Valentine L. Telegdi, 1922-2006
A distinguished physicist, a major personality at CERN, Prof. Valentine Telegdi has passed away. He spent extended periods here as a visitor, carried out many experiments, gave lectures to the summer students and was a member of the Scientific Policy Committee (SPC), acting as chairman from 1981 to 1983. After his retirement from ETH Zurich he was a permanent unpaid visitor at CERN, except for three months each winter, which he spent in California. It was there that he died on 8 April after various medical problems.
Val was born in Budapest and, after school years in Vienna and Brussels, he worked from 1940 to 1943 in a patent office in Milan. He then fled to Switzerland, where he obtained a Master of Science degree in chemistry at EPUL (now EPFL) in Lausanne in 1946. He received his PhD in nuclear physics at ETH Zurich under the joint direction of Paul Scherrer and Wolfgang Pauli. It was there he met his wife, Lidia (Lia) Leonardi, in 1950. He then moved to the University of Chicago, where he started as an instructor in 1951 and was named Enrico Fermi Distinguished Service Professor in 1972. He returned to Europe in 1976 and became a professor at ETH Zurich until his retirement in 1989, though spending a lot of his time at CERN.
It is difficult to list all his achievements, many of which involved the muon: in 1957, together with Jerome Friedman, he contributed to the proof of parity violation in the chain Ï-μ-e; he demonstrated the V-A structure of muon capture; he studied the fine and hyperfine structure of muonium, allowing him to enter, as he said, the inverse millionaire club for accuracy; he obtained the BMT equation of motion of a spin in a magnetic field with Val Bargmann and Louis Michel, useful for muon storage rings and in many other fields; he was a member of the small group that carried out the first measurement of the gyromagnetic factor of the muon in CERN's g-2 experiment; he measured the helicity of the muon neutrino; and in the 1980s, his group in Zurich initiated the NA10 experiment, which studied the Drell-Yan production of muon pairs. His list of publications is impressive, but we would like to single out the first direct proof of parity violation in neutron decay in 1957.
When chairman of the SPC, he and Herwig Schopper convinced the USSR to let the Russian delegate Lev Okun attend the committee meetings. This was very important for East-West relations. As well as being a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, he was also a foreign member of many academies, including those of Budapest, London, Padua, Paris, Rome, Stockholm and Russia. He received many prizes, including the prestigious Wolf Prize with Maurice Goldhaber in 1991 for their separate seminal contributions to nuclear and particle physics, particularly those concerning weak interactions involving leptons.
Val spoke many languages, including Hungarian, Italian, French, English, German and Swiss-German. He liked art, especially modern works such as those of Hans Erni and Paul Klee. He enjoyed good food and wine in restaurants, and also at home where he had a five-star cook in the person of Lia. He had many friends, especially theorists, to whom he often asked sharp questions and would not accept overly easy answers. We shall remember him as a sometimes demanding but wonderful friend, for his jokes and his unsurpassable imitations (for example, of French theorist Louis Michel or Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner).
His friends and colleagues at CERN
