Kenneth W. Ford

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For the businessman who established Roseburg Forest Products, see Kenneth W. Ford (businessman).
Kenneth W. Ford
Project Matterhorn, various textbooks on physics
SpouseJoanne Baumunk Ford
ChildrenPaul Ford
Sarah Ford
Nina Tannenwald
Caroline Richards
Adam Ford
Jason Ford
Star Ford
Scientific career
FieldsPhysics
Doctoral advisorJohn Archibald Wheeler

Kenneth William Ford (born May 1, 1926) is an American

CEO of the American Institute of Physics
.

Biography

Ford was born on May 1, 1926, in West Palm Beach, Florida, to parents Paul Hammond Ford (1892-1961) and Edith Timblin Ford (1892-1992) and was the second of their three children. He spent most of his childhood in Kentucky, living one year in Georgia when he was eight and nine.

Education

Ford attended Highlands High School in

Project Matterhorn
.

US Navy

In April 1944, just before his 18th birthday, while still at Exeter, Ford enlisted in the

Ann Arbor. In three four-month semesters completed in one year, he was able to secure credit for two years of college work and entered Harvard University as a junior in the fall of 1946 following his discharge from the Navy in June of that year.[1]

Graduate Work and the H-Bomb

In the fall of 1948, Ford began graduate studies in physics at

Project Matterhorn
.

Much of Ford's work was concerned with writing programs and doing calculations related to

National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. A SEAC calculation, programmed by Ford with the assistance of John Toll and the guidance of John Wheeler, provided the final predicted yield of 7 megatons for the Mike test
on November 1, 1952. The actual yield was approximately 10 megatons.

"I was aware of the fact that Oppenheimer was expressing opposition to the development of the H-bomb, for various reasons, from technical to moral. But I was also an accidental participant in what may have been the critical moment in changing his point of view. In June of '51 there was a meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission [actually a broader gathering that included the GAC] meeting at the Institute for Advanced Study. They were meeting in a first floor room on, if I remember correctly, a Sunday morning. Maybe it was a Saturday morning. It was a weekend. [It was Sunday, June 17.] Wheeler was scheduled to make a presentation on the latest results of our calculations on the CPC in New York. I was working every night, all night, that week prior to that meeting trying to get the latest and best results that we could.

"The night prior to this meeting at the Institute for Advanced Study, I took a morning train down from New York with the latest results, went over to the Matterhorn building, got out a very large piece of paper, maybe about two feet by three feet in size, a large rectangle of paper, and sketched out a graph showing our latest calculation of thermonuclear burning, still very crude of course, because of those calculations, yet extremely encouraging. I then rolled up this large graph and drove over to the Institute and walked up to the first-floor window of the room where the meeting was in progress and either rapped gently on the window or signaled through the window to catch Wheeler's attention. As it happened, Wheeler had just taken the floor. It had just become his turn to speak. He interrupted his speech, walked over to the window, opened it, took from me this large graph, carried it back and pasted it on the blackboard for all to see. And then, at that moment, according to the reports of those who were there, Oppenheimer suddenly decided, 'This does look encouraging. I think they've really got something. It looks like it's going to work after all.'"[1]

In the fall of 1952, Ford left project Matterhorn and spent the next six months completing his graduate dissertation on the collective model of the nucleus. After defending his dissertation in the spring of 1953, and after spending that summer working in Los Alamos, he took up a post-doctoral research appointment at Indiana University, beginning that fall.

Ford furthered his professional education in two subsequent leaves of absence: in 1955–56 at the

MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, mentored by Abdus Salam, Herman Feshbach, and Victor Weisskopf and supported by a National Science Foundation
Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship. It was during this second leave that Ford wrote his first book, The World of Elementary Particles.

In 1964, Ford took a job as professor and department chair at the newly opened University of California, Irvine, setting up the physics department there for its opening in the fall of 1965.[2]

Cessation of Weapons Work

In the summer of 1968, influenced by his opposition to the Vietnam War, Ford announced at a talk in

Cloudcroft, NM that he would no longer do weapons work or other secret work.[3]

Research, Teaching, Administration, and Writing

Ford's principal research was in the theory of

magnetic monopoles
.

Although Ford's initial appointment at Indiana University in 1953 was as a postdoctoral researcher, he was given the opportunity to teach a graduate course. In later appointments at Indiana and other universities, he continued to teach both graduate students and undergraduate. Subsequent to retirement, he taught high-school physics at Germantown Academy (1995–98) and at Germantown Friends School (2000-2001).

