Nobelist Ben RoyMottelson, writ at the time of his death

 

Nobelist Ben RoyMottelson, writ at the time of his death

Ben Roy Mottelson was born in Chicago in 19 and 26. Single particle motion was his life-long quest. He died in the State of Denmark, Friday, May the 13th, 2022.

He found that the shape of the nuclei of atoms was fluid, not set. Instead, protons and neutrons in motion could distort the marble at the middle. But when he came up with this theory people said it was a myth.

See, people thought the nucleus to be like a circle around the Sun. A little ball marble round which electrons orbit.

Purdue, Harvard, the Institute for Theoretical Atomic Physics in Copenhagen. He studied. He really became a Dane. Dr Mottelson worked with Dr. Jr. Bohr, and they share 1975 Nobel in Physics with Dr. Rainwater. 

Said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: They discovered connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and they developed the theory around that. A reading of the Britannica rather suggests it was Dr. Rainwater of Idaho who came up with the theory, and Bohr and Mottelson who proved it. 

They came up with a theory that the essential structure could only be explained by accounting for the individual and collective rotations of the protons and neutrons. This came to be called a super imposition of forces.

In in the world of quantum it helped set new wheels in motion.

The simultaneous use of both collective and single particle coordinates to describe a system caused uproar. When he came up with his theory, he faced total disbelief. Some grad student tonight tries to make it work for quantum computing.

In hinterland still, they look sideways, sidereal, askance.
In the annals of nuclear physics they watch Ben Roy’s proton dance.

                                                                                                - Jack Vaughan, 2022