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Death Notices

All information about these individuals is supplied by readers. The American Institute of Physics, Physics Today, and its staff assume no responsibility for the accuracy of the given information. Some of these listings will later appear as full obituaries in the print version of Physics Today.

Featured Obituaries

Simon van der Meer (1925-2011)

Simon van der Meer, the inventor of stochastic beam cooling, passed away on 4 March 2011 in Geneva. In 1984 van der Meer and Carlo Rubbia were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the W and Z bosons in the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) collider.

Victor Manuel Blanco (1918-2011)

Victor Manuel Blanco, director of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in La Serena, Chile, from 1967 to 1980, built CTIO into a leading observatory in the Southern Hemisphere and made it a model for successful national and international observatories.

Norman Foster Ramsey Jr (1915-2011)

Norman Foster Ramsey Jr died on 4 November 2011 at age 96. Ramsey is best known for inventing the separated oscillatory field method and the hydrogen maser, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1989, but those were just two of his many contributions.