H. Pierre Noyes
Encyclopedia
H. Pierre Noyes is an American nuclear physicist
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

. He has been a member of the faculty at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S...

 at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 since 1962. Noyes specialized in several areas of research, including the relativistic few-body problem in nuclear
Nuclear physics
Nuclear physics is the field of physics that studies the building blocks and interactions of atomic nuclei. The most commonly known applications of nuclear physics are nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons technology, but the research has provided application in many fields, including those...

 and particle physics
Particle physics
Particle physics is a branch of physics that studies the existence and interactions of particles that are the constituents of what is usually referred to as matter or radiation. In current understanding, particles are excitations of quantum fields and interact following their dynamics...

; foundations of physics; combinatorial hierarchy
Combinatorial hierarchy
Combinatorial hierarchy is a mathematical structure of bit-strings generated by an algorithm based on discrimination . It was originally discovered by A.F. Parker-Rhodes in the 1960s, and is interesting because of physical interpretations that relate it to quantum mechanics...

; and bit-string physics
Bit-string physics
Bit-string physics is an emerging body of theory which considers the universe to be a process of operations on strings of bits. Bit-string physics is often associated with A.F. Parker-Rhodes' combinatorial hierarchy, which is notable for its relationship with the electromagnetic and gravitational...

: a discrete model for masses, coupling constants, and cosmology from first principles.

Biography

H. Pierre Noyes was born in 1923 in Paris, France to the American chemist William Albert Noyes, Sr. and Katherine Macy, daughter of Jesse Macy
Jesse Macy
Jesse Macy was an American political scientist and historian of the late 19th and early 20th century, specializing in the history of American political parties, party systems, and the Civil War...

. His older half-brothers were W. Albert Noyes, Jr.
W. Albert Noyes, Jr.
William Albert Noyes, Jr. was a chemist and the son of a famous chemist, William A. Noyes. They are the only father and son who have each won the Priestley Medal.-External links:*...

 and Richard Macy Noyes
Richard M. Noyes
- Life and work :Richard Macy Noyes was born April 6, 1919 in Champaign, Illinois.In 1959 Noyes became Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oregon. His research area was focused on the kinetic studies of oscillating reactions. Together with Richard J. Field, Endre Koros he developed a model ...

 who both became chemists.

Education

Noyes received his baccalaureate degree in physics (magna cum laude) in 1943 from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

. One of his roommates during this time was Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was deeply influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift," which has since become an English-language staple.Kuhn...

, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , by Thomas Kuhn, is an analysis of the history of science. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of scientific knowledge and it triggered an ongoing worldwide assessment and reaction in — and beyond — those scholarly...

. Before moving on to doctoral studies, Noyes spent a year at the Antenna Group at the MIT Radiation Laboratory and served in the US Navy for two years as an Aviation Electronics Technician Mate.

Noyes earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics
Theoretical physics
Theoretical physics is a branch of physics which employs mathematical models and abstractions of physics to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena...

 from the University of California at Berkeley in 1950 doing research under the direction of Robert Serber
Robert Serber
Robert Serber was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; he was the eldest son of David Serber and Rose Frankel. He married Charlotte Leof in 1933. Rose Serber died in 1922; David married Charlotte's cousin Frances Leof in...

 with Geoffrey Chew
Geoffrey Chew
Geoffrey F. Chew is an American theoretical physicist.He has worked as a professor of physics at the UC Berkeley since 1957 and has been an emeritus since 1991. Chew holds a PhD in theoretical particle physics from the University of Chicago. Between 1950 and 1956, he was a physics faculty member...

 as his advisor. Noyes’ first doctoral problem was pion-pion scattering, followed by a second problem: meson production from proton-deuteron decay. His work under Chew was among the early applications of S-matrix theory
S-matrix theory
S-matrix theory was a proposal for replacing local quantum field theory as the basic principle of elementary particle physics.It avoided the notion of space and time by replacing it with abstract mathematical properties of the S-matrix...

.

After earning his Ph.D., Noyes spent a postdoctoral year on a Fulbright scholarship
Fulbright Program
The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright-Hays Program, is a program of competitive, merit-based grants for international educational exchange for students, scholars, teachers, professionals, scientists and artists, founded by United States Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946. Under the...

 at the University of Birmingham
University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Birmingham Medical School and Mason Science College . Birmingham was the first Redbrick university to gain a charter and thus...

, England, under the direction of Rudolf Peierls
Rudolf Peierls
Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, CBE was a German-born British physicist. Rudolf Peierls had a major role in Britain's nuclear program, but he also had a role in many modern sciences...

