national academy of sciences

frederick seitz
19112008

A Biographical Memoir by
charles p. slichter

Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the author

and do not necessarily reflect the views of the
National Academy of Sciences.

Biographical Memoir
Copyright 2010
national academy of sciences
washington, d.c.

Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center.

FREDERICK SEITZ
July 4, 1911March 2, 2008
B Y CHARLES P . SLICHTER

rederick seitz was a brilliant scientist.

He was one of the

founders of the field that became known as the physics of
condensed matter; a wise and insightful leader of academic
and scientific organizations; an influential spokesman for
science nationally and internationally; a trusted counselor
and adviser of many organizations. His contributions to
the field of solid-state physics, to the National Academy of
Sciences, and to The Rockefeller University were transformative. Ever alert, he used his influence to help many scientists
at crucial stages of their careers. He died in New York on
March 2, 2008.
I met Fred in 1949 when we both joined the faculty of
the Department of Physics of the University of Illinois, he
as research professor and I as a brand-new Ph.D. with the
rank of instructor. Although he was only 38 years old, he was
already a famous scientist. He had been elected a member
of the American Philosophical Society in 1946, and he was
elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences five
years later. He was deeply and actively involved in solid-state
physics. Fred had a profound effect on my scientific career.
I take the liberty of telling a few of those personal aspects
in this memoir. In preparing this memorial I have drawn on
many of his writings, especially his 415-page autobiography On


B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

the Frontier, My Life in Science.1 I have also been enlightened

by a DVD recording of the memorial symposium in Freds
honor held at The Rockefeller University in February 2009,
kindly made available by Freds good friend and colleague
Purnell Choppin. Ralph Simmons, Andy Granato, and Ned
Goldwasser, three of Freds colleagues at Illinois, have written
a memorial article about Fred Seitz for Physics Today.2
The Early Years

Fred was born in San Francisco. In his autobiography he

writes, The date was July 4, 1911, the year in which Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus, Kamerlingh Onnes
discovered superconductivity, and Sun Yat-sen overthrew
the Chinese monarchy and established a republic. In this
one sentence he captures many qualities his friends enjoyed
about him: setting the event in a larger context, mentioning
some history of science, and I suspect delivering the message
with a twinkle in his eye since the reader was supposed to
grasp that he was poking fun at himself by associating his
birth with these great events.
He describes the neighborhood in which he grew up,
with its mixture of ethnic groups and strong family traditions, with great warmth and affection. His father, after
whom he was named, was born in 1876 in Germany. Owing
to a family financial misfortune, his father was unable to go
to college. Rather, he was apprenticed at age 14 to a Viennese-style pastry baker in Heidelberg for three years, and
later for two more years in Innsbruck. At age 19 he came to
America, settling initially in New York. Ten years later he
was in San Francisco, where eventually he set up his own
bakery. Freds mother was born in San Francisco in 1883.
She had a large extended family in the area. Although his
father was serious and on occasion stern, Fred speaks of his
parents as strong and loving.

FREDERICK SEITZ

Fred attended Lick-Wilmerding High School. The school

had two curricular pathways, trade and college-bound. But
during the first two years, all students took the same courses,
including mechanical and freehand drawing, and shop
(masonry, tinsmithing, and various sorts of woodworking).
He writes, While a program of this type was acceptable to
West Coast colleges and universities, it would have been
regarded as inadequate at one of the elite eastern private
universities. He reports that it was held against him when he
applied for graduate school at Princeton. He adds, I believe
that the continual downgrading of the status of hands-on
technology of those institutions, with the admitted exception
of computer use and programming, may provide additional
signs of a form of national decay.
He goes on to write, My experience in the schools auto
repair shop taught me the satisfaction of technical competence, and brought some bonus rewards as well. One of
my classmates Gene Mires had somewhere acquired a 1923
Buick touring car. We worked on it lovingly in the shop until
it was in excellent condition, and in it a group of us went
camping in Yosemite Valley for several weeks one summer.
Throughout his life, Fred enjoyed the out-of-doors and nature
as well as the company of others.
He speaks with special affection and admiration for his
physics teacher, Ralph Britton, with whom he kept in contact
right up to the time of Brittons death at age 96. The mathematics teachers were also clearly excellent. Graduating in
the middle of his senior year, December 1928, Fred entered
Stanford.
In his autobiography he describes in great detail and
with warmth his years at Stanford. Because he arrived in
January, he was out of phase with most of the freshman
class that started in September. Thus, he writes, most of
my classmates had already formed bonds of friendship, and

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

I found myself somewhat detached from the group. As a

result, I never developed much class spirit and went my own
way, knowing that sooner or later I would have to decide
what lead to follow. But he treasured the great freedom to
find ones own way that college life offered. He was warmly
received by several members of the Physics Department.
They included William Hansen (a member of the team of
Bloch, Hansen, and Packard that in 1946 discovered nuclear
magnetic resonance3) and John Clark. Edward Condon,
a 28-year-old theorist who was a guest lecturer at Stanford
in 1930, took a particular interest in Fred. He urged Fred
to apply to Princeton for graduate school and played a key
role in getting Fred admitted to Princeton.
Fred actually majored in mathematics at Stanford. That
department, Fred reports, was a close happy family. In fact,
when Fred left for graduate school, Professor Blichfeldt, the
head of the Math Department, gave a small luncheon party
for him. Freds experience of having caring and attentive
mentors was evident in his own style as a mentor of younger
scientists. His caring touched many of us who later had the
good fortune to know him.
Concluding that Caltech was clearly the best technical
school in the west, Fred decided that he should spend
some time there. He transferred in the fall of 1930 for his
junior year. The year proved exciting but had a drawback;
there were no dormitory facilities and the only on-campus
dining was a light lunch served in a primitive wooden shed.
Of particular interest were lectures given by Linus Pauling,
then in his twenties, about his quantum mechanical theory
of the directionality of the chemical bond. It is interesting
that in two years Fred would be working on the bonding of
sodium atoms in sodium metal, developing a more rigorous
approach characteristic of physicists. However, Fred reports
that Condon once observed that chemists needed a theory

FREDERICK SEITZ

that was applicable to the vast array of molecules of their

world, and thus could not afford the luxury of dealing only
with systems of great simplicity for which a high degree of
rigor is feasible. It was quite characteristic of Fred that he
did not scorn the less rigorous methods of the chemists but
rather grasped and admired the creative power they gave
chemists. He embraced both approaches.
Realizing that he could graduate in just one semester if
he returned to Stanford, Fred returned there for the summer
and fall of 1931, graduating in January 1932. Early in 1932 he
took the train east to Princeton. Condon was there, finishing
his famous book with George Shortley, The Theory of Atomic
Spectra. Condon suggested to Seitz that a promising new area
would be to use quantum mechanics to explore the properties
of crystalline solids, trying to be as quantitative as possible.
There was already important work of this sort for Fred to
absorb from authors such as Peierls, Bethe, Frank, Bloch,
Houston, and Van Vleck. When autumn 1932 arrived, Condon
was so immersed in finishing his book that he suggested that
Fred should work with Wigner, and helped arrange for that.
Seitz had already absorbed Wigners book on group theory,
a knowledge that proved important for his thesis. So Seitz
became Wigners first American graduate student.
SOLID-STATE PHYSICS: FREDS VISION

Wigner was a close friend of John von Neumann, dating

from their teenage years in Budapest. Through Wigner,
Fred got to know von Neumann. Thus began another friendship that was of great importance to Fred right up to von
Neumanns untimely death in 1957. With Wigner, Fred began
a study of solid materials, trying to understand the quantum
mechanical nature of such properties as their cohesive energies and lattice constants. Wigners original guiding thought
for their work was that the main source of the cohesion energy

