Roy Schwitters Obituary, Death – Roy Schwitters passed away last week. Wonderful individual. I wrote his eloquent obituary. Roy F. Schwitters, a well-known physics professor at Harvard, Stanford, and UT Austin, died of cancer on January 10. The first flight of the Boeing B52 past Roy’s Seattle school piqued his interest in science and technology. He didn’t fly till he attended MIT for physics. Harold “Doc” Edgerton, who employed physics to create sonar, deep-sea photography, and the hydrogen bomb detonation device, influenced him. Roy, a Mount Rainier summer mountain guide, was captivated by Edgerton’s national security work and adventurous spirit. In Paradise on the Mountain, he met his wife, Karen Chrystal. Roy was fascinated by particle physics. He assisted in the development of particle colliders at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
He would eventually be in charge of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), America’s attempt to construct the world’s largest particle accelerator. After spending two billion dollars on the project, a budget-cutting Congress withdrew funding for the SSC in 1993, leaving important discoveries like as the Higgs boson particle to the Geneva-based Large Hadron Collider. Roy’s greatest professional blunder. The cancellation was dubbed “the fury of the C students” by him. He saw the endeavor as a Cold War casualty as well. “We lost our existential rival, the Soviet Union,” he explained. He believed that a nation’s intellectual destiny dictates its power and that America had abandoned high-energy physics. Roy’s SSC mysteries have yet to be solved.
Roy was apathetic. He was upbeat and enjoyed teaching.
He became a member of JASON, an exclusive group of theoretical physicists, oceanographers, computer scientists, chemists, and biologists, in 1996. Eleven Nobel laureates are among its members. They address difficult issues such as nuclear weapons, climate change, and renewable energy. “I honestly saw it as a new lease of life for me, given the fantastic individuals I was working with, their intellectual toughness, and the significance of the problems we tackled,” Roy remarked. From 2005 to 2011, he served as the chairman of JASON. JASON advised the United States government against developing a new generation of nuclear weapons, explored greenhouse gas emissions monitoring, and issued reports on cyber security, radar interference from wind farms, and microorganisms for energy production.
The federal government and some of America’s greatest scientists collaborate on a variety of issues.
Roy led the University of Texas Maya Muon Tomography project, which used cosmic rays to map a Belizean Mayan temple. He was working on a book about that voyage when he died of cancer on Orcas Island, where he and Karen had retired. Roy Schwitters lived 78 fascinating and eventful years. Karen, his 57-year-old wife, his sister Elizabeth Rodriguez, Marc, Anne Smith, and Adam, as well as five grandchildren, survive him.