Obituary for Robert Forward in Physics Today

From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Tue Aug 12 2003 - 05:19:04 MDT

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    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

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