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

of solids was a lowering of kinetic energy, on the supposition that the wave functions in a solid would be smoother
than those of a free atom. They discovered that the Russian
physicist Prokofiew had developed a core potential for the
sodium atom that produced valence electron energies accurate to about 1 percent. All that fall they worked trying to
demonstrate the correctness of Wigners hypothesis.
Seitz reported that over the Christmas vacation he stayed
in Princeton since the West Coast seemed so far away in
those days before transcontinental air travel. The Physics
Department was deserted. He then saw that they should
perhaps focus on the Prokofiew core potential, and after
a happy week or so of integration by the method of finite
differences and the use of a Monroe calculator, the cellular
method of deriving solid-state wave functions was born, and
when Wigner returned at the end of the Christmas holidays
we carried on with increasing excitement. Our key paper4
was published in May.
In a second paper5 Wigner added a treatment of the
electron correlation energy, making possible a full treatment
of the cohesive energy of sodium. These papers applying
symmetry principles to formulate a quantum theory of crystals opened the way for quantitative expansion of the field.
They inspired in Fred a vision of how one could achieve an
understanding of condensed matter in terms of quantum
mechanics.
In the winter semester of 1933 a new student, John
Bardeen, joined the Math Department at Princeton. His
interests were in physics. On the very date he arrived he was
introduced to Seitz. Bardeen became Wigners second student,
working on the physics of the surface layer. He published
two6,7 papers: Theory of Work Functions of Monovalent Metals
and Theory of Work Functions. II. Surface Double Layer. Subsequently Hillard Huntington, Conyers Herring, and Roman

FREDERICK SEITZ

Smoluchowski joined the group of Wigner students studying

physics of solids while Seitz was there. The discovery of the
neutron and exciting developments in nuclear physics then
drew Wigner away from study of solids to the field of nuclear
physics, but in this one short burst Wigner had guided five
of the most important theorists in the history of condensed
matter physics.
In the autumn of 1934 Fred was invited to give a physics
colloquium at Bryn Mawr College. There he met a young
physicist, Elizabeth Katherine Marshall. They soon discovered
they had many interests in common, including music. Betty
had grown up in China where her parents were missionary
teachers. After preparing for college in Shanghai, she
attended Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.
A year of graduate study at Cornell netted her an excellent fellowship at Bryn Mawr. Her two brothers, Lauristan
and Robert, were both physicists. The friendship advanced
rapidly with the result that Fred and Betty were married on
May 18, 1935.
Fred received his Ph.D. in 1934 and stayed on for another
year as a postdoctoral fellow. Then, in 1935 he joined the
faculty at the University of Rochester as an instructor. The
department head was Lee DuBridge, who had been recruited
the year before from Washington University in St. Louis. In
his autobiography Fred writes that the complete freedom for
research and the light teaching load gave him the opportunity to launch an ambitious project that he had been
contemplating since his student days: to write a comprehensive
account of the various aspects of solid-state physics
in order to give the field the kind of unity it deserved. This integration
had been made possible by the development of quantum mechanics which
offered the means of consolidation. The result, The Modern Theory of Solids,
was published by McGraw-Hill five years later in 1940Perhaps the greatest

10

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

value of the book was the attraction it provided for new, young investigators
to undertake research in the area in the immediate post-war period.

I was one of those he lured.

In this monumental task Fred was greatly assisted by Betty.
Fred writes in his autobiography, I think it is safe to say
that, in the writing of this book, Betty, who was soon deeply
involved with the program, and I became familiar with every
paper related to the field. I believe it is fair to say that this
book8 effectively defined the field of solid-state physics and
played a major role in stimulating its advance.
While at Rochester, Fred already showed those qualities
that characterized him: identifying younger scientists of
promise, and doing his best to encourage them and help
them in their endeavors. This quality was no doubt deeply
rooted in his psyche, but I am sure his experience with
particular faculty at Stanford, Caltech, and Princeton, about
whom he speaks with great warmth in his autobiography,
helped cultivate this quality in Fred. He mentions three
undergraduates at Rochester whom he particularly enjoyed:
Bob Dicke, Leroy Apker, and Joseph Platt. In the National
Academy of Sciences memoir about Bob Dicke, a particular
point is made of Freds encouragement of Dicke, including
abetting Dickes transfer to Princeton in his junior year.
Fred writes that while working on his book
it became evident that the rate at which the field of solid-state physics could
be expected to evolve would be determined to a considerable degree by the
number of experimental investigators attracted to it, and who might work
in close association with the theoretical developments.

This vision provided the theme that occupied Fred for

the next 30 years.
It led to his leaving Rochester after two years to join the
General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New
York. Fred was given a lab in the lighting research group

FREDERICK SEITZ

11

headed by Saul Dushman. In 1938 in a paper on the plastic

properties of solids Fred published a detailed theoretical
interpretation of the experiments on thallium-doped alkalihalide crystals9 in response to a paper from the laboratory of
Robert Pohl. Awareness of these papers later led to some of
his first invitations to aid industrial scientists after he joined
the University of Pennsylvania.
While at GE, Fred and Betty purchased a plot of land on
the shores of Lake George. The simple but tastefully designed
cottage in a bay on the eastern side of the lake became over
the years a year-round refuge for Fred and Betty, as well
as later for their son Jack; Jacks wife, Elise; and their three
children: Eric, Carey, and Jennifer.
Although Seitz particularly enjoyed the substantial freedom
he had at GE, eventually he concluded that the Depression
had produced a stagnation at the laboratory that stood in
marked contrast with the situation at some research-oriented
universities. He decided that GE was not developing a unified
program but rather existed as splintered groups. Accordingly,
in 1939 he accepted an offer from Gaylord Harnwell for an
associate professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, with
the opportunity to add members to the staff to create a team
of experimental and theoretical physicists. Louis Ridenour,
whom he had met as a summer fellow at GE, was also there.
Seitz brought Andrew Lawson (a student of Shirley Quimby at
Columbia University), Robert Maurer (a student of DuBridge
at Rochester), James Koehler (a new Ph.D. theorist from
Michigan), and Wigners student Hillard Huntington. The
group thus formed began an activity that Seitz guided, with
some losses and some additions, culminating finally in the
group he developed at the University of Illinois starting in
1949. The group of strongly cohesive theorists and experimenters was a tangible expression of the thinking that motivated Fred to write The Modern Theory of Solids.

12

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

In December 1941 the war broke out. By 1942 Harnwell

was called away and Leonard Schiff was made the acting
department head. Ridenour left for the Radiation Laboratory
at MIT, where radar was under development. Fearing that
neither Harnwell nor Ridenour would return to the department after the war, Seitz became uneasy about the future of
his group. When the headship of the Physics Department at
Carnegie Tech became open, Condon, who had moved from
Princeton to the Westinghouse Research Lab in Pittsburgh,
proposed Seitz for the position. Among the attractions at
Carnegie Tech was a small research group under the leadership of Otto Stern, whose famous atomic beam experiment
with Gerlach had demonstrated the spatial quantization of
spin systems. The administration was supportive of Freds
outside interests and indeed felt that they might help others
in the institution. So in late 1942 Seitz moved to Carnegie
Tech and Fred and Betty moved to Pittsburgh. Huntington
and Lawson joined the Radiation Laboratory at MIT. Koehler
and Maurer joined Fred at Carnegie Tech.
Between 1939 and 1945 Seitz became heavily involved
with applied research as the outside world learned of his
abilities. As he says in his autobiography,
Any hope I might have had of returning to a completely sheltered academic
life when joining the University of Pennsylvania was a vain one. Not only
would it have taken much more will power than I possessed to turn my back
on scientifically interesting aspects of applied work, but I would also have to
have had the good fortune to live in a world without wars. The more immediate requests, however, came from private industry and were a consequence
of my published research at the General Electric Laboratory.

