If physicist James Van Allen wanted to look back over his career, all the way back to his first experimental research as an undergraduate at Iowa Wesleyan College in 1931, the task would be daunting. Although his papers are conveniently gathered at the main library of the University of Iowa, the school where Van Allen earned his physics PhD in 1939, the collection stretches across more than 210 feet of shelf space.
And Van Allen, who was honored by the university in early October on the occasion of his 90th birthday, continues to add to the collection. Five days a week, he goes to his office on the top floor of a building that bears his name and delves into the massive amount of data his Geiger Tube Telescopes gathered on their decades-long journeys through the solar system aboard the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. The last bit of the...
