Wolfgang Kurt Hermann Panofsky Group of Awards

WOLFGANG KURT HERMANN "PIEF" PANOFSKY (1919-2007)

“Pief” Panofsky is best known as the director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) from 1961 to 1984, then as emeritus director until his passing; as well as an arms control advocate who advised the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Awarded nearly every prestigious prize in science except the Nobel, he was instrumental in facilitating countless discoveries including that of Nobel Prize winners.

Panofsky was born in Germany but immigrated to the United States in 1934 when his father took a teaching position at Princeton to escape Nazi persecution. Pief Panofsky would go on to study physics at Princeton and do his graduate work at California Institute of Technology (CalTech) in Pasadena. He was recruited to Los Alamos by J. Robert Oppenheimer and Luis Alvarez based on his work measuring the shockwaves of bullets. He worked as a consultant to the Manhattan Project from 1944 until the end of the war, during which he found himself in an airplane on the morning of July 16, 1945 attempting to measure the Trinity bomb’s atomic blast yield with instruments he had developed.

Panofsky went to Berkeley to work with Alvarez after the war where they built a proton linear accelerator and then worked on experiments with Jack Steinberger on the neutral π meson. The UC Berkeley Loyalty Oath that was instated during the McCarthy era irked Panofsky enough for him to take a position with Stanford where he immediately got to work improving the Mark III linear accelerator in 1951.

He and his colleagues conceived of a next-generation linear accelerator in 1956 – the longest in the world at two-miles long. Panofsky developed the concept of a “national facility” whereby Stanford leases the land to the government and manages SLAC, including determination of its research program, subject only to annual budget approval by the Department of Energy. Panofsky, as SLAC’s first director, and his colleagues navigated myriad obstacles to have the project completed in time for the scheduled first operation in 1966.

California congressman Peter McCloskey, who had earlier in his capacity as a lawyer, fought, on behalf of nearby Woodside citizens, against proposed power lines for the linear accelerator that would cut through the area, later described “the magic of Pief is that he can bring all kinds of people together. He was a person of unquestioned credibility and an unbelievable builder of coalitions.”

Aside from his role at SLAC, where work has led to 3 Nobel Prizes and countless discoveries about the composition of subatomic matter, Panofsky served on the President’s Science Advisory Committee during both the Eisenhower and the Kennedy administrations. He served on the General Advisory Committee (GAC) to President Carter, as president of the American Physical Society (1974), chair on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on International Security and Arms Control (1985-1993).