Marshall Wilt
Marshall Wilt was a normal, inquisitive boy growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1940s and ‘50s. He was interested in mechanical and electrical things. His dad, a corporate financial executive, encouraged him to fix his own bicycle and build electric circuits. He built a radio when he was 11 years old. He enjoyed those things, but not to the exclusion of other activities. He was also interested in the outdoors, scouting, and athletics in high school and college. Always good in high-school science and math courses as well as everything else – he was class valedictorian—as a freshman at the University of Louisville, he experienced something that focused his mind. “I had a teacher in an introductory physics course, Professor Bennett, who just captivated me by his ability to, seemingly from memory, produce these beautiful 50-minute lectures that I found overwhelmingly interesting,” Wilt recalls. “And I got interested in physics then.” Two years later, as a transfer student, a junior at Centre College, Wilt fell under the influence of a young physicist who had gotten a Ph.D. at the age of 21 who was somewhat of a prodigy. “He was in his mid-30s, a rah-rah, go-getter type of guy. Charles Whittle was his name.” Whittle, formerly the chairman of the physics department at Western Kentucky University, was hired to reshape the physics program at Centre. He brought with him another faculty member and about 10 undergraduate physics and math students. “So there was a cadre of five or six juniors and seniors who were all dedicated to physics under Whittle’s mentorship,” Wilt recalls. “I fell in with them, and sometime in my junior year I decided I wanted to get a Ph.D. in physics and use that as a vocation so I could support myself and a family.”
An Interest in Spectroscopy
Also in his junior year, Wilt became interested in spectroscopy. Whittle had acquired an infrared spectrometer discarded by a corporate research lab, and he believed in undergraduate research. “This seemed to be the most challenging project he had available for students, and I gravitated toward it,” Wilt said. He chose Vanderbilt University for his Ph.D. work, where he discovered that infrared spectroscopy was only one facet of a broad field with many applications. At Vanderbilt Wilt gravitated toward theoretical work and high-resolution spectroscopy, “although it required instruments I was never going to be able to afford because they cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.” He completed his Ph.D. in three years, and by that time Whittle had become dean at Centre College. “He recruited me heavily,” Wilt recalls. Although he had offers from a number of other schools, Wilt chose to return to his alma mater to “see if I could develop a physics program there that I would be able to influence fundamentally.” During his first year as a member of the physics department, Wilt set about trying to obtain a high-resolution infrared spectroscope. “Whittle knew about Research Corporation, and he put me in touch with Brian Andreen,” Wilt said. Andreen, now happily retired, is a legendary figure at Research Corporation. He ended his long career as the vice president of the Foundation, but for many years as a program officer he traveled the nation visiting campuses and getting to know the bright, early career physical scientists who might benefit from a little help from Research Corporation. He was a co-founder of the Council on Undergraduate Research, which continues to work with agencies and foundations to enhance research opportunities for faculty and students.
Over the Years with Research Corp.
Andreen recommended a $3,000 grant to Centre. “And we added to that amount another $7,000 or so we had from other sources and bought a very good commercial instrument that was beyond my expectations as a beginning faculty member,” Wilt said. “I fondly remember Brian Andreen,” Wilt said. “I communicated with him about our first projects. I remember getting maybe a phone call or letter, some kind of communication, saying he was going to be in the area and would like to drop by and see what I was doing and meet me and talk to me. He was genuinely interested in getting at least a basic understanding of what I was doing and why it was interesting and why students would be motivated to participate in it.” Wilt’s research soon attracted the best and brightest undergraduates into his lab. “I had several valedictorians in the first four or five years who spent the summers working with me. We began to publish papers in the best spectroscopic journals in the world.” Over the years there were four additional Research Corporation grants, from 1968 to 1976. The 1976 grant, for example, led to three research papers in the Journal of Molecular Spectroscopy representing the state-of-the-art knowledge, spectroscopically, of the fluoroform molecule. “My study involved trifluoromethane, or CHF3,” Wilt said. The commercial name for this molecule is R23, a refrigerant once used in vehicular air conditioners and also as a fire suppressant. “Fluoroform was a good choice for me to study spectroscopically because much of the rotational fine structure of its spectrum had not been resolved, and our instrument of moderately high resolving power was just capable of measuring these details. My students did so for CHF3 and its deuterated and C-13 isotopic species. In the process we discovered and explained many spectroscopic irregularities, or perturbations. Another result was the discovery of fluoroform’s harmonic frequencies, from which this compound’s thermodynamic properties can be calculated more accurately than they can be measured.”