The first stimulus came from DuPont concerning the

stability of dry pigments of various dyes. This interaction
launched a 35-year association. Soon after the start of the
war, scientists from the Research Laboratory of the Frankford Arsenal approached Fred. He helped develop a group

FREDERICK SEITZ

13

of consultants that at various times included Tom Read,

Hans Bethe, Cyril Smith, and William Deming. Fred also
helped at the Naval Proving Ground at Dahlgren, Virginia,
on the Potomac River. Lee DuBridge had left Rochester to
head the Radiation Laboratory at MIT. In 1941 he contacted
Seitz for help with the problem of crystal diodes that were
used for frequency conversion of radar signals. Based on
experimental results of the group led by Lawson and Park
Miller, it became clear that controlling the purity of silicon
or germanium was crucial. Fred enlisted the help of DuPont
in making pure material. As the use in radar increased a
group at MIT led by Henry Torrey orchestrated joint work
by many other laboratories. This work, of course, laid the
groundwork for the development of the transistor at Bell
Laboratories after the war.
In autumn of 1943 Wigner asked Bardeen and Seitz to
join a theoretical group at the Metallurgical Laboratory of
the Manhattan District at the University of Chicago. Work
was well along on water-cooled graphite reactors, and Wigner
had become concerned about the effect of neutron bombardment on the integrity of the interior structures of the reactor.
Bardeen was not able to accept, but Fred did. He enlisted
Bob Maurer, whose experiments with Ed Creutz showed
that the effects feared by Wigner were indeed serious. A
program under Koehler was established at Carnegie to focus
on the uranium slugs. In 1944-1945 the physics community
at Carnegie Tech was thrilled to learn of the award of the
1943 Nobel Prize to Otto Stern (and the 1944 Nobel Prize
to I. I. Rabi, who had studied molecular beam techniques
in Sterns laboratory).
Seitzs last war activity took place in 1945. The secretary
of defense, Henry F. Stimson, asked Fred to establish a small
office at U.S. military headquarters in Europe to collect information on technical advances made by the Germans during

14

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

the war that might be of particular interest to our military.

In the process Seitz had interesting contacts with the Alsos
group of American scientists who were in Europe to find out
about the German activities concerning an atomic bomb.
During the winter of 1945-1946, Wigner went to Oak
Ridge as director of the lab that had previously been run by
the University of Chicago. Several of the staff from Chicago,
including Alvin Weinberg joined him there. Wigner asked
Seitz if he would take responsibility for a reactor education
program. Fred agreed to do so for one year, taking a leave
of absence from Carnegie Tech. In the fall of 1947 Wigner
decided to return to Princeton. Alvin Weinberg was named
as Wigners successor, serving until 1974. In his memoir Seitz
reports that although Wigner received the Nobel Prize for
his work on the theory of the nucleus, Wigner felt that his
greatest contribution to society was his work on the theory
and technology of reactors.
SOLID-STATE PHYSICS: FREDS YEARS AT ILLINOIS

Seitz returned to Pittsburgh from Oak Ridge fully expecting

to remain there for the rest of his career. But in his autobiography he reports that it soon became evident that Creutzs
program in nuclear physics was very successful and would
require, in all fairness, almost all of any new appointments.
In the fall of 1948 Louis Ridenour, who had become the dean
of the Graduate School at the University of Illinois, invited
Seitz to meet with him and Wheeler Loomis, head of the
Illinois Physics Department. They offered Seitz a research
professorship and the opportunity to make a number of
departmental appointments. Seitz accepted in the winter of
1949. He brought with him from Carnegie Tech Bob Maurer,
and Bobs recent Ph.D. student Dillon Mapother (to set up
a low-temperature program), and recruited David Lazarus,
a brand-new Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, who had

FREDERICK SEITZ

15

been directed in his thesis research by Andy Lawson. As

mentioned above, I also joined the faculty in 1949. The next
year Jimmy Koehler followed from Carnegie. Thus, Fred had
come close to reconstituting the team he assembled when
he first went to the University of Pennsylvania.
Fred reports that the move to Urbana-Champaign was
initially of some concern to Betty but that they promptly fell
in love with the Midwest. Fred writes,
The great American prairie has many qualities of the sea; there is the same
kind of rich interplay between the sky and rolling land as is seen between sky
and undulating water. Brilliant sunsets and magnificent storms hover over
the vast spread of the land. And, like the sea, the land presents markedly
different aspects at different times of day and at different seasons. In the
early spring, the new plantings emerge as if by magic from the rich black
soil. During the autumn, or in snow-covered winter, the pheasants move
like gleaners through the grain fields, often whole-flocks at a time. In the
summer the whole world seems bursting with life of all kindsWe never
had a happier or more fulfilling time in our lives.

Indeed, Illinois provided the occasion for Fred to bring to

stable fruition his dream of assembling a strongly interacting
group of scientists, experimenters, and theorists.
Wheeler Loomis had gone to Harvard, been on the faculty
of New York University, and then was brought to Illinois in
1929 to head the Physics Department. He was a close friend of
I. I. Rabi and, indeed, had tried unsuccessfully to recruit him
to Illinois. The Depression came shortly after Loomis started
at Illinois, delaying the chance to build the department. It
was followed by the war. Loomis was DuBridges second in
command at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, which gave
Loomis the opportunity to identify from firsthand experience
many of the top young scientists, including my own Ph.D.
thesis adviser Edward Purcell. Seitz remarks that he suspects
that Loomis recruited Ridenour to Illinois, having met him
at the Radiation Laboratory.

16

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

Loomis was a person of great strength. He radiated

integrity and fairness. He thus created a sense of stability
and peacefulness among the faculty. There were none of
the tensions one sometimes hears about among university
faculty. Wheeler and Edith Loomis had a large house about
five blocks from the Physics Building. They rather frequently
had large parties at their house, to which all of the members
of the department were invited, as well as a number of faculty
members from other departments in the university. Wheeler
was a master preparer of the martini cocktail.
I found the department to be a very happy place. Even
though I initially had merely the rank of instructor, the
senior faculty welcomed me with great warmth. Before the
arrival of Seitz, the department was almost entirely concerned
with nuclear physics. There was a small cyclotron, a small
betatron, and a much bigger one under construction under
the guidance of Donald Kerst, inventor of the betatron.
There were also people studying artificial radioactivity, the
most prominent being Maurice and Gertrude Goldhaber.
The warmth of the welcome accorded the new solid-state
faculty is all the more remarkable when one realizes that
the department was quite crowded. The new additions were
shoehorned in a building that was already rather full. For
example, when John Bardeen came in 1951, he had to share
his office with his postdoc. An extra floor was inserted in a
portion of the space between the third and fourth floors to
provide offices for the theory grad students, such as Johns
student Bob Schrieffer. The students named it the Center
for Retarded Study.
This spirit of welcome and congeniality that we all knew
was created by Wheeler and Edith Loomis. The spirit lives
on at Illinois today, and is a deeply revered tradition. No
one could have been more at home with it or stronger at

