Erwin Max Friedländer

Abstract

Erwin Max Friedländer, a pioneer in the use of nuclear emulsions for cosmic-ray and, later, accelerator research, died on 22 January 2004 in Oakland, California, of complications from a heart attack. Friedländer was born on 29 May 1925 in Cluj, Romania, as a Czech citizen. During the war years, which he spent in Bucharest, he was drafted into forced labor because he was Jewish. Shortly thereafter, when the Communists came to power in Romania, he was imprisoned for illegal ham radio operations.In the early 1950s, after obtaining his physics degrees from the University of Bucharest, he joined his mentor, Josef Ausländer, to found the Cosmic Ray Laboratory at the new Institute for Atomic Physics of the Romanian Academy of Sciences. There, he trained a one-of-a-kind, loyal team of scanners who are still active today and collaborated with cosmic-ray physicists from around the world.In 1963, Friedländer became head of the laboratory and was elected corresponding member of the Romanian Academy. He was allowed the great perk of traveling abroad (without his family), but was continually subjected to political and anti-Semitic pressures. He wrote eloquently of these pressures in his memoirs, which he finished just weeks before his death. Friedländer never joined the Communist party and took risks few others in his position would have. In the 1960s, for instance, he participated in a high-energy physics seminar that was organized by former colleagues who had been fired from their jobs after applying for emigration.Friedländer was particularly interested in multiparticle production dynamics. That field became popular in the 1970s in great part due to the important contributions made by his emulsion group, one of the first to discover multiplicity-scaling laws in proton-nucleus reactions. In 1975, Friedländer defected to West Germany and soon emigrated to the US. After a year-long effort, his wife, Jo, and daughter, Monica, were able to join him. He found employment at the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory before joining Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in 1977, where he stayed until his retirement in 1991.In the late 1970s, Friedländer started a collaboration with theorists at the University of Marburg, Germany, which resulted in a large number of papers that predicted or interpreted new phenomena. Using the methods of quantum optics, that collaboration found a simple explanation of multiplicity scaling regularities (intermittency) observed in hadron–hadron and electron–positron reactions, and thereby settled a long-standing controversy. In analogy with the effect of self-induced transparency in optics, Friedländer and his collaborators predicted a similar phenomenon in hadron–nucleus reactions. At LBNL, the experimental study of the interactions of relativistic heavy nuclei and their secondary products became one of Friedländer’s most intriguing and challenging efforts. He initiated a collaboration using relativistic heavy-ion beams that had become available at LBNL’s Bevatron/Bevalac. That work gave rise to increased interest in the bur-geoning field of relativistic heavy-ion physics and ultimately to the maturation of this field, now exemplified by the ongoing quest for the quark–gluon plasma under way at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory.An expert in statistics, Friedländer had an uncanny ability to extract significant information from scant experimental data. During the last few years of his life, he planned to write a textbook on statistics for experimentalists, one of the few projects he didn’t finish.Friedländer was inadvertently responsible for a new term in physics. As an invited speaker, he gave a talk at the University of California, Irvine, about “The Anomalous Scattering of….” A secretary misread his hand-written “anomalous” as “anomalons,” and thus a new, hypothetical “particle” was created!An accomplished musician proficient as a pianist and organist, Friedländer also had a great sense of humor and recounted political jokes from behind the iron curtain. He spoke seven languages fluently and could crack jokes in all of them.In 1978, Friedländer became an active participant in the worldwide human rights movement SOS (Scientists for Sakharov, Orlov, and Sharan-sky), which fought to obtain freedom for scientists imprisoned in the former Soviet Union for their political views. Owing to his insight and personal experience, Friedländer played a vital role in the formation of the intellectual goals and procedural tactics that made this movement eminently successful.During his career, Friedländer wrote around 250 publications. He received a Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1985 and, in 2003, he became an honorary foreign member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences, a reaffirmation of his broad range of contributions to physics.The last few years of his life were not easy ones for Friedländer. Illness robbed him of sight and mobility, but he struggled on courageously and kept abreast of developments in physics.Erwin Max FriedländerPPT|High resolution© 2004 American Institute of Physics.