Sessler as Lab director in 1973.
By Lynn Yarris
Sessler as Lab director in 1973. |
If Andy Sessler has slowed down much in his 75th year, it is not readily apparent. The award-winning theoretical physicist, acclaimed humanitarian, and former director of Berkeley Lab (1973-1980) who founded both the Earth Sciences and what is now the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, maintains a schedule that would tire most grad students. This posed a problem for colleagues who wanted to honor him with a symposium.
“They wanted to hold it in honor of my retirement but I haven’t retired,” Sessler said in an interview for Currents, “so they decided to hold it in honor of my 75th birthday.” But Sessler’s schedule is so busy that the symposium was held last Saturday, March 15, even though he won’t actually turn 75 until December.
“All my life I’ve worked hard and I’ve played hard,” Sessler said. As proof of the latter, he’s made it to the ski slopes 12 times this winter and is planning to take one of his grandsons back to Lake Tahoe for another go later this month. As proof of the former, consider what he currently has on his plate.
After his ski trip, Sessler will be off to Japan and then to Russia where he will deliver scientific talks on particle beam cooling, quantum interference, and stochastic phenomena in particle accelerators.
 “I always loved the outdoors, and preserving the environment was a big concern,” Sessler said. He is shown here hiking in Alaska in 1995. |
“Keith Symon and I were among the first to report on stochastic phenomena, or chaos, in particle accelerators, based upon work we did back in 1955 and 1956,” Sessler said, laughing, which is something he does a lot. “But we didn’t think much of the effect at the time because it wasn’t good for particle physics. Now, of course, chaos has become a very large field of research.”
In recent years Sessler has traveled extensively to deliver presentations in various capacities that reflect his active participation in a broad expanse of diverse organizations. For example, for the American Physics Society (APS), of which he is a past president (1998), he now chairs its Forum on Physics and Society, which addresses issues in physics that relate to society as a whole and publishes a quarterly newsletter that serves as a public outreach organ. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences Board of Radiation Effects Research, which, among other projects, tracks the long-term effects of radiation on Japanese citizens who were exposed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and on American soldiers exposed during the testing of nuclear weapons in the 1950s. Another activity of the Board is to oversee a study aimed at determining the most effective means of using potassium iodide as an antiradiation drug in the event of a terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant.
Getting involved in issues beyond the traditional scope of his scientific field has long been one of Sessler’s trademarks. During the Cold War-era, he was a co-founder of the human rights group “Scientists for Sakharov, Orlav, and Sharansky” (SOS), for which he received the first APS Nicholson Medal for Humanitarian Service in 1994. Currently, he’s spearheading a proposal through the APS for a study on the detection, disarming and removal of landmines.
“The U.S. General Accounting Office estimates that there are approximately 127 million landmines in 55 countries and these landmines cause about 20,000 casualties each year,” Sessler said. “At the present rate of removal it would take 1,000 years to remove all the mines, and for every one removed, 10 new ones are placed. New technologies are clearly needed. We’re proposing a study on humanitarian demining that would help funding agencies, especially those having little technical capability, to better decide which technologies to support for research, design and development.”
Finding answers to questions outside the traditional scope of his own scientific field is another Sessler trademark. When he succeeded Edwin McMillan as director of Berkeley Lab in 1973 the Laboratory was already multidisciplinary, but its priorities were clearly on high energy physics.
“I felt the future of the Laboratory was in other directions as well as high energy physics,” Sessler said. “I’d always loved the outdoors, and preserving the environment was a big concern, so I met with other physicists at the Lab and we established the Lab’s first Environmental Office. We had to work to get approval from the Atomic Energy Commission (DOE’s predecessor) before we could create new scientific divisions.”
That ESD and EETD will soon be celebrating their 30th anniversaries is testimony to the success of Sessler’s efforts, but along the way he had to steer the Laboratory through a cultural change in which its diverse scientific activities would be treated with equal importance. To accomplish this, he involved the senior scientific staff in the decision-making process to a much greater degree than at any time before. As Sessler once said, “We moved from the benevolent dictatorships of Lawrence and McMillan to a more democratic form of management.”
 Andy Sessler (left) chats with Moishe Pripstein of the Physics Division at the March 15 symposium held in Sessler’s honor. |
But you don’t bring about cultural change at a prestigious scientific institute such as this with diplomatic skills alone. You also need the research chops that command respect from your peers. Sessler was a cum laude graduate of Harvard who earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Columbia University. After a professorship at Ohio State University, he joined the staff at Berkeley Lab in 1961 to work on plasma and accelerator physics. His accomplishments, which include more than 300 scientific papers, have earned him a plethora of awards and recognitions, including the E.O. Lawrence Award (1970) and the Robert R. Wilson Prize (1997).
For all of his outside activities, Sessler continues to be an active presence at Berkeley Lab — he holds the titles of Distinguished Scientist Emeritus and Director Emeritus — and in initiatives involving Berkeley Lab. Until this past year, he was the spokesperson for the Neutrino Factory and Muon Collider Collaboration, a project for constructing a muon storage ring that can produce intense directed beams of neutrinos for research. In 2002 he served on the Berkeley Lab Committee on the Formal Investigation of Alleged Scientific Misconduct. Currently he is a member of the Neutrino Working Group for Berkeley Lab’s three physical sciences divisions.
In his “spare” time, Sessler is writing a book. “I’m working with Ted Wilson from CERN. It’s going to be a coffee table book on the history of particle accelerators,” he said.
Andrew Sessler has been a vital part of the history of Berkeley Lab for more than four decades. This past Saturday, scientists from across the nation gathered here to celebrate his many scientific achievements and humanitarian contributions. Organizers of the event were no doubt relieved he could slow down long enough to enjoy it.