Nobel Prize winner visits Air Mobility Command; says 'thank you' for recent support

Published Dec. 13, 2010
By Master Sgt. Scott T. Sturkol
Air Mobility Command Public Affairs

SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. -- During a visit to Air Mobility Command Headquarters Dec. 9, Nobel Prize winner Dr. Samuel Ting praised AMC for its recent support in delivering the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer from Geneva, Switzerland, to Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Doctor Ting, the 1976 Nobel Prize winner in physics, provided a briefing to AMC Airmen about his personal history and about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, or AMS. Doctor Ting is the lead scientist for the AMS project.

On Aug. 26, a C-5M Super Galaxy from AMC's Dover Air Force Base, Del., delivered the 7.5-ton AMS on its last "terrestrial" journey from Switzerland to Florida. The C-5M proved to be the best option, officials said, because it could carry the entire AMS without breaking it apart -- lessening chances for any damage to occur.

Doctor Ting said the international team was "very thankful" for the support by the AMC Airmen to deliver the equipment in the Air Force's largest airlifter.

"Without the C-5, we would have had to take the AMS apart in two pieces to load on a Boeing 747," Doctor Ting said. "I want to thank Air Mobility Command for helping us with this effort."

He added, "When the mission took place, it was the biggest news in Switzerland."

The AMS is scheduled to be lifted into space on a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) space shuttle mission, STS-134, on April 1, 2011, to be placed on the International Space Station. The AMS experiment, according to NASA, is "a state-of-the-art particle physics detector being constructed, tested and operated by an international team composed of 56 institutes from 16 countries and organized under United States Department of Energy sponsorship."

On being the lead physicist for the AMS project, Doctor Ting said the effort is unprecedented and once it is on the space station it will provide information on the "origins of the universe."
"The highest energy for charged particles is in the cosmos," he said.

According to NASA, the AMS will use the "unique environment" of space to advance knowledge of the universe and lead to the understanding of the universe's origin by searching for antimatter, dark matter and measuring cosmic rays.

The AMS cost about $2 billion to build and was paid for by an international coalition in the science community, Doctor Ting said. Additionally, more than 600 physicists from across the globe were involved in the AMS project.

In addition to discussing the AMS, Doctor Ting talked about his personal history and how he became one of the world's leading physicists. He is widely known for winning the Nobel Prize for physics in 1976 for his co-discovery of the J/Psi particle while he was a researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. He shares the award with Dr. Burton Richter, who was at Stanford (University) Linear Accelerator, Calif., at the time.

According to the Nobel Prize Web site, Doctor Ting's and Doctor Richter's discovery introduced a whole new family of subnuclear particles called "charmed" quarks. Theoreticians suspected these existed and the discovery validated what is now referred to as the "standard model" for physics and particle research in the scientific community.

"In the fall of 1974, we found evidence of a new, totally unpredicted, heavy particle -- the J particle," Doctor Ting notes in his biography on the Nobel Web site. "Since then a whole family of new particles has been found."

Doctor Ting's biography also shows he was born in 1936 in Ann Arbor, Mich., as the first of three children of Kuan Hai Ting, a professor of engineering at the University of Michigan, and Tsun-Ying Wang, a professor of psychology.

During World War II, Doctor Ting was back in China with his parents. In his biography, he said both of his parents were working so he was raised by his maternal grandmother. During those years of the war, he said education was not at the forefront and he "really had no interest in going to school."

After the war, the focus on education changed. After receiving the equivalent of a high school diploma from Taiwan, Doctor Ting returned to the United States in 1956 to attend school at the University of Michigan. By 1962, he earned undergraduate degrees mathematics and physics and a doctorate in physics. Since then he has been teaching at numerous universities and has been a part of many physics-related endeavors that have earned him numerous awards internationally.

Today, Doctor Ting is proud of what his international team's latest endeavor in the AMS will do for the future of science.
"The AMS is the most complicated spectrometer NASA will have ever delivered into space," Doctor Ting said. "It (the AMS) will be on the space station for the life of the space station and we will learn much more about our universe than ever before."

As the AMS experiment will most likely have a huge impact on the future of physics, mobility Airmen can take credit for assisting in making that effort happen. The AMS team waited 16 years for the day they could accompany it to Kennedy Space Center, according to an August AMC news report.

"We were very grateful to the U.S. Air Force for taking our AMS," Doctor Ting said.

"We're so honored to be on this flight," Dr. Susan Ting, spouse of Doctor Ting and budget manager for the project, said in the August report during the C-5M delivery mission. "To have the U.S. Air Force take us home is just ..." and she paused and smiled, then patted her hand over her heart.

(First Lt. Kathleen Ferrero, Air Mobility Command Public, contributed to this report.)