UW nuclear physicist "Heinz" Barschall dies
[By Jennifer A. Galloway for the Wisconsin State Journal, Wed., Feb. 5, 1997]
| Henry H. Barschall, an acclaimed UW-Madison nuclear physicist whose laboratory was destroyed in the 1970 Sterling Hall bombing, died Tuesday in Madison. He was 81.
Born in Berlin and known to his friends as "Heinz," Barschall pioneered studies of the interaction of neutrons, one of the basic particles of the atom. His work yielded some of the first accurate measurements of neutron properties and provided insights into the structure of the nucleus of the atom. Though his career at UW-Madison spanned 25 years, it was cut short when his Sterling Hall lab was blown away in a bomb targeted at the U.S. Army Math Research Center in the same building. The bomb was detonated in protest against American military involvement in the Vietnam War. Reflecting on the bombing years later, Barschall said it would have been "just too much to rebuild a lab" at that late stage of his career. Barschall was born in 1915 and educated at the University of Berlin and Princeton. He joined the faculty at UW-Madison in 1946. In 1965 he was awarded the first T.W. Bonner Prize by the American Physical Society and was granted membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1972 and fellowship in 1987. During World War II he was involved in the Manhattan Project, the secret U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M. In retirement, Barschall took up the cause of the high cost of scientific journals and the detriment to scientists. His research sparked an international legal battle and he was sued by German, Swiss and French publishing houses. His studies of journal pricing were generally supported by the courts and made him a hero to a generation of research librarians. In 1990, The Association of Research Libraries gave him a special citation for this efforts. See http://barschall.stanford.edu/ for related information. Barschall is survived by his wife, Eleanor, and two children, Peter and Anne.
The family wishes memorials be made to Hospice Care Inc. |