FREDERICK SEITZ

17

preserving it than Fred and Betty Seitz, since they had been
practicing this style long before they came to Illinois.
Maurers first Illinois student was Charlie Bean, who later
made important discoveries about superconductors at GE.
Koehlers first Illinois student was Ralph Simmons, a Rhodes
scholar, whose Ph.D. thesis set a new standard for measurements of defects in metals and who later served as department
head for years. Mapother set up a Collins helium liquefier
and began developing low-temperature methods. Bob Hill,
a nuclear physicist, took advantage of the new facility to
investigate orienting radioactive nuclei at low temperatures.
John Wheatley came in the mid-1950s to be a postdoc to
assist Hill. Of course, Wheatley stayed on, establishing his
own low-temperature group. His student Ansel Anderson
later became head of the Illinois Physics Department. David
Lazarus, who had been a student of Andrew Lawson, established a program investigating diffusion in solids.
In 1951 Fred learned that John Bardeen was unhappy
with his situation at Bell Labs. With the assistance of Wheeler
Loomis and William Everitt, dean of engineering, Illinois
was able to lure Bardeen with a joint appointment in the
Physics Department and the Department of Electrical Engineering. Bardeen soon brought other postdocs, including
David Pines, Elihu Abrahams, and Leon Cooper. And, of
course, Bob Schrieffer came to do a Ph.D. thesis with John.
In 1957 Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer (BCS) discovered
their famous theory explaining superconductivity.
Hans Frauenfelder joined the Physics Department in
1952 as a research associate working with professors Jim
Allen and Chalmers Sherwin, famous for their work on the
neutrino. For his Ph.D. thesis in Zrich, Hans had employed
nuclear physics techniques to study surfaces, and he soon
set in motion a program in surface physics at Urbana. Andy

18

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

Granato was recruited from Brown University and set up

studies using ultrasound.
In the early 1960s Leo Kadanoff and Gordon Baym
came as assistant professors. Gordon is still at Illinois. Tony
Leggett came as a postdoc. He went back to England for a
few years, but we lured him back in 1983. He has told me
that one of the attractions of Illinois was the experience he
had while a postdoc there in the early 1960s. We had many
other outstanding young scientists from abroad, attracted by
the presence of Fred Seitz, including Fausto Fumi, Franco
Bassani, and Gianfranco Chiarotti, all of whom later had
distinguished careers in Italy, and Werner Knzig and Heine
Grnicher from Switzerland, who likewise had distinguished
careers.
The activity that Fred initiated and cultivated as soon as
he finished his Ph.D. at Princeton reached a stable maturity at
Illinois, bringing to full fruition Freds dream of a community
of theorists and experimenters who interacted strongly with
one another, with scientists in the related fields of chemistry,
metallurgy, ceramic engineering, and electrical engineering,
and with scientists from all around the world.
Freds efforts to keep a coherent life as a scientist at Illinois
were under continual assault from people who recognized his
wisdom, his wide knowledge of both science and technology,
and his administrative skills. They realized that he received
much stimulation and pleasure from tackling and solving
new problems. In 1954 Fred was asked to serve as the chair
of the Governing Board of the American Institute of Physics;
he served for five years. Soon after, he was elected to the
Council of the National Academy of Sciences, its governing
board, for a three-year term. In 1959 he was asked to head
an advisory committee to give scientific and technical advice
to the United Aircraft Corporation. He was also enlisted as
a scientific adviser to the Ampex Corporation.

FREDERICK SEITZ

19

In his autobiography Seitz reports that in 1954 John von

Neumann, one of the commissioners of the Atomic Energy
Commission, concluded that advances in solid-state physics
research were as important for both science and technology
as any field of science and that much more concentrated
attention should be devoted to the field. My own suspicion
is that this idea came from Fred, although he does not say so
in his autobiography. Fred says that von Neumann had asked
him to prepare a proposal to the AEC for establishing such
an interdisciplinary laboratory at the University of Illinois.
He also urged other agencies of government to follow this
lead. Von Neumanns death from cancer in 1957 derailed
the initial proposal to the AEC, but the plan took root in
the Department of Defense.
A number of universities applied for a laboratory. The
bidding was opened and the individual in charge of selecting
which institutions would be provided the new labs was Charles
Yost, an old friend and supporter of the Illinois group. At first
he felt that Illinois did not need such a lab because it was
already so strong, but eventually he recognized that without
a lab, Illinois might be raided by institutions that had labs
and relented. Unfortunately, congressional politics stood in
the way. Senator Dirksen of Illinois had angered a senator
from Missouri by maneuvering to get a federal prison that
was headed for Missouri to be placed instead in Illinois. In
retaliation the Missouri senator succeeded in getting the lab
for Illinois removed from the bill.
I remember vividly the disappointment all of us in Urbana
felt when we learned that we would not be included. Don
Stevens at the AEC finally found a solution involving the
AEC, the Department of Defense, and the Illinois administration using funds from a state construction agency that were
reimbursed over a 10-year period by the federal agencies.

20

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

Bob Maurer became the first director of the Illinois Materials

Research Laboratory.
In 1955, realizing that the field of solid-state physics had
grown vigorously since publication of his book in 1940, Fred
decided to launch a series of books by active researchers
to, so to speak, update his volume. With David Turnbull, a
distinguished metallurgist, he launched a series with Academic
Press: Solid State Physics: Advances in Research and Applications.
Their original idea was a series of about six books, each
about 400 pages in length, to be published over the next
five years. The books turned out to be so successful that the
series was extended to more volumes. This series, currently
edited by Frans Spaepen, now has 61 volumes, the latest
being published in 2009.
The materials research laboratories have played a very
important role in the development of solid-state physics
and materials research in the United States. I believe they
should fairly be considered the final brick Fred Seitz put in
place to complete the structure he set out to achieve when,
with his fresh Ph.D., he began writing his book, The Modern
Theory of Solids.
In 1959 when Wheeler Loomis retired as head of the
Physics Department, Seitz was asked to become head and he
accepted. Just as he was attempting to build a settled life as
the department head, he was approached to spend a year in
Europe as science adviser to NATO Secretary General Paul
Henri Spaak. The position had first been filled by Norman
Ramsey, who had agreed to hold it for a year. Fred likewise
undertook the post for a year.
Then, at Illinois, Seitz was pulled still farther from
an active life of science when he was asked in 1963 to
become dean of the Graduate College and vice president
for research. Gerald Almy succeeded Seitz as head of the
Physics Department.

FREDERICK SEITZ

21

THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

In 1962 Fred Seitz was invited to stand for election for

president of the National Academy of Sciences. The position had traditionally been a part-time position, but Freds
experience on the Council had alerted him to the fact that
the duties of the presidency had grown, and he was not
sure whether he could accommodate them with his duties
at Illinois.
Three years later the Academy decided that the presidency of the Academy should become a full-time position.
Seitz was asked to assume the position. He had some reservations. He and Betty had made long-term plans for life in
Champaign-Urbana. Moreover, the Vietnam War was on and
created a great deal of political controversy and animosity
toward the Johnson Administration in many parts of the
academic community. Recognizing that the Academy had a
major role in advising the government, Fred realized that it
might be difficult to reconcile this role with the sentiments
of many Academy members. Indeed, that turned out to be
the case. Fred accepted the nomination and was elected the
first full-time president of the National Academy of Sciences
for a six-year term beginning in July 1965.
Freds term as president of the Academy set the organization firmly on a new course. Of the many actions he carried
out as president I think of seven that were especially revealing
of Freds insight and touch:
1. Reorganization of the Academy membership structure
2. Formation of the National Academy of Engineering
3. Formation of the Institute of Medicine
4. Construction of the main auditorium and east wing of the Academys
building
5. Initiation of annual fundraising activities
6. Launching reports on the status of various fields of science
7. Formation of the Universities Research Association

