Obituary of David Park (1919-2012)

David Allen Park, Webster Atwell - Class of 1921 Professor of Physics Emeritus at Williams College, died on January 19, 2012 at age 92. He was a brilliant scholar, a natural teacher, and an inspiration and mentor to his colleagues.

After graduating with a prize scholarship from Harvard in 1941, David taught at Williams as an instructor until 1944, when he went off to support the war research effort as an operations analyst at the Harvard Radio Laboratory and in England. After the war, various fellowships helped him earn a Ph.D. and gain postdoctoral experience at the University of Michigan. He then spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before returning to Williams as an assistant professor in 1952. He retired in 1988, after which he set the gold standard for professional accomplishments in retirement.

The author of eight books, dozens of articles and countless book reviews and letters to editors of all sorts of publications, David was a prolific and wide-ranging scholar. In the 1950’s at the invitation of the editors of American Journal of Physics he wrote a pair of long articles, each entitled “Recent Advances in Physics,” which together reviewed and explained new results in low temperature physics and particle physics, including the exciting discovery of parity violation. In a 1973 letter to the Dean of the Faculty conveying a list of David’s publications, his department chair noted that it included publications in at least seven sub-fields, work done in collaboration with three Williams colleagues in three different disciplines, and both books and articles surveying contemporary physics, using the kind of imaginative dissection of sophisticated concepts that he brought to his classroom teaching

Indeed, many of David’s books and articles are essentially teaching vehicles, often based on original research. Many of David’s papers go well beyond simply informing or clarifying to encourage the reader to adopt an entirely new point of view. Some of his re-imaginings are illustrated by simple geometric arguments; others involve rather sophisticated mathematics, often ingeniously simplified.

One of David’s first books, Introduction to the Quantum Theory, was written for advanced undergraduates. It may have been the first quantum text to aim at and succeed in helping students develop an intuitive understanding of the subject with a minimum of mathematical fog. Five of David’s other books are better known since they appeal to a general audience. They review the evolution of human perceptions of time and light and the nature of explanation, starting with the early Greeks right through modern physics. Two of them, The Image of Eternity and The How and the Why, won Phi Beta Kappa book awards. They are accessible and instructive to non-scientists. To a physicist they are poetry.

David’s many book reviews range over a wide variety of topics, from books about science to books about history, philosophy, music and art. Often they employ ingenious juxtapositions, sometimes bringing a smile as well as driving home a point. Consider this comment from his review of a book about the painter Pieter Bruegel. “Some of the older historians used to guess that Bruegel was born a peasant. It is as if to guess from his paintings that Renoir was born a woman.”

In addition to educating through his books, David was deeply interested in classroom teaching, in which he was both popular and effective. He taught a course for non-scientists called Natural Philosophy of Time, as well as courses that brought modern developments in physics to undergraduate majors. He organized an MIT seminar about time and was a founder and president of the International Society for the Study of Time. During his leaves he lectured and taught in Ceylon, India, Papua New Guinea and many institutions in Europe as well as MIT and the University of North Carolina.

In 2005, at age 85, David published a book entitled The Grand Contraption and delivered a series of three brilliant public lectures celebrating the 100th anniversary of the 1905 Einstein papers that revolutionized physics. The book reviews 4,000 years of cosmology in Europe and the Near East, as human descriptions of natural processes developed from myth to law to recognition of unpredictability. In assessing the quantity and quality of work involved to produce the book, a reviewer for Physics Today commented that it is “well documented and massively informative.” The Einstein lectures demonstrated not only David’s generosity in wanting to enrich the community, but also a depth of insight and an obvious joy in sharing these iconic ideas.

David’s many contributions to his college and to the larger community of learning testify to his broad-ranging intellectual engagement and his expansive spirit. Those of us lucky enough to have known him are surely the greatest beneficiaries.