Wednesday, August 09, 2006

James A. Van Allen (September 7, 1914 – August 9, 2006)

I remember talking with Dr. Van Allen in an elevator in Physics Bldg. (Van Allen Hall). He always had a pipe in his and would talk to you like you really matter. He was a great guy. Even when I knew him in the mid 1990’s he was still as sharp as a tack. He had a corner office on the seventh floor of the building named after him. His place was always crowded with paper, book, computer tapes, models and just all kinds of interesting stuff. Dr. Van Allen always reminded me of the archetype old wizard in the tower.

His was a mind that was always clicking, even if he spent a lot of time talking about the past. I hear his whole family was like that. He had brothers all of them went to make their marks in other fields. Yeah the gene pool went deep there, and we may never see their like again: Feynman, Teller, Oppenheimer, Goddard, Edison, and the whole crowd that made the 20th century.

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