Stanford Professor Emeritus H. Pierre Noyes died peacefully at Stanford Hospital on 30 September, in Stanford, California at the age of 92. He was survived by his wife, Mary Noyes (for six weeks before she too passed); his children, David Brian Noyes, Alan Guinn Noyes and Katia Hope Noyes; his grandchildren Brian Knut Noyes and Beth Ann Goder; and his great grandchildren Emma Goder and Lucy Goder.
H. (Henry) Pierre Noyes was born on 10 December 1923 in Paris to William Albert Noyes and Katharine Howarth Macy, daughter of Jesse Macy, while W. A. Noyes was on sabbatical from the chemistry department of the University of Illinois.
Pierre graduated Harvard in 1943 with a degree in physics. While at Harvard, his roommate was Thomas Kuhn, and Pierre was reader of an early draft of Kuhn’s now famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He served two years in the US Navy as Aviation Electronics Technician Mate, where he worked on radar technology, including a better design for naval radar antennae. His subsequent postgraduate work culminated in a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in theoretical physics in 1950. His doctoral advisor was Geoff Chew (whose doctoral advisor had been Enrico Fermi) under the direction of Robert Serber. After moving to Rochester, New York, Pierre began working as an assistant professor in 1951 at the University of Rochester and also became a Fulbright scholar in Birmingham England. During this period he also worked on the classified Project Matterhorn (magnetic fusion reactor) at Princeton.
In 1955 he joined what was to become the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he worked under directors Edward Teller and, to a lesser degree, Ernest Lawrence. Teller and Lawrence had founded the lab a mere three years before. While there Pierre worked on computations relating theoretical fusion and nuclear weaponry. From 1956 to 1962, he served as group leader of the General Research Group. In 1958 Freeman Dyson invited him to work on Project Orion at General Atomics in La Jolla, California, with whom he had become acquainted while working on Project Matterhorn. In 1962, Pierre was invited to join the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), where he essentially created the Theory Group and served as its first administrative director. The transition to Stanford was timely as he was becoming disenchanted with nuclear weapons research.
Pierre was destined to spend the rest of his career at Stanford, where he progressed from associate professor to professor and was awarded emeritus status on 1 May 2000. Over the years, his work was focused on high-energy subatomic particle interactions, especially the three-body problem, to which he made many contributions. Professor Noyes’s graduate students in particle physics included James Lindesay (Howard University), Alex Markevich (SAP), George Pastrana (Orsus Research), and Enrique Zeiger (ECM).
Noyes served as the Associate Editor of the Annual Reviews of Nuclear Science from 1962 until 1977.
In addition to his work in theoretical physics, Pierre ultimately became an outspoken opponent of nuclear weapons within the physics community. Having come from a family with a strong Quaker background, he was naturally inclined against violence. This led to his becoming a protestor against the Vietnam War, and he actively resisted defense funding for his own research and helped establish that right within SLAC. After Richard Nixon assumed office, Pierre became the first person in history to bring a lawsuit against a sitting US president for his actions with respect to the war. The suit was dismissed when Nixon resigned from the office.
The year 1979 was significant for Pierre in a number of ways. In November 1979, revolutionary Islamist students invaded the US embassy in Tehran and seized 52 hostages, whom they held until January 1981. During this time, they demanded that the Shah be returned to Iran from the US and stand trial. The hostages went on trial, and the students invited a number of impartial international witnesses to the trial. One of those invitees was H. Pierre Noyes, who bravely went to Tehran and served as witness.
In 1979 Pierre received an Alexander von Humboldt US Senior Scientist Award, primarily to continue his theoretical work on the quantum mechanical three body problem for strongly interacting particles. In that same year he joined with John Amson, Ted Bastin, Clive W. Kilmister and A. Fredrick Parker-Rhodes to found the international Alternative Natural Philosophy Association (ANPA) at Cambridge University, and was president of that organization until 1987. Under Pierre’s influence, advisors to and participants in the group included such notables as Patrick Suppes, Michael Redhead, David Bohm, Geoff Chew, Chris Isham, John S. Bell, Karl Pribram, and others.
About 1980, Pierre founded the Light Hearted Philosophy Group (LHPG) at Stanford and held meetings in his home. Continuing throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, speakers ranged from Nobel Laureates to US vice presidential candidates, and a broad range of topics were presented. In 1984, he formed the ANPA West organization with David McGoveran. Pierre presided over yearly ANPA West conferences with the support and participation of Stanford’s Pat Suppes. In later years, Pierre was increasingly interested in social and biological systems, which he worked on with Fred Young.
A lifelong humanist and enthusiast for the scientific understanding of the world, he was always delighted to explain his theories—a process that often left his listeners marveling. He will be missed by his many associates, students and colleagues, as well as many others who came to know and love him.
