Alex E.S. Green

Alex E. S. Green, one of the most productive, innovative, and visionary physicists of the 20^th Century, died in Gainesville, Florida, on March 12, 2014. Born June 2, 1919 in Brooklyn, NY, he became fascinated by physics, electronics, and slide rules at Brooklyn Technical High School. He received a BS in Physics from the City College of New York (CCNY) in 1940 and a MS from California Institute of Technology (CalTech) in 1941. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor interrupted his PhD efforts and he soon began work as a co-inventor of Cal Tech’s Firing Error Indicator (FEI). In October 1943, Green accepted a position with the Army Air Force (AAF) to address the urgent gunnery problems of our bombers over Germany and to introduce the FEI into their gunnery training. In early 1944, he was formally posted as an AAF Operations Analyst in the China-Burma-India Theatre. Based out of Kharagphur, India, he developed specialized slide rules to solve technical problems related to B-29 bombing raids for General Curtis LeMay. Seizing an opportunity to combat test his slide rule calculators, in March 1945 he participated in one of the longest and most hazardous B-29 missions, which found the missing Japanese fleet, including the world’s largest battleship Yamato. His devices were used on the Enola Gay and are now in the Smithsonian Museum. In 1947 President Truman awarded him a Medal of Freedom for Operations Analysis work that contributed to saving lives and an earlier end of World War II.

Shortly after the war, at 27 and newly married to Freda Kaplowitz, Green took up a faculty position at University of Cincinnati (Ohio) in 1946. One year later, he completed his PhD in Nuclear Physics on a Quantum Electrodynamics problem posed by Professor Boris Podolsky (the co-founder of quantum electrodynamics with Paul Dirac and Vladimir Fock and co-author of the famous EPR paper with Einstein and Rosen). He remained on the Cincinnati faculty for 7 years.

In 1953, Green joined the faculty of the Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee, where he initiated the Physics PhD program. In 1955 Green wrote Nuclear Physics for the McGraw Hill International Series in Pure and Applied Physics. With this significant textbook, he joined Stratton, Smythe, Schiff, Seitz, Townes, Schawlow, Morse and Feshbach, and others as authors in this series, which provided the fundamental advanced teaching tools for many physics departments throughout the 1950s and ‘60s.

While at FSU, Green also served as Nuclear Advisor to Florida Governor Leroy Collins. In mid-fifties, Green requested that the State of Florida build centers of excellence in nuclear researchat taxpayer expense. In one of the most noteworthy developments for Physics of that era, the requests were readily approved. This move resulted in (a) the installation of a tandem Van de Graaff accelerator at the FSU Physics Department, enabling FSU to develop its renowned nuclear physics and chemistry research programs, and (b) the installation of a nuclear reactor at the University of Florida (UF), enabling UF to develop one of the nation’s first and outstanding nuclear engineering programs.

Green took a sabbatical year at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1957 and spent a summer consulting at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Over the years, Green and his students had been actively involved in properly defining the Nuclear Shell Model/Optical Model potential to explain the diverse measurements involving nucleon-nucleon (N-N) and nucleon-nucleus interactions. Green and his collaborators contributed significantly to this model by their unification of the bound state and scattering data with the introduction of non-local potentials. In March, 1959 he brought the world’s leading nuclear physicists to Florida for a conference dedicated to the now well-recognized Nuclear Optical Model that had been pioneered in 1954 by Feshbach, Porter, and Weisskopf.

Later, working with Los Alamos scientist Warren Miller, Green developed a relativistic formalism for the N-Nuclear interaction. Their formulation was not only compatible with realistic N-N interactions, but, for example, could reproduce also binding energies per particle and rms charge radii for closed shell nuclei. It was, in fact, a first attempt at a relativistic shell model. Much of this work is summarized in Green’s 1970 invited Science article on The Fundamental Nuclear Interaction. Not until the early 1980’s, however, when LAMPF data with polarized 500-MeV proton beams became available, did it become clear that a fully relativistic treatment as first proposed by Green in the late 1940’s is indispensible even at low energies.

In late 1959, he left FSU for an industrial position as Chief of Physics at Convair General Dynamics in San Diego and also consulted for Aeroneutronic Systems, University of California, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Aerospace Corporation, Institute for Defense Analysis, Marshall Space Flight Center, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator.

Green returned to academia in 1963, joining the University of Florida (UF) at Gainesville as Graduate Research Professor. There he established an Interdisciplinary Center for Aeronomy and Atmospheric Sciences, which brought together UF researchers from many fields around problems such as acid rain and ozone depletion. In early 1970s, Green was among the expert witnesses testifying before Congress regarding the proposed Supersonic Transport (SST) fleet with evidence indicating that nitrogen oxide emissions, at the altitude the planes would fly, would damage the fragile ozone layer as well as increase the greenhouse effect.

Always ready to learn a new field while applying the analytical methods he had honed in his early years, Green observed that, as his students became leaders in a field, he would move on to new areas of research. No wonder that, half a century later, many of his former students are contributing as leading researchers in diverse fields ranging from traditional Nuclear Physics to Atmospheric and Space Sciences, and even founding successful industrial firms.

With the 1973 oil crisis, Green turned his attention to finding alternatives to oil. To this end he organized studies and conferences on related energy and environmental topics. He edited works such as Coal Burning Issues in 1980 and An Alternative to Oil: Burning Coal with Gas in 1981 with a series of contributors. He proposed utilizing readily available domestic fuels, like biomass, and co-burning them with natural gas and coal in an industrial boiler designed for oil. In 1986 the U.S. Secretary of Energy appointed Green to the Coal Council, whereto he was reappointed by five successive Energy Secretaries. He served as the lone University Researcher on this council until his retirement from UF in 2003.

In 1996 he joined the Coal, Biomass and Alternative Fuels committee of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers International Gas Turbine Institute and worked through its ranks to become its Chairman. In 2003, he organized the first International Conference on Co-utilization of Domestic Fuels, with Dr. Evan Hughes of the Electric Power Research Institute and Dr. Rafael Kandiyoti of the Imperial College. The diversity of ways scientists and engineers around the world use abundant waste products infused with locally available fossil fuels were demonstrated by this conference.

After retiring from UF in 2003, Green became an entrepreneur, forming Green Liquids and Gas Technologies (GLGT). In 2007 GLGT was awarded a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Mobile Integrated Sustainable Energy Recovery (MISER) program grant that funded research on the destruction of Ready-to-Eat Meals’ waste in wartime field conditions.

At age 94, Green was updating his earlier Taylor and Francis Encyclopedia of Energy Engineering and Technology article on the conversion of solid wastes to energy by advanced thermal technologies (SWEATT). He also continued journal reviews and writing articles on his World War II slide rules. His career produced 17 books, over 400 publications, and numerous patents and awards.

It takes courage to age with poise and dignity, states colleague Rafael Kandiyoti. Alex Green lived his entire life with poise, dignity, enormous energy, and with a zest for life. Green is survived by his wife of 67 years, son Bruce, daughters Deborah, Marcia and Tamara, six grandchildren, two step-grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.

Prakash Sood 1958
Professor P C Sood
Department of Physics
Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning
Prasanthi Nilayam (AP) 515134

Philip J. Wyatt 1959
Chief Executive Officer
Wyatt Technology Corporation
6300 Hollister Avenue
Santa Barbara, CA 93117-3253

Peter Riley 1961
Professor Emeritus
Department of Physics
Univerity of Texas
Austin, TX