George Briggs Collins, particle experimentalist, educator, and administrator, died on 15 December 2001 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
George was born in Washington, DC, on 3 January 1906. He attended Johns Hopkins University, where, in 1932, he received his only degree, a PhD in physics in the emerging field of UV spectroscopy, under the direction of R. W Wood.
In 1933, George accepted a position on the faculty at the University of Notre Dame. There, he built one of the highest-energy Van de Graaff accelerators at that time. Eight years later, having attained the rank of professor for his pioneering work on nuclear excitation and disintegration, he left Notre Dame to assist in the war effort at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory. He led the magnetron group, which contributed to the development of radar for the US military. George also helped document the laboratory’s technical series on advanced electronics. He served as the deputy editor of the MIT Radiation Laboratory Series and was the author of volume 6 of that series: Microwave Magnetrons (McGraw-Hill, 1948).
George joined the physics department at the University of Rochester in 1946 and served as chairman, beginning that year, until 1950. Not only did he strengthen the department through new faculty hires such as Robert Marshak, but he was also in charge of the construction and operation of the 240-MeV synchrocyclotron. He and Marshak initiated the Rochester Conference series—the first conference was in 1950—which continues today as the International Conferences on High-Energy Physics.
George was called to Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1950 to serve as chairman of the Cosmotron department, which was responsible for the construction and operation of the first accelerator to achieve energies in excess of 1000 MeV. As a Fulbright fellow in Belgium during 1957 and 1958, he proposed a plan for increasing the participation of Belgian universities in high-energy physics research.
Transferring in 1962 to Brook-haven’s physics department, George worked as a senior physicist and group leader for high-energy experiments at both the Cosmotron and the newly commissioned Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, which then had the world’s highest energy, 30 GeV. At the time of his transfer, he and Joe Fischer initiated the development, at Brookhaven, of a new instrument for particle research at high energy: the wire spark chamber. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, George’s group at the AGS performed single-arm, double-arm, and multiparticle spectrometer experiments using planar and cylindrical arrays of wire spark chambers. The single-arm spectrometer results were among the first to reveal the role of diffractive processes in elastic and slightly inelastic collisions of hadrons. Those devices and their offspring, multiwire proportional chambers, combined with sophisticated digital computers, have revolutionized how particle research is now performed.
In 1971, at the age 65 and with substantial energy and continuing enthusiasm for new challenges, George was convinced by a young collaborator, W Peter Trower, to join the physics department of Virginia Tech, located among the hills of southwestern Virginia. The challenge of an emerging physics program and university, and the opportunity to continue his Brookhaven championship tennis play at Virginia Tech against a new array of worthy opponents, sealed the deal. George proceeded to lead a group that successfully concluded one of the first experiments at the then recently completed highest energy accelerator located at Fermi-lab. For George, this was to be the last in a series of experimental searches for the elusive magnetic monopole. At the same time, he recognized the need to explain the beauty and harmony of physics to college students in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The course “Physics as a Liberal Art” was developed and first taught by George in 1972.
Although George formally retired in 1976 from Virginia Tech as a University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, he continued to work from 1981 to 1985 as chair of what subsequently became known as the Collins Committee to develop the framework for a university core curriculum at Virginia Tech. He also taught physics part-time until 1985. For the next 10 years, George continued with his primary hobbies of doubles tennis play and gardening.
George’s career was all-encompassing. Not only was he a teacher and administrator, but an early advocate for large, centralized research centers with shared staff and shared facilities that could be accessed by university scientists who could not afford to build comparable research resources at their home institutions. He was one of the original trustees (1946–50) of Associated Universities Inc, formed in 1946 to operate Brookhaven for the Atomic Energy Commission. He also was especially influential as a council member (mid-1950s to the end of the 1960s) and chairman (1969–70) of SUNY Stony Brook’s board of trustees.
During George’s nearly six decades of research and professional service, he exhibited many personal characteristics that formed common threads throughout his distinguished career. He had energy and enthusiasm for the journey; the ability to generate enthusiasm in others; a pioneering spirit and willingness to pursue new ideas and embark on risky, cutting-edge research; the wisdom to recognize those new ideas that were best to follow; and a charming way of softening the sharp edges of the sometimes strongly divergent opinions among collaborators.
