Kenneth W. Ford

When Molecular Physics of Technology's research results failed to measure up to expectations and the company had to shut down, Ford took a position as education officer of the American Physical Society. Then, in 1987, he became the director of the American Institute of Physics and later helped to shepherd its move from New York City (to which he'd been commuting from Philadelphia) to College Park, MD. Ford's retirement from the institute in 1993, at age 67, coincided with its move to College Park, along with other physics organizations.

In 1970, for family reasons, Ford left Irvine for the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he was a professor. In 1975, he accepted the job of President of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NM Tech). He spent 7 years at New Mexico Tech, resigning after receiving a vote of no confidence from the faculty. Ford then became Executive Vice President of the University of Maryland System. That job lasted for slightly more than a year, during 1982–83, before Ford took his first non-academic job as president of Molecular Biophysics Technology in Philadelphia.

In the summer of 1968, influenced by his opposition to the Vietnam War, Ford announced at a talk in Cloudcroft, NM that he would no longer do weapons work or other secret work.

In 1964, Ford took a job as professor and department chair at the newly opened University of California, Irvine, setting up the Physics Department there for its opening in the fall of 1965.

Ford has written eleven books (counting one three-volume work as three books), one of them with a co-author—five before his retirement and six after. His first book, The World of Elementary Particles, written in 1961-62 and published in 1963, did well enough and was satisfying enough to encourage him to write more. The thick textbook Basic Physics followed in 1968 and the three volumes of Classical and Modern Physics in 1972–74. Following his retirement and while teaching at Germantown Academy, he joined with John Wheeler to write Wheeler's autobiography, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam, published in 1998. In 1999, this book won an American Institute of Physics Science Writing Prize. There followed The Quantum World in 2004, In Love with Flying (a memoir) in 2007, 101 Quantum Questions in 2011, and Building the H Bomb in 2015. Basic Physics was reissued in 2017, repurposed as a resource for teachers.

In 1958, after a year's leave from Indiana University in Los Alamos, Ford took up new faculty duties at Brandeis University, where he continued research, supervision of graduate students, and, for the first time, taught introductory physics. He also served as department chair at Brandeis, 1963–64. In 1964 he was recruited by the soon-to-open new campus of the University of California at Irvine as its first physics chair.

Ford furthered his professional education in two subsequent leaves of absence: in 1955–56 at the Max Planck Institut in Göttingen, Germany, mentored by Werner Heisenberg and supported by a Fulbright Fellowship; and in 1961–62 at Imperial College, London and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, mentored by Abdus Salam, Herman Feshbach, and Victor Weisskopf and supported by a National Science Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship. It was during this second leave that Ford wrote his first book, The World of Elementary Particles.

Although Ford's initial appointment at Indiana University in 1953 was as a postdoctoral researcher, he was given the opportunity to teach a graduate course. In later appointments at Indiana and other universities, he continued to teach both graduate students and undergraduate. Subsequent to retirement, he taught high-school physics at Germantown Academy (1995–98) and at Germantown Friends School (2000-2001).

Ford married Karin Stehnike on August 27, 1953 and fathered two children; Paul Thomas Ford (1957) and Sarah Elizabeth Ford (1958). They divorced in 1961. Ford married Joanne Baumunk on June 9, 1962, gained one stepdaughter, Nina Tannenwald (1959), and fathered four more children: Caroline Amanda Ford (now Caroline Richards) (1963), Adam Baumunk Ford (1964), Jason Lawrence Ford (1966), and Lucas Wheeler (now Star Lucia) Ford (1968). He has 13 grandchildren and three step-grandchildren.

Much of Ford's work was concerned with writing programs and doing calculations related to thermonuclear burning, first using human "computers" with desk calculators, then IBM card-programmed calculators (CPCs), and later, with Project Matterhorn, the SEAC computer at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC. A SEAC calculation, programmed by Ford with the assistance of John Toll and the guidance of John Wheeler, provided the final predicted yield of 7 megatons for the Mike test on November 1, 1952. The actual yield was approximately 10 megatons.

In the fall of 1952, Ford left project Matterhorn and spent the next six months completing his graduate dissertation on the collective model of the nucleus. After defending his dissertation in the spring of 1953, and after spending that summer working in Los Alamos, he took up a post-doctoral research appointment at Indiana University, beginning that fall.

Ford's principal research was in the theory of nuclear structure, with some work in particle and mathematical physics. He exploited the nuclear shell model and the collective, or unified, model, and also worked extensively on muonic atoms. His first paper, co-authored with David Bohm in 1950, used data from low-energy neutron scattering to give evidence for the transparency of nuclei to neutrons. A 1953 paper showed how regularities in the energies of the first excited states of even-even nuclei can be interpreted in terms of the deformations of these nuclei. Later papers analyzed muonic-atom data to give evidence on the distribution of electric charge within nuclei. Ford's 1959 papers with John Wheeler provided a semiclassical theory of scattering. In 1963, he participated, with Henry Kolm and Eiichi Goto, in a search for magnetic monopoles.

In the fall of 1948, Ford began graduate studies in physics at Princeton University. In 1950, he took a leave of absence from graduate work to work on the H-bomb at Los Alamos National Laboratory (then called the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) with his mentor John Wheeler. Others in Wheeler's immediate group were John Toll and Burton Freeman. They worked closely with other lab staff members such as Carson Mark, Conrad Longmire, Edward Teller, and Stanislaw Ulam, and with lab consultants such as John von Neumann, Enrico Fermi, and Hans Bethe. Following the radiation implosion idea offered by Teller and Ulam early in 1951, the focus of the work was on this new design idea. In June 1951, Ford returned to Princeton to continue the H-bomb work there at Wheeler's Project Matterhorn.

In April 1944, just before his 18th birthday, while still at Exeter, Ford enlisted in the US Navy. After summer employment at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Ford was called to active service and began the Navy's Electronic Technician Training. In June 1945, he transferred into the V-12 Navy College Training Program, studying at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In three four-month semesters completed in one year, he was able to secure credit for two years of college work and entered Harvard University as a junior in the fall of 1946 following his discharge from the Navy in June of that year.

Ford attended Highlands High School in Fort Thomas, Kentucky from 1940 to 1942, then Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH, graduating in 1944. In 1948, he received an A.B. from Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1953, studying under John Archibald Wheeler. During 1950-1952 he interrupted his graduate studies to join the H-bomb design team at Los Alamos National Laboratory (then Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) and at Princeton University's Project Matterhorn.

Kenneth William Ford (born May 1, 1926) is an American theoretical physicist, teacher, and writer, currently residing near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the first chair of the physics department at the University of California, Irvine, and later served as president of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech) and as Executive Director and CEO of the American Institute of Physics.

Ford was born on May 1, 1926 in West Palm Beach, Florida, to parents Paul Hammond Ford (1892-1961) and Edith Timblin Ford (1892-1992) and was the second of their three children. He spent most of his childhood in Kentucky, living one year in Georgia when he was eight and nine.