.

Career

Noyes’ career included several academic and research positions. He first worked as a post-doctoral fellow and then as assistant professor of Physics at the University of Rochester
University of Rochester
The University of Rochester is a private, nonsectarian, research university in Rochester, New York, United States. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees. The university has six schools and various interdisciplinary programs.The...

 (1952–5). During that time, he compiled and edited the Proceedings of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th Rochester Conferences on High Energy Physics
ICHEP
ICHEP or International Conference on High Energy Physics is one of the most prestigious international scientific conferences in the field of particle physics, bringing together leading theorists and experimentalists of the world. It was first held in 1950, and is biennial since 1960...

. During the summers of those years, he worked at Project Matterhorn at Princeton
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

, researching thermonuclear weapons (1952) and at the Brookhaven National Laboratory
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Brookhaven National Laboratory , is a United States national laboratory located in Upton, New York on Long Island, and was formally established in 1947 at the site of Camp Upton, a former U.S. Army base...

 (1953). During the summer of 1954, he worked on calculating the binding energy
Binding energy
Binding energy is the mechanical energy required to disassemble a whole into separate parts. A bound system typically has a lower potential energy than its constituent parts; this is what keeps the system together—often this means that energy is released upon the creation of a bound state...

 of the triton using a particular non-relativistic, quantum mechanical potential model fitted to the low energy nucleon-nucleon parameters at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory conducting unclassified scientific research. It is located on the grounds of the University of California, Berkeley, in the Berkeley Hills above the central campus...

 in Berkeley, California
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...

.

In 1955, Noyes joined the Theoretical Division of what was to become the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , just outside Livermore, California, is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center founded by the University of California in 1952...

. From 1956 to 1962, he served there as group leader of the General Research Group, under co-founder and director Edward Teller
Edward Teller
Edward Teller was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb," even though he did not care for the title. Teller made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy , and surface physics...

. During that time, he also served as co-chair of the design-review pre-mortem committee for the devices tested on Christmas Island
Kiritimati
Kiritimati or Christmas Island is a Pacific Ocean raised coral atoll in the northern Line Islands, and part of the Republic of Kiribati....

 in 1962 during Operation Dominic I, including the UGM-27 Polaris
UGM-27 Polaris
The Polaris missile was a two-stage solid-fuel nuclear-armed submarine-launched ballistic missile built during the Cold War by Lockheed Corporation of California for the United States Navy....

 submarine-launched ballistic missile
Submarine-launched ballistic missile
A submarine-launched ballistic missile is a ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead that can be launched from submarines. Modern variants usually deliver multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles each of which carries a warhead and allows a single launched missile to...

 and Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) warhead prototypes.

During a sabbatical from his work at Lawrence Livermore in 1957 and 1958, Noyes was Leverhulme Trust
Leverhulme Trust
The Leverhulme Trust was established in 1925 under the will of the First Viscount Leverhulme, William Hesketh Lever, with the instruction that its resources should be used to support "scholarships for the purposes of research and education."...

 Lecturer in the Experimental Physics
Experimental physics
Within the field of physics, experimental physics is the category of disciplines and sub-disciplines concerned with the observation of physical phenomena in order to gather data about the universe...

 Department of the University of Liverpool
University of Liverpool
The University of Liverpool is a teaching and research university in the city of Liverpool, England. It is a member of the Russell Group of large research-intensive universities and the N8 Group for research collaboration. Founded in 1881 , it is also one of the six original "red brick" civic...

. He also worked as a consultant to General Atomics
General Atomics
General Atomics is a nuclear physics and defense contractor headquartered in San Diego, California. General Atomics’ research into fission and fusion matured into competencies in related technologies, allowing the company to expand into other fields of research...

 under Freeman Dyson
Freeman Dyson
Freeman John Dyson FRS is a British-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum field theory, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering. Dyson is a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists...

 and Ted Taylor
Ted Taylor
Theodore Brewster Taylor , was a Mexican-born, American theoretical physicist and prominent nuclear weapon designer who later in life became a nuclear disarmament advocate.- Early life:...

 for Project Orion
Project Orion (nuclear propulsion)
Project Orion was a study of a spacecraft intended to be directly propelled by a series of explosions of atomic bombs behind the craft...

 (a nuclear explosion propelled space ship) from 1958 to 1961 at the invitation of Prof. Dyson.

In 1961, Noyes served as AVCO visiting professor at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

.

Starting in 1962, he worked at SLAC as head of theoretical physics until he was replaced by Sidney Drell
Sidney Drell
Sidney David Drell is an American theoretical physicist and arms control expert. He is a professor emeritus at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Drell is a noted contributor in the field of quantum electrodynamics and particle...