22

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

In 1963 Seitz and Douglas Cornell of the Academy staff

examined the trends in membership. They found that the
composition of the 14 sections had changed markedly. For
many years about 15 percent of the membership had a
professional engineering education and a similar percentage
had a medical education. The former were linked with
the sections involving the physical sciences, the latter with
those involved with life sciences, until separate sections in
engineering and medicine were created. The rapid postwar
growth of the basic sciences after 1945 led to a decrease in
the fraction of the Academy elected in the engineering and
medical areas. In response to this information the Council
set up a committee to study the issue. It recommended
establishing Classes of membership across the sectional
groups and assigning new membership election quotas to
each Class.
The role of engineering remained a subject of contention.
Members of the U. S. Congress, such as George Miller of
California, were sympathetic to the engineers concerns.
Realizing that the Congress might, if it became directly
involved, solve the problem in a manner that could damage
the Academy, Seitz enlisted Julius Stratton, president of
MIT, and Eric Walker, president of Penn State, to assist the
Council. It was agreed that a sister institution should be
created under the Academys charter. The National Academy
of Engineering (NAE) was formed in 1964. The Institute of
Medicine was created in 1970, under the NAS charter, to give
a mechanism for balanced, authoritative medical advice.
Early in his term of office Fred decided that it would be
helpful to various fields of science if from time to time they
were to examine themselves in order to see where the most
exciting future opportunities might lie. The first of these
studies was led by George Pake, whom Fred had known when
George had been an undergraduate at Carnegie Tech. Physics:

FREDERICK SEITZ

23

Survey and Outlook; Reports on the Subfields of Physics10 was the

result. Since then the Academy has made such studies for a
number of fields of science from time to time.
Soon after taking office, President Kennedy appointed
Glenn Seaborg as head of the Atomic Energy Commission.
To acquire additional high-energy facilities Seaborg got
authorization and funding for an accelerator to be built at
the Lawrence Laboratory at Berkeley. High-energy physicists
from other parts of the country were unhappy because prior
experience convinced them that a facility located at Berkeley
would not be welcoming to non-Berkeley scientists. A number
of physicists came to Seitz about their concerns. In the autumn
of 1964 Seitz met informally with the governing board of the
Brookhaven National Laboratory, which had been organized
after the war to promote nuclear energy and provide facilities
for high-energy physics by nine eastern universities. It was
managed cooperatively through an organization called the
Associated Universities Incorporated. Seitz proposed that they
extend their membership nationally to manage a new facility.
They decided not to undertake such an extension. Seitz then
convened a group of about 25 universities and solicited their
views. They recommended forming a consortium to manage
the next accelerator. They also proposed that a reevaluation
of the design was in order. Seitz went to Seaborg to persuade
him to agree, which fortunately he did.
The new organization was named the Universities Research
Association. The Academy served as its initial base and helped
in the organizing process and development of a board of
directors based on regional representation. Norman Ramsey
was chosen as its first president and R. R. Wilson of Cornell
was selected as its first director. Responsibility for site selection
was delegated to the Academy, which set up a committee
chaired by Manny Piore. The committee worked out a set of
criteria and then all interested states were invited to submit

24

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

proposals. President Johnson requested that the committee

present him with a short list of the six most promising sites.
He selected Illinois. The laboratory, built under the direction
of Robert R. Wilson with Ned Goldwasser as deputy director,
was named the National Accelerator Laboratory. (It was
renamed Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in 1974.)
Detlev Bronk, Freds predecessor as Academy president,
had successfully raised money to complete the two wings of
the original design of the Academy building. Soon after Fred
became a full time president in 1965, he decided to try to
raise funds to construct the auditorium that would complete
the design. The campaign was successful, and an architect
was selected just before Fred left the Academy.
In 1967 Detlev Bronk decided he wanted to retire as
president of Rockefeller University. Fred had been chair of
the Board of Trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation and a
member of the board of The Rockefeller University. It was
therefore very natural that the trustees asked Fred to be the
new president of The Rockefeller University. Fred spent the
academy year 1968-1969 commuting between the NAS and
The Rockefeller University and assumed full-time service at
Rockefeller in 1969.
THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY

The Rockefeller University began as a research institute.

Founded in 1901 by John D. Rockefeller, it had thrived under
the continuing attention of the Rockefeller family. In 1910 a
research clinic was added to the institute. When Seitz became
president, David Rockefeller was chair of the governing
board. Bronk had made a number of significant changes
during his tenure, including adding small departments of
physics, mathematics, and philosophy, selecting the faculty
with great care. He founded a small graduate school with
about 100 carefully selected students. He had also added a

FREDERICK SEITZ

25

number of amenities, including a new faculty center and a

student dorm. He added a laboratory building. All of these
things together with the growth of the research activities
and changes in federal funding produced a growing deficit
for the institute.
Fred had his own style of administrative organization
that was more formal than that of Bronk. Consequently he
brought in several new people to help him in his presidential
responsibilities. From the University of Rochester he brought
Al Gold, one of his former postdocs at Illinois, as vice
president for academic resources. Gold brought David J.
Lyons, also from Rochester, as vice president for business
and finance as well as treasurer. A key appointment was Rod
Nichols, another physicist, with whom Fred had worked when
he was chair of the Defense Science Board and Nichols was
on the staff of the deputy director of defense research and
engineering in the Office the Secretary of Defense. He joined
Fred in 1970 as vice president, later becoming executive vice
president.
In 1970 the decision was made to limit the number of
graduate students to about 100. In conjunction with Alick
Bearn, physician-in-chief of the New York Hospital of the
Cornell University Medical College, Rockefeller began a
program to give some of the students the chance to obtain
an M.D. degree from Cornell while also obtaining a Ph.D.
from their research program at Rockefeller. Although Seitz
fully appreciated the magnificent advances in cellular and
molecular biology that took place in the 1950s and 1960s,
he also realized that the practice of medicine is a human
art, based on wisdom, skill, and experienceTherefore it
is vitally important to maintain links between the research
scientist and the practitioner, and the University Hospital at
Rockefeller had performed that function with distinction.
Fred likened the relationship between clinical work and basic

26

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

biological research to the relationship between engineering

and applied science to basic science in his own field of
solid-state physics, where he was a strong proponent and
practitioner of a robust linkage.
Fred felt that as president, Detlev Bronk had been
ambivalent toward the hospital, feeling that a great revolution
in medical care was in the offing. However, Bronk had
appointed Maclyn McCarty as physician-in-chief of the
hospital. Together with Oswald T. Avery and Colin McLeod,
McCarty had demonstrated that DNA carries the genetic
message. Thus he had given the hospital strong leadership
in the clinical area. Seitz and McCarty developed a close
working relationship on this and many other matters. When
McCarty retired, Fred appointed Attalah Kappas to maintain
the strong role of the hospital and clinical research.
All of these activities placed strong pressure on an
already severely strained budget. Although the staff had been
augmenting the internal funding by applying for government
grants, the financial pressure was great. Therefore, Fred
proposed that a formal program was needed to seek private
funds. A special characteristic of these efforts was to have the
prospective donor meet with one or more members of the
scientific staff. This practice led to many close links between
the scientists and the donors, yielding benefits beyond the
simple monetary assistance. Fred created an advisory council
of some of these benefactors that met on campus several
times a year.
In his autobiography Fred writes, No private endowment
is so great these days that one can ignore federal funds. To
ignore their availability would be to abuse the special flexibility
provided by limited private funds, which usually have fewer
strings attached to them at present. In this statement I
suspect one hears echoes of some strained conversations he

FREDERICK SEITZ

27

had with staff resulting from the transition from the early
period where the endowment supported a larger fraction of
the research. A byproduct of the fundraising effort was the
appointment of Pat Haggerty, chief executive officer of Texas
Instruments, as chairman of the Rockefeller board and Fred
Seitz to the board of TI. Fred clearly enjoyed the activity at
TI, especially the continuing contact with the heads of the
Research Laboratory, Ross MacDonald and then Norman
Einspruch.
In his autobiography Fred writes,
With all due respect to many other attractions, it is my opinion that the
single most impressive feature of Rockefeller University has always been
the exceptional quality and character of its senior staff, and of the young
scientists who work with them.

