H. Pierre Noyes (born December 10, 1923)
Is an American nuclear physicist. He has been a member of the faculty at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University since 1962.[2] Noyes specialized in several areas of research, including the relativistic few-body problem in nuclear and particle physics; foundations of physics; combinatorial hierarchy; and bit-string physics: a discrete model for masses, coupling constants, and cosmology from first principles.
Biography
H. Pierre Noyes was born in 1923 in Paris, France to the American chemist William Albert Noyes, Sr. and Katherine Macy, daughter of Jesse Macy. His older half-brothers were W. Albert Noyes, Jr. and Richard Macy Noyes who both became chemists.
Education
Noyes received his baccalaureate degree in physics (magna cum laude) in 1943 from Harvard University.[2] One of his roommates during this time was Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Before moving on to doctoral studies, Noyes spent a year at the Antenna Group at the MIT Radiation Laboratory and served in the US Navy for two years as an Aviation Electronics Technician Mate.
Noyes earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1950[2] doing research under the direction of Robert Serber with Geoffrey Chew as his advisor. Noyes’ first doctoral problem was pion-pion scattering, followed by a second problem: meson production from proton-deuteron decay. His work under Chew was among the early applications of S-matrix theory.[3]
After earning his Ph.D., Noyes spent a postdoctoral year on a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Birmingham, England,[2] under the direction of Rudolf Peierls.
Career
Noyes’ career included several academic and research positions. He first worked as a post-doctoral fellow and then as assistant professor of Physics at the University of Rochester (1952–5).[2] During that time, he compiled and edited the Proceedings of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th Rochester Conferences on High Energy Physics. During the summers of those years, he worked at Project Matterhorn at Princeton, researching thermonuclear weapons (1952) and at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (1953). During the summer of 1954, he worked on calculating the binding energy of the triton using a particular non-relativistic, quantum mechanical potential model fitted to the low energy nucleon-nucleon parameters at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California
