Farewell Stuart


I am very saddened today to hear of the sudden passing of my colleague Stuart Freedman. He was a great scientist and a great mentor. I will miss his dry wit and gift to see right to the heart of an issue. As part of his Ph.D. work circa 1972 with Clauser he performed the first experimental result to show a violation of Bell’s inequality, demonstrating that quantum mechanics was not only complete but non-local in character. This was during a time where “dabbling” in the foundations of quantum mechanics was not particularly fashionable. However, his ambitious result paved the way for the later celebrated work of Aspect et al. and is sadly often forgotten in such discussions. The breadth of his contributions to science is uncanny, spanning many fields and specialties following him from Berkeley to Princeton, Stanford, University of Chicago, and back to Berkeley. He was a fellow of the American Physical Society and Member of the National Academy. At Berkeley, he held the prestigious Luis W. Alvarez Chair in Experimental Physics. I was most familiar with him in his recent role as the US spokesman for the CUORE collaboration, meeting him in 2005 while I was still a postdoc at Berkeley Lab. His voice of scientific leadership in our work will be greatly missed. It was a privilege to have worked with him and collaborated with him, and to name him amongst my mentors. Farewell, Stuart. You will be missed.