Arthur Kent Kerman (born May 3, 1929 – May 11, 2017) was a Canadian-American nuclear physicist, a fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences. He was a professor emeritus of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP) and Laboratory for Nuclear Science He was known for his work on the theory of the structure of nuclei and on the theory of nuclear reactions.
Education
Arthur Kent Kerman was born May 3, 1929, in Montreal. He graduated in 1950 from McGill University, where he studied physics and mathematics. At MIT, under Victor Frederick Weisskopf, he completed his PhD in nuclear surface oscillations in 1953. From 1953 to 1954, he studied with Robert F. Christy at Caltech under a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, and in 1954 he began a two-year stay at the Niels Bohr Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen.
Career at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Kerman joined the MIT faculty in 1956 as an assistant professor of physics. In the summers of 1959 and 1960 he was a research associate at the Argonne National Laboratory, and also was a consultant to the Shell Development Company of Houston, and the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory. He also participated in the Physical Science Study Committee – a group of high school and university physics professors – to write a more accessible and engaging high school physics textbook. He was a consultant with Educational Services Inc. from 1959 to 1966, and collaborated in the quantum physics part of the experimental course Physics: A New Introductory Course (nicknamed PANIC), produced by the Education Research Center at MIT. He became an associate professor in 1960, and the following year, he went on academic leave and was “professeur d’echange” at the University of Paris under a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. He became professor in 1964.
In the early 1960s, Kerman traveled with physics professors Sheldon Glashow, then of the University of California at Berkeley and now of Boston University, and Charles Schwartz of Berkeley for a month-long visit as potential members to JASON, a scientific advisory group in Washington, sponsored by the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, among other government groups.
“We were asked at the beginning of our particular interests,” recalls Glashow. “What they were getting at was whether we wanted ‘war’ work or ‘peace’ work. Everybody, except us three ‘lefties’ including Arthur, chose ‘war.’ Our ‘peaceful' challenge was to examine all available sources, whether classified or not, to assess the potential value of airborne or satellite surveillance of the Soviet Union and to produce a supposedly unclassified document. We did our work, and our document was promptly classified. We never heard back from JASON, nor did we care.”
From 1976 to 1983, Kerman was the director of MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics, and from 1983 to 1992, he was director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science. He had various longstanding consulting relationships with Argonne, Brookhaven, Knolls Atomic Power, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos Scientific, and Oak Ridge national laboratories, and with the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST).
Kerman officially retired from MIT after 47 years, and retained the title of professor emeritus from 1999 until his death.
Scientific contributions
Kerman’s research included nuclear and high-energy physics, astrophysics, and the development of advanced particle detectors. His interests in theoretical nuclear physics included nuclear quantum chromodynamics-relativistic heavy-ion physics, nuclear reactions, and laser accelerators. He developed a set of nucleon-nucleon potentials, which were found to be useful for the study of nuclear matter and finite nuclei.