Henry Abraham Boorse, an authority on low-temperature physics, one of the founding members of the Manhattan Project, and a professor of physics at Barnard College in New York City, died in Houston, Texas, on 28 July 2003.
Born on 18 September 1904 in Norristown, Pennsylvania, Henry graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1928 and served on active duty for two years before beginning graduate study in physics at Columbia University. After earning a master’s degree, he was awarded the PhD in 1934. His dissertation, under the direction of A. P. Wills, was on magnetic double refraction in liquids. He spent the following year as a postdoctoral fellow under John Cockcroft at Cambridge University in the Royal Society Mond Research Laboratory (later merged with the Cavendish Laboratory), where he worked on the low-temperature research pioneered there by Peter Kapitza.
Henry returned to Columbia to begin developing a low-temperature laboratory in the department of physics. In 1937, he accepted a teaching appointment at Barnard, the women’s college affiliated with Columbia—just across the street from Pupin Hall, which then housed labs of the likes of Harold Urey, George Pegram, I. I. Rabi, Enrico Fermi, and Polykarp Kusch. For the next four years, Henry chaired the Barnard physics department, worked to develop his low-temperature laboratory, and continued to do research on the liquefaction of hydrogen.
In 1942, Henry joined Urey and Fermi, two of his Leonia, New Jersey, neighbors, in founding the Substitute Alloy Materials (SAM) Laboratory at Columbia. SAM was part of the Manhattan Project; Henry worked in the project in New York as divisional director, and then at the Oak Ridge, Tennessee, site until 1945, when he returned to Barnard and Columbia. For the three decades that followed, he balanced roles of researcher, teacher, and dean, sometimes emphasizing one over the others, but never losing sight of his multiple responsibilities and interests. Henry went back to building his department and completing a laboratory from which, over the next several years, he published studies on helium transport on different metal surfaces at temperatures below 1 kelvin and on the heat capacities of superconducting and various other metallic elements. He became a full professor in 1948. Years later, a longtime colleague would wonder if Henry’s knowledge of low-temperature physics was what allowed him to “keep his cool” as an administrator during the student unrest in the late 1960s.
In the 1950s, in a fully equipped low-temperature laboratory, he and his students worked on superconductivity and reported regularly in the Physical Review and the American Journal of Physics. At the same time, he was becoming more active in professional groups and in the governance of his college. He was a consultant to the US Atomic Energy Commission and to Brookhaven National Laboratory; he was a director of the calorimetry conference and wrote an article on the subject for Science; and by the end of the decade, he had become dean of the faculty at Barnard.
Henry’s scientific explorations progressed during the 1960s, even as his involvement in academic administration expanded. His investigations covered various aspects of solid-state physics at very low temperatures and dealt with superconducting heat capacities of zinc, niobium, and lanthanum. He served on Commission 1 of the International Institute of Refrigeration and as a member of the US National Committee of the institute. Twice during the decade, Henry was interim president of Barnard, and he made a six-week trip to India to promote faculty exchange among women’s colleges in the US and India. At the end of his first presidential stint, a faculty chorus saluted him to the tune of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”:
Now come hours of cryogenic joy, comfort and joy!
Oh, tidings of kelvin zero joy!
In 1966, Henry, with the astronomer Lloyd Motz, published an annotated two-volume anthology, The World of the Atom (Basic Books), a collection of seminal papers by physicists from Lucretius to Hans Bethe and Victor Weisskopf, with extensive commentaries that were hailed as lucid and comprehensive. Twenty-three years later, when he was 85, he co-authored a companion volume of biographies, The Atomic Scientists (Wiley, 1989). At the end of the decade, under his deanship, the department established a History of Physics course with laboratory, which he hoped would “humanize physics” for Barnard and Columbia students.
In 1970, Henry stepped down from the college deanship and became professor emeritus of physics, but he only more or less retired. For the next five years it was “less.” He was a special lecturer, an interim yearlong director of the college libraries, and a special assistant to the president. When he retired “more,” he was able to pursue a lifelong interest in studying and collecting early American prints and maps of prerevolutionary Philadelphia. He served as the president of the American Historical Print Collectors Society and published articles in that society’s journal and in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography.
On his formal retirement, Henry was toasted as a dean with a “tidy” mind, always impartial, willing to listen before judging, and “courageous in his caution”—surely just as descriptive of a good scientist. He probably enjoyed, even more than the toast, the senior faculty chorus that serenaded him, this time à la “When I Was a Lad” from HMS Pinafore, ending with the refrain:
His cold chambers had such frigidity
That now he is the ruler of the Faculty.