IN MEMORIAM

Robert Reginald Brown

Professor of Physics, Emeritus

UC Berkeley

1923 – 2010

Robert (Bob) Reginald Brown, 87, emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, died Sunday, May 23, 2010. Born April 4, 1923, in Alameda, California, he attended UC Berkeley, earning his B.A. in 1944 and his Ph.D. in 1952, both in physics. From 1944 to 1946, Bob served as a Japanese translator in the U.S. Naval Reserve. He joined the Department of Physics in 1957, and remained at Berkeley until his retirement in 1982.

 

Bob’s research involved balloon-borne x-ray measurements of energetic electrons precipitating into the high latitude atmosphere along auroral zone magnetic field lines. Together with Berkeley astrophysics professor Kinsey Anderson, he discovered that auroral x-rays are produced near-simultaneously at both ends of a magnetic field line and, hence, that acceleration of the electrons producing these x-rays occurred in the near-equatorial region at an altitude of about 60,000 km. To achieve this result, Bob’s team flew balloons from Macquarie Island during the southern hemisphere summer while Anderson launched x-ray payloads from Alaska.

 

Bob began his Berkeley research career in a most auspicious manner. He came to Berkeley from a teaching position in New Mexico because he knew that the recently discovered radiation belts of the Earth would produce significant effects in the high latitude ionosphere and atmosphere—that is, in the auroral zone—and he wanted to build x-ray detectors to measure them. He assembled a group of students and technicians who built balloon payloads weighing less than 12 pounds (to comply with Federal Aviation Administration regulations), and they set out for Alaska in July 1959, for their first flights. They were fortunate to encounter three major magnetic disturbances unlike any found later in Bob’s career. These events produced thesis materials on polar cap absorption due to huge x-ray events and on solar cosmic ray protons that produced nuclear reactions with atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen.

 

Bob served the Department of Physics and the University well. He mentored nine Ph.D. students. He served as associate dean of the College of Letters and Science at a trying time in the administration of the college, from 1974 to 1977. He was awarded the Berkeley Citation for this service upon his retirement.

 

Bob enjoyed building and playing early keyboard instruments. During his years at Berkeley, he built an eighteenth-century spinet from scratch. He and his second wife, Mary Lou Norrie-Brown, who was a professor emerita of physical education at Berkeley, also enjoyed listening to classical music; and in his later years he became a lifetime member of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music. He also enjoyed a lifelong interest in amateur radio and propagation. Known by the call letters NM7M, Bob worked mainly on the top band of 160 meters and wrote several articles on propagation effects at such wavelengths.

 

Bob was a friend to all and always had a smile on his face. He is missed by his many physics, music, and ham radio friends. He is survived by three children from his first marriage and their families: Janet Brown Becker of Long Beach, California; Bruce Alan Brown of West Hollywood, California; and Jennifer Brown Modestou of North Liberty, Iowa.

 

 

Forrest Mozer

2011