I was away Thursday thru Sunday. My major Professor, Dr. James Gust Skofronick, had passed away at age 93, and I went up to Tallahassee to pay my respects. In addition to being brilliant, he was a wonderful human being. I couldn’t tell you all the good things he did for me and his other students. I was his third PhD student. My friend and lab mate, Dr. Kevin McArdle, was his second. Kevin was there as well. Dr. Skofronick’s first PhD recipient passed on two years ago. What I did with him was to experimentally demonstrate the existence of the Ramsauer-Townsend effect for low energy He-He and He-H2 collisions. It was seminal work. It has no practical application whatsoever. But that’s what most of advanced physics is.
This week of stand alones is from October of 2000.
