Obituary of Samuel Devons

Samuel Devons, physicist, teacher, and science historian, passed away on 6 December 2006 in New York City. He had several successful careers, and brought unique perspectives to all of them. After achieving early scholastic success, he served in various capacities during WWII. Subsequently, he became a renowned experimental physicist studying properties of nuclei, an innovative teacher and promoter of scientific education, and a highly regarded communicator and historian of science.

Born in Wales on 30 September 1914, Devons was the son of an emigrant, David Isaac Devons, named after his Lithuanian town of origin, Devoniske. David was a Jewish minister to small communities in Wales and Midlands. Samuel was one of six children; his father died when he was 12 years old. At age 16, he won a prestigious scholarship to Cambridge University’s Trinity College, where his courses included those taught by J. J. Thomson. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1935, and continued his studies and research at Cambridge, with his doctorate awarded in 1939.

As a student and later, he treasured the legacy of the Cavendish Laboratory in writing and discussion, with emphasis on the heritage provided by Thomson and Ernest Rutherford. His affections for and connections to Cambridge continued throughout his life. In 2005, he traveled to London to be honored for his 50 years as a Fellow of the Royal Society and subsequently celebrated his ninety-first birthday at the high table of Trinity College. At the time of his doctorate, Britain’s involvement in World War II consumed everyone. Devons worked as a scientific officer in the Air Ministry on antiaircraft barrages. He vividly described the experiences, early in the Blitz, of shooting 750-foot long wires from the ground toward low-flying planes. Later he worked on radar, and as a UK-US liaison officer, made frequent trips to the MIT Radiation Laboratory in Cambridge, MA, where US research and development on radar was headquartered, and where I. I. Rabi, recent Nobel recipient, was Director of Research. At the very end of the war, Devons served as a British Intelligence officer in Germany interrogating surrendered scientists.

After the war, he taught physics successively at Cambridge University; Imperial College, London; and the University of Manchester, where he was also Director of Physics. In accepting the position as Langworthy Professor at Manchester in 1955, he followed Rutherford’s example. He concentrated on nuclear physics experiments, achieving a substantial reputation, and became a Fellow of the British Royal Society in 1955.

After visiting for a year in 1959, he accepted a professorial appointment at Columbia University, New York. Attractions included the inspired leadership of Rabi, as well as the Pupin, Pegram, and Nevis Laboratories, with facilities for acceleration of elementary particles. When he arrived, the Columbia physics department had an air of excitement reminiscent of Cavendish at its height: maximal parity violation had recently been proposed and found, and discovery of a second neutrino type, the muon-neutrino, was imminent.

The existence of this second neutrino was foreshadowed in the early 1960’s by an elegant null experiment designed by Devons and the late Alan Sachs. Positively charge pions from the Nevis cyclotron were stopped in a plastic scintillator where they produced an abundance of muons at rest. The muon decays predominately to an electron, a neutrino and an antineutrino. If there were only one neutrino type, the neutrino and antineutrino would virtually combine into a single photon. Devons searched for this alternate decay: the muon transition to an electron and photon. In such a two-body decay, the electron and photon would be directly opposite each other. Signals from seven appropriately placed plastic scintillators were fed to a “Garwin” vacuum-tube coincidence circuit, which in turn drove the best electronic optical detectors of the times, spark chambers. The two chambers, one for the electron and one for the photon, were viewed in 90 degree stereo by cameras ordinarily used by department stores to photograph children sitting on Santa’s lap. The resulting 100-ft rolls of exposed tri-X film were easy to scan. The experiment’s only graduate student simply held a ruler along the track of the electron and recorded whether the conversion point for the photon lay along the extension of the track or not. There was no signal above background. If there were only one neutrino, the experiment should have recorded more than 100 events: the process was determined to be absent.

Then as now, such null experiments were important – but it was also desirable to measure processes with finite rates. Fortunately Devons was able to use the same scheme to detect something that should occur: the rare decay of the charged pion into a neutral pion, an electron, and a neutrino. This process is analogous to nuclear β decay.

