It’s early Fall, 1965. My wife Joan and I had just arrived in San Jose, I having been assigned by the IBM Research Division to the staff of its tiny lab just off Cottle Road, on the site of the company’s multi-acre “disk drive” manufacturing facility (at the time not the toys today in your PC, but 16 inch diameter monsters on corporate plant floors). I had recently received my PhD in Physics from a former divinity school in East Massachusetts…I think it’s called Harvard. I attended Harvard as an employee of IBM and was targeted to join the main research facility in Yorktown. But I’m a skier, and was tired of New York/New England ice and bare slopes, and fantasized descending the trails surrounding Lake Tahoe.
But this remembrance is not about me. At lunch my first week or two at the San Jose site, a new fellow staff member come over and sat with me. He had a strange accent…weird…which turned out to be Austrian (I think!). His name was Hans Morawitz. We bonded almost immediately. Hans and I shared two life skills…as skiers and soccer players. Oh. And we were also both physicists, but he was a “pencil and paper” theorist, and I a spectroscopy experimentalist and computational modeler. But it was on flat fields and downhill slopes where we bonded…and maybe a little bit on a tennis court. Our collaboration as physicists took another decade to cement.
Hans was the captain and organizer of our IBM Research soccer team, which competed against those of other divisions on the San Jose plant site, and occasionally those of other companies located in Santa Clara County. The team would “practice” over lunch on the San Jose plant recreation facility field. Hans was always center-half, and I played left-outside, my high school position, and occasionally left-full. Our team always did quite well. We had an advantage. The research lab had a postdoc program whereby an IBM company abroad would sponsor two-year visits of new PhD graduates from the UK and Europe. Naturally, several were excellent soccer players, and Hans and I would “steal” employee identities from our San Jose colleagues and re-assign to them so they could play on our team! In one practice session in the late 70’s, I had my right leg broken, and Hans helped take me off the field, called an ambulance and had my wife Joan take me to the hospital. I healed reasonably quickly, and was able to resume play about three months later, but Hans assigned me to the goal…which I hated but nonetheless tolerated for the peace of the team!
Now on to skiing. Hans and I had both been skiers essentially from birth. The winter following my arrival in 1965, I joined the ski patrol at Alpine Meadows. As such, I had the privilege to invite one or two guests to accompany me on the slopes, and, of course, Hans would be often number one. We would often descend the Ward Peak trails at Alpine together with several of our less accomplished IBM colleagues? (unnamed). And then there were the stopovers in Alta returning from those occasions whenever the annual APS March Meeting was held east of the Rockies. Especially memorable were our experiences on the Swiss slopes during conferences held near Interlaken and Lausanne. Our Swiss, Italian, German, French and Norwegian colleagues were always taken back by my skills on the slopes (as an American!). I would respond I was taught to ski by Hans…their response would sort of like…”OK, now we understand!”
Tennis. Enough said. Hans was the best tennis player on the San Jose plant site. He did teach me how to play “doubles defense.” Very useful later helping my daughter Sandra and I winning a Watson Trophy in an IBM San Jose mixed doubles tournament sometime in the 1980s.
Personal. The decade of the 1980s was a period of “difficulty” for me in social relationships and family life. Hans comforted me and advised me throughout and helped me eventually emerge healed. Many such “consultations” took place in local bars throughout the USA and Europe. A story to be told at a later time in my memoirs.
OK. Back to Science. In the late 70s and early 80s, Hans, even though a “pencil and paper” theoretician, took the lead in organizing our collaboration with the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) utilizing XANES (x-ray-absorption near-edge structure) to study the cation-anion charge distribution in organic conductors and superconductors which were the rage in solid state physics of the time, which had a significant impact on focusing research on these compounds worldwide. It’s now 1986, and our colleagues at IBM Zurich discovered materials superconducting above the temperature of liquid air, an outstanding event that took the world of science at the time by storm. At Almaden, we followed up with our own program. Hans would hang out in my lab annoying the team with questions…what’s causing superconductivity at such high temperatures? And that question remains unanswered even today. However, in late 1987, Hans, collaborating with Vlad Kresin of LBNL, postulated a possibility…a combination of “plasmons and phonons.” Suppose history proves them right? What a legacy to leave humanity!
What follows is a brief anthology of publications coauthored by Hans and myself and our colleagues at IBM Almaden. Simply copy and paste the URLs into your favorite browser.
Publications:
• http://w2agz.com/Publications/Science%20&%20Technology/IBM/31%20(1979)%20The%20Role%20of%20AsF_5%20in%20Modifying%20the%20Electrical%20Properties%20of%20Polyacetylene,%20(CH)_x.pdf
• http://w2agz.com/Publications/Science%20&%20Technology/IBM/37%20(1980)%20The%20Mechanism%20of%20Arsenic%20Pentaflouride%20Doping%20of%20Polyacetylene.pdf
• http://w2agz.com/Publications/Science%20&%20Technology/IBM/39%20(1980)%20X-Ray%20Absorption%20in%20Polymers.pdf
• http://w2agz.com/Publications/Science%20&%20Technology/IBM/51%20(1984)%20X-ray%20Absorption%20Near-Edge-Structure%20Studies%20in%20(HMTSF)%20and%20(HMTSF-TCNQ)%20and%20(HMTSF-TFTCNQ).pdf
Presentations:
• http://w2agz.com/Presentations/1978/21%20EXAFS%20CHx%2027%20March%20APS%20DC%20(1978).pdf
