Henk Casimir This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. Physics Today September 2000

   www.aip.org/pt/vol-53/iss-9/p8 - [Cached]

   Published on: 12/2/1999   Last Visited: 9/15/2000

   Born in The Hague on 15 July 1909, Casimir was endowed with a strong body, fabulous memory, and great intelligence.
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   Casimir spent the years 1932­33 with Wolfgang Pauli in Zürich, an experience that had a lasting and far-reaching influence on him.
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   Casimir loved to recount his relationship with Pauli and would include anecdotes from that period in most of his seminars in later life.
   
   After Ehrenfest's untimely death in 1933, Casimir returned to Leiden, where he continued to be active in both physics and mathematics.
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   In 1942, during World War II, Casimir moved to the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. He remained an active scientist and in 1945 wrote a well-known paper on Lars Onsager's principle of microscopic reversibility.
   
   In 1948, he published a famous paper with Dik Polder on the influence of retardation on the London­ van der Waals forces. What is now known as the Casimir force has been convincingly demonstrated only recently.
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   Even then, Casimir continued to be scientifically active. An interesting example is his work with Chris Bouwkamp on the representation of the field of spatially distributed electrical currents into a series of multipole fields. This work formed the basis for extensive work on antennas with arbitrary current distributions.
   
   In this period he also laid the foundation for what came to be known as the science­technology spiral. Technology uses science with a time delay of, say, 10 years ; science in turn is driven by new developments in technology ; and both progress together. For example, radio lamps made it possible for new aspects of atomic and nuclear physics to be researched. The resulting science­technology spiral is largely responsible for the great technology progress of the previous century. A much more comprehensive description of Casimir's views (and an excellent book) can be found in his autobiography Haphazard Reality--Half a Century of Science (Harper & Row, 1983).
   
   The Philips labs had been isolated from the rest of the world during World War II.
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   With that aim, Casimir strongly cultivated contacts with colleagues from other scientific centers and industry all over the world. In this effort, he drew on his impressive fluency in several languages and his deep conviction that research is essentially an international activity, and that repetition and duplication are useless!.
   
   Within the company, Casimir did not put many restricting boundary conditions on suggestions for programs of work, provided they were potentially of interest to Philips and not merely, as he put it, advanced classroom experiments. He was able to stimulate people by knowledgeable hints for progress in widely diverging fields, avoiding short-term interference with their affairs. Casimir's abundant knowledge of science (and arts!) together with his extraordinary capacity for dissecting the most intricate problems, often by the use of amusing metaphors, made conversation with him on the bottlenecks in scientific progress not only entertaining but also effective. He contributed substantially to an atmosphere at the Philips research facility that was fertile and productive. After his retirement from Philips in 1972, he continued to foment research by coming into the laboratory in Eindhoven and asking young people What is new in physics and what can we learn from it? As a young physicist at Philips, I was greatly stimulated by such conversations.
   
   Casimir was active on the Dutch and European physics and industry scenes. He was involved in the founding of the European Physical Society in 1968, and after his retirement from the Philips board of management in 1972, he became president of that society. He was also one of the founders and the first chairman of the European Industrial Research Management Association (EIRMA).
   
   Casimir loved strenuous walking in mountainous areas, eating good food, and playing the violin. With his extraordinary memory, he recited by heart poems to his children, and used poems in his lectures. He loved a good chat with people from almost any discipline, particularly the arts or literature. He visibly and deeply loved his wife and five children, and they formed a fine family.
   
   Casimir was awarded many prizes and honors. Most recent was the American Physical Society's George E. Pake Prize for outstanding scientific and industrial research leadership. With the death of Henk Casimir, we have lost one of the most gifted scientists and industrial research leaders of the century.