Obituary of Russell Lewis Collins

Russell Lewis Collins, an expert on the Mossbauer Effect and prolific author of more than 50 refereed papers in standard journals, died of fibrosis of the lungs on October 11, 2010 in Austin, Texas. Collins was born in Coffeyville, Kansas on September 21, 1928. He grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma where he attended public schools. After graduation from high school he enrolled in the University of Tulsa where he earned his BS degree in engineering physics in 1948. Subsequently he attended The University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma for graduate study in physics and earned his master’s degree in 1950 and his PhD in 1953. After graduation, he worked as a physicist at Phillips Petroleum Company. He left Phillips to join the Physics Department at the University of Texas at Austin in 1962 where he served as professor until retirement in 1984.

He founded and served as President of Austin Science Associates which was a leading manufacturer of Mossbauer Instrumentation for many years and received many research grants from the United States Army and Navy for practical applications of The Mossbauer Effect. The company also worked with the US Department of Agriculture to pioneer green methods of weed and pest control.

With his graduate students, Dr. Collins published numerous papers in standard journals. He was a demanding and rigorous mentor. He engaged his students in weekly seminars where each had to present a relevant topic. He liked to say that he knew one of his graduate students was ready for a PhD when he could show his teacher that he had made a mistake in a statement or proof.

In retirement, he worked on several vexing problems of physics. He wrote, “Rubber Rulers and Lackadaisical Clocks Simplify Gravity”, to present some of his findings. Collins became intrigued with the Pound and Rebka Mossbauer experiment of 1960 which confirmed the prediction by General Relativity that gravity would cause a redshift of photons. This experiment can be interpreted to find that rest mass increases under gravity. Using this interpretation Collins further reasoned that such a mass increase for the electron would cause a decrease in the size of the atom, in turn causing a decrease in the length of any measurement device. This led him to intuit a simpler alternate approach to General Relativity which he called Mass Metric Relativity. Using this approach he was able to easily calculate the precession of the perihelion of the planet Mercury, the gravitational deflection of starlight, as well as the delay of light passing through a gravity field. Collins felt that the results of the Stanford Gravity Probe B would be pivotal for validating or invalidating his approach. As far as the writers of this obituary know he never was able to determine if his approach was tenable.

Collins felt that both subatomic particles and photons had to be electromagnetic in nature. He was attempting to use Maxwell’s equations with static and dynamic electromagnetic fields to model both subatomic particles and photons when he died. He presented multiple dissertations on his findings to meetings of the American Physical Society. He was also involved with a small group of individuals in Austin Texas who loved physics. They met regularly to discuss new theories and findings. Most would sit in awe as he would fill the white boards with formulas to back up the latest theory he had put forth. All were inspired to dig deeper into their old physics books to try to prove/disprove him right or wrong by the next meet-up. His mind was always running full speed and he could keep a couple of PC’s occupied day and night writing and editing his latest paper or researching his models. Always open to suggestions, he could bring out the best or worst as the case may be, with his deep probing questions.

Collins was deeply committed to finding reasonable physical and mathematical models to explain what he observed in nature and he was always willing to be convinced that he was wrong in his conclusions. He was constantly probing and attempting to find the simplest possible explanations to explain nature. He had tremendous mathematical abilities and insights and in any discussion would fill many yellow pages in the notepads that he always carried. He is sorely missed by his friends and colleagues.