Frederick Reif

Our friend and colleague Frederick Reif passed away on 11 August 2019 at the age of 92.

Fred was born in Vienna in 1927, and he began studies at the Gymnasium at age 10. Life in Vienna ended with the rise of the Nazi regime and the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938. The family lived briefly in France, where they tried to reach Cuba on the ill-fated voyage of the ship St. Louis. They successfully emigrated to New York in 1941. Following high school in New York, Fred earned a scholarship to Columbia University. After service in the military, he received his bachelor’s degree from Columbia in 1948. Fred then entered Harvard University, where he earned a PhD in physics under the guidance of Edward Purcell on NMR studies of solid hydrogen. Then followed an unusual career: the first half focusing on physics, the last half focused on cognition and education research.

Credit: Portrait by Alexander Ty

In 1953 Fred joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, where he continued his NMR work, culminating in a review article with Morrel Cohen in 1957. Fred then began studies of superfluid helium. With Lothar Meyer, he discovered that the greater the energy of an excess electron in the fluid, the slower it moved—a completely counterintuitive result.

Fred joined the Berkeley physics faculty in 1960. His research group was always small, with just one or two students at a time. In 1962 he and student Mike Woolf reported direct evidence of gapless superconductivity, which was a controversial concept at the time. Their work, which confirmed the 1960 predictions of Alexei Abrikosov and Lev Gor’kov, was a key result in ending the controversy. Continuing the research in superfluid helium, Fred and student George Rayfield discovered that electrons in the liquid were attached to microscopic quantized vortex rings. Their results, published in 1965, matched precisely a prediction made a decade earlier by Lars Onsager and Richard Feynman. These results still stand today as one of the cleanest experimental confirmations of the predicted behavior of superfluid helium. As his final research in physics, Fred and a student discovered a mobile neutral excitation generated in superfluid helium by alpha-particle bombardment. They deduced it was an electronically excited helium molecule in a bubble in the liquid. Their follow-up experiments shed light on UV luminescence from noble gas liquids and solids and are now relevant to the current generation of neutrino and dark-matter detectors.

In the 1960s Fred authored the influential textbook Fundamentals of Thermal and Statistical Physics. It is fair to say that it changed the way this subject is taught. Teachers worldwide still consider it the best undergraduate text for this subject. He also authored an introductory text on the topic for the Berkeley Physics Course.

It was partly through these books that Fred became interested in how an abstract topic such as physics could best be taught. While less abstract material can be transferred from teacher to student in a straightforward manner by lecturing or reading, learning abstract concepts is quite different. With Robert Karplus, he formed an interdisciplinary PhD program at Berkeley known as the Graduate Group in Science and Mathematics Education, or SESAME, in 1969.

Fred chaired SESAME in the early 1970s, making the case (before cognitive science was a named discipline) that the rigorous multidisciplinary study of educational issues would be a fertile area for study. Fred is regarded as a pioneer in Physics Education Research (PER), beginning with the early article “Science Education for Non-Science Students” (Science magazine, 1969). He chaired the search committee for faculty in the school’s Program in Education, Math, Science, and Technology, the world’s first program in cognitive science and education.

In 1989 Fred moved to Carnegie Mellon University to continue his cognition and education research. His final book, Applying Cognitive Science to Education: Thinking and Learning in Scientific and Other Complex Domains, was published in 2008.

Fred was a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1988 he received a Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Excellence Award, and in 1994 he received the Robert A. Millikan Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers for his work in education research.

Fred was a very private person. A solace in life was playing the violin, which he began in Vienna, yet few ever heard him play. That said, late in his life he agreed to recount his Holocaust experiences to Pittsburgh-area high-school students. For those of us who knew him, he was inspirational, and his passing is an immense loss. The logic of his thought made him a true joy to interact with and learn from.