In 1958, after a year's leave from Indiana University in Los Alamos, Ford took up new faculty duties at

University of California at Irvine
as its first physics chair.

In 1970, for family reasons, Ford left Irvine for the

University of Maryland System. That job lasted for slightly more than a year, during 1982–83, before Ford took his first non-academic job as president of Molecular Biophysics Technology in Philadelphia.[4]

When Molecular Physics of Technology's research results failed to measure up to expectations and the company had to shut down, Ford took a position as education officer of the

College Park, MD. Ford's retirement from the institute in 1993, at age 67, coincided with its move to College Park, along with other physics organizations.[4]

Ford has written eleven books (counting one three-volume work as three books), one of them with a co-author—five before his retirement and six after. His first book, The World of Elementary Particles, written in 1961-62 and published in 1963, did well enough and was satisfying enough to encourage him to write more. The thick textbook Basic Physics followed in 1968 and the three volumes of Classical and Modern Physics in 1972–74. Following his retirement and while teaching at Germantown Academy, he joined with John Wheeler to write Wheeler's autobiography, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam, published in 1998. In 1999, this book won an American Institute of Physics Science Writing Prize. There followed The Quantum World in 2004, In Love with Flying (a memoir) in 2007, 101 Quantum Questions in 2011, and Building the H Bomb in 2015. Basic Physics was reissued in 2017, repurposed as a resource for teachers.

Issues with Secrecy

While in the final stages of writing his book Building the H Bomb, Ford was requested by the United States Department of Energy to excise approximately ten percent of his manuscript as the security officials at DOE felt that it had the potential to reveal decades-old government classified information. After some back-and-forth, Ford made minimal edits to the book and went ahead with publishing, putting himself at risk of prosecution, but no action was taken by the DOE.[5][6]

Post-retirement

Since officially retiring, Ford has done some consulting work, worked for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, tutored students, both in person and online, taught high-school physics, and, as noted above, written six books. He lives outside Philadelphia.

Personal

Ford married Karin Stehnike on August 27, 1953, and fathered two children; Paul Thomas Ford (1957) and Sarah Elizabeth Ford (1958). They divorced in 1961. Ford married Joanne Baumunk on June 9, 1962, gained one stepdaughter, Nina Tannenwald (1959), and fathered four more children: Caroline Amanda Ford (now Caroline Richards) (1963), Adam Baumunk Ford (1964), Jason Lawrence Ford (1966), and Lucas Wheeler (now Star Lucia) Ford (1968). He has 13 grandchildren and three step-grandchildren. Ken and Joanne celebrated sixty years of marriage in June, 2023 before Joanne’s death on September 5, 2023.

Selected honors

Selected bibliography

  • The World of Elementary Particles (Blaisdell Publishing Co., 1963). Translated into Italian, German, and Russian. (
    Library of Science
    selection in the United States, science writing prize in Italy.)
  • Basic Physics (Blaisdell, 1968). Introductory text for nonscience students. (Re-released, repurposed to serve as a resource for physics teachers, by World Scientific in 2017.)
  • Classical and Modern Physics (Xerox College Publishing, 1972–74). Introductory text for students of science and engineering. 3 volumes.
  • Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics, with John Archibald Wheeler (W. W. Norton, 1998). Wheeler's autobiography. Translated into Chinese and Greek. (1999 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Prize.)
  • The Quantum World: Quantum Physics for Everyone (Harvard University Press, 2004). Translated into several languages. Paperback with “Quantum Questions,” 2005. Answer Manual available.
  • In Love With Flying (H Bar Press, 2007). Memoir on 50 years of flying small planes and gliders.
  • 101 Quantum Questions: What You Need to Know About the World You Can’t See (Harvard University Press, 2011). Translated into several languages.
  • Building the H Bomb: A Personal History (World Scientific, 2015).
  • The First 95 Years (H Bar Press, 2021).

External links

Archival collections

References

  1. ^ a b c d Interview of Kenneth W. Ford by Alexei Kojevnikov on November 15, 1997, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA
  2. ^ "University of California History Digital Archives". Sunsite.berkeley.edu. 1965-07-01. Archived from the original on 2008-08-29. Retrieved 2013-07-19.
  3. ^ http://www.spsnational.org/governance/ethics/ford.pdf [bare URL PDF]
  4. ^ a b Interview of Kenneth W. Ford by Alexei Kojevnikov on November 22, 1997, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA
  5. ^ William Broad, “Hydrogen Bomb Physicist’s Book Runs Afoul of Energy Department,” The New York Times, March 23, 2015.
  6. ^ More Secrets: Letter to the Editor by Ken Ford, Inference, 2021
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