In Memoriam : Edwin L. "Ned" Goldwasser

1919–2016

Emeritus Professor of Physics Ned Goldwasser was both a distinguished high-energy physicist and a deeply respected science and university administrator.

Goldwasser attended the Horace Mann School in New York City from 1930 to 1936. He enrolled in physics at Harvard College in 1936, earning an AB degree in 1940. During World War II (1941–1945), he served as a civilian physicist with the US Navy, where he worked on methods to reduce ships’ magnetic signatures, for evading mines. He received his doctoral degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950.

In 1951, Goldwasser joined the Department of Physics as a research associate in nuclear physics, working on the 25-MeV and 300-MeV betatrons. He was promoted to research assistant professor in 1953, and to assistant professor in 1954. He was granted tenure as an associate professor in 1957, and was promoted to professor in 1959. Goldwasser was the author of numerous technical publications on the properties of cosmic rays, energy loss of charged particles, photon interactions, and elementary particle interactions. He took a leading role in efforts by a consortium of Midwestern universities in the 1950s and 1960s to strengthen their research facilities in high-energy physics and to locate a national accelerator facility in the central U.S.

A dedicated and inspiring teacher, Goldwasser wrote the then-influential introductory textbook Optics, Waves, Atoms and Nuclei (New York, W.A. Benjamin, 1965) and led the University of Illinois contingent of the Physical Science Study Committee, a collaborative effort by Illinois and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create a modern high-school physics curriculum. The resulting textbook and teacher’s guide, PSSC Physics, to which Goldwasser was a major contributor, transformed the way that physics was taught in U.S. high schools post-Sputnik.

In 1967, with an Illinois site chosen by the US Atomic Energy Commission as the location of the nation’s new “National Accelerator Laboratory” (now Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory), Goldwasser took a leave of absence from Illinois to serve as deputy director of the new facility. Goldwasser oversaw the construction of the accelerator complex, scheduled its experimental program, and implemented its groundbreaking equal-employment program.

Goldwasser returned to Illinois in 1978 as vice chancellor for research and dean of the graduate college. He was vice
chancellor for academic affairs from 1980 to 1986. He took another leave that year to join the Central Design Group of
the proposed Superconducting Super Collider, where he served as associate director until 1988. At that time, he returned to Illinois as acting director of the Office of International Programs and Studies, and he also served as director of the University of Illinois’ Computer-assisted Education Research Laboratory. In 1990, following his retirement from Illinois, he was appointed a “Distinguished Scholar” at the California Institute of Technology to work on the LIGO project.

Goldwasser was a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships and served on the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee and on the University of California’s committees that oversee its three national laboratories.