In addition to serving as director of a major Department of Energy laboratory, he also became known in his later years for other contributions to academic and public life.
It began with a guest speaker in her small upstate New York town. Roshan Houshmand’s uncles were visiting, and because of their engineering background, she thought a talk on physics would be ideal for a night of entertainment.
Chalkboard discussions usually arise spontaneously, with one person explaining something to a small group standing nearby. Scratchings on the board tend to represent fragments of a conversation rather than a complete train of thought.
Peter Fisher was in the audience when Marin Soljacic, a fellow physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave a lunchtime talk about a technology that could transform consumer electronics.
Affectionately known at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) as simply “The Blue Book,” The Stanford Two-Mile Accelerator has been a classic on site since the day it was published in 1968.
In the 1990s, astronomical observations revealed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Not knowing what causes this acceleration, scientists began to attribute the phenomenon to some unknown source of energy, coined "dark energy" by astrophysicist Michael Turner.
Mike Herlihy is active in the village of North Aurora, near Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and west of Chicago. Hes been a village trustee for six years, belongs to the Lions Club and served on an advisory committee to evaluate a proposed freeway.