He quotes F. Peyton Rous: It is not a place where one

feels compelled to do anything trivial. Fred points out that
for senior staff, routine work is minimal. There are no
formal classes and few committees. In fact, the most onerous
task they currently face is probably the need to prepare
competitive proposals for federal agenciesa fact of life in
a democratic society.
This strong statement expressing Freds assessment of
Rockefeller University shows very simply, in my opinion, why
he abandoned his earlier intention to return to Illinois at
the end of his term as president of the National Academy
of Sciences to undertake the presidency of Rockefeller
University.
When Seitz assumed the presidency in 1968 at age 57,
Rockefeller University had a policy specifying that the
president should retire at age 65. His actual retirement
occurred in 1978, when he was a mere 67 years old. His next
30 years were full of vigor and creative activity.

28

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS
RETIREMENT

After retiring from the presidency of Rockefeller University

in 1978, Fred and Betty were fortunate to be invited to stay
on in an apartment owned by Rockefeller University. Kappas
provided him with a suite of offices in the University Hospital.
These arrangements enabled Fred to keep up a very active
life. He joined the boards of the Ogden Corporation and the
Lounsbery Foundation. He also joined the board of the China
Foundation, based in Taiwan. When Pat Haggerty formed
an advisory group to the Taiwanese government, named the
Science and Technology Advisory Board, Seitz became its
vice chairman. He also joined a research advisory committee
to help the R. J. Reynolds Company make medical grants
to universities. That committee included Maclyn McCarty
and James Shannon. One of their most successful contributions was funding the research of Stanley Prusiner, who was
striving to understand the origin of scrapie, a neurological
disease in sheep. The support at a time when Prusiner was
about to lose his job and with it his research opportunity
was described in exciting terms by Prusiner at the memorial
symposium honoring Seitz at Rockefeller University in 2009.
The work led to the discovery of prions for which Prusiner
was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1997. He invited Fred and
Maclyn McCarty to the Nobel award ceremony.
Freds other activities included participating in a number
of scientific panels. With Dean Eastman of IBM he headed
an NAS panel to study the needs to update experimental
facilities for materials research in the United States. With
Bob Richardson of Cornell he headed a study concerning
needs for facilities providing high magnetic fields.
When President Reagan announced his plan to support
the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Presidents science
adviser, George Keyworth, asked Seitz to chair an advisory
committee to undertake critical reviews of the program and

FREDERICK SEITZ

29

its development. Although many in the scientific community

were strongly opposed to this program, Seitz wrote that
early on, some proponents of the program spoke of developing an impenetrable shield which clearly would be very difficult to maintain if hundreds
of attacking missiles had to be dealt with in a short period of time. The
more sober and realistic view taken by our advisory group was that we could
hope to achieve a sufficiently high level of defense as to severely limit the
effectiveness of a first strike by the Soviets while making U.S. retaliation a
virtual certainty.

Fred seriously questioned the scientific basis for global

warming estimates. In a 1991 article with W. Nierenberg
and R. Jastrow11 he outlined his concerns at that time.
His continuing, outspoken skepticism and some actions to
enlist support for his position on this highly charged issue
beclouded his image in the eyes of some colleagues.
The happy years of retirement were interrupted sadly
with the discovery that Betty was suffering from cancer. From
the start, after their lightning fast courtship, Fred and Betty
were a team even, as mentioned above, involving the writing
of Freds famous book. They maintained close contact with
Bettys family. When they were at Illinois, Bettys brother Larry
Marshall was based in Indianapolis, Indiana, a two-hour drive
from Champaign. When Fred and Betty arrived at Illinois,
we all soon got to know Larry and his wife, Lucie.
I remember vividly dinners and larger parties at the
Seitzes house in Urbana when we had some visiting scientist
of interest to Fred. Betty was somewhat shy, but she was a
warm and gracious hostess. In Urbana she took up the piano
again and enjoyed an association with other musicians. From
the start Fred and Betty shared a love for music. She lent
important support to all their joint activities. She was warmly
remembered at the memorial symposium held at Rockefeller
University in 2009. Several of the speakers showed delightful
photos of Fred and Betty together, including some showing

30

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

them riding on the special rail system that Fred had installed
at Lake George to help transport groceries and other things
from the parking lot high above the lake to the cottage by
the lakeshore. Betty died in 1992 after a long illness.
After Bettys death, Fred embarked on a series of books
and articles about the history of science. Rod Nichols in his
remarks at the memorial symposium said, At heart, Fred was
a physicist. He had an insatiable curiosity, a deep interest
in all branches of science, and a love of history. The books
he wrote in retirement were a method for him to celebrate
science and the people who did science, especially physics
and its applications. These writings brought him back to
physics. He sought to bring to life the human role in the
creation of science. These accounts express his belief in the
importance of basic research motivated by the curiosity of the
investigator as the source of the great discoveries. They also
express his strong belief in the importance of the coupling
of science to technology and his respect for importance of
work on applications of science.
In 1973 while at Rockefeller he and Rod Nichols published
their book Research and Development and the Prospects for International Security,12 laying out their belief that strong support
for research in basic science and in development were the
vital underpinnings to international security. In 1992 Fred
published The Science Matrix, the Journey, Travails, Triumphs.13
In 1994 he published his autobiography On the Frontier, My
Life in Science.1 In 1996 he published Stalins Captive, Nicholaus
Riehl and the Soviet Race for the Bomb.14 This remarkable book
is in part Seitzs translation into English from the German of
Riehls book Ten Years in a Golden Cage. Written by Riehl in
1955 but not published until 1988, it tells of Riehls work on
the production of pure uranium for the Soviet atom bomb.
The first 60 pages by Seitz, titled The Backdrop, set the
stage for Riehls book. Freds book is a scholarly work of

FREDERICK SEITZ

31

the first magnitude, as becomes immediately evident from

Freds description in the preface of the research process that
enabled him to write the Backdrop and do the translation.
As I have remarked above, Fred was elected to the
American Philosophical Society in the spring of 1946 at the
remarkably young age of 34. (He in fact holds the record
for longest membership in the history of the society, 62
years, beating out the runner-up James Madison, the fourth
President of the United States, who was a member for 51
years). Fred regularly attended the meetings and contributed
many articles to the Proceedings as described below. I looked
forward every year to seeing him there.
Together with Norman Einspruch, Fred wrote Electronic
Genie, the Tangled History of Silicon,15 published in 1998. Fred
wrote a first version of this material for the journal Physics
Today.16 He published a second version in the Proceedings of
the American Philosophical Society in 1998.18
In the opening paragraph of Electronic Genie he wrote,
The so-called information or computer superhighway is paved with chips
of silicon. This is a triumph of advances in understanding the solid-state
or materials science. It is also a product of the knowledge gained in the
convergence of major areas of chemistry, metallurgy, and physics, particularly those related to the behavior of solids in the presence of electric and
magnetic fields, when applied to the design of electric circuits.

