Edward Forbes Greene, a noted experimental chemical physicist at Brown University, died of pneumonia on 13 August 2005.
Born on 29 December 1922 in New York City, Ned, as he was called by his colleagues and friends, was raised in Beijing, where he was educated at the Peking American School. His father, Roger Sherman Greene, was the resident director of the China Medical Board and acting director of the newly formed Peking Union Medical College, both early projects of the Rockefeller Foundation.
A brilliant student, Ned entered Harvard University and in 1943, after only three years, graduated with an AB in chemistry and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Between 1944 and 1946 he served as an electronics technician in the US Navy. His PhD research at Harvard, under the direction of George B. Kistiakowsky, was devoted to the mechanisms by which shock waves initiate detonations in cylindrical pipes. In 1949, after completing his PhD and making a brief visit to Los Alamos Laboratory, he joined the Brown University chemistry department, where he stayed for the rest of his life. Ned served as department chair in 1980–83 and was named the Henry D. and Louise Sharpe Metcalf Professor in 1985.
At Brown, Ned developed the use of shock waves to investigate chemical reactions. He and Norman Davison were the first to demonstrate the unique opportunities provided by shock waves, which heat a gas in nanoseconds to temperatures of several thousand degrees and thereby initiate high-temperature reactions that can be easily followed by observing the time-dependent light emission after the shock front passes. Research into shock-initiated chemistry has greatly expanded since Ned conducted his work in the 1950s, and it continues to be actively pursued in many laboratories worldwide. Ned’s book with one of us (Toennies), Chemical Reactions in Shock Waves , first published in German (Steinkopff, 1959) and later in expanded form in English (Arnold, 1964), was the first authoritative monograph in that emerging research area and remains a standard reference in the field.
Ned had an extraordinary ability to identify important scientific questions and to develop strategies to address them. In 1955 he immediately realized the great potential of crossed-molecular-beam scattering experiments, demonstrated earlier that year by Ellison Taylor and Sheldon Datz at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. At Brown, with the use of a newly designed apparatus, Ned and his coworkers discovered the distinct maxima, now known as rainbows, in atom–atom angular distributions. In a 1962 crossed-beam study of the K + HBr reaction, Ned, Dieter Beck, and John Ross were the first to use a velocity-selected beam to measure the reaction threshold of a chemical reaction. Subsequently, they also developed a new method to extract reaction probabilities from reactant angular distributions.
In the late 1970s Ned became interested in surface science and its abundance of unsolved problems. Using elastic and inelastic scattering of atomic beams from single-crystal surfaces, he began a series of investigations into the structure and dynamics of important model systems. Among his many notable contributions are his studies of order–disorder transitions and melting of silicon and germanium surfaces. He was a founding father of the annual Gordon Research Conference on the Dynamics of Gas–Surface Interactions, which continues today as one of the important international meetings in that field.
Ned was a deep thinker with unwavering convictions. Equity, fairness, and plain human decency were dear to his heart. In 1965 Ned spent a sabbatical teaching chemistry at the historically black Tougaloo College in Mississippi, an engagement that subsequently led to a very long-term commitment to Tougaloo. Ned served on Brown’s Committee on Minority Affairs from 1978 to 1980, and in 1985 he chaired its task force to recommend a site for the university’s new third-world center. He was a devoted teacher and will be fondly remembered by his many students for his hands-on instruction in the lab, his probing questions, and his way of making science fun. He was thoroughly democratic in the way he treated students and colleagues, yet old-fashioned in his politeness and modesty. He was known for his fondness for words, word games, and languages. His dry sense of humor tended to surprise and delight. After having been at Brown for more than 50 years he commented, “You know, we are all transients here!”
The international molecular-beam and surface-science communities have lost a revered colleague and great leader.