Motivating Undergrads to Ph.D.s
Wilt said the work motivated a number of his undergraduate collaborators to go on to earn Ph.D.s “Of course they didn’t all turn into spectroscopists, they went into various areas of physics as their interests told them—health physics, high-energy physics, nuclear physics, and what not.” At one point, after studying theory and reading a number of papers, Wilt hit on an idea that might explain a phenomenon that was just coming to light regarding the energy levels of simple molecules and various interactions called “perturbations,” which were very difficult to take into account in analyses. “Only a few people were beginning to have the resources to observe and understand and come up with ways to analyze these perturbations,” he recalls. “I was reading about them and trying to keep abreast of that area of spectroscopy, and I remembered some papers I had read a few years before where these abnormalities in the spectra had been observed at Michigan State and at the University of Minnesota.” Nobody knew what they were at the time, but Wilt made the connection between the papers he’d read and the new theories that were beginning to appear relating to other molecules exhibiting the same effects. “I was hoping to collaborate with Professor Harvey Edwards, a spectroscopist at Michigan State, and another at the University of Minnesota who had spectra they couldn’t interpret,” he said. “But in order to follow through, I had to have the spectra. I wanted to travel from Danville to East Lansing, Michigan, and to Minneapolis to talk to the spectroscopists, to tell them my ideas about what was going on, and try to talk them into a collaboration where I would analyze the data they’d already taken. But I needed $300 or so to drive from Danville to East Lansing and then to Minneapolis and back. I called Brian Andreen and asked him if I could modify a grant that I had to use $300 for travel. It hadn’t been part of the proposed budget, and I can remember his reaction. He said that generally travel was something that could be misused, or wasn’t a highly productive budget item in Research Corporation’s experience, and he wasn’t real sure about it. But he agreed to take a chance on me. Anyway, it worked out really well, and I was always grateful for that. “ Wilt and a Center undergraduate were able to hypothesize what was causing the underlying distortion in these high-resolution spectra. Their work resulted in a paper in the Journal of Molecular Spectroscopy, and the undergraduate, Joseph Fehribach, went on to become a full professor in mathematics. By the late ‘70s Wilt was a full professor at Centre. Unfortunately, at the time the U.S economy was stagnating while inflation was rapidly escalating. Salaries and the outlook for promotion and financial advancement for scientists at primarily undergraduate intuitions appeared limited. He looked around for a job in industry and was hired by the world’s largest packaging company, Continental Group, headquartered in Chicago.
Working in Applied Science
Taking a leave of absence from Centre, Wilt spent the next two-and-half years working on applied science problems. He helped develop a powder coating process to replace the environmentally problematic solvent-based coatings for the inside of steel and aluminum cans. He also worked on improving reconstituted collagen for sausage casings, and helped to perfect a two-liter aluminum can to compete with plastic carbonated beverage containers. “In that we were ultimately successful, scientifically, in being able to make a very high-quality product,” Wilt recalls. “But we didn’t succeed economically because aluminum was four times more expensive than the raw material for the polymer of the plastic bottle. We knew that from the beginning, but it was a challenge our bosses said we had to meet, so we met it.” His leave of absence at an end, Wilt returned to Centre, where they’d come into significant new funds for supporting faculty. Wilt soon became head of the science division at the college, a post he held for six years. During that time Centre received a major grant from the John Olin Foundation to build a new physics and chemistry building. He spent three years, working with designers and builders, working out the kinks. “And I then shifted my interest to atomic spectroscopy and laser spectroscopy,” he recalls. “I guess I was looking for something related but different to expand my horizons in spectroscopy. This was a going field because tunable lasers were producing phenomenally high resolutions and phenomena that hadn’t been seen before. And using these tools one could get past the Doppler broadening restrictions of conventional spectroscopy. So I did some work there, and my students helped me build a lot of the equipment with support from NSF grants.” He said many of the students who worked on his laser projects went on to get Ph.D.s., some of them working in the production of Bose-Einstein condensations, which require the use of lasers to produce ultra-cold temperatures. Two of them, John Burke and Darren Hudson, are now professors of physics and research scientists.
