In 2005, Paul Henrich Heckmann, the spiritus rector and elder statesman of the Bochum beam-foil group, passed away. Heckmann had always shied away from publicity, and therefore a low-profile note was considered to be in line with his own wishes. The press notice issued by the university for a while had the highest rank seen by a certain search engine when actually searching for its author.

When Stanley Bashkin, one of the discoverers of the beam-foil spectroscopic technique, died on May 1, 2007, he was prestigeous enough to merit an obituary in a journal. However, science journals at times feel overburdened with obituary notes, and one also needs an equivalently important notice author. These processes can drag on. Stanley in the end got more than one notice, among them one by the Optical Society of America and one by Alan Chodos in Physics Today:
Bashkin_OSA , Bashkin_PT

When Indrek Martinson passed away in 2009, his friend and colleague Larry Curtis had not long before written a biographical sketch on Indrek in Physica Scripta T 120, 5 to 6, 2005. He now remembered him on his institute pages. Larry then tried to have an obituary note in Physics Today, but at first he was diverted to the electronic pages only. Lateron the journal considered a print version, but the submitted text was rejected by the automated plagiarism checker: The author of the first version had to write a different text for another outlet of the same journal. LJC_IM_PhysicsToday
(Don't tell me that obituaries and their stories have no entertainment value of their own!) Indrek also was remembered by the United States Chess Federation (IM_Chess), an honour bestowed on few physicists. My own version for ASOS10 conference is largely based on Larry's aforementioned texts IM_CanJPhys .

Another two years later, in 2011, Henri-Pierre Garnir succumbed to sequential cancers. Since he had for a long time supported the European Group for Atomic Spectroscopy (EGAS), which is nowadays run as part of the European Physical Society (EPS) who is proud of their new web pages, I suggested to honour him there, and I received a favorable response, but for many months saw no result. Eventually somebody who knew Garnir spotted where they put a marker, obliquely, but fittingly: they put a link above a list of future EGAS meeting locations, that is, on a page that (in a preceding version) Henri may well have designed himself. Garnir at EGAS

Elmar Träbert Physics home page

Updated: 24 Sept 2012