Comments on: John Bahcall

By: Philip Downey

Philip Downey — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 13:54:52 +0000

I’m very sad to hear of his passing. He was obviously a very smart man, and a strong guiding force in the direction of neutrino detection experiments.

I saw him speak once or twice and he always seemed like a true gentleman.

As Mark mentioned, it will always be a little surprising he didn’t win the Nobel Prize. It took decades for him to be proved right, but he was right!

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 02:00:34 +0000

As an undergraduate student many years ago I read Bahcall’s book Neutrino Astrophysics. This set me on a course that eventually found me a decade later 2 kilometers underground beneath the Canadian Shield trying to find out if Bahcall had got his solar neutrino calculations right. (More on that below.) Not only did his work set the future direction of neutrino physics and eventually lead to an unexpected revolution in particle physics, but the mere act of reading his book on solar neutrinos in the end wound up causing me to switch fields and even move to a foreign country. I can’t say that any other physics book had such an impact on my life.

I was pleased to meet John on a number of occasions. Readers of this blog will especially appreciate the first time I met him, when I was a graduate student at Chicago. I had joined him and a colleague for dinner in Hyde Park, and interestingly enough John wasn’t really that interested in talking about neutrinos. Instead, he was all excited that his wife Neta had just written a paper showing that Omega_m=0.3, apparently ruling out inflation! This was obviously a big deal. But by my memory it was just a few months later that the supernova results pointed to a non-zero cosmological constant, putting Omega_m=0.3 in a completely different light!

In 2002 I gave a special talk at the University of Pennsylvania announcing the first neutral current results from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, which definitively showed that John Bahcall’s solar model was right on the money. We submitted the paper late on a Friday, and my talk was scheduled for the following Tuesday. Although I had invited John to come over from Princeton for the talk, by the worst of luck the time of my talk conflicted utterly with his schedule and he wasn’t able to make it. I really regret the missed opportunity to have seen his face when he saw our result for the first time, but I’m pretty sure that he had no doubt whatsoever about what the answer was going to be. He knew.

By: Clifford

Clifford — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 22:24:25 +0000

Yes, Igor Klebanov started his talk today with the sad news, remarking upon John’s contributions and tremendous stature in the field, and the assembled audience (from both the Supercosmology and the Collider Physics workshops) expressed their agreement.

-cvj

By: Zero

Zero — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 17:28:55 +0000

I’ve got to give big props to John Bahcall. When I first met him about five years ago, I felt like I was walking into God’s office. To say that I was overwhelmed by his intellect would be a vast understatement. Thanks for the memories, John.

Zero