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Historical records matching Dr. Colgate Whitehead Darden, III, Ph.D.
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About Dr. Colgate Whitehead Darden, III, Ph.D.
- Colgate's birth and death information are available at https://www.myheritage.com/matchingresult-7b2207dbbd37aa9be99587462... and in his obituary in The News Journal, Wilmington, Del., Thursday, March 19, 2009, page B8.
- The following write-up is available at http://boson.physics.sc.edu/Department/doc/QuantumLeap/QuantumLeap2..., and is provided below in its entirety (except for images):
- "The Loss of Professor Colgate W. Darden III
- "By Frank T. Avignone III
- "Colgate W. Darden III, Distinguished Professor Emeritus (alias “Coke”), lost his long battle with cancer on March 12, 2009. Dr. Darden joined the physics faculty in the summer of 1964 as a part-time lecturer in astronomy. Coke received a BS degree in electrical engineering and a Master of Arts at the University of Virginia (UVA) and his Ph.D. degree in nuclear physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had taken courses in astronomy at UVA and maintained an interest as an amateur astronomer. In his first year at the University of South Carolina, he established a modern lecture course in astronomy that was the genesis of the present astronomy program later created by Professor John Safko. Over the years the program developed into the current one that accounts for a significant fraction of the student contact hours of the department.
- " Although he was paid on the basis of one-third time, he worked full time and was as productive as a full-time tenured associate professor. As time went on, he moved into teaching a number of different physics courses, and in particular was very effective in teaching Physics for Engineers. In these early years, his engineering background was extremely valuable in setting the course standards exactly where they should have been.
- "In 1965 Darden played a very important role as a mentor to me when I joined the USC faculty on Jan. 1 of that year. Together we wrote a successful proposal to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to develop a reactor neutrino research program at the Savannah River P-Reactor, the site of the discovery of the neutrino about seven years earlier. Coke Darden’s mature guidance resulted in a successful program and was in no small part responsible for USC’s present internationally known program in low energy neutrino physics and double-beta decay. Several years later Coke was the principal investigator of the AEC grant to develop a modern nuclear physics laboratory. This has been a very successful pedagogical tool that teaches real-world research techniques in nuclear physics, as well as health, medical, and environmental physics.
- "The next major milestone in the long list of outstanding contributions of Colgate Darden came in 1977 when he took a leave of absence in Hamburg, Germany, at the Deutches Electron Synchrotron (DESY) Laboratory. This was very shortly after the psi particle had been discovered, and there was a race on to attempt to observe the upsilon particle and its excited states. Darden proposed to the laboratory leadership the restoration of the decommissioned Double Arm Spectrometer (DASP) to working order.
- "He and his colleagues instrumented it to search for the upsilon and several excited states. This energy was just out of reach of other accelerators at that time. By the time he returned to USC in May 1978, the search was successful; the DASP experiment observed the upsilon () and measured the energies of both the first and second excited states, -prime, and -double prime.
- "These results were world-renowned and won Darden the Russell Research Award for his leadership in the project. These experiments and their results were described in the famous text on elementary particle physics by Professor Lev Okun, a famous Soviet scientist at the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) in Moscow.
- "Because of these successes, Coke was invited to take a leadership role in the construction of the central vertex wire chamber of the new ARGUS detector at DESY to carry these investigations further. He involved Professor Richard Childers (now deceased), who had left research, and they built an effective team. They obtained funding to alternate semesters in Germany as run chiefs during the operation of the experiment. During the next few years, the collaboration measured the spectroscopy of the D* and F* mesons and the hyperon. This was the solidification of the establishment of a viable program in high-energy physics in the department. Following the successful activities at DESY, Darden and Childers established a research program at the Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Ill.
- "These successes led to the attraction of Carl Rosenfeld to USC as the heir apparent to lead the program and later to the addition of Jeff Wilson, Milind Purohit, and more recently Sanjib Mishra and Roberto Petti. This is a highly successful program, representing a large part of the cutting-edge research and funding in the department.
- "Darden retired in 1994 but remained in contact with many members of the department until his death. As a legacy, Colgate Darden made important contributions in the creation of three important research programs in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He will be missed as a friend, colleague, and benefactor of our department."
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Dr. Colgate Whitehead Darden, III, Ph.D.'s Timeline
| 1930 |
November 6, 1930
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Norfolk, Virginia, United States
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| 2009 |
March 12, 2009
Age 78
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Lexington, Lexington County, South Carolina, United States
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