 (who combined that responsibility with being Deputy Director of SLAC). He progressed from associate professor from 1962 through 1967 to professor (at SLAC, 1967–2002) and was awarded emeritus
Emeritus
Emeritus is a post-positive adjective that is used to designate a retired professor, bishop, or other professional or as a title. The female equivalent emerita is also sometimes used.-History:...

 status in that rank on May 1, 2000. He collaborated with Richard Shoup at the Boundary Institute.

Noyes served as the Associate Editor of the Annual Reviews of Nuclear Science
Annual Reviews
Annual Reviews, located in Palo Alto California, is the non-profit publisher of a collection of 41 review series in specific disciplines in science and social science. Each review series contains 12 to 40 authoritative comprehensive review articles, covering the major journal articles on a...

 from 1962 until 1977. In 1979 he received an Alexander von Humboldt U.S. Senior Scientist Award
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation is a foundation set-up by the government of the Federal Republic and funded by the German Foreign Office, the Ministry of Education and Research, the Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development and others for the promotion of international co-operation...

, primarily to continue his theoretical work on the quantum mechanical three body problem for strongly interacting particles. In that same year he joined with John Amson, Ted Bastin
Ted Bastin
Ted Bastin was a physicist and mathematician who held doctorate degrees in both physics and mathematics from Kings College, Cambridge University, to which he won an Isaac Newton studentship...

, Clive W. Kilmister
Clive W. Kilmister
Clive W. Kilmister was a British applied mathematician who specialized in the mathematical foundations of physics, especially quantum mechanics and relativity. He was one of the discoverers of the combinatorial hierarchy, along with A. F. Parker-Rhodes and E. W. Bastin...

 and A. Fredrick Parker-Rhodes
Frederick Parker-Rhodes
Frederick Parker-Rhodes was an English linguist, plant pathologist, computer scientist, mathematician, mystic, and mycologist.-Background & education:...

 to found the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association (ANPA), and was president of that organization until 1987.

Research

In his early career, Noyes primarily focused on nuclear forces from an elementary particle point of view. In Inward Bound, Abraham Pais
Abraham Pais
Abraham Pais was a Dutch-born American physicist and science historian. Pais earned his Ph.D. from University of Utrecht just prior to a Nazi ban on Jewish participation in Dutch universities during World War II...

 had commented, correctly, that no one's work along this line lead to any fundamental new insights into elementary particle theory. Noyes’ research into this area confirmed that the phenomenological analysis of nucleon-nucleon and pion-nucleon scattering, supplemented by an S-matrix based dispersion theory, shows that quantum field theory
Quantum field theory
Quantum field theory provides a theoretical framework for constructing quantum mechanical models of systems classically parametrized by an infinite number of dynamical degrees of freedom, that is, fields and many-body systems. It is the natural and quantitative language of particle physics and...

 is roughly correct for two-particle scattering, and in some cases can be connected to the non-relativistic models used in nuclear physics. The research did not, however, lead to any unique, quantitative model of the strong interactions.

After leaving Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, he started working on the quantum mechanical three body problem developed by Ludvig Faddeev
Ludvig Faddeev
-References:...

, Alt, Grassberger, and Sandhas by reformulating it in the relativistic domain. In 1969, he concluded that any nonreletivistic quantum mechanical three body problem using strictly finite range forces between the pairs necessarily implies a non-local interaction in any three body system, which would extend to indefinitely large distances. A specific example of this is the fact that three identical particles with scattering lengths between the pairs that tend toward infinity, will support an indefinitely large number of three body bound states with their radii increasing as the square of that number, as was shown independently by Vitaly Efimov
Vitaly Efimov
Vitaly N. Efimov is a Russian theoretical physicist. He proposed the existence of a novel and exotic state of matter now dubbed the Efimov State as a researcher in A.F...

 in a specific model.

Driven by this success, an interest in John Stewart Bell’s
John Stewart Bell
John Stewart Bell FRS was a British physicist from Northern Ireland , and the originator of Bell's theorem, a significant theorem in quantum physics regarding hidden variable theories.- Early life and work :...

 work, and Thomas Phipps’ construction of a covering theory for both classical and quantum mechanics, Noyes was inspired to return his attention to the foundations of quantum mechanics. Around this time (1972-3), he heard a report from Ted Bastin on his combinatorial hierarchy work and met with Bastin and his collaborators: J. Amson, C. W. Kilmister, and A. F. Parker Rhodes. The research conducted during this interaction resulted in the development of and many papers on finite and discrete physics and cosmology called bit-string physics
Bit-string physics
Bit-string physics is an emerging body of theory which considers the universe to be a process of operations on strings of bits. Bit-string physics is often associated with A.F. Parker-Rhodes' combinatorial hierarchy, which is notable for its relationship with the electromagnetic and gravitational...

