Biographical Memoirs Volume 85 (2004) / Chapter Skim
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John H. Reynolds
John H. Reynolds
Pages 248-267
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From page 249... ...
His father, Horace Mason Reynolds, was educated at Harvard, taught English in various colleges in the Boston area and at Brown University, and wrote for newspapers 249
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From page 250... ...
Literary people often visited John's parents, and these contacts predisposed him toward the academic life. John lived in Cambridge for most of his boyhood, with occasional periods in Providence, Rhode Island, when his father taught at Brown and where his sister, Peggy, was born, and in Williamsburg, Virginia, when his father taught at William and Mary College.
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From page 251... ...
John was captivated by the enthusiasm of the stellar roster of geochemists and cosmochemists: Harold Urey, Harrison Brown, Hans Suess, and the relative youngsters Clair Patterson, George Tilton, and Sam Epstein. Gerry Wasserburg and George Wetherill were graduate students there a bit later.
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From page 252... ...
Jenkins interviewed over a hundred students across the country and produced an ordered list of his top choices for the faculty to consider. While interviewing at Chicago, Jenkins was influenced by suggestions by Francis Turner and John Verhoogen of the Berkeley Geology Department that a physicist skilled in isotope spectroscopy would be a useful adjunct.
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From page 253... ...
The university provided funds for John to set up his own laboratory for mass spectrometry. Two years later he requested funds from the Office of Naval Research for "studies by rare gas mass spectrometry of reactions of transmutation," specifically to study transmutation of iodine into isotopes of xenon by deuterons; to search for absorption of solar neutrinos in bromine and its transmutation into krypton; and to increase the sensitivity for K-Ar geochronology so that rocks containing only a moderate potassium concentration could be dated.
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From page 254... ...
In 1947 Harrison Brown had suggested that meteorites could be used to determine quite accurately the age of the elements if the daughter of an extinct natural radioactive nuclide could be found there. What one would actually measure would be the time delay between nucleosynthesis of elements in the solar system and the freezing-in of longlived radioactive nuclides in solar system bodies.
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From page 255... ...
Before 1960 little was known about the age and time interval for formation of the solid bodies of the solar system except that the Earth was 4.6 billion years old, as measured with the uranium-lead technique by Clair Patterson, Harrison Brown, George Tilton, and Mark Inghram in 1953. Thanks to the prediction by Harrison Brown, John (as well as other geoscientists)
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From page 256... ...
In preparation for his second sabbatical, 1963-1964, John studied Portuguese for a year and obtained both a National Science Foundation senior postdoctoral fellowship and NSF funding to set up a complete K-Ar laboratory at the University of Sao Paolo, Brazil. In preparation Professor Umberto Cordani of that university spent six months learning mass spectrometry at John's Berkeley laboratory.
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From page 257... ...
John was well aware that most of the Physics faculty felt that his research was far afield from mainstream physics. For example, Luis Alvarez once wrote in support of a merit increase for John: "I remember wondering when John Reynolds first came to Berkeley why any bright young physicist would want to work in the field of mass spectroscopy, which I considered to be a rather dead field at that time.
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From page 258... ...
For a few years while we were studying lunar samples and I was searching for fossil spontaneous fission tracks of superheavy elements (Z 110) in meteorites and lunar rocks, we ran a joint seminar; but I moved gradually into astrophysics and started a separate weekly seminar.
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From page 259... ...
Excess heavy xenon isotopes in certain carbonaceous chondrites with an apparent fissiogenic origin different from 244Pu were thought by some to be due to spontaneous fission of an unknown superheavy element, but that intriguing possibility has never been confirmed. In his typical fashion, when he agreed to be joint organizer of a U.S.-Japan symposium on cosmochemistry at Hakone National Park in 1977, he began preparing a year in advance by auditing a course in Japanese.
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From page 260... ...
John's next big project, which occupied him for the better part of the decade 1978-1988, was to design, construct, and do research with a new type of mass spectrometer, which along with electronics and computing facilities, was carried in a 25-foot trailer. I remember seeing their trailer, painted with the giant acronym RARGA (for Roving Automated Rare Gas Analyzer)
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From page 261... ...
The Chicago group was able to isolate the sources of the exotic rare gases by dissolving mineral grains in strong acids and then extracting almost all the exotic gases from the 0.5 percent remaining solid matter. They proposed a spectacular explanation for the heavier xenon isotopes: that they were the products of spontaneous fission of some extinct superheavy element.
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From page 262... ...
His societal concerns extended beyond the walls of academia. He was a staunch believer in representative democracy and ran for the Berkeley Rent Board out of a sense of civic duty.
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From page 263... ...
His interests also extended to amateur astronomy, bread making, beer brewing, and harvesting California fungi. Ann and he often hosted dinners and parties both for international visitors and for Berkeley friends.
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From page 264... ...
1980 Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1987 Doctor, honoris causa, University of Coimbra, Portugal 1988 Awarded the National Order of the Southern Cross, with grade of Comendador Awarded the Berkeley Citation, for outstanding research, teaching, and service IAM INDEBTED to Ann Reynolds for her friendship and for her help with this memoir, to Professors Bruce Bolt and Richard Packard for contributing part of the text, and to the Physics office at Berkeley for use of its extensive records.
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From page 265... ...
90:1047. 1956 High sensitivity mass spectrometer for rare gas analysis.
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From page 266... ...
Isotopic analysis of rare gases from stepwise heating of lunar fines and rocks. Science 167:545.
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From page 267... ...
J O H N H . R E Y N O L D S 267 1983 Isotopic anomalies in meteorites explained?
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