Matthew Sands

Matthew Sands is an American physicist and educator who is best known as a co-author of the Feynman Lectures on Physics.

Sands received his B.A. in physics and mathematics from Clark University in 1940 and his M.A. in physics from Rice University. After earning a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1948, Sands joined the MIT faculty. In 1950, he moved to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) where he helped build and used a 1.5 Gev electron synchrotron.

Sands was the first to show - theoretically and experimentally - the importance of quantum effects in electron accelerators. He is also known for his work on beam instabilities, wake fields, beam-cavity interactions, and other phenomena.

In 1963 Sands became deputy director for the construction and early operation of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). When Richard Feynman was debating whether to accept his 1965 Nobel Prize—due to a disdain for the added notoriety it might bring—Sands convinced Feynman that not accepting it would bring even more attention.^[1] He later joined the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) as a professor of physics and served as its vice chancellor for science from 1969 to 1972. Sands was an exacting professor, known to never provide answers to his difficult problem sets.^[2] After retiring from UCSC in 1985, Sands worked as a consultant for SLAC and also as a consultant for local K-12 schools in Santa Cruz to develop computer systems and physics lab activities for students.

From 1960 to 1966, Sands served on the Commission on College Physics, which carried out a national program to modernize physics instruction in the colleges and universities of the United States. He also helped write the famous 1964 physics textbook Feynman Lectures on Physics with Richard P. Feynman and Robert B. Leighton, based upon the lectures given by Feynman to undergraduate students at Caltech in 1961–63.

In 1972 he received a Distinguished Service Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers.

In 1998 The American Physical Society awarded him the Robert R. Wilson Prize "for his many contributions to accelerator physics and the development of electron-positron and proton colliders."

External links

• Matthew Sands biography, American Physical Society
• Feynman R, Leighton R, and Sands M. The Feynman Lectures on Physics. 3 volumes 1964, 1966.

References

1. ^ Richard Feynman's book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) 1985
2. ^ Bernt Wahl - former Sand's physics student 1984

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