Dealing with Pre-meds
Of course, many of the undergraduates in Wilt’s lab and classroom over the years were there to fulfil science requirements on their way to medical school. One of those pre-med majors, Dr. Gary V. James, recalls Wilt’s help in 1971:
… Centre had only one section of physics, and it was taught by Dr. Marshall Wilt, a brilliant man. I had to take his section of physics, but in order to be able to take physics you had to have taken a course in calculus, because of all the Newtonian physics was done by differential equations and calculus. I had made one B+ at PCCC [Paducah Community College] and thus did not have a 4.0 average, but I had made As in everything else. But when I got to Centre, in my first section we would do five chapters in the physics book, and then we’d have an exam. During the first one, I studied hard and really thought I had a good hold on everything, but, but I made only a 50 on the first exam. Well, I knew I had to have physics, and I thought how tough it was going to be. For the next section, at the end of each chapter there were usually from one to thirty-five problems. I went through every chapter, and I worked out every single problem except four in all those five chapters. The day of the second exam I went over to the science building and walked up to Dr. Wilt’s office. Thankfully, he was there. He was a super-nice fellow, always willing to help. I asked him, “Dr. Wilt, can you help me with four problems I’m having trouble with?” He said, “Sure.” We sat down there and went through those four problems. I basically understood them; it was just some minor math things I needed to know. We sat there and worked them out, and by that time it was time to start the class, so he said, “Let’s go to class.” I actually walked over to the class with him, He handed out the exams. There were five problems on it; four of them were the ones we had just worked. They were the last problems of each chapter and were the hardest problems in the book. I’ve always thought if I had made 50 on that exam, I might not have made it through that physics course. But I made 100 on that one! Of course, I made an A in the class, but it was a dismal showing on everyone else’s part. After the class was over, he told everybody that I’d made 100 on [the test]. That was the only physics class there, and if I had failed that physics class, I might not have been able to get into medical school. [Excerpted from William Lynwood Montell, Tales from Kentucky Doctors, © 2008 by The University Press of Kentucky. http://kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=2096#.WljrRKinGUk. Used by permission.]
Wilt said that when it came to teaching physics to pre-med students, he eventually learned to play to his audience:
“Sometimes a student would be grumbling about a score. They’d grouse that they didn’t need to know physics, they just needed to have an A grade to get into medical school. I would take the time, spend an hour or two, explaining how physics might possibly have some relevance in medicine—different diagnostic tests, the ultrasonic tests, X-ray tests all use fundamental physics. These students, with a little extra attention, could see that. And they could see that I was interested in their success in medicine, so they bought into the program. They were some of the best students I had over the years. And I remain friends with a number of them. My own daughter I gave similar advice to. She’s now a surgeon.”
Hundreds of students, in the classroom as well as the laboratory, have benefitted from Marshall Wilt’s patience and kindness during his long and productive career in physics at a primarily undergraduate institution. His advice to early career teacher-scholars is gleaned from the path he chose:
“Follow your interests and don’t be stymied by adversity. If you’re a person like I was at an institution that didn’t have a lot of resources and a lot of priority on doing research—that’s changed somewhat, but it was true then – accept that you’re going to have to persevere. You’re going to have to meet disappointment and figure out how to get around it. And to keep the faith—if you have good ideas and you’ve got a good mind, you can succeed. There are institutions like Research Corporation that can assist in making all that happen.” In the following pages a method of designating different regions of space by a systematic colour scheme has been adopted. The explanations have been given in such a manner as to involve no reference to models, the diagrams will be found sufficient. But to facilitate the study a description of a set of models is given in an appendix which the reader can either make for himself or obtain. If models are used the diagrams in Chapters XI. and XII. will form a guide sufficient to indicate their use. Cubes of the colours designated by the diagrams should be picked out and used to reinforce the diagrams.
