E. Norval Fortson
“Make the most of it.” That’s the advice E. Norval Fortson, professor emeritus, physics, University of Washington, gives to early career teacher-scholars who receive their first grant from Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA). Fortson, 81, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, built a long and successful research and teaching career on the jumpstart provided by his first Research Corporation grant in 1968, for a project entitled “Radio Frequency Spectroscopy with Stored Ions.” Once he received the funds Fortson promptly set off on a simple but new project involving charge exchange. “Basically, I was using light to orient atoms in a vapor,” he recalls. “Rubidium atoms. By ‘orient’ I mean they had a spin, and I would line up the spins using circularly polarized light, which has a direction.” That was nothing new, he says. “But what I saw when I ran a discharge in the vapor, which created some rubidium ions as well as the atoms that I was lining up, was a signal due to the alignment of the ions by charge-exchange with the aligned atoms. And that hadn’t been seen before.”
From Research Corp. to the NSF
It wasn’t an earth-shattering discovery, Fortson admits, “But it was enough to get me started, and I did several papers on it. Although I didn’t pursue that research forever, I did it for two or three years and established my lab, and it required only modest money.” He says the initial success he achieved with Research Corporation funding on this small project seemed to impress referees for his subsequent research proposals to the National Science Foundation (NSF). “After Research Corporation, almost all of my research was funded by the National Science Foundation. I went on with NSF funding to do some quite interesting things over a very long period of time. So the Research Corporation grant was really the beginning of my career.” The major focus of Fortson’s research over the years has been on what he calls “bargain basement elementary particle physics.” Instead of using a giant particle accelerator, he figured out several ways to use small scale experiments with atoms to search for the breakdown of symmetries exhibited by the elementary particles such as electrons inside the atoms. One such symmetry has to do with the handedness of the spin of a particle. The spin is said to be right handed If the particle is spinning clockwise when viewed along its direction of motion, left handed if spinning counter clockwise. For a long time, Fortson notes, it was thought that the laws of physics obeyed “parity,” that is, nothing would change regardless of whether particles exhibited left- or right-handedness. Then, in 1956, Chein-Shiung Wu, of Columbia University, performed an experiment suggested by theorists Tsung Dao Lee of Columbia University and Chen Ning Yang of the Institute of Advanced Study, proving that is not the way nature works. Parity had been violated, that is, how a particle interacts does indeed depend upon its handedness.
Parity Violation Measurement
Fortson spent most of his research life perfecting the measurement of parity violation in atoms, and pursuing the search for a related effect, time-reversal symmetry violation in atoms, predicted by many elementary particle theories -- “although it was significant that we did the experiments, we never saw the predicted time reversal effects,” he notes. Fortson earned his graduate degree in physics under Norman Ramsey and then went on to the University of Washington where he did postdoctoral work under Hans Dehmelt. After two years there, he worked for a year with Wolfgang Paul in Germany before returning to the University of Washington, where’s he’s been ever since. In 1989 the Nobel Prize in Physics was divided among Ramsey, "for the invention of the separated oscillatory fields method and its use in the hydrogen maser and other atomic clocks," and Dehmelt and Paul, "for the development of the ion trap technique." Fortson says his thesis adviser, Ramsey, and his postdoc adviser, Dehmelt, “were very important in my career even though I didn’t follow in their footsteps. They were role models just in the way they did their work. I didn’t try to replicate or follow up on their work, per se. But in the spirit of their work, I would say I did.”
A Scholarship to Duke
Most professors at major universities also teach, and Fortson was no exception. Over the years he taught everything from freshman physics to advanced graduate physics. Before he became an emeritus a decade ago, he nurtured a total of 25 graduate students for their Ph.D. theses. Fortson recalls he became interested in science in 8th grade, and by the time he’d graduated from high school, he knew he wanted to be a physicist. The detonation of the atom bomb at the end of World War II made him realize that physicists “really knew what they were doing.” Being a bright student, Fortson won a four-year scholarship to Duke University and completed his undergraduate studies, along with some graduate courses, in three years. At the end of this time an academic scientist had a great impact on his career and his approach to his own students later, and he tells a little story about him: “I had another year of scholarship money, so I thought I would just come back and do some research and just think a bit,” he recalls. “The chairman of the physics department was a man named Walter Nielson, and he hadn’t seen me since I’d taken his mechanics class for freshmen. But one day he called me into his office and he said, ‘I understand you’re going to come back here and basically take history and fool around. I don’t think you ought to do that.’ He said, ‘If you do that I don’t know what will happen to you. I think you ought to go to graduate school. Would you like to go to Harvard? I’ll write you a letter.’ Nobody had ever really spoken to me like that. He had taken an interest in me … and I took an interest in my own students later, partly because of that.” Fortson’s advice for early career researchers who are getting their first grant from RCSA today is: “Make the most of it. It’s your first chance, when you get it, to have some money. Pick something small, or begin a small part of a larger project that you can finish with the RCSA money. That way you - and others - will see you can succeed.” Making the most of it made all the difference for Fortson.
