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Lyman Spitzer died on 31 March 1997 at the age of 82. He had a remarkably productive career that spanned quite diverse areas of activity and led him to become one of the most influential American scientists of his time. His personal theoretical contributions to interstellar astronomy and to plasma physics quickly established him as a world leader in each field. He was a pioneer in the opening up of ultraviolet astronomy and in the first attempts to generate power by thermonuclear fusion. Spitzer generated the earliest proposal for a Large Space Telescope which was ultimately to be renamed the Hubble Space Telescope, but many astronomers, myself included, thought that the original acronym (LST) should have been retained as the Lyman Spitzer Telescope.
Spitzer took his first degree in physics at Yale and then went on to Cambridge for a year before going to Princeton to study astrophysics under the great Henry Norris Russell; he received a PhD just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Like many other scientists, he became embroiled in the war effort and carried out sonar analysis at Columbia University as a guide to anti-submarine tactics. After the war, he went back briefly to Yale and in 1947 he was invited to succeed Russell as Professor of Astronomy at Princeton. He accepted, and held the post until his formal retirement in 1982.
At Princeton he developed his theories of the interstellar medium, and the application of his great knowledge and understanding of physics raised the subject to an exciting level. He quickly realized that observations of the inter-stellar gas were most important in the ultra-violet where most of the resonance lines of the common elements lay. This led to a proposal for an ultraviolet observatory satellite designed specifically to study the interstellar medium. This satellite was approved by NASA, and Copernicus was launched in 1972. It was a great success; among many other things, it showed that molecular hydrogen was the dominant form of the interstellar medium and it detected deuterium, the heavy isotope of hydrogen. According to Big Bang theory, the abundance of deuterium is a sensitive indicator of the (baryium) density of the universe; the Copernicus result gave a value of 10% of the critical density, in agreement with estimates from visible matter plus gravitationally detected dark matter, implying an open universe.
Spitzer's contributions to plasma physics were major and seminal. They are summarized in his book Physics of Fully Ionized Gases (1962) which became a bible for all researchers in plasma physics. He recognized the immense energy potential of a controlled thermonuclear fusion reactor, converting hydrogen (in the form of deuterium or tritium) into helium which would provide humanity with an inexhaustible power supply. His proposal to do this, by heating hydrogen to the tens of million degrees existing in stellar interiors and confining it in a magnetic field configuration, was approved and the toroidal machine, which he called a "stellarator" was built in the 1950s. Developments in this area have continued ever since with the British ZETA at Harwell and the European JET at Culham, but a break-even situation with energy out exceeding energy in has still not been achieved. Developments continue in Russia and Japan but, sadly, funding for the Princeton programme is being terminated by the US Congress in the year that Spitzer died.
I was fortunate to have met and interacted with Lyman Spitzer on a number of occasions over many years because of my own activities in fusion research and ultraviolet astronomy. The last time I met him was at the admission ceremony to mark his election as a foreign member of the Royal Society in 1990. He was as he always had been charming, generous, and modest, qualities which are not always present in our most brilliant scientists.
Robert Wilson.
Spitzer took his first degree in physics at Yale and then went on to Cambridge for a year before going to Princeton to study astrophysics under the great Henry Norris Russell; he received a PhD just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Like many other scientists, he became embroiled in the war effort and carried out sonar analysis at Columbia University as a guide to anti-submarine tactics. After the war, he went back briefly to Yale and in 1947 he was invited to succeed Russell as Professor of Astronomy at Princeton. He accepted, and held the post until his formal retirement in 1982.
At Princeton he developed his theories of the interstellar medium, and the application of his great knowledge and understanding of physics raised the subject to an exciting level. He quickly realized that observations of the inter-stellar gas were most important in the ultra-violet where most of the resonance lines of the common elements lay. This led to a proposal for an ultraviolet observatory satellite designed specifically to study the interstellar medium. This satellite was approved by NASA, and Copernicus was launched in 1972. It was a great success; among many other things, it showed that molecular hydrogen was the dominant form of the interstellar medium and it detected deuterium, the heavy isotope of hydrogen. According to Big Bang theory, the abundance of deuterium is a sensitive indicator of the (baryium) density of the universe; the Copernicus result gave a value of 10% of the critical density, in agreement with estimates from visible matter plus gravitationally detected dark matter, implying an open universe.
Spitzer's contributions to plasma physics were major and seminal. They are summarized in his book Physics of Fully Ionized Gases (1962) which became a bible for all researchers in plasma physics. He recognized the immense energy potential of a controlled thermonuclear fusion reactor, converting hydrogen (in the form of deuterium or tritium) into helium which would provide humanity with an inexhaustible power supply. His proposal to do this, by heating hydrogen to the tens of million degrees existing in stellar interiors and confining it in a magnetic field configuration, was approved and the toroidal machine, which he called a "stellarator" was built in the 1950s. Developments in this area have continued ever since with the British ZETA at Harwell and the European JET at Culham, but a break-even situation with energy out exceeding energy in has still not been achieved. Developments continue in Russia and Japan but, sadly, funding for the Princeton programme is being terminated by the US Congress in the year that Spitzer died.
I was fortunate to have met and interacted with Lyman Spitzer on a number of occasions over many years because of my own activities in fusion research and ultraviolet astronomy. The last time I met him was at the admission ceremony to mark his election as a foreign member of the Royal Society in 1990. He was as he always had been charming, generous, and modest, qualities which are not always present in our most brilliant scientists.
Robert Wilson.
Lyman Spitzer's obituary appeared in Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 38:6 (1997), 36.