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H. Pierre Noyes (December 10, 1923 – September 30, 2016) was an American theoretical physicist. He became a member of the faculty at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University in 1962. Noyes specialized in several areas of research, including the relativistic few-body problem in nuclear and particle physics.

Family

Noyes was born in 1923 in Paris, France to the American chemist William Noyes and his third wife Katherine Macy, daughter of Jesse Macy. His older half-brother was Albert (1898–1980) and his brother Richard (1919 – 1997); both were chemists.

Education

Noyes received his baccalaureate degree in physics (magna cum laude) in 1943 from Harvard University. Noyes earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1950 doing research under the direction of Robert Serber with Geoffrey Chew as his advisor.

After earning his Ph.D., Noyes spent a postdoctoral year on a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Birmingham, England.

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).

In 1955, Noyes joined the Theoretical Division of what was to become the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. From 1956 to 1962, he served there as group leader of the General Research Group, under co-founder and director Edward Teller.

During a sabbatical from his work at Lawrence Livermore in 1957 and 1958, Noyes was Leverhulme Trust Lecturer in the Experimental Physics Department of the University of Liverpool. He also worked as a consultant to General Atomics under Freeman Dyson and Ted Taylor for Project Orion.

In 1961, Noyes served as AVCO visiting professor at Cornell University.

Starting in 1962, he worked at SLAC as head of theoretical physics until he was replaced by Sidney Drell (who combined that responsibility with being Deputy Director of SLAC). He progressed from associate professor from 1962 through 1967 to professor (at SLAC, 1967–2002) and was awarded emeritus status in that rank on May 1, 2000.

Noyes served as the Associate Editor of the Annual Review of Nuclear Science from 1962 until 1977. In 1979 he received an Alexander von Humboldt U.S. Senior Scientist Award, primarily to continue his theoretical work on the quantum mechanical three-body problem for strongly interacting particles.

Some of his letters to Gregory Breit (1899–1981) are in the collection of the Yale University Library.

Honors

Noyes’s honors include:

• Fulbright Scholarship (Birmingham, England) (1950-1)
• Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award (1979)
• Leverhulme Lecturer in the Experimental Physics Department of the University of Liverpool (1957-8)
• Scientific Essays in Honor of H Pierre Noyes on the Occasion of His 90th Birthday, festschrift, edited by John C Amson (University of St Andrews, UK), Louis Kauffman (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA) ISBN 978-981-4579-36-0

Publications

• Noyes, H. P. (March 1996). "Are Partons Confined Tachyons?" (PDF). 12th Annual Western Chapter of the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association Meeting, Stanford, CA (United States), 17-19 Feb 1996. Alternative Natural Philosophy Association Meeting. OSTI 219371. Retrieved June 22, 2011.
• Noyes, H. Pierre (March 15, 1972). "Comment on the Exterior-Interior Separation in the Three-Body Problem". Physical Review D. 5 (6). The American Physical Society: 1547–1551. Bibcode:1972PhRvD...5.1547N. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.5.1547.
• Noyes, H. Pierre (September 20, 1965). "New Nonsingular Integral Equation for Two-Particle Scattering". Physical Review Letters. 15 (12). The American Physical Society: 538–540. Bibcode:1965PhRvL..15..538N. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.15.538. OSTI 1444235.
• Phys. Rev. Lett. 3, 191–193 (1959) Modification of the Effective-Range Formula for Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering, in collaboration with David Y. Wong at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley and Livermore, California
• Phys. Rev. Lett. 15, 538–540 (1965) New Nonsingular Integral Equation for Two-Particle Scattering, in collaboration with David Y. Wong at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley and Livermore, California

References

1. Noyes, Henry Pierre. "United States Public Records, 1970-2009". familysearch. Retrieved 24 July 2014.
2. ^ "H. Pierre Noyes Professor (Emeritus)". SLAC faculty biography. January 26, 2007. Archived from the original on May 18, 2011. Retrieved June 22, 2011.
3. "Pierre Noyes Obituary". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 10 February 2017.
4. "Nuclear and Particle Science". Annual Reviews web site. Retrieved June 22, 2011.
5. "Manuscripts and Archives". Yale University Library.
   Breit, Gregory (1899–1981). Correspondence, 1932–1973, diaries and notebooks, 1935–1973, of physicist involved in the early development of the atom bomb. Includes correspondence with Suraj N. Gupta, McAllister H. Hull, Jr., Allan C. G. Mitchell, H. Pierre Noyes, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Moti L. Rustgi, Edward Teller, Merle A. Tuve, John A. Wheeler, and Eugene Paul Wigner, as well as with major scientific research institutions and federal science organizations. Diaries and notebooks include references to professional activities, lectures and courses taught, conferences and meetings attended, and calculations and related notations. Microfilmed 1989. 20,000 frames. 20 reels 35mm. Guide. HM 211 Microfilm available from Center for the History of Physics, American Institute of Physics, 335 East 45th Street, New York, New York 10017-3483.
6. Scientific Essays in Honor of H Pierre Noyes on the Occasion of His 90th Birthday. Series on Knots and Everything. Vol. 54. 2014. doi:10.1142/9055. ISBN 978-981-4579-36-0.

• 1923 births
• 2016 deaths
• American expatriates in France
• American nuclear physicists
• Harvard University alumni
• University of California, Berkeley alumni
• University of Rochester faculty