Charles Kincaid Bockelman

Abstract

Charles Kincaid Bockelman, retired professor of physics and deputy provost at Yale University, died on 6 June 2002 following a series of strokes.Bockelman was born on 29 November 1922 in San Francisco, California. His parents moved back to their native Midwest, and he grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That he was interested in science from boyhood is apparent in a clipping from the Steuben Junior High School newspaper in Milwaukee that shows a picture of Bockelman as the 13-year-old president of his graduating class. The accompanying story says that his ambition was to be a physics professor. After graduating from high school in 1940, he obtained a job, through his mother’s intercession with an old family friend, as a Riding Page in Senator Harry S Truman’s office in Washington, DC. There, he attended George Washington University to study physics and chemistry while acting as Truman’s mail clerk. Truman, who took an avuncular interest in him, wrote several personal letters to the young soldier after he entered the US Army in 1942.Following his discharge in 1946, Bockelman, with financial aid from the GI bill, enrolled at the University of Wisconsin as a physics major. There, while still an undergraduate, he began a five-year span working in experimental nuclear physics with Heinz Barschall, and received his PhD in 1951. During those years, Bockelman played an important role in the Barschall group’s studies of the nuclear scattering and absorption of neutrons with energies ranging from about 100 keV to a few MeV. His thesis crowned a series of 11 papers, with Bockelman as coauthor, describing work that both demonstrated the existence of broad, well-defined energy levels at those energies in elements as heavy as lead and revealed unexpected patterns of the cross sections averaged over resonances. The analyses of the discrete resonances contributed to the evidence that established the importance of spin–orbit coupling in nuclear forces, and the analyses of the cross sections, averaged over resonances, provided the foundation of the “cloudy crystal ball” model of nucleon–nucleus interactions developed by Herman Feshbach, Victor Weisskopf, and Charles Porter.After receiving his doctorate, Bockelman went to MIT and worked for four years with W. W. Buechner, studying neutron interactions at higher energies with an emphasis on high-resolution analyses of the reaction products. Bockelman’s work on the resonant scattering of protons and deuterons due to energy levels in odd–odd compound nuclei provided both early information on charge independence in nuclear reactions and measures of isotopic spin impurities in those states.In 1955, Bockelman went to Yale, where, with Howard Schultz, he investigated neutron capture resonances and continued some of the nuclear spectroscopy studies he had initiated at MIT. During the early 1960s, he and Schultz worked on the preparation of facilities for the 70-MeV electron accelerator they obtained in 1964. Bockelman then used that accelerator to study nuclear structure through inelastic electron scattering. Later, with one of us (Bromley), he helped develop a large multigap magnetic spectrometer to be used at the new Arthur W. Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory at Yale. Over the next decade, Bockelman used this instrument to study the properties of heavy- and medium-mass nuclei.The graduate students who worked on those programs with him included Dennis Kovar, who currently is responsible for all of nuclear and much of particle physics in the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science; Robert Eisenstein, who, until recently, was NSF’s assistant director for mathematical and physical sciences (see page 74 in this issue); Lawrence Cardman, director of research at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility; and Peter Barnes, former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Meson Physics Facility. All of them show clear evidence of Bockelman’s training and of his integrity, honesty, and love of physics. Bockelman’s research career of 20 years, though, was slowed by demands for his administrative abilities by those who admired his wisdom, intelligence in human affairs, responsible manner, and good sense. He was asked to take on the position of director of the physical sciences at Yale in 1966. Three years later, he took the newly created position of deputy provost for science, which he held for two decades. In those capacities, he facilitated the construction of new buildings, the implementation of computer systems, the setting up of new faculty, the maintenance of senior faculty programs, and the growth of the sciences. He also spent interregnum periods as acting provost and as acting dean of the graduate school.Bockelman made significant contributions to physics research, to the education of students in the classroom and laboratories, and, in his administrative capacity, to research in all sciences at Yale. Perhaps his most fitting epitaph, however, is found in a remark by a young administrator in the Yale physics department: “He was such a nice man!” Charles Kincaid Bockelman PPT|High resolution© 2003 American Institute of Physics.