Matthew Sands

Matthew Linzee Sands (October 20, 1919 – September 13, 2014) was an American physicist and educator best known as a co-author of the Feynman Lectures on Physics.

A graduate of Rice University, Sands served with the Naval Ordnance Laboratory and the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.

After the war, Sands studied cosmic rays for his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the supervision of Bruno Rossi.

Matthew Linzee Sands was born in Oxford, Massachusetts, on October 20, 1919.

His parents were Linzee Sands and Beatrice Goyette, both of whom were bookkeepers.

He had a brother, Roger, and a sister, Claire, who was seven years younger.

As a 12-year-old Boy Scout, Sands was motivated by his scoutmaster, who was a radio amateur, to build his own shortwave radio receiver.

With the aid of information from the Radio Amateur's Handbook, he constructed it out of parts scavenged from old radios.

He was encouraged to study mathematics and science by his high school math teacher, John Chafee, a graduate of Brown University.

After high school, Sands entered Clark University, where he studied physics and mathematics, and eventually received his Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in 1940.

At Clark, his physics professors were Theodore P. Jorgensen, who became famous for his book "The Physics of Golf", and Percy M. Roope, who participated in the rocket experiments of Robert H. Goddard.

As part of a job subsidized at 35 cents per hour by the National Youth Administration, they assigned him to build physics equipment in the machine shops, where he became familiar with the drill press, lathe, and other metalworking tools.

Sand went on to receive his Master of Arts (M.A.) in physics from Rice University.

At Rice, Sands took graduate courses in relativity, statistical mechanics, and thermodynamics from Harold A. Wilson, who was the first chair of the Rice physics department.

He also completed experimental studies of ferromagnetism.

At Rice, Sands met his first wife, Elizabeth, an undergraduate student there.

In 1941, Sands went to the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington, D.C., where he learned more about electronics under Joseph F. Keithley.

Keithly and Sands developed two influence mines, from which three patents were derived.

They performed sea tests of a working prototype, but the program was stopped for unknown reasons.

By 1943, Sands had become impatient with the Navy's bureaucracy.

After discussing the situation with Wilson, he appeared unannounced in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the office of Dorothy McKibbin, who had been designated to meet newcomers to Los Alamos Laboratory.

After she made a telephone call to the personnel office, which had just received a desperate call for electronics people, Sands was bussed to Los Alamos.

To his surprise, he was met by Jorgenson, who had just joined the Manhattan Project after leaving Clark and going to Nebraska.

He immediately took Sands to the library to read Robert Serber's Los Alamos Primer, which introduced him to the basic physical principles of nuclear fission as they were known at the time, and their implications for nuclear weapon design.

By this time, Sands had extensive experience with electronics and was immediately thrust into the electronics group, which was tasked with making instruments for the whole laboratory, and whose head was Darol Froman.

Within this group, his close collaborators were William Elmore, William Higinbotham, and Ernest Titterton.

Anybody who had an instrumentation problem would come to the group for help.

As a result, Sands worked with Luis Alvarez, Robert Bacher, Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, Otto Frisch, Bruno Rossi, Emilio Segrè, Robert Walker and Robert Wilson; many of these famous physicists played important roles in his later career.

In particular, he formed a close relationship with Rossi, with whom he later decided to work on his post-war Ph.D. degree.

Rossi was most interested in the group's nuclear electronics equipment: pulse counters and amplifiers, discriminators, and scalers.

In this area, Sands designed and patented a pulse height analyzer, and with Otto Frisch and Elmore, a pulse amplifier.

He also created electronics for more general purposes, such as precise temperature regulation, and control of electroplating operations.

In 1945, the Los Alamos Laboratory carried out the Trinity nuclear test at a remote site near Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Sands worked with Walker on a piezoelectric pressure measurement of the atmospheric shock wave produced by "the gadget", a prototype of the Fat Man weapon later dropped on Nagasaki.

Their instrumentation worked well during a test explosion of 108 tons of TNT in May 1945, but no information was obtained during the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, because an unexpected rain shower the night before soaked the apparatus.

To raise public consciousness of issues raised by Trinity, David Hawkins, William Higinbotham, Philip Morrison, Robert Wilson, Sands, and others formed the Los Alamos Association of Atomic Scientists.

Sands went to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1950, and helped build and operate its 1.5 GeV electron synchrotron.

He became deputy director for the construction and early operation of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in 1963.

Sands later joined the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) as a professor of physics, and served as its Vice Chancellor for Science from 1969 to 1972.

In 1998, The American Physical Society awarded him the Robert R. Wilson Prize "for his many contributions to accelerator physics and the development of electron-positron and proton colliders."