Dr. Virgil E. Barnes II

Virgil E. Barnes II died peacefully on August 31 with his family at his side. He was a Professor of Physics at Purdue for 49 years and a leader in the golden age of subatomic particle discoveries since the 1960s that led to the modern understanding of the building blocks of the Universe.
Born November 2, 1935 in Austin, Texas, Dr. Barnes was the son of Virgil Everett Barnes, an eminent geologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and Mildred Louise Barnes. A top 10 winner of the national Westinghouse Science Talent Search competition while in high school, Dr. Barnes went on to study physics at Harvard before completing his PhD in 1962 at the University of Cambridge on a Marshall Scholarship. His advisor, the luminary Otto Frisch, had coined the term "nuclear fission." Dr. Barnes's first job was at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, then the center of particle physics research in the U.S. In 1964, he was on the team that discovered the Omega Minus particle, a key experiment which confirmed the quark model in high energy Physics and contributed to at least one Nobel Prize.
After joining the faculty of the Purdue University Physics Department in 1969, Dr. Barnes served as Assistant Dean of the College of Science, and mentored 8 graduate students, as well as over two dozen undergraduates. He became a founding member of the groups building particle detectors both at Fermilab near Chicago and at CERN in Europe. He developed techniques (still used around the world) for precisely measuring the energy of particles, key to identifying them and allowing many further discoveries.
In 1995, Dr. Barnes and the team at Fermilab discovered the top quark, completing the discovery of this class of elementary particles, begun 31 years earlier. In 2012, he was also a member of the team that discovered the Higgs Particle, which gives all other particles mass. This was the most important discovery in particle physics of the last few decades.
Dr. Barnes married Barbara Green, a fellow research scientist, in 1957. They had a son before her untimely death in 1963. He later met Linda Taylor while they were both vacationing on the French Riviera and it was love at first sight. They married in 1970 and had three sons.
The couple had many friends in the West Lafayette area and around the country, including a close knit group of couples who shared a love of fine food, wine, and raucous laughter, known as the "Gourmet Group." They were members of Parlor Club, where they presented well-received papers on various topics such as "Off the Beaten Path in Japan" and ""Terra Amata - A Paleolithic Campsite."
Dr. Barnes spoke French and German, loved classical music, and collected African and Asian art. He delighted his sons and grandchildren with toys and geometric creations, including a wand to create 20 foot long bubbles and a dodecahedron version of the Rubik's Cube. He even built his own harpsichord.
Dr. Barnes and his family traveled widely, including to Tibet, Egypt, Peru and Tanzania, as well as throughout Europe. His favorite vacation spot, though, was a beloved home on Cranberry Lake in the Adirondacks. The couple skied together for multiple weeks every year until Linda's death in 2011. Dr. Barnes continued skiing until he was 78.
Dr. Barnes is survived by his sisters Louise and brother-in-law Larry Seeman of Nashville, TN; his sister Elizabeth of New York, NY and Eze, France; his brother-in-law Allan Taylor of Los Angeles; as well as his four sons and their spouses: Virgil Barnes III of West Lafayette; Christopher and Noriko Barnes of Mountain View, CA; Jeffrey and Jaime Barnes of Maplewood, NJ; and Daniel Barnes and Alexandra Boucher of Washington, DC. He will also be fondly remembered by his 11 grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held at Thomas Duncan Hall, 619 Ferry Street, in Lafayette on Saturday, October 5 at 2:00pm.