From BA to PhD, Vandervoort’s teachers reached Nobel fame
Peter Vandervoort was trying to be inconspicuous at a social gathering on the evening before his friend Donat Wentzel’s wedding in 1959, but future Nobel laureate Maria Goeppert-Mayer put him on the spot.
Vandervoort, BA’54, BS’55, MS’56, PhD’60, Professor Emeritus in Astronomy & Astrophysics, was then a graduate student in physics at the University. The next day he would serve as best man at Wentzel’s wedding to Maria Mayer, the daughter of physics professor Goeppert-Mayer, who in a few years would win the 1963 Nobel Prize.
Goeppert-Mayer lit a cigarette, blew away the smoke then looked at Vandervoort. “I hear rumors that I’m on your thesis committee,” she said. After Vandervoort verified the fact, Goeppert-Mayer smiled and said, “Do not worry. I will not take your head off.”
Gregor Wentzel, the groom’s father and also a physics professor, overheard the comment. “Now, Maria,” he said, “You should not make rash promises.” Replied Goeppert-Mayer: “What I meant to say was, he would not feel it when I did take his head off.”
Laughing heartily at the recollection, Vandervoort said he considered it an honor to have such distinguished scientists make a joke at his expense at such an early stage of his graduate education. “Our faculty in physics were all celebrities as far as the graduate students were concerned,” Vandervoort said.
A virtual travelogue
Vandervoort’s path at the University is a virtual travelogue of Nobel winners, reflecting the extraordinary intellectual firepower that the physics program retains to the present day. Vandervoort had the unusual experience of getting to know many of the Nobelists in the 1950s, before they achieved the ultimate scientific acclaim.
The chair of his PhD committee was Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who went on to win the 1983 Nobel Prize in physics. The late Robert Mulliken, PhD’21, the 1966 Nobel laureate and a professor in physics, served on Vandervoort’s PhD candidacy examination committee.
During the Autumn Quarter of 1956, Vandervoort also took the first class taught here by Yoichiro Nambu, the 2008 Nobel laureate in physics and the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Physics.
“Yes, we now identify them as Nobel laureates, but they were representative members of our physics faculty in those days,” Vandervoort said.
Even one of the graduate students for whom Vandervoort once worked would go on to receive a Nobel Prize: Jerome Friedman, AB’50, MS’53, PhD’56, the Institute Professor and Professor in Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
As an undergraduate, Vandervoort had obtained a job in the nuclear emulsion laboratory, which Enrico Fermi, the 1938 Nobel laureate in physics, had established before his death in 1953. Vandervoort’s first project was scanning nuclear emulsion plates for Friedman’s dissertation project. Friedman also was a teaching assistant for one of Vandervoort’s classes.
“Our association with our Nobel laureates and other highly distinguished colleagues greatly enriches the lives and work of those of us in the University of more modest standing. I have been very fortunate in such associations,” Vandervoort said.
A theorist at heart
A theorist like his mentor, Chandrasekhar, Vandervoort currently focuses his research on the dynamics of galaxies. Can chaotic behavior result from the dynamics of merging galaxies?
His other intellectual activities include teaching the course “Order and Chaos in the Natural World,” an offering in the Master of Liberal Arts Program in the Graham School of General Studies. He also is contributing to the planning for a new building—the William Eckhardt Research Center.
“I like to think that I can help produce a building that will serve the science of an assistant professor who hasn’t even been born yet,” Vandervoort said. “If her science is a little better than it would have otherwise been, that’s a good thing to think about.”
By Steve Koppes
