Hoover Fellow And Stanford Physicist Spoke During ODU And Jlab Symposium On June 4

Sidney D. Drell

Sidney D. Drell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor emeritus of theoretical physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) at Stanford University, spoke on June 4 on the Old Dominion University campus. The talk, which was free and open to the public, was part of the third international symposium on the Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn Sum Rule, hosted by the ODU physics department and the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility from June 2-5.

The goal of the symposium, held in ODU's Godwin and Oceanography and Physics buildings, was to bring together experimentalists and theorists working on spin structure functions and their moments at low and intermediate energies. Previous symposiums were held in Mainz, Germany and Genova, Italy.

The symposium consisted of 20 invited talks, 30 contributed talks and two sessions with roundtable discussions on topics ranging from the Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn Sum Rule with real photons and its extensions to virtual photons and spin polarizabilities and Compton scattering.

A theoretical physicist and arms control specialist, Drell is widely recognized for his contributions in the study of theoretical physics, particularly elementary particle processes and quantum theory. He is a founding member of JASON, a group of approximately fifty academic scientists who convene semiannually to study selected scientific issues for the military and other federal agencies on issues of national importance. Drell is a member of the Advisory Committee to the National Nuclear Security Administration, chairs the Senior Review Board for the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center and acts as a consultant to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

As an adviser to the executive and legislative branches of government on national security and defense technical issues, Drell served as chairman of the panel on Nuclear Weapons Safety of the House Armed Services Committee, the Technology Review Panel of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the UC President's Council that oversees Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

From 1993 to 2001, Drell served as a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He has also been a member of the Commission on Maintaining U.S. Nuclear Weapons Expertise and the President's Science Advisory Committee.

He has received several awards, including the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, the William O. Baker Award for contributions to national security, the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award, and the Enrico Fermi Award, the nation's oldest award in science and technology. He was one of 10 scientists honored in 2000 as "founders of national reconnaissance as a space discipline" by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office.

Drell has written two books on relativistic quantum mechanics and fields with J.D. Bjorken that have been widely translated and used for more than 30 years. He also wrote "Reducing Nuclear Danger" with McGeorge Bundy and William J. Crowe Jr. His 1983 Danz lectures at the University of Washington were published in "Facing the Threat of Nuclear Weapons." In 1993, a collection of his writings and congressional testimony was published in "In the Shadow of the Bomb: Physics and Arms Control."

After joining the physics faculty at Stanford in 1956, Drell transferred to SLAC when it was created in 1963 and served as deputy director until retiring in 1998. He received his bachelor's degree in 1946 from Princeton University and his master's and doctorate from the University of Illinois in 1947 and 1949, respectively.

For more information, contact Sebastian Kuhn at gdh2004@physics.odu.edu or visit www.physics.odu.edu/GDH2004 for copy of the presentations and photos.

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