"Experimental Physicist" Robert B. Leighton Signed 3X5.5 Card for Sale

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"Experimental Physicist" Robert B. Leighton Signed 3X5.5 Card For Sale

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"Experimental Physicist" Robert B. Leighton Signed 3X5.5 Card:
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Technology (Caltech).[1] His work over the years spanned solid state physics, cosmic ray physics, the beginnings of modern particle physics, solar physics, the planets, infrared In the latter four fields, his pioneering work

opened up entirely new areas of research that subsequently developed into

vigorous scientific communities. Leighton was born in Detroit, where his father made precision dies for an

automobile company. After moving to Seattle the family broke up, and his father returned to

Detroit. His mother moved to downtown Los Angeles, where she worked as a maid in a hotel. Leighton

grew up in Los Angeles and attended Los Angeles City College.

He was accepted to Caltech as a junior in 1939 but lived at home, helping

support his mother and himself with a job building X-ray equipment for the

Kellogg Laboratory. Leighton received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from

Caltech in 1941. He then switched to physics and went on to obtain his M.S. in

1944, and his Ph.D. in 1947 with a thesis on the specific heat of face-centered cubic crystals. He joined the faculty in 1949 and later served

as Division Chair of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy from 1970 to 1975.

Leighton was a renowned teacher at Caltech. His Principles of Modern

Physics, published in 1959, was a standard and influential textbook. Leighton

and Richard Feynman were

close personal friends. After Richard's Lectures in Physics course, in the

early 1960s, Leighton spent over two years reworking the tape-recorded text

into publishable form: The Feynman Lectures on

Physics, which were published in 1964 and 1966, and which have

enjoyed perennial success ever since. In addition, he co-authored, with Robbie Vogt, a set of problems to accompany the Feynman

Lectures. One of Leighton's sons, Ralph, also collaborated with Feynman on several books. Leighton

was known as a remarkably ingenious physicist and astrophysicist during his 58 years at Caltech. He found

no instrumentation problem too difficult, especially if it might open a new

part of the electromagnetic spectrum to

observation. If he found an inexpensive solution, he would build the apparatus

in his spare time, for use by others and by himself. Leighton built, improved,

and used cloud chambers to

identify and measure new products of cosmic ray collisions. He explored the decay modes of mu-mesons and recognized several of the strange particles when particle physics was at its beginning. Leighton played a

key role in 1949 in showing that the mu-meson decay products are two neutrinos and

an electron, and he made the first measurement of the energy spectrum of the decay electron (at the time, low

statistics experiments suggested that only one neutrino was involved). In 1950

he made the first observation of strange particle decays after the initial discovery of two cases

in England in 1947. Over the next seven years, he elucidated many of the

properties, e.g., mass, lifetime, decay-modes and energies, of several of the

new strange particles, in particular, the lambda, the xi, and what were then

called the theta particles (K-mesons). His subject matter evolved from

physics to astrophysics as he helped astronomy take on its modern shape. About

1956, Leighton became interested in the physics of the outer layers of

the Sun. With characteristic imagination and insight, he

devised Doppler shift and Zeeman effect solar cameras. They were applied with

striking success to the investigation of magnetic and velocity fields on the

sun. With the Zeeman camera, Leighton mapped complicated patterns of the sun's

magnetic field with excellent resolution. Even more striking were his

discoveries of a remarkable five-minute oscillation in local surface velocities

and of a "super-granulation pattern" of horizontal convection

currents in large cells of moving material. These solar oscillations have

subsequently been recognized as internally trapped acoustic waves, opening up

the whole new fields of helioseismology and solar magneto convection. Leighton

himself soon realized that solar magneto-convection cells would lead to an

effective diffusion of flux on the solar surface (now called Leighton

diffusion), and he included it in a dynamo model of the solar cycle. In

the early 1960s, Leighton developed and fabricated a novel, inexpensive infrared telescope, which included a simple array These cells were surplus from the defense

industry; they had been developed for the Sidewinder missile's heat-seeking guidance system.

Starting in 1965, he and Gerry

Neugebauer used the new telescope to sweep the roughly 70 percent

of the sky visible from Mt. Wilson Observatory,

collecting the data as squiggles on a strip-chart recorder. This began a new

area of infrared astronomy. The

resulting Two-Micron Sky Survey, published in 1969, the vast majority of which had been

previously uncataloged. Some of these have been found to be new stars still

surrounded by their dusty pre-stellar shells, while others are supergiant stars in the last stages of their evolution,

embedded in expanding dusty shells of matter ejected by the stars themselves. Leighton's

development of photographic equipment during the mid-1950s had allowed him to

obtain the best pictures of the planets ever attained anywhere to that time,

from the 60 and 100-inch telescopes, and led to his work as Team Leader at

the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

for the Imaging Science Investigations on the Mariner 4, 6, and 7 missions to Mars during

the middle 1960s. As Team Leader and an experienced experimental physicist,

Leighton played a key role in forming and guiding the development of JPL's

first digital television system for use

in deep space: the Mariner 4 flyby of Mars in

1964.[8] He also contributed to the first efforts

at image processing and

enhancement techniques made possible by the digital form of the imaging data.

He received the Space Science Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics for

the Mariner television experiments in 1967 and the NASA Exceptional

Scientific Achievement Medal in 1971.In the 1970s, Leighton's interest shifted

to the development of large, inexpensive dish antenna which could be used to again, his remarkable experimental abilities opened a new field of science

at Caltech which continues to be vigorously pursued at the Owens Valley Radio

Observatory in California and the Caltech Kea, Hawaii using the "Leighton Dishes".

Leighton was an elected member of the National

Academy of Sciences and served on its Space Science Board. Leighton

shared the Rumford Prize in 1986

for advancements in Infrared Astronomy, and

won the James Craig Watson Medal in

1988, for his work as creator and exploiter of new instruments and techniques

that opened whole new areas of astronomy — solar oscillations, infrared

surveys, spun telescopes, and large millimeter-wave reflectors.