Biography|Michael Witherell — The Sterling Hall Thesis Defended at Twenty-Three

In 1973 the University of Wisconsin physics department still sat in Sterling Hall, not in the later Chamberlin renovation.

Michael Witherell took a Ph.D. in experimental particle physics in that building that year, at twenty-three.

The American Institute of Physics file dates the doctorate to 1973 and names Richard Prepost as advisor.

The thesis title, recorded on the public record, is The eta-pion mass-spectrum from threshold to 1200 MeV/c² in the reaction π⁻p → π⁻ηp.

He had already taken a master's degree on the same campus in 1969.

Sterling Hall is the building a visitor can still walk up to, at about 43.07444 north, 89.40583 west, on the Madison campus.

Three years before the defense, on 24 August 1970, a bomb aimed at the Army Mathematics Research Center in this same hall killed postdoctoral physicist Robert Fassnacht and wrecked physics labs.

The department was still here when Witherell finished.

Physics later moved into renovated Chamberlin Hall, opened to the department in 2005. Pinning Chamberlin for 1973 would send a reader to the wrong door.

From Madison he went to Princeton as an instructor in 1973, then assistant professor from 1975 to 1981.

The doctorate year is firm. The defense day is not in the sources used here.

Photo: Reidar Hahn, public domain (U.S. Department of Energy work), via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait made at Fermilab, 15 August 2003.

Building photo: JabberWok, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.