Devons’ scientific career at Columbia also continued forefront research into properties of nuclei, including experimental and theoretical studies of gamma ray emission by metastable light nuclei. He created “muonic atoms”, in which a muon replaces an atomic electron, and which emit X-rays characterizing the electric charge distribution in the nucleus. Amidst a very active research and teaching career, he chaired the Columbia physics department in the years 1963-1967.

In 1957, he had traveled on a UNESO technical aid mission to Argentina. In later years, he held visiting appointments at Andhra University in India and at Weizmann Institute and Hebrew University in Israel. He served for many years on the Board of Governors for the Weizmann Institute. In addition to being honored as a Fellow of the Royal Society, he was a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 1970, the British Institute of Physics awarded him the Rutherford medal and prize.

He had a unique, though well-grounded, perspective of science. He advocated persuasively the use of logarithms for instant calculation. Most working physicists know the fundamental physical constants, including c, h, and e. Devons memorized rather the logarithms of all the constants – permitting him to calculate with addition rather than multiplication, and so provide numerical answers almost instantly. He wanted to extend the engineers’ decibel to general use through the “jot”, defined specifically as that number having a common logarithm of 1/10 and defined generally as the smallest unit that a scientist needs. Devons hoped to extend the jot to undergraduates but, in his own words, succeeded only in entering the “Ugly Man Competition”. A revival in freshman physics courses in Colorado in the 90’s produced similar groans, but one student wrote, “The most effective aspect of this course was its emphasis on having students learn how to learn. A bit frustrating to have to do this, but worth the effort. Devons helped.”

He produced and starred in films on the lives of famous scientists, choosing background music with fine taste – his favorite being Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”. He also brought a special excitement of life to colleagues and students. An example was his admiration for the humor of the Marx Brothers; he was known on occasion to spontaneously sing – with all the appropriate mannerisms – “Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia? Lydia The Tattooed Lady” … and then complete all the lyrics!

More broadly, his enthusiasm over the great ideas of science was contagious. But he was quick to see the limitations to what can be learned from books; he felt strongly that learning by doing was best. Graduate students often characterized their collegial contacts with Devons as providing unique hands-on learning of experimental science.

Devons’ career in teaching undergraduates mirrored this emphasis on learning by doing. In 1970, he became director of the History of Physics Laboratory at Columbia’s Barnard College, and devoted increasing energy to the task of opening science to nonscientists. His teaching emphasis was to provide early opportunities for undergraduates to design experiments, an experience that even professional scientists often postpone to late in their education. As teaching and communication tools, he worked with students to re-create experiments by renowned scientists of history, and recorded many on film.

During the 1980’s, he organized the “The Joseph Priestley Society” at Columbia to promote interactions among university faculty, high school teachers, and science museum administrators. Devons served as president and organized discussions and seminars about optimal ways to teach science.

Retired in 1984, he remained just as active as an Emeritus Professor. He was a renowned scholar on various historical aspects of physics, particularly on the lives and works of Newton, Franklin, Thomson, Volta, Rutherford, and Rabi. In November 2004, when 90 years old, he gave his valedictory, a well attended and well received Physics Colloquium at Columbia (King’s College prior to the American Revolution) on “Benjamin Franklin: Electron, Electricity and King’s College, New York.” Connections between physics and other sciences, particularly biology, always attracted his interest and were promoted by Devons.

He was devoted to Columbia University, constantly looking for improvements. A generation of Columbians knew him as the mace-bearer at the annual Commencement ceremonies, marching with his splendid beard and scarlet Cambridge robes. He also devoted enormous energies to preserving and restoring contacts among faculty members at the Faculty House, and in fostering the Emeritus Professors in Columbia (EPIC), a group he founded in 1999.

Devons is survived by his wife of nearly seventy years, Ruth Toubkin Devons, and by four daughters and many grandchildren and great grandchildren. He was a devoted husband and family elder. Samuel Devons worked all his life to broaden the intellectual world in which he and his colleagues lived. He will be deeply missed by all who knew him and were touched by his honesty, his curiosity, and his enthusiasm for life. A memorial service is being planned at Columbia University for late May 2007.