Obituary of Alan Moulton Thorndike

Alan Moulton Thorndike died here at age 87, following a career as a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Thorndike was the youngest child of the Columbia University psychologist Edward L. Thorndike and Elizabeth Moulton Thorndike. Born in 1918, he was a tenth generation descendent of John Thorndike, who came to Massachusetts Bay in 1630, and of Robert Moulton, who came in 1629. He was raised in Montrose, NY and New York City, attended the Horace Mann School, studied physics at Wesleyan University (1939), and earned the Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from Harvard in 1947. His undergraduate thesis , supervised by Professor K. S. Van Dyke, explored the piezoelectric properties of quartz crystals. In 1941, Thorndike followed Van Dyke to San Diego to work in the Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group. A year later, he married Van Dyke’s daughter, Mary Louise. He was a co-editor of “Anti-submarine Warfare in WWII”, a summary of these activities published by Columbia University Press. His doctoral thesis, supervised by E. Bright Wilson, presented measurements of the radiative properties of carbon dioxide.

At Brookhaven, Thorndike was a member of the team of scientists that built and used large accelerators to study the fundamental structure of matter. Their greatest achievement was the discovery of the omega-minus particle in February, 1964. This was an important contribution to the development of the present theory of matter. Thorndike was the author of “Mesons: The Experimental Facts”, and co-author (with David Frisch) of the widely read “Elementary Particles. " He retired from Brookhaven in 1981. Along the way, he spent sabbatical years at Johns Hopkins, and at CERN.

Since retiring, he has managed a tree farm in Orford, NH. He had life-long interests in hiking, skiing, boating, and tennis. He was a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the American Federation of Scientists, the American Civil Liberties Union, and a supporter of Wesleyan University, the International Rescue Committee, the United Negro College Fund, the American Indian Fund. He is survived by his wife Louise, his children Jean, Alan S., Charlotte, Karl, and Margaret. He had twelve grandchildren and four great grandchildren. There will be no memorial service. But all who knew him will long remember him as a creative scientist, a man devoted to his family, and a responsible citizen.