Francis Goddard Slack (November 1, 1897 – February 2, 1985) was an American physicist. He was a physics teacher, researcher, and administrator in academia who was renowned for placing equal emphasis on teaching and on research.

Education

Slack was born in Superior, Wisconsin on November 1, 1897. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Georgia in 1918. Thereupon, he entered the United States Army, where he was trained and commissioned as a pilot; he did not see combat in World War I, as the war ended before his graduation from pilot training. In 1921, he entered Columbia University; he received his Ph.D. degree in physics in 1926. Between his entry and graduation from Columbia, Slack spent a period of study and research with Arnold Sommerfeld at his Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Career

Slack remained at Columbia for a period after receipt of his doctorate. In 1928, he became an associate professor of physics at Vanderbilt University, where his focus was on strengthening both teaching and research. At Vanderbilt, he organized and equipped an advanced laboratory in which students could learn the fundamentals of electrical measurement in the performance of the famous experiments which measured the fundamental constants such as the charge of the electron (q), the electron's mass-to-charge ratio (m/q), and the Planck constant (h). In 1931 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 1939, Slack was appointed Professor of Physics and head of the Vanderbilt Department of Physics. He advocated and practiced equal emphasis on teaching and on research in his academic career as a physics teacher, researcher, and administrator. While at Vanderbilt, Slack maintained ties with his alma mater Columbia University. In December 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons; they communicated these results to Lise Meitner. Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, who correctly interpreted these results as being nuclear fission. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939. In 1944, Hahn received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission. Some historians have documented the history of the discovery of nuclear fission and believe Meitner should have been awarded the Nobel Prize with Hahn. Even before it was published, Meitner's and Frisch's interpretation of the work of Hahn and Strassmann crossed the Atlantic Ocean with Niels Bohr, who was to lecture at Princeton University. Isidor Isaac Rabi and Willis Lamb, two Columbia University physicists working at Princeton, heard the news and carried it back to Columbia. Rabi said he told Fermi; Fermi gave credit to Lamb. It was soon clear to a number of scientists at Columbia that they should try to detect the energy released in the nuclear fission of uranium from neutron bombardment. On 25 January 1939, Slack was a member of the experimental team at Columbia University which conducted the first nuclear fission experiment in the United States, which was conducted in the basement of Pupin Hall; the other members of the team were Herbert L. Anderson, Eugene T. Booth, John R. Dunning, Enrico Fermi, and G. Norris Glasoe. During the Manhattan Project, Slack returned to Columbia to work with Dunning, who was conducting pioneering work on gaseous diffusion to separate uranium isotopes; others working on the project included Booth, Henry A. Boorse, Willard F. Libby, and Alfred O. C. Nier. Slack was on the Editorial Advisory Board (formerly called Associate Editors) of the American Journal of Physics from 1941 to 1943.

Selected Literature

Honors