Walter Gordy: some memories and impressions

Abstract

With the death of Walter Gordy it was clear to many physicists and chemists, and especially to those who knew him as a person, that the world of radiospectroscopy and molecular physics had lost one of its more versatile and colourful characters. For something like thirty years he was the dominant figure in the quest for scientifically usable radio waves at the shortest possible wavelengths, an objective which he pursued with dramatic success and with relentless energy. For a more complete picture of the man, however, we must also look into the ways in which this energy was also directed into various other areas of physics and chemistry. A scientist’s first research, and how he or she describes it, can often give keys to the person’s general approach to scientific problems, and indeed can often show a pattern of interests to be sustained over a long period. This applies in some degree to Gordy, but an examination of his early work leaves us aware, not for the only time, that generalizations such as that above do not apply well to him. Beginning in 1934 and continuing through the remainder of that decade, Gordy’s early publications were of infra-red spectroscopic studies of liquids and solutions. The early work was associated with the names of E.K. Plyler and Dudley Williams, at the Physics Department of the University of North Carolina, and continued in the later part of this period when Gordy was at the Mary Hardin-Baylor College in Belton, Texas. Perhaps it was during this time that he, a Southerner by birth and to some extent by temperament, became what he once described to me as “a Texas fan”. The frontier spirit of that state no doubt suited his approach to science and to life. In some thirty papers up to 1941, Gordy’s work shows a strong awareness of chemical bonding and structure. Mostly this was in relation to molecular interactions in liquids, particularly hydrogen bonding, spectroscopic studies of which were becoming recognized [ 11 as a very direct means to new clear-cut