Obituary of Earle Cabell Fowler

Earle Cabell Fowler, a well known physicist, died on March 1, 2008 at age 86 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Earle had wide experience in particle physics ranging from cosmic ray work to accelerator experiments. Over the years he led university research groups, a physics department, and the facilities management team at the U. S. Department of Energy.

Earle was born on June 10, 1921 in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He attended the University of Kentucky where he studied chemistry before serving in the Army Air Force as a meteorologist during World War II. After the war, Earle went to Harvard University and studied physics under Curry Street. He and a fellow graduate student, Rod Cool, used a cloud chamber to study cosmic ray interactions in a molybdenum mine near Climax, Colorado. One of his cosmic ray collaborators commented on Earle’s sense of humor: He took the’s out of cosmic.

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1949, Earle joined the physics department at the recently established Brookhaven National Laboratory. He worked in the Shutt group where he was joined by his brother, Bill Fowler. The group constructed a high pressure hydrogen diffusion cloud chamber to use at the new 3 GeV Cosmotron. They had the chamber working before the accelerator turned on, and Earle and Bill took the chamber to the pion beam at the Nevis Cyclotron to study elastic scattering. They had several exposures and on one of them, when they turned on the chamber, it gave no tracks at all! They later learned that a cloud of radiation from the hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific was drifting over New York and perhaps that deadened the detector. Back at Brookhaven the hydrogen cloud chamber was followed by sequence of hydrogen bubble chambers used at the Cosmotron and later at the AGS for a long series of important experiments.

Earle left BNL in 1952 to help establish a high energy physics group at Yale University that would use the Brookhaven accelerators and detectors. In collaboration with the Shutt group, his group proposed experiments, helped develop the detectors and analyzed the results at Yale, a model for university‑laboratory collaboration that became wide‑spread in that epoch. Joined by Horace Taft and Jack Sandweiss, he inspired students to become involved with the hardware as well as the analysis that made for exciting physics in the 1960 s. In addition he wrote a book with Bob Adair on the emerging physics of strange particles.

In 1962 Earle moved on to a new group at Duke University, investigating strong and weak interactions at the Brookhaven AGS. At Duke he hosted a number of conferences on hadron resonances. He also helped to establish a university computer center at the Research Triangle in North Carolina. From 1967 to 1969, he served as one of the distinguished initial members of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, advising the Atomic Energy Commission on how best to support this fundamental science. Highly regarded by his fellow scientists, Earle was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society and served as Secretary‑Treasurer of the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society.

Earle went to Purdue University in 1972 as Head of the Department of Physics. He was able to continue doing research, including a search for exotic mesons at SLAC and a neutrino experiment at Fermilab. He also hosted a major conference on neutrino physics, Neutrino‑78. He spent a sabbatical year in 1978 in Bill Willis group at CERN, and contributed to the group’s first ISR experiment. His years with cloud and bubble chambers benefited the detector commissioning.

In 1980 Earle went to the Department of Energy where he led the Facility Operations Team in the Division of High Energy Physics. His substantial and wide‑ranging experience was a key resource for DOE in managing the research program. He also looked after the U.S.‑China Agreement on High Energy Physics. He also took part in the extensive site selection effort for the Superconducting Super Collider. Earle retired in 1997 and went home to Chapel Hill.

Earle Fowler was highly respected by his colleagues. His mature judgment and advice were greatly valued and it was a joy to discuss science and related concerns and issues with him. Earle was a warm and engaging person who provided inspiration and guidance to graduate students and senior physicists alike. His wise counsel will be universally missed.