Both Fred and Norman, as major contributors to that

knowledge, were singularly well qualified to tell the story.
Fred also wrote other articles that appeared in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. In 1999 he wrote
The cosmic inventor, Reginald Aubrey Fessenden (1866-1932)17
honoring Saul Dushman, his friend and adviser from his
days at Schenectady. Fessenden was a prolific inventor who
made important contributions to radio (inventor of amplitude modulation), among many things. As in all such writings
Fred provided a three-dimensional portrait of the man, his

32

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

upbringing, and his family, as well as explained the scientific

discoveries and their significance.
In James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) member APS 187519
published in 2001 Fred gave an interesting picture of what
Maxwell was like as a person in addition to an historical
account of his discoveries. It includes an interesting account
of the relationship of Maxwells equations describing electric
and magnetic fields to Einsteins special theory of relativity,
including the discoveries of Lorentz and Poincar.
In 2002 Fred published China and natural science: Conundrum. In remembrance of Ta You Wu (1907-2000)20 about the
life and accomplishments of Professor Wu, with a discussion
of why it was that China had not developed modern science
long before it developed in the West. Preparation of the
article drew on an article on this topic written by Professor
Wu. Included is a touching note written by C. N. Yang to
his teacher, Professor Wu, on the occasion of the award of
the Nobel Prize to Professor Yang.
In Henry Cavendish: The catalyst for the chemical evolution21
in 2004 Fred brought out the importance of the chemical
studies of Cavendish to the later work of Lavoisier.
Reading Freds autobiography, one sees readily how
much Fred enjoyed people. He writes warmly of his boyhood
friends in San Francisco. He met an astonishing array of
people from all over the world and clearly enjoyed this aspect
of his life. He had the ability to view the human foibles he
encountered with an air of amused detachment. Indeed, Fred
had a superb sense of humor, but he expressed it usually
in a quiet, subtle manner that required the listener to be
alert to spot the fun. In reading Freds autobiography, those
who knew Fred can find many places where one senses that
the words were written with a twinkle in Freds eye. He had
great self-control, even under circumstances that must have
been highly aggravating. Well, well just have to pull up

FREDERICK SEITZ

33

our socks was an expression with which he was known to

respond when frustrated in an endeavor or when reaching
a dead end in some effort.
Fred was chair of the board of the American Institute
of Physics from 1954 to 1959, president of the American
Physical Society in 1961, a member of the Presidents Scientific Advisory Committee from 1962 to 1967, and chair of
the Defense Science Board from 1964 to 1968.
He received many honors in addition to election as a
member of the National Academy of Sciences (in 1951) and
the American Philosophical Society and countless honorary
degrees. Several prizes or medals of particular significance
that Fred received are the Franklin Medal of the Franklin
Institute (1965), the National Medal of Science (1973), the
Compton Medal of the American Institute of Physics (1970),
and the Vannevar Bush Prize of the National Science Foundation (1983). The University of Illinois named its Materials
Research Laboratory after Fred in 1993.
SOME PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS

Fred Seitz has influenced the lives of many people. In

this final section I give a few examples from my personal
experience. Fred undertook the writing of his famous book
The Modern Theory of Solids to influence the field of solid-state
physics. It strongly influenced me when I was finishing my
own graduate work at Harvard in 1949.
I did a Ph.D. thesis with Edward Purcell in the field of
magnetic resonance that Purcell, Robert Pound, and Henry
Torrey had just discovered22 (January 1946). For my thesis I
studied the electron spin resonance of paramagnetic salts.
In the fall of 1948 I met Wheeler Loomis when he came
to Harvard on a recruiting trip, no doubt in part to see if
Purcell had some student in this new field. Loomis invited
me to visit Illinois. I had decided that magnetic resonance

34

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

would be a powerful tool to study the properties of solids,

but though I knew of Freds book, I had never taken a course
in the field. When I got to Urbana, Loomis showed me the
department and then offered me a position as instructor
when I completed my Ph.D. I had heard a rumor that Seitz
was about to move to Illinois and asked Loomis if that were
true. He replied that Seitz had been offered a position but
had not yet given his reply. I asked Loomis if I could wait
to give my reply until Seitz gave his answer. What colossal
nerve on my part! Loomis said yes, I could wait. Several
weeks later Loomis called to say that Seitz had accepted,
and I immediately accepted. Since I was offered a position
because I was Purcells student, I was not recruited by Seitz
and not officially a member of the solid-state group that he
had recruited. But Seitz rapidly made me feel welcome.
It was not long before I began to experience the benefits
of Freds presence. My first student, Dick Norberg, took
Freds course on solid-state physics in the fall of 1949. After
hearing Fred lecture about the interesting effects hydrogen
had when introduced into the lattice of metallic palladium,
Dick proposed that for a thesis he study the hydrogen nuclear
magnetic resonance (NMR) of that system. So Fred was
responsible for the thesis topic of my first Ph.D. student. Dick
later went to the Physics Department at Washington University where he did magnetic resonance work of exceptional
importance, receiving the triennial prize of the International
Society of Magnetic Resonance. For many years he was their
department head.
Fred was a strong believer in the value of getting postdocs
who came from other laboratories or universities. In 1951 Al
Overhauser got his Ph.D. at Berkeley, where Charles Kittel
was his thesis adviser. For his thesis Al calculated the spinlattice relaxation time of conduction electrons. Al has told
me how Kittel said to him, Now we need to get you a job.

FREDERICK SEITZ

35

He sent Al out of his office for a few minutes, then called

him back in, saying, Would you be willing to go to the
Midwest? I have just talked to Fred Seitz and he has offered
you a postdoctoral position working on radiation damage at
Urbana. That was what it was like to deal with Fred Seitz.
So Al came to Urbana in the fall of 1951. My students
and I soon got to know him. One day, probably in late 1951
or early 1952, Al heard Dick Norberg give a talk about his
thesis. Al has told me that this stimulated him to look again
at his own thesis, and within two days he had come up with
his idea for dynamic polarization of nucleithe famous
Overhauser effect. Within a year my student Tom Carver
and I had demonstrated the effect in lithium and sodium
metals. The magnetic resonance community was agog at
Overhausers idea. In 1954 Tom went to Princeton as an
instructor. He had a distinguished career at Princeton, but
tragically he died at a young age in 1981.
I had another especially talented student at exactly that
time, Don Holcomb. He and Dick Norberg had been studying
the alkali metals by NMR, seeing such things as the ability of
NMR to reveal self-diffusion in the solid state and how the
NMR signal gave detailed information about the properties
of the conduction electrons. Fred played a crucial role in
getting Don his post-Ph.D. job.
In the spring of 1954 Lloyd Smith, head of the Cornell
Physics Department, and Fred were riding on the subway in
New York. Smith asked Fred if he knew of any good students
at Illinois. Fred immediately told him about Don. Smith
invited Don to visit Cornell and hired him. Don had a long
and distinguished career at Cornell, serving as chair of the
Physics Department on several occasions, as director of their
Laboratory of Solid State Physics, and as president of the
American Association of Physics Teachers. I found it amazing
that Fred knew about my students and what they were doing,