. This work became Noyes’ focus for much of the rest of the century. His contributions to the new field include:
  • He showed that show that, thanks to a 1952 paper by Freeman Dyson, the integer value of ћc/e2 = 137 given by the first three levels of the combinatorial hierarchy could be given physical interpretation as the maximum number of electron-positron pairs which could be discussed within a radius of ћ/2me, using renormalized quantum electrodynamics
    Renormalization
    In quantum field theory, the statistical mechanics of fields, and the theory of self-similar geometric structures, renormalization is any of a collection of techniques used to treat infinities arising in calculated quantities....

    . Further, the rest energy of this system (137 x (2mec2)) ≈ mπ could then suggest that the breakdown of quantum electrodynamics
    Quantum electrodynamics
    Quantum electrodynamics is the relativistic quantum field theory of electrodynamics. In essence, it describes how light and matter interact and is the first theory where full agreement between quantum mechanics and special relativity is achieved...

     found by Dyson might be due to the strong interactions mediated by pions. The same argument extended to the fourth level suggested that the closure of the scheme at the fourth level, characterized by 2127, could be understood as the formation of a black hole
    Black hole
    A black hole is a region of spacetime from which nothing, not even light, can escape. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will deform spacetime to form a black hole. Around a black hole there is a mathematically defined surface called an event horizon that...

     with the Planck mass by that number of baryons of protonic mass concentrated within ћ/mpc. Noyes, however, remained profoundly skeptical of these results until a decade later when David McGoveran
    David McGoveran
    David McGoveran is a consultant, researcher, lecturer, and industry analyst to the software industry; author of numerous books and articles in the fields of relational databases, transaction processing, business intelligence, business process management, mathematics, and physics; and an inventor...

     showed that the scheme not only allowed one to derive the Sommerfeld-Dirac formula for the fine structure spectrum of hydrogen and then to correct the 137 approximation by correctly calculating the next four significant figures in the inverse fine-structure constant
    Fine-structure constant
    In physics, the fine-structure constant is a fundamental physical constant, namely the coupling constant characterizing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction. Being a dimensionless quantity, it has constant numerical value in all systems of units...

     in agreement with experiment, but also to correct the value for Newton's gravitational constant
    Gravitational constant
    The gravitational constant, denoted G, is an empirical physical constant involved in the calculation of the gravitational attraction between objects with mass. It appears in Newton's law of universal gravitation and in Einstein's theory of general relativity. It is also known as the universal...

     and compute several other elementary particle coupling constants and mass ratios.
  • Work with Michael Manthey led to a cosmological model which predicted long ago that there was not enough matter to close the universe and that the ratio of dark matter
    Dark matter
    In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is matter that neither emits nor scatters light or other electromagnetic radiation, and so cannot be directly detected via optical or radio astronomy...

     to baryonic matter is 12.7. A consistent scheme developed by Ed Jones (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories) also predicted a positive cosmological constant of the magnitude that was only observed in 2011.
  • He compiled Selected Papers on Bit-String Physics to serve as an introduction to this new field.


Some of his letters to Gregory Breit
Gregory Breit
Gregory Breit was a Russian-born American physicist and professor at universities in New York, Wisconsin, Yale, and Buffalo...

 (1899–1981) are in the collection of the Yale University Library
Yale University Library
Yale University Library is the library system of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. It is the second-largest academic library in the North America, with approximately 12.5 million volumes housed in 20 buildings on campus...

.

Honors

Noyes’ honors include:
  • Fulbright Scholarship (Birmingham, England) (1950-1)
  • Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award (1979)
  • Leverhulme Lecturer in the Experimental Physics Department of the University of Liverpool (1957-8)
  • AVCO visiting professor at Cornell University (1961)
  • First Annual Alternative Natural Philosopher Award (1988?)

Publications

  • Bit-String Physics: A Finite and Discrete Approach to Natural Philosophy (2001)
  • Phys. Rev. Lett. 3, 191–193 (1959) Modification of the Effective-Range Formula for Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering, in collaboration with David Y. Wong at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley and Livermore, California
  • Phys. Rev. Lett. 15, 538–540 (1965) New Nonsingular Integral Equation for Two-Particle Scattering, in collaboration with David Y. Wong at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley and Livermore, California
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