Jack Sandweiss

1930 - 2020

1930 - 2020
Jack Sandweiss, Member of the National Academy of Science of the United States and Donner Professor of Physics Emeritus at Yale University, died peacefully in his sleep on November 19, 2020 in Hamden Connecticut at the age of 90. Jack was born in Chicago IL, on August 19, 1930 to Charles and Florence Sandweiss. After earning a B.S. in Physics in 1952 and a Ph.D. in experimental physics in 1957, both at the UC Berkeley, he accepted a position as instructor at Yale University in 1957. Within seven years he had been promoted to full professor and retired from Yale in 2014. On his retirement, a Yale tribute called him a "superb member of the Yale community...part of the glue that holds this place together" and praised his service for helping "to close the cultural gap between the sciences and the humanities."

Jack was an internationally recognized and highly respected leader in experimental elementary particle physics, a field that epitomizes mankind's search for an understanding of the basic constituents of matter and their fundamental interactions. He pioneered, soon after the discovery of the antiproton, in building beams of antiprotons at Brookhaven National Labs to study the properties of that then esoteric new particle. This led to the discovery of several new fundamental particles such as the anti-Xi hyperon. He followed this by equally pioneering beams of the even more esoteric sigma hyperons at Fermilab. He did groundbreaking work on fundamental symmetries of space and time by studying time reversal invariance in kaon decays at Argonne Labs and searching for parity violations in heavy ion collisions at Brookhaven. He also pioneered in elucidating and searching for a fundamentally new form of matter, atoms with unusual quark content called strangelets, both on Earth, in Moon Dust, and later in outer space.

Jack's outstanding success in research was recognized in myriad ways, perhaps most significantly by his election to the National Academy of Science of the United States in 1987. His prominence and influence in physics went beyond research, however. He served on many national and international committees and chaired the U.S. High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) from 1976 to 1988. Jack was also the Editor of the American Physical Society's flagship publication Physical Review Letters from 1988 to 2013--the longest tenure of any editor of this leading journal.

Jack married Letha (Boeck) Sandweiss in 1956; she predeceased him in 2013. Jack is survived by his children, their spouses, and his grandchildren: Daniel, Maria del Carmen [Rodriguez] and Andrew Sandweiss of Bangor, Maine; Anne Riz-Sandweiss, Thomas Riz, and Elena Riz of Bern, Switzerland; and Benjamin, Christin [Ciresi], and Serena Sandweiss of Hamden, Connecticut. He is also survived by his brother Bernard Sands and by many friends, colleagues, and former students. They all miss him deeply.