James N. Lloyd

Figure 1 James N. Lloyd giving a demonstration lecture in 1983. The participants and many in the audience wore formal evening dress in the spirit of nineteenth century British evening discourses.

James N. Lloyd, Colgate University Professor of Physics Emeritus, died on June 8th in Seattle, WA at the age of 83. Jim was raised in Dover, NJ, and attended Colgate in 1950-54, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with High Honors in Physics. He did his graduate work at Cornell University, earning his Ph.D. in solid state physics in 1963.

In 1961 he returned and joined the Colgate faculty. The college’s four-person Department of Physics and Astronomy was recovering from the stresses and efforts of mounting a Navy V-12 educational program during World War II and then educating veterans in the immediate postwar years. Its need to add faculty coincided with a shortage of trained physicists resulting from the nationwide post-sputnik expansion of science teaching everywhere. Jim’s undergraduate mentors appealed to his loyalty to Colgate and he came back.

As a Colgate professor, he was for many years advisor to the Department’s pre-engineering students, chaired the Graduate Fellowships Committee, and, as the physics instructor of numerous pre-medical students, served decades on the Health Sciences Advisory Committee. He chaired the Department in 1973-77 and 1987-90, He retired in 1996.

Jim joined the faculty at Colgate as it was transitioning from a quiet liberal arts college to an elite institution. He brought calculus-based instruction into introductory physics, and labored to improve laboratory instruction. To stretch its budget, the Department purchased needed lab apparatus (power supplies, meters, etc.) as kits, and Jim would put them together at home. He did this for relaxation, he said.

He devoted himself to improving the two-semester physics course taken by life-science and pre-medical students, supplementing his lectures with frequent demonstrations, posing in-class questions designed to promote qualitative reasoning, and organizing lab classes into teams of three students, each with a specified role. Students remember reclining on his ballistic cardiograph built from a door suspended horizontally from four wires.

In the late1980’s he was a key player in the Department’s invigoration of the introductory curriculum for physics majors, and was a co-author of the resulting textbook, Modern Introductory Physics.

Jim had many hobbies (“My hobby is collecting hobbies”). Among them were model railroading, radio-controlled model airplanes, and amateur (ham) radio. As an undergraduate, he was on the technical staff of the student radio station WRCU, and later, as a faculty member, he was the station’s advisor and technical director. In 1968 he and students built a small radio telescope and discovered the Sun --- by its radio waves.

He also took up photography. He had an eye for beautiful or interesting images, and he enhanced these by doing his own darkroom work. This included mastering the exacting processes for making photographic prints in color.

Jim was a talented and resourceful experimentalist. Like other physicists of his day, he built much of his own equipment. He was a deft machinist, and, while he grew up in the era of vacuum tubes, he adapted easily to solid state integrated circuitry and was a clever electronics designer and troubleshooter. He also was the first person to use liquid helium on the Colgate campus.

Using his expertise in radio and cryogenics, he constructed an electron spin resonance (ESR) spectrometer that he and his students used to study the magnetic properties of amorphous metal alloys at low temperatures.

In 1990 his interests shifted to surface physics. With NSF funding he acquired an ultra high vacuum chamber. He equipped it with a thin-film evaporator, a thermal-desorption spectrometer, and, using an electron gun from an old television tube, he built a reflection high energy electron diffractometer (RHEED). With this apparatus he and his students deposited ultra pure, atomically flat films of palladium and measured the bonding of carbon monoxide to them, a process critical to the operation of automotive catalytic converters.

Jim also played a role in the village of Hamilton, NY (where Colgate is located). He was twice elected Trustee of the Village and served as its Police Commissioner. He was active in the Park United Methodist Church, where he was a member for over 50 years. He was an accomplished baritone, and, in addition to the church choir, he sang in the University Chorus, the Colgate Chamber Singers, and the Blue Parsley Boys, a local group that performed at events in and around Hamilton.

When Jim joined the Colgate faculty, there was little emphasis on scholarship. He experienced and contributed to Colgate’s transition into an elite modern college. He saw this transition as valuable but iincomplete. In a statement on the occasion of his retirement he called for an environment more supportive for those students “with keen edges, cutting edges.” We miss his own keen and cutting edges, his insight, and his sometimes gruff candor.