad news of the passing yesterday evening of Professor John Bahcall.
John was the Richard Black Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, and had been with the Institute since 1968, when he arrived here as a Member. He was appointed to the Faculty in 1971.
Many of you are familiar with John and his distinguished career, which is marked by work on models of the Galaxy, dark matter, atomic and nuclear physics applied to astronomical systems, stellar evolution, and quasar emission and absorption lines. John was an expert on the elusive form of radiation known as neutrinos, and was involved for many years with NASA’s Hubble Telescope Working Group.
John was truly a pioneer, who made lasting contributions to the field of astrophysics. He will be greatly missed, and we extend our deep sympathy to his wife Dr. Neta Bahcall and their children Safi, Dan and Orli.
Peter Goddard
Bahcall was known primarily, of course, for his work on the solar neutrino problem. He was the theorist who calculated the expected number of neutrinos that the Sun should be emitting; he worked very closely with Ray Davis, the experimenter who first demonstrated a deficit of solar neutrinos reaching the earth. Davis was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002, and many people (myself included) were very surprised that Bahcall didn’t share the award.
I’ve got to give big props to John Bahcall. When I first met him about five years ago, I felt like I was walking into God’s office. To say that I was overwhelmed by his intellect would be a vast understatement. Thanks for the memories, John.
Zero
Yes, Igor Klebanov started his talk today with the sad news, remarking upon John’s contributions and tremendous stature in the field, and the assembled audience (from both the Supercosmology and the Collider Physics workshops) expressed their agreement.
-cvj
As an undergraduate student many years ago I read Bahcall’s book Neutrino Astrophysics. This set me on a course that eventually found me a decade later 2 kilometers underground beneath the Canadian Shield trying to find out if Bahcall had got his solar neutrino calculations right. (More on that below.) Not only did his work set the future direction of neutrino physics and eventually lead to an unexpected revolution in particle physics, but the mere act of reading his book on solar neutrinos in the end wound up causing me to switch fields and even move to a foreign country. I can’t say that any other physics book had such an impact on my life.
I was pleased to meet John on a number of occasions. Readers of this blog will especially appreciate the first time I met him, when I was a graduate student at Chicago. I had joined him and a colleague for dinner in Hyde Park, and interestingly enough John wasn’t really that interested in talking about neutrinos. Instead, he was all excited that his wife Neta had just written a paper showing that Omega_m=0.3, apparently ruling out inflation! This was obviously a big deal. But by my memory it was just a few months later that the supernova results pointed to a non-zero cosmological constant, putting Omega_m=0.3 in a completely different light!
In 2002 I gave a special talk at the University of Pennsylvania announcing the first neutral current results from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, which definitively showed that John Bahcall’s solar model was right on the money. We submitted the paper late on a Friday, and my talk was scheduled for the following Tuesday. Although I had invited John to come over from Princeton for the talk, by the worst of luck the time of my talk conflicted utterly with his schedule and he wasn’t able to make it. I really regret the missed opportunity to have seen his face when he saw our result for the first time, but I’m pretty sure that he had no doubt whatsoever about what the answer was going to be. He knew.
I’m very sad to hear of his passing. He was obviously a very smart man, and a strong guiding force in the direction of neutrino detection experiments.
I saw him speak once or twice and he always seemed like a true gentleman.
As Mark mentioned, it will always be a little surprising he didn’t win the Nobel Prize. It took decades for him to be proved right, but he was right!