36

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

and about their quality. But this is what Fred was like. Also
typical was his immediate grasping of the opportunity to help
the student (as well as the students adviser.)
These stories illustrate how concretely and immediately I
was a beneficiary of being near Fred Seitz. I can give further
insight into how alert and skillful Fred was in helping young
scientists by the following story. In 1949 most of the research
in nuclear physics at Illinois was supported by a large grant
from the Office of Naval Research (the ONR). Wheeler
Loomis was the principal investigator. This was the source
of my research support initially. I spent almost zero time
applying for money, merely giving Loomis a couple of pages
every year describing what my students and I had done the
year before. Loomis dealt with the federal agencies. In 1959
Fred came to me one day to say that the ONR grant was
growing successively more and more financially pinched.
Since I was not really doing conventional nuclear physics,
and since he said I was by now well established in solidstate physics, he suggested that I should try to get research
support of my own.
I had never previously applied for a research grant. I
began by trying to find out where to go for money, how one
went about the process, and so forth. Then a few days later
Fred came to me and said, I have just been to Washington
and saw Don Stevens at the AEC. I told him that you were
looking for research support. He said that he would be glad
to provide it and that you should send him a letter telling
what you needed. Thus began my support from the AEC.
They supported me for many years as the agency morphed
into its present form, the Department of Energy.23
Like many of my colleagues at the University of Illinois,
my contacts with Fred remained warm over the rest of his
life. He made the effort to keep connected even as his career

FREDERICK SEITZ

37

drew him to Washington and New York. It was always a special

joy for me to hear from him or to see him.
I am most grateful to Ralph O. Simmons, Edwin L. Goldwasser, Andrew
V. Granato, and Purnell Choppin for help in gathering material for this
memoir, and to Anne F. Slichter and Celia M. Elliott for their advice and
editorial assistance in preparing the manuscript.

38

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS
NOTES

1. F. Seitz. On the Frontier, My Life in Science. New York: AIP Press,

1994.
2. E. L. Goldwasser, A. V. Granato, and R. O. Simmons. Frederick Seitz (obituary). Phys. Today 61(2008):66. [Link]
org/10.1063/1.2963019.
3. The Stanford group and the Harvard group of Purcell, Torrey,
and Pound discovered nuclear magnetic resonance independently
and simultaneously in January 1946. Bloch and Purcell shared the
Nobel Prize in Physics in 1952.
4. E. Wigner and F. Seitz. On the constitution of metallic sodium.
Phys. Rev. 43(1933):804.
5. E. Wigner and F. Seitz. On the constitution of metallic sodium.
II. Phys. Rev. 46(1934):509.
6. E. Wigner and J. Bardeen. Theory of the work functions of monovalent metals. Phys. Rev. 48(1935):84.
7. E. Wigner and J. Bardeen. Theory of the work function. II. The
surface double layer. Phys. Rev. 49(1936):653.
8. F. Seitz. The Modern Theory of Solids. New York: McGraw-Hill,
1940.
9. F. Seitz. Interpretation of the properties of alkali halide-thallium
phosphors. J. Chem. Phys. 6(1938):150.
10. National Research Council. Survey and Outlook. Reports on the
Subfields of Physics, ed. G. Pake. Washington, D.C.: National Academy
Press, 1966.
11. W. Nierenberg, R. Jastrow, and F. Seitz. Global warming: What
does the science tell us? Energy 16(1991):1331-1345.
12. F. Seitz and R. Nichols. Research and Development and the Prospects for International Security. New York: Crane, Russak, 1974.
13. F. Seitz. The Science Matrix: The Journey, Travails, Triumphs. New
York: Springer-Verlag, 1992.
14. F. Seitz. Stalins Captive: Nikolaus Riehl and the Soviet Race for the
Bomb. Washington, D.C. American Chemical Society and the Chemical
Heritage Foundations, 1996.
15. F. Seitz and N. G. Einspruch. Electronic Genie: The Tangled History
of Silicon. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998.
16. F. Seitz. Research on silicon and germanium in World War II.
Phys. Today 48(1995):22.

FREDERICK SEITZ

39

17. F. Seitz. The cosmic inventor, Reginald Aubrey Fessenden (18661932.) Trans. Am. Phil. Soc. 89(1999):Pt 6.
18. F. Seitz and N. G. Einspruch. First use of crystal rectifiers in
wireless. Proc. Am. Phil. Soc. 142, 4 (1998), pp. 639-42.
19. F. Seitz. James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879); member APS 1875.
Proc. Am. Phil. Soc. 145(2001):1.
20. F. Seitz. China and natural science: Conundrum. In remembrance
of Ta You Wu (1907-2000). Proc. Am. Phil. Soc. 146(2002):1.
21.F. Seitz. Henry Cavendish: The catalyst for the chemical revolution. Proc. Am. Phil. Soc. 148(2004):151.
22.E. M. Purcell, H. C. Torrey, and R. V. Pound. Resonance absorption
by nuclear magnetic moments in a solid. Phys. Rev. 69(1946):37.
23 The support I received from the AEC and its program monitors
was a model of how an agency should carry out this activity. Over
all that time I never had to give some special justification for what I
wanted to do. When I saw a new direction I wanted to pursue, I just
did it because I knew this was what this magnificent agency wanted
me to do. Sad to say, I find that today many agencies no longer
follow this model.

40

B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

SELECTED B I B LIO G RAPHY

1933
With E. Wigner. Constitution of metallic sodium. Phys. Rev. 43:804810.
1934
With E. Wigner. Constitution of metallic sodium II. Phys. Rev. 46:509524.
Matrix-algebraic development of crystallographic groups. Zeitschrift
fr Kristallographie, Kristallgeometrie, Krystallphysik, Kristallchemie
88:433-450.
1938
Alkali halide-thallium phosphors. J. Chem. Phys. 6:150-162.
1939
With W. Leverenz. Luminescent materials. J. Appl. Phys. 10:479493.
1940
The Modern Theory of Solids. New York: McGraw-Hill.
With J. B. Sampson, Theoretical magnetic susceptibilities of metallic
lithium and sodium. Phys. Rev. 58:633-639.
1941
With T. A. Read. Theory of plastic properties of solids. J. Appl. Phys.
12:100-118.
1942
With H. B. Huntington. Mechanism for self-diffusion in metallic
copper. Phys. Rev. 61:315-333.
1943
Physics of Metals. New York: McGraw-Hill.

FREDERICK SEITZ

41

1946
Color centers in alkali halide crystals. Rev. Mod. Phys. 18:384-408.
1948
On the theory of vacancy diffusion in alloys. Phys. Rev. 74:15131523.
1949
On the disordering of solids by action of fast massive particles. Discuss.
Faraday Soc. 5:271-291.
1950
On the nature of the V-centers in the alkali halides. Phys. Rev.
79:529.
1951
Speculations on the properties of the silver halide crystals. Rev. Mod.
Phys. 23:328-352.
1952
On the generation of vacancies by moving dislocations. Adv. Phys.
1:43-90.
1954
Color centers in the alkali halides II. Rev. Mod. Phys. 26:7-94.
1958
On the theory of the bubble chamber. Phys. Fluids 1:2-13.
1962
Effects of irradiation on metals. Rev. Mod. Phys. 34:656-666.
1980
Biographical notes [on the early days of solid state physics]. Proc. R.
Soc. Lond. Ser. A 371:84-99.

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B IO G RAPHICAL MEMOIRS

1991
With W. Nierenberg and R. Jastrow. Global warming: What does
science tell us? Energy 16:1331-1345.
1994
On the Frontier, My Life in Science. Woodbury, N.Y.: American Institute
of Physics Press.
1998
With N. G. Einspruch. Electronic Genie, the Tangled History of Silicon.
Chicago: University of Illinois Press.