Walter R. Johnson: Personal recollections and his early work

Abstract

My personal story and acknowledgement of Walter Johnson comes from the period 1952–1957 when we were both students in Physics and Mathematics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was ahead of me and my classmates by a year or two, and very wisely guided several of us to important courses offered by the Applied Mathematics group that otherwise we could well have passed up. I and my beginning graduate student colleagues often abandoned the usual study halls in favor of the smoky cafeteria den of the Michigan Union, where we would talk, smoke, and drink gallons of coffee, working on our graduate-studies notes and difficult assignments in Electricity and Magnetism, Quantum Mechanics, and so forth. And that is where we increasingly found ourselves in Walter’s company. He was a very generous teacher even then, tutoring us again and again on the material that we were wrestling with. So we came to rely on him as our most excellent mentor. Our distractions in that setting were many, as the Union had big black and white TV sets that drew big crowds to view the Kefauver hearings, HUAC, and the Army–McCarthy hearings. Indeed, those were the days. But Walter’s steady scholarship tended to keep the rest of us in line. For example, he got us to organize a study group to give group theory seminars to each other from Wigner’s book that was then still in German; in the end, I think his work on this cost him more time than it saved him! I heard that Walter had accepted a research position with Professor Otto Laporte, so he asked me to come see what was going on in that laboratory. Leading up to his Ph.D. dissertation, he was working on shock wave experiments and wanted to show me what he called a “shock tube”, where there was a brilliant flash of light that arose simply from violent shock wave compression, not from any electrical discharge. Well, this fascinated me at the time and then became a dominant interest of mine for the next fifteen years. Otto Laporte’s laboratory and several others (Western Ontario, Harvard College Observatory,