Obituary of Albert Messiah (1921-2013)

A.M.L. (Bacco) Messiah died 17 April 2013 in Paris. He had a remarkable life, both as a physicist and educator who wrote the rst books on modern quantum mechanics from which two generations of French physicists learned quantum mechanics, and as a member of the Free French Army during the 2nd World War.

Albert Messiah was born 23 September 1921 at Nice, France. At the start of the 2nd World War, Messiah and his brother Andre’ were studying at the Ecole Polytechnique in the north of France. Their uncle hired them to drive himself and his wife to San-Jean-de-Luz in the south-west of France where they hoped to be sheltered from the Nazis. During the drive south, Messiah heard a radio talk by Petain and realized that Petain would not resist the Nazis. He resolved to leave France, expecting to ght the Germans in Africa. He joined a group of Poles on a ship that he thought would go to Africa. Instead the ship went to London where Messiah joined de Gaulle and the Free French forces. In September 1940 Messiah joined an expedition to Dakar which failed to liberate the French colony from the Vichy French military forces which actively opposed the Allies. At the end of 1944 he joined the 2nd Armored Division in the liberation of Strasbourg and was part of the allied advance into Germany. He was in the unit that occupied Berchtesgaden and he took trophies, including Goering’s briefcase and Hitler’s ruler, both of which he later donated to the Museum of the Liberation.

Having been a French Jew who escaped France to ght in the Free French Army of de Gaulle, he was awarded a grant to study and work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey in the US. The seminars at the Institute were incomprehensible to Messiah who had only a high-school education in physics, and he became depressed to the extent that he considered abandoning his plans to become a physicist. Fortunately he met Robert Marshak at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington, DC. Marshak suggested that Messiah come to the University of Rochester and get a US PhD in physics.

When Messiah returned to France, he taught quantum mechanics at the French Nuclear Center at Saclay, outside Paris. There was no text on quantum mechanics in French until Messiah wrote his two volume Mecanique Quantique published by Dunod in 1959. His books were translated to English by G.M. Temmer, as well as to other languages. Messiah’s books were the standard references in French on quantum mechanics for many years. He later became the Director of the Physics Division at the French Atomic Energy Commission and a Professor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University.

Messiah collaborated with the O.W. Greenberg on identical particle statistics other than bosons or fermions. This work led directly to Greenberg’s suggestion of parastatistics of order 3 for quarks, which was the rst suggestion that quarks carry a hidden three-valued charge, now colloquially called “color.”

Messiah’s rst wife Jacqueline died suddenly in 1962. He married Janine Gre- nier in 1964. He has three children, Martine, Antoine and Pierre Henri, and 4 grandchildren.

We remember Bacco for his warmth and kindness and for his sense of humor, as well as for the depth of his understanding of physics.

O.W. Greenberg