From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Tue Aug 12 2003 - 05:19:04 MDT
Physics Today recently published a very moving obituary for
Robert Forward.
http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-56/iss-8/p66.html
Obituaries
Robert Lull Forward
Physicist and science-fiction author Robert Lull Forward died on 21
September 2002 in Seattle, Washington, from brain cancer. A leader
in gravitational radiation astronomy and advanced space propulsion,
he contributed particularly to gravitational and inertial sensors
and low-loss electronics.
Forward was born on 15 August 1932 in Geneva, New York. He obtained
his BS in physics from the University of Maryland in 1954, an MS in
applied physics from UCLA in 1958, and his PhD from the University
of Maryland in 1965. For his thesis, he built and operated the first
bar antenna for gravitational wave detection; he did this work under
the direction of Joseph Weber and David Zipoy. His antenna was on
display in a Smithsonian Institution museum and is now in storage
there.
Beginning in 1956 and for the next 31 years, Forward worked at the
Hughes Aircraft Research Laboratories in Malibu, California, rising
to senior scientist on the director's staff. In his early years at
Hughes, he invented and developed gravitational radiation detectors
and explored many new ideas in space applications. One such
invention was the rotating cruciform gravity gradiometer mass
detector, which measures Earth's subsurface mass variations or
gravitational multipole moments. In 1960, he was the first to point
out that a laser interferometer gravity-wave detector could be built
to be photon noise limited, and that scaling it up would make
extreme events in the universe detectable.
Retirement for Forward was a simply a new category of innovation and
activity. He took early retirement in 1987 and founded Forward
Unlimited. The appropriately named company emphasized space
propulsion methods, including using laser- and microwave-driven
sails and antimatter propulsion for high velocities.
Through his concepts for matter and antimatter rockets and laser-
and microwave-driven sails, he explored the only technically
credible ways of sending probes to the stars; such craft can reach
speeds necessary for those vast gulfs. His book Mirror Matter:
Pioneering Antimatter Physics (Wiley, 1988), written with Joel
Davis, presents his ideas on matter and antimatter rockets.
In 1992, Forward formed Tethers Unlimited Inc with Robert Hoyt. The
company specializes in innovations for space travel using elegant
mechanical methods. He retired again just before his death.
Forward's written work consists of 157 technical publications and 71
popular science articles. His 14 book-length works include science
fact and science fiction. His best known novels are Dragon's Egg
(Ballantine, 2000), which is about life on a neutron star and is
still used in astrophysics courses, and Rocheworld (Baen Books,
1990), which is based on his concept for propulsion using
laser-driven sails. He was among the most rigorous of the "hard"
science fiction writers. His best nonfiction summary work is
Indistinguishable From Magic (Baen Books, 1995), based on Arthur C.
Clarke's Third Law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Elegance of concept marked his many inventions; in all, Forward
obtained 20 patents. Orbital tethers will be both graceful and
useful. In a long series of papers, many with Hoyt, he calculated
how light cables could be used to transfer energy and momentum
between spacecraft; that effort opened new methods of orbit
changing. Cables carrying electrical currents can raise or lower
orbits by using the J ? B force, available from Earth's magnetic
field. Forward believed that antimatter could provide the most
fundamental method of containing energy. In the 1980s, he published
18 issues of his privately circulated journal, Mirror Matter
Newsletter, to stimulate the field. He saw how magnetic traps could
make antimatter useful in medicine, principally in tumor treatment.
Forward lived up to his name: His thinking was well ahead of his
time, and he was known for a positive, supportive, and playful
manner. We knew him primarily as a pioneer of beam-driven sails, but
he had a thousand other interests. Some of his papers have amusing
titles, such as "Laser Weapon Target Practice With Gee-Whiz
Targets." He fancied wearing colorful vests to go with his exciting
ideas, concepts nonetheless developed with full conservative
scientific rigor. Knowing of his fatal illness, he devoted his last
months to writing out his newest, partially explored scientific
ideas.
Of Forward's many innovations, some were realized in his life, but
most will likely emerge in 21st-century space propulsion and
gravitational wave detection. Now that the first solar sails are
about to be launched and plans are being made to beam microwaves at
them to demonstrate photon propulsion, Forward's ideas are starting
to become real. He was fond of saying that he wrote science fiction
to advance ideas that he couldn't get into the scientific journals.
He usually coupled his science-fiction writing to his science papers
and thus gave concepts a wider publicity and advanced public
understanding of what the consequences of these ideas could mean.
Gregory Benford
University of California Irvine
James Benford
Microwave Sciences
Lafayette, California
© 2003 American Institute of Physics
Other links for Forward:
http://www.ForwardUnlimited.com.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=9328
-- ******************************************************************** Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/ ******************************************************************** "Every exit is an entry somewhere else." --Tom Stoppard
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