Nobel laureate in physics, U. Professor Emeritus Fitch dies

University Professor Emeritus and Nobel laureate Val Logsdon Fitch died on Feb. 5 in Princeton after a distinguished career in the natural sciences.He was 91.

Throughout his life, Fitch worked on the Manhattan Project, won the Nobel Prize in Physics and was a member of numerous science organizations and a mentor to many younger scientists.

“He chose his experiments very well and would always try to explain or discover something which was important,” said U.physics Professor Emeritus Pierre Piroue, who noted that Fitch was recognized by scientists all around the world as a top physicist who had made an “astounding discovery.”

From Nebraska to Princeton

Fitch was born on March 10, 1923, in Merriman, Neb., on a cattle ranch where his father raised purebred Herefords and his mother was a schoolteacher. The family eventually moved to Gordon, Neb., where Fitch graduated as valedictorian of his high school in 1940.

Fitch attended Chadron State College for two and a half years before he was drafted and entered the U.S. Army in March 1943. He was sent to Los Alamos National Laboratory to work on the Manhattan Project where he assisted in the development of the atomic bomb.

Fitch received his undergraduate degree from McGill and earned his doctorate in physics from Columbia in 1954.

Fitch arrived at Princeton in 1954. He began working on experiments using Brookhaven National Laboratory’s high-energy particle collider, where he met James Cronin, a colleague who later becamea faculty member at the University’s Department of Physics from 1958 to 1971.

“Early in his career, Val Fitch made some beautiful measurements on the decay of K-mesons, which were very important in putting out some mysteries of the time when we were just beginning to learn about particle physics,” said Cronin, who is now a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago,adding that Fitch himself was a mild-mannered and thoughtful person who was a pleasure to work with.

From Princeton to the Nobel Prize

In 1976, Fitch was named the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor ofPhysics and in 1987, he became the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics. He served as chair of the physics department from 1976 to 1981.

In 2000, he was awarded an honorary degree at the University"s Commencement ceremony.

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Fitch was the president of the American Physical Society from 1988 to 1989. From 1970 to 1973 he was a member of the President"s Science Advisory Committee, and from 1980 to 1983, he was a member of the physics advisory committee to the National Science Foundation.

In 1980, Fitch and Cronin were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for an experiment they had conducted in 1964. The Nobel Prize describes his prize motivation as “the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons.”

“The effect that he discovered showed that there really was a significant difference in the behavior of matter and anti-matter,” said A.J. Stewart Smith, vice president of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and University physics professor.

“His experiment with Cronin which measured CP online casino [charge parity] violation is a major discovery. People were flabbergasted that this happened,” Piroue said.

In a 2009 interview with Nobelprize.org, Fitch described his discovery of CP violation as an idea that was “a great stumbling block for physicists to accept.”

“This symmetry violation has led us to understand in principle how a matter-dominated universe could evolve from the Big Bang,” said Cronin.

A man who touched science and souls

Fitch was regarded by many as not only a scientist but also a kind individual and mentor.

He earned many honors and awards throughout his career aside from the Nobel Prize, including the E. O. Lawrence Award from the U.S. Department of Energy in 1968, the John Price Wetherill Medal from the Franklin Institute in 1976 and the National Medal of Science in 1993.

Fitch was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He was also a Sloan Fellow, a Fairchild Scholar at the California Institute of Technology and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago.

Cronin described Fitch’s contributions to physics as being “really quite extraordinary.”

“He was a very strong mentor of mine,” said Smith. “His experimental discoveries would certainly be in the top 10 in particle physics of the 20th century.”

“He has this long list of students that have gone on to great careers and his scientific legacy is pretty clear,” said Alan Fitch, Val Fitch’s son. “Reading all the emails I’ve been getting, it’s clear that my father touched all of these people in a very personal way also and was a role model not just as a scientist but as a human being.”

He is survived by his wife of 39 years Daisy Harper Fitch, his son Alan Fitch, his half-sister Judi Fitch Singleton, his stepdaughters E. Mackenzie Sharp and Locke Harvey, his stepson Douglas Wilkinson